My Female Alpha

FORTY ONE

emery

"Do you have to pace like that?"

Dani stops to look over at me. "Mind your own business, human."

"I am. You're stressing me out doing that," I mutter, clutching at the thin blankets around me. "What's your deal, anyway?"

"I don't have a deal," she says. Her eyes flutter around before coming back to me. "I'm just worried. Arabella trusts that Alpha too much. I'm pretty sure she's going to pull something while they're gone."

I keep myself from saying, "Yeah, well, that troublemaking Alpha is mine. So you can shut the hell up."

Instead, I tighten the blankets around my shoulders and sigh. "You're worried about Arabella."

She shoots me a look that I'm sure should be a glare but is just sad. I feel for her.

"You're in love with her?" I ask.

"No," she says too quickly. "I just . . . care about her. We'll all be fucked if something happens to her."

I don't buy that excuse at all, but I'm not about to point fingers when there is no one here to prevent Dani from ripping my throat out.

"Why do you rely on her so much? I mean, doesn't that defeat the point of being a rogue?" I say, even though I don't know anything about rogues. It just sounds like something Lenora has said before.

"Being a rogue can mean a lot of things." She rubs the bridge of her nose, distressed. "You wouldn't know the first thing."

"You're right. I don't. Since we have nothing else to do, why don't you explain it to me?"

Dani paces a few steps before she stops again and faces me. "I don't know why I'm even bothering, but fine," she says.

She sits in front of me under the makeshift tent. Up close, I can see how dark her eyes are and how dirty her hair is. Pine needles stick out of the fine, black strands, and dirt clumps around the ends. I wish I could just take her back to the pack house and bathe her. A hot meal, too.

"Not all rogues want to be alone," Dani tells me. She steeples her fingers together, holding my gaze steadily. "Some of us had bad experiences with packs or were kicked out. We don't want that life, but we don't want to be by ourselves either. Before Arabella and the others started to gather us, a rogue had to basically either live out in the woods like a natural wolf or completely abandon that part of ourselves and live a human life." Dani shakes her head. "You can't imagine how awful that is, pretending to be someone you're not. I don't know how people do that for their whole lives. I did it for four years and I was barely holding on."

I do feel bad for her. Wolves are so much more complicated than I'll ever understand. Yes, they are part human, like me, but they have so many more instincts, urges, and social complexities.

Humans don't have mates. We don't have Alphas. Many humans even like to live alone, off the grid. Wolves need other wolves to stay sane.

Not to even mention how their anatomy is so physiologically different from ours.

"I'm sorry," I whisper, as though empathizing with her is a sin. "I can't imagine how that must have been for you."