*WINNER of Best Cliche Breaker for Undiscovered Werewolves*
"Underneath her skin was a wolf; all bite and snarl and nothing else."
The day Saoirse de Rais made her Alpha submit is the day she decided to run.
Traveling from city to city--state to sta...
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He didn't call them Sunday prayers. It wasn't mass that they were all meant to attend. Still, Bo put on his best shirt and jeans, and waited for Saoirse to find something in her pile of clothes to wear for the early morning gathering. It was never religious—it was just an hour of some old wolf in the pack rambling on about how important it was to remember where we all came from.
He didn't believe in much of it; he understood that each member of his pack came from a lengthy line of old wolves that migrated across continents and oceans to find land for themselves. But when they started jabbering about the Morrigan, and how blessed she was, he started to fall asleep. If they were descended from rogues, deserters, then what was the point in listening to all of it? What was the point in remembering something your ancestors wanted to initially forget?
When he was Alpha, he was forced to go. He had no choice but to sit at the front of the group and listen while the oldest of his pack told the stories—now he felt almost ashamed that he had to force her to go. Because he knew that at the very end of the history lesson, the scary stories about Wildlings would always come up. He didn't want her to endure that shit-fest. Saoirse wasn't a scary story, or a monster. Her curse, her affliction, wasn't something of nightmares. It was bad luck, and nothing else.
Eventually, she made it out of the bedroom.
He wasn't the type to be smitten—to stop in his tracks and stare like some absent-minded idiot when a pretty girl entered a room—but his half smile and burning cheeks were too hard to ignore. Saoirse managed to find a dress in her pile of hand-me-down clothes. A simple sun dress with wildflower patterns along the bottom of the skirt that draped down onto the flower. Somehow, he was impressed at how she managed to get all her wild, curly hair into a single braid.
Where's the wild? He asked himself, staring at her longer than he should have. He could smell sickly sweet perfume that most wore on Sundays, rather than that lovely vanilla scent he was so used to smelling. She wasn't wild today—and he kind of missed it.
But he quickly looked away, suddenly aware of how boring his Sunday clothes were. Maybe he should have pulled out the fancy shirt and slacks—but that was meant for funerals, and he didn't want to look too out of place. He took a deep breath, relieved that he indeed took that shower and used his better deodorant.
He cleared his throat. "It's just a Sunday, you know." He shrugged, reaching for his keys to lock up the trailer behind them. "I'll probably use your shoulder as a pillow. No need to look so pretty."
She narrowed her gaze at him, giving a soft chuckle under her breath before she brushed passed him. That perfume was too sweet, too nice—everything about her made impossible for him to remember that just a few days ago she was scrambling to pick up broken glass and sobbing. It was hard for him to remember that she hadn't smiled in the last few days, that she'd kept herself confined in his bedroom just waiting for that savage wolf of hers to bury itself again.
