Fated to the Warrior Wolf (The Hunted Omegas #3)

24. Gael

TWENTY-FOUR

Gael

I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the side of my palm. A hum of satisfaction thrummed in my veins, leaving me energized after the fight rather than tired.

If someone had plugged me straight into a light socket, I couldn’t have been buzzing any higher than I was. There was only one person who could send me higher, and she was standing ringside, a dismayed frown on her too-pale face. She was normally golden, as if she’d captured her own personal ray of sun, but today, she looked wan in the cold, overcast afternoon light.

“Gael, I—” Leigh paused, swallowing hard. She seemed to second-guess whatever she was about to say and change course. “We need to talk.”

“Why does that sound so ominous?” I asked, wrapping my arms around her waist, ignoring the rest of our pack mates standing around chatting and forming a not-so-subtle privacy shield from the Pack Caelestis members still loitering nearby, hoping to get the scoop on the gossip behind the challenge. They were going to be disappointed, though. Nobody knew the rest of the story except me, and I wasn’t telling them shit .

I did have to tell her, though, and that thought brought me down a few notches, even though the hum of violence in my blood was still there, still pushing me to do something reckless with it.

Something like claim your mate.

Reckless and suicidal were two very different things, and judging by the stiff cant of her shoulders and stubborn set of her jaw, if I suggested that course of action, she’d be tearing me a new one before I finished the sentence.

It was a tempting thought, though. Stripping her naked and driving her to ecstasy, then sinking my fangs into her, marking her so that no more fucking idiots ever dared talk about her again. No one would mess with her once she bore my mark. The thought of claiming her had me indecently hard, and I knew I’d be working out my fantasies in the shower later. Because from the look on Leigh’s face… she wasn’t in the mood to help me take the edge off.

“Because it just… is. If it were a happy discussion, we’d just say the thing instead of saying ‘we need to talk’ and then dragging it out and waiting until we were somewhere alone, and then?—”

“Hey,” I murmured, skating my hands up her back until they tangled in her blonde hair, tilting her head back to focus on me instead of the endless thoughts she always seemed to have. “It’s going to be okay. Let’s go talk.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

Why did that make her seem so deflated when it was exactly what she’d all but demanded of me before the challenge? She-wolves were confusing.

But when she slipped her fingers between mine, lacing our hands together, and pressed her palm tightly to mine, I forgot about the confusion. She was mine, and we fit. The rest would work itself out, even if I would rather get a root canal by a demented pixie with an expired medical license than tell her the truth about why I’d had to challenge those two assholes.

She still deserved the truth.

Sergei clapped me on the shoulder as we passed him, giving Leigh a polite nod. “I’ll see to the rest of their discipline.”

“Thanks.” I liked Sergei fine, but I didn’t like how close he was standing to Leigh. It was absurd, because he was happily mated and had his own pups older than I was. Yet somehow… any male but me was a threat.

I’d appreciated that Kane, Reed, and Dirge had kept their distance, letting the women cluster together in the center.

I wasn’t sure if Reed had had the time to tell them what we’d discovered… but it didn’t matter. My pack mates knew something was brewing.

Probably needed to make it a priority to fill Kane in, though. A task for later.

We dodged the main entrance at the back of the castle, instead taking a hard left and slipping in through a smaller—though still obscenely grand—door that let us cut through the knights’ hall.

Leigh sucked in a surprised breath and gaped up at the vaulted ceilings, or perhaps the gleaming suits of armor. They looked like they’d been polished and waxed this morning, and knowing Cristian, they probably had.

“You haven’t seen much of the castle yet, huh?” I paused, giving her a moment to absorb the grandeur.

“No, mostly just our rooms, the library, the gym, and… what is this place called?

“The knights’ hall. This place is so old, they used to have honest-to-Goddess knights and hold contests. This was their feasting hall, after they’d defeated their foes and wooed the fair maidens.” I whispered the last part close to her ear and delighted in her little shiver at the closeness .

She wasn’t immune to this thing between us, and I was hanging on to every little crumb she gave me to prove it. The distance between us these last few weeks had eaten away at me like a corrosive slowly drilling its way through my chest. But now… now all bets were off.

There was no reason to stay apart. Everything was pushing us together, as if Fate was serving her up on a silver platter.

So why didn’t she look happier?

Awe at the castle, yes. But happy… not at all.

I tugged on her hand, and she kept walking, following me as she kept her eyes trained on the painted ceilings. So much so, she didn’t notice at first that I didn’t take her back to either of our rooms. One side hallway, and she finally paid attention as we left the jaw-dropping hall behind.

“Where are we going?”

“I thought you might like to see a few more parts of the castle. You know, since you’ve been holed up in the rooms since we got here.”

“Denned up, more like,” she muttered.

“You don’t like it? My wolf finds it soothing, but if yours doesn’t?—”

“She does,” Leigh admitted a little begrudgingly. “It makes us feel safe.” Her free hand dropped to her stomach absently, the subtle reminder of who else was with us making me want to put my hand over hers. Would she let me? Or would I be pushed away?

I was scared to make a wrong move, scared to send her running for the hills again.

So I didn’t, even though it killed me.

“Good.”

I led her through a few more twists and turns before stopping at the door.

“What is it?” she asked .

“This is my favorite room in the castle.” I smiled at her warmly, simultaneously excited to share it with her and also nervous that her first experience of it would be ruined by the ugliness that I had to tell her. I would do my best to say it gently.

“Well, are you going to actually show me, or…” She grinned at me then, and the weight in the middle of my chest lifted.

We were going to be okay. It might take a while to work through all the crap. But in the end? I got to keep her. Which meant the rest was just details. The journey.

I grinned back and pushed open the door, a small wave of humidity hitting us as I ushered her through the door with my hand on her lower back.

She didn’t push me away after all, I mused as I watched her experience the atrium for the first time. The ceiling was round, vaulted glass high overhead, with plants growing from every available surface, save for a few seating areas clustered here and there.

“Oh, this is gorgeous, BD.” She breathed the words so softly, I couldn’t even bring myself to care that she’d used my least favorite nickname.

Fine, it was growing on me. I was her baby daddy. But I wanted to be a hell of a lot more.

Baby steps .

“I hoped you’d like it.”

She reached out and ran a fingertip gingerly over a fiery orange leaf nearby before turning wide eyes on me. “Who maintains all this?”

I shrugged. “It’s been this way since I was a child. Back then, it seemed like fairy magic, but now… I assume there’s a team of gardeners. Kane probably knows.”

She nodded, biting her lip as she took her time to circulate around the room, exploring the beauty of it. When she reached me again, she hesitated .

I watched as realization dawned on her that we were supposed to be having an uncomfortable conversation.

“We should sit,” I suggested, taking her hand again and leading her to my favorite nook. It was a padded bench tucked deep within a little grotto of sorts. Trailing vines dotted with flowers formed a series of arches, making it feel like you were inside a world of flowers and greenery. Even the light was tinted green from filtering through the leaves.

“This is oddly soothing,” Leigh said as she sat on the soft blue bench, running her fingers reverently over the silky fabric.

“A good place to have a conversation. Quiet, uninterrupted.” I sat right next to her, so that our shoulders were touching.

I could feel the gentle heat of her, and my wolf rumbled his approval in my chest.

“So why did you challenge those two?” she blurted abruptly, looking away, down toward her feet instead of anywhere near me.

“They said some very inappropriate and disrespectful things about you. I walked out of the locker room and almost ran into them. They’d stopped to gawk.”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip. “BD, I need to tell you something. I have an idea of what they might have said, and I just want you to know—” She took a fortifying breath, but not being able to see her eyes was driving me insane.

I tucked my fingertips under her chin, turning her to face me.

She faltered when our eyes met, biting that lip again. I used my thumb to gently pop it free. “You can tell me anything. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not going to be angry.”

“You might be, Gael.”

Alarm bells started going off in my head, both at her use of my actual name—suddenly, I wanted that damn awful nickname back—and the tears welling up in her eyes. Shit.

“I won’t, I promise you. There’s nothing that you could say that would change how I feel. You’re mine.” I growled at the end. I couldn’t help it. My wolf was getting riled, knowing she was upset, but not why. He wanted to destroy anyone who’d ever caused her pain, but we couldn’t go off and fight an invisible enemy. She had to talk first.

“Why don’t you tell me what they said first?” she whispered, swiping at the corner of her eye where a tear had escaped.

I didn’t want to do it, but I’d promised. Time to man up. “They said some inappropriate sexual things. Do you want me to tell you verbatim?”

She shook her head slowly at that, brows furrowing.

Thank the Goddess.

“And then they brought up that there’s a rumor you’re already pregnant, and that… you’re a mutt.” I said the word reluctantly and with distaste. “Even if you weren’t pregnant with my baby, it was highly disrespectful, and I want you to know that we don’t tolerate that behavior against any female in our pack. They’re all under our protection, and that’s not how an honorable male behaves.”

She nodded slowly, but the tears were escaping faster now, and she wasn’t bothering to wipe them away.

“Talk to me, princess. I’m so sorry. I know it’s all false. I hope you know that. I do not care what a couple of assholes think. You and this baby, you’re mine. And I?—”

“Stop, just stop,” she said on a broken sob.

I froze, scared to make it worse, because clearly, everything I said was wrong. Her shoulders were shaking with tears at this point, and I did the only thing I could think of. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close.

It was stupid to bring her here. I should have gone back to my room, where we could den up.

She’s pregnant, you idiot. Of course she would want to feel safe for this conversation .

Leigh said something, but it was muffled against my chest, and I couldn’t make it out. I eased my grip, and she tried again.

“It’s all true. Gael, I’m so sorry, but it’s all true. I am a mutt.”

I froze, shock pulsing through me like a heartbeat.

What the fuck. What the actual fuck .