FJ and Olafr came here looking for answers. Something to help them either skip or win the Boss level back home. I can’t make them go back before they have a chance to gather everything they need to save their parents and their entire village. No, I can’t just sign their death warrants, because I don’t want my father to win the game.
Which means I can’t keep them. And I can’t keep the vows I made to them.
I nod in answer to Uncle Ford’s question. My chest so tight, it feels like I’m being squeezed to death by my awful feelings.
And he gives me a stiff nod of his own before quickly looking away. He seems to be having an even harder time looking at me now. Because I mated with two wolves, or because I mated with two wolves despite knowing what my father would do when he found out, I don’t know. Either way, I now feel the opposite of what I’d felt with Olafr and FJ.
Not treasured, but disgusting. Because even when I thought I could run away with them, I knew. In my heart of hearts, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay with them forever. But I let them believe we actually had a chance of being together. Let that whole game of moonlight make believe go down even though I’ve never in my life been given any reason to so much as imagine my life could ever have a fairytale happy ending.#p#分页标题#e#
I feel awful. And yeah, I know what I have to do in that moment. Get on a plane. Go back to Detroit before they wake up, so this terrible dream I let happen between us isn’t made any worse. But…
“They’ll come after me,” I warn Uncle Ford, “You and me get it, but they don’t know my father. And they’re very…” protective, loyal, devoted. A thousand words for how hardcore awesome they are run through my mind before I finally settle on, “determined. They won’t give up until—”
Uncle Ford cuts me off.
“I’ll take care of your boys. Put tranqs in them and keep them locked up downstairs until Alisha gets them whatever they need to get the hell up out of here. Meanwhile, I had the pilot come back after he got done dropping my nieces and their families off at the airport this morning. We got a plane fueled up and ready to go.”
Uncle Ford trails off, once again looking away from me. “Anyway, if you’ve got anything you want to bring back with you, better go get it now. You probably won’t be coming back here for a while.”
Knowing this is his incredibly awkward version of a kindness, I nod and head toward the kitchen door. The truth is, once I return to my father’s house pregnant, it won’t just be a while before I come back to Alaska. It’ll probably be never.
“Yours always.”
I stop in my tracks. The promise I made to Olafr and FJ—it paralyzes my heart, ringing in my head, echoing in my bones.
“You know it’s the right thing to do,” Uncle Ford tells my back.
He’s right. I have to let all of this go. FJ and Olafr, as well as any dreamed of future we might have had together.
I’d been right about one thing. FJ and Olafr aren’t boys and I’m no longer the ridiculously innocent girl of a few days ago, before I’d ever been kissed.
There would be no official wedding, and I would probably never return to Alaska. But if it keeps FJ and Olafr alive, my going back to Detroit will be worth it.
I continue out the kitchen door and upstairs to my room. I can’t find my laptop, but I pack my phone and everything else I need. Then I go back down to meet Uncle Ford at the pier.
And this time when I leave, I don’t look back.
32
The sleep that falls upon FJ after they give their she-wolf true claim is filled with many dreams: longhouse fires, laughing with his parents, promising his sister he will see her again before the fated mate spell grabs her away from their time and their land. But at the end of all of these dream-memories, does he find himself seated beside his father in the thatch-roof kingdom house of a Gotar fenrir. One of many. For these lands are not like the ones lived upon by his father’s North Wolves. The Gotar wolves are not a single pack united under a single king.
No, in these lands, each village has a wolf who calls himself fenrir, and mostly did they gain their titles through fight, almost never through inheritance. However, this particular Gotar village sits below a gate. So though his father has rarely met twice with the same fenrir, did he travel every three winters to pay visit to whosoever occupied this particular village’s kingdom house.
When FJ was five-and-twenty, his father did take him along on his travels to the Gotar land. Supposedly so he could impress upon him the diplomatic lessons he would need for when he became king of the North Wolves. However, FJ had much suspicion his father’s true purpose was to find him a mate.