Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
“Where are we going?”
I turn to Karl with a flustered kind of feeling. I swear to god Connor was an easier baby. Or maybe everything is just easier when you’re twelve and have absolutely no outside input.
“Just a drive, dear,” he says. “Why don’t you close your eyes?”
My eyelids were already heavy. I am asleep almost before his sentence ends.
When I wake up I feel refreshed, and I find that I am in an area I know very well.
My home range. My forest.
It’s… back?
It is not as it was. The tall trees are gone, but they have been replaced with dense bushes and saplings. In the distance, some of the old growth still remains. As I look at it, I realize that this is the living equivalent of a stopped watch. The development ceased when Rainer died.
Karl has the baby out of her seat, and has fed and changed her. I’ve loved him for a lot of things, but I think I love him for this most of all.
“Come,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
I follow him through the forest, remembering how it felt the first time we went this way. He had just finished assaulting some forestry crews, and I was planning on kidnapping him and forcing him to buy the land for me. I guess it worked out, sort of, maybe. My mother owns this territory now. She doesn’t seem to have done much with it, but there are signs of restoration. Someone’s put a track in, too, a shingled driveway. I try not to pay it too much attention, because it makes me sad to see neat gray stone paving through what used to be completely wild terrain. This is a place that should be picked through on deer tracks, not driven through.
It’s a nice walk, and I let myself sink into the happy memories of what was once here, the life I lived when I was too young and too simple to even imagine all that would happen to me in the future.
“Here,” Karl says, stopping in front of me, effectively blocking my view. “Come and see this.”
I step around him and gasp.
“Oh, my god!”
A house has been built on the banks of the river I once lived on in the same place the old shacks used to stand. It’s big, but not too big. Just big enough for a family to live in, with a broad covered porch that runs around the exterior.
“Someone built here!” I say, turning to him. “Someone…”
I see his smile, and my mood shifts from horror at the notion someone else would live in my home territory, to realizing that this isn’t just a surprise on a walk.
“Wait,” I say. “Did you…”
“Do you like it?” His scar crinkles as he smiles.
Relief and joy rush through me. I thought I was looking at the first in a series of some set of riverside dwellings for people who want to get away from it all for five minutes, turning my territory into a weekend bender spot full of crumpled beer cans and used condoms and human teenagers doing loud, human teenage things while their middle-aged parents cut down trees more or less out of spite and renovate their kitchens for the sixth time in the hopes that this time it will change everything.
But that’s not what’s happening. Not at all. This is one house. For me. For my family. For Karl and me and our baby and… my eyes are filling with the happiest tears.
“I love it,” I say. “I absolutely love it.”
“The alpha doesn’t have to live in a big house in New Orleans. I can live here. With you. And all our babies.” He takes my hand. “Come inside.”
The interior is roomy and cozy at the same time, with the living areas facing the river so the flow of the water seems to be part of every single space. There’s a main bedroom and a nursery off of it, and three other rooms that stand ready to be furnished. There’s a future here. There are things yet to be done. Lives yet to be lived. Generations to be born. I can feel them all here, almost as if these future events have already happened.
“We’re really going to live here? Not just visit on weekends or vacations?” I ask the question, because I cannot believe it, even though I can clearly see what he’s done. He’s made all my dreams come true, and more. He’s understood that this was always more than some territory or a home. Karl seems like a brutal, vicious, murderous beast, because he is. But he’s become something more than that. He’s become a true alpha. A lover. A provider. And the first in a new lineage of shifters who will live wild and free.
“This is our home,” he says. “This is where you chose to den, and this is where I will defend you, and all who come from us until my last breath.”