Benny’s brow wrinkled, his lips turning down with alarm as he considered the possibility. With his glossy chestnut hair, golden brown skin, and watchful, hooded eyes, Viktor wouldn’t say he was unattractive. Perhaps he wasn’t conventionally pretty — he was a scrapper and it showed in his crooked nose and scarred knuckles — but he wasn’t ugly. With the gossip mill of the pack churning constantly, Viktor knew for a fact that he managed to get enough lovers to never be too lonely.
Though, perhaps he was feeling his single status more keenly than usual, since his fledgling pursuit of Healer Goode had crashed and burned before it could even get off the ground. Viktor wasn’t even sure that Margot knew his second was interested before her life went up in flames — literally.
Poor bastard had the bad luck to moon after Teddy’s mate, he thought, wincing on his second’s behalf. That is a fight even I couldn’t win.
“No, I mean that I’m harmless,” he explained, waving away Benny’s doubtful look. “I am. Women can feel it when someone is really trying to get something from them — sex, companionship, whatever.” He shrugged. “I’m safe because I don’t actually want anything they could give me. Even when I do want sex, they know I’m not going to ask them for more.”
And shifter women were notoriously reticent about that sort of thing. There was a reason they took courtship so seriously. Coaxing a woman into a permanent monogamous relationship could be a Herculean trial. It was worth it, though.
When the mating fever hit and two people decided to take the bite, nothing could tear them apart. There was no higher loyalty than what existed between mates.
“Not even that pretty fox?” Benny shook his head. His dark eyes took on a dreamy cast. Seeing that look on his bruiser’s face might have been comical if Viktor wasn’t feeling his own terrible longing at that moment. “Can’t imagine. I’m tired of dancing with women who only want me for a night. I want to sink my claws into a soft, pretty woman and never let her go.” He paused, considering, before he added, “I’d like her to sink her claws into me too, honestly.”
Viktor eyed his friend critically. “You feeling the fever already?”
Benny rubbed absently at his chest, as if he could soothe an ache that was not physical, but deep in the heart of his inner animal. “Yeah, I’m starting to feel it.” His hard mouth twisted into a self-deprecating smile. “Damn, man, I even found myself in a homegoods store the other day, thinking about getting all new furniture. Just got up one day and thought my den needed to be completely overhauled. Shit’s crazy.”
Viktor laughed, shaking his head, but he didn’t feel any mirth. He knew what the fever did to a person. It was a clawing need that tore at every inch of one’s life and drove all peace out the window. The desire to decorate was the least of what it could do to Benny’s mental health.
Trying for cautiously concerned nonchalance, he asked, “You don’t even have a mate yet and you’re already going den-crazy?”
“Shut up.” Benny flashed his fangs, but there was no real heat in it. “You watch out. Someday you’re gonna find a mate, and then you’re gonna wish you’d made a den as nice as mine before you met her.”
Viktor’s smile thinned.
He shared almost everything with his inner circle, but not Camille. He hoarded her close to his heart. Possessiveness and the fear of how the pack would react to an elvish alpha he couldn’t even coax to his side meant he didn’t tell even his closest friends that he had been working on his den for years, always with her in mind.
Not wanting to get into it now, of all times, Viktor swallowed his animal’s rage and loneliness. He sent his second an arch look. “I’ve got other things to think about, you know. Like uprooting our entire pack, building us a better future. Little things like that.”
Or big things like mile long legs of the softest lavender and wavy black hair that shone like oil in the light.
Like a soft, almost husky voice and a razor-sharp mind. Like the pleasure of watching her unravel under his hands as an orgasm nearly buckled his knees. Like a girl who’d given him her heart when she was at her most vulnerable and who would rather skin him alive than see him today.
“Uh-huh.” Benny cushioned his cheek on one of his meaty fists, his expression more knowing than Viktor would have liked. “You keep telling yourself that, Vik.”
“Hm. We’ll see.”
Reading him easily, Benny changed the subject. “How did the meeting go?”
“Great, until Ruben spoke up.” Viktor blew out a breath. “Fuckin’ hate that guy. Reminds me way too much of my dad.”
“They were two shitty peas in a pod,” his second astutely pointed out. “Remember when he and your dad used to fuck off to go gambling in the New Zone? Neither of them cared that they were taking money the pack needed to survive.”
Old, dark rage made Viktor flex his fingers into the arm of his seat. “Yeah, I remember.”
“We knew he’d be a problem, Vik.”
Viktor nodded and breathed out slowly, releasing the old poison that was his father’s memory. “Yeah, we did. I’m just hoping he won’t find a way to tank our bid.”
“He won’t,” Benny replied, utterly immovable. “You are going to land this, Vik. I know you will. The only way that old bastard could take it from you is if he killed you.”
“I almost wish that was still how we did things.” Viktor smiled ruefully. “I mean, not really, but it would be way simpler than trying to work with shitheads.”
Benny snorted. “Agreed.”
Viktor thumbed his useless phone and stared out the window. He counted down the minutes until he could turn it on. He’d called in several favors to have Camille’s building watched. Worry for her ate at him constantly, and he relied on the updates he received to calm a small but necessary fraction of his instincts. If he at least knew she was safely in her apartment — even though he was also worried about her self-imposed isolation after her mother’s death — he could get through another hour, another day.
And that was all he could count on now. The promise of seconds progressing into minutes, to hours, to days.
He wasn’t always so high strung. Twenty years was a long time to miss the other half of your soul, after all. He’d learned to cope, to find happiness in the day-to-day, to move on as best he could. With her almost never in the city, he’d managed to live a mostly normal life for an alpha in his prime.
He’d built strong bonds with his pack. He enjoyed his life. He took brief, nearly anonymous lovers when he needed to. He managed.
All that was shot to the underworld now, though.
If he thought the mating instinct, the fever, was rough when he was sixteen, it was nothing compared to the torture he experienced at thirty-six. Now that he’d seen her, held her in his arms, breathed in her wild, floral scent, watched her come and tasted her skin, it was like she’d torn him open and pulled a monster out of him.
That monster only wanted her. It wanted to be near her, to rub its fur against her skin, to know she was in his den and safe, happy, sated, at all times. It hungered for her.
And she wouldn’t fucking see him.