You’re my heart. My very first pack. My first and only love.
I adore all that you are and all that you will be, with or without me.
You are not alone, Cam. I’ll come when you call, and if by chance you never do, I’ll love you every day anyway.
Yours,
Vik
Camille couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t see the page through her tears. When she set the letter oh-so-gently aside, she barely felt it leave her trembling fingertips.
She sat there with her back pressed up against the desk’s drawers for nearly a half an hour before she sniffled, wiped her eyes, and sent Viktor a simple text.
I’m home.
He sent a cascade of hearts and, a minute later, a question: Mind if a coyote begs at your door for a little while? I’ve got time between meetings and I miss you.
No, she answered, chest aching. I don’t mind at all.
When the knock came less than forty minutes later, she had secreted the letter away beneath her pillow and at least somewhat composed herself again. Her emotions were in upheaval, knocking loose all the convictions she’d relied on for so long, but she still didn’t dare allow him into her space.
If not because of the pull, then because she simply couldn’t imagine him seeing her in the state she was in after reading his letter.
So instead of letting him in, she disabled the proximity alarm and softly greeted him through the door. “Hey, Vik.”
“Hey, sweetheart.” She heard the faint scrape of skin against the wood of the door. She imagined he trailed his palm down the smooth surface like he might graze her cheek, her shoulder. Camille skimmed her fingers down the same path. “How are you feeling today? Was the nursery good? All the elflings doing all right?”
“I’m good,” she answered, trying to keep the shakiness out of her voice. “The nursery was great. I— I played dodgeball with some of the kids and then helped with lunch.”
She could hear the smile in his voice when he asked, “Were you wearing your heels?”
Camille glanced down and peered at her white suede stiletto booties, which were liberally sprinkled with bits of grass and smudges of dirt. “Yes.”
“Perfect.”
“How was your meeting?”
“It was good. I’m always looking to invest more money for the pack, so I’m happy to meet with people trying to do cool shit.” There was rustling on the other side of the door before he spoke again. This time, his voice was lower to the ground. “Sit with me, sweetheart.”
Camille turned and pressed her back against the door. Sliding down until she could tuck her legs under her, she asked, “How do you keep getting in without security noticing?”
“I’m a coyote. We’re good at that sort of thing.”
“By that sort of thing, do you mean picking locks and trespassing on private property?”
“Exactly.”
A small laugh bubbled out of her throat, but it faded quickly into a heavy silence. Camille stared down the hallway, towards the sumptuously decorated sitting room, though she didn’t see it.
Into the quiet, she whispered, “I’m sorry I never gave you a chance to ask.”
She felt a faint thump against the door and guessed that he had tilted his head back. “You were scared and heartbroken, Cam. I don’t hold it against you.”
“I know you don’t.” Viktor didn’t hold grudges. He wasn’t like her family, who never forgave or forgot a slight. He wasn’t like her, who took out her anger on those who loved her most. “But things could have been different.”
“I don’t know…” He sucked in a deep breath. “Would things have been better? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be my pack’s alpha and you wouldn’t be who you are today — which is someone I happen to like very much, even if you keep clawing at me.”
Camille let out a watery scoff. “It seemed like such a good plan in my head. I thought we’d run away together, maybe to the New Zone, until people forgot about us. Then we could come back and everything would be okay. No one would mind.”
“Even if your mother approved of us, Cam, you have to know your family would have hunted us to the end of the Earth. Teddy was ready to take my head off for rejecting you. I can’t imagine what he would have done if I stole you.”
And despite what she had coolly asserted the previous night, there really was no telling what Marian would have done if Camille chose to leave her side for Viktor. A volatile woman even before her sharp decline, there was a fifty-fifty chance that she would think it was a grand way to get back at the Solbournes. If her mood swung the other way, she might have done something dangerous and explosive, like putting a bounty on their heads.
Camille was mature enough to look back and know it was a bad idea, but there would always be a part of her that wondered what it would have been like to jump from one seedy motel to another with him; how it would have felt to have him be her first. More than that, she would always wish she could have succeeded in saving him from what the future held.
“I never wanted to come between you and Teddy,” she admitted, eyes stinging. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I knew it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart. It was just… the way it happened. I would have done the same thing if I was in his place.”
Guilt crawled up her throat. Camille wasn’t sure she really wanted to know, but she had to ask anyway. “What happened?”
“Cam…”
“I want to know.” She curled her hands into fists and pressed them against her thighs. “I need to know.”
Viktor was quiet for the span of several heartbeats before he quietly admitted, “We fought.”
Her throat wanted to close around the words, but she forced them out anyway. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that Valen had to call in the Guard to separate us.”
Camille closed her eyes. Fuck.
That meant they must have come very close to killing one another. The Guard wouldn’t have stepped in otherwise. Generally speaking, elves were left to solve their own disputes.
You picked a fight, you were the one who suffered the consequences.
To know that members of the Sovereign’s Guard — at the time under Delilah’s command — had to step in to stop the fight was a horrifying testament to just how bad it must have been.
“And then you were left to face your father alone.” Camille wrapped her arms around her middle and drew her legs up to her chest. Resting her forehead against her knees, she choked out, “You were alone because of me.”
Viktor’s voice was a raw croon when he said, “I wasn’t really alone, Cam. I knew that if I really needed the Solbournes, I could always ask for help. But I was always going to have to face my dad by myself. I knew it from the moment I could walk. He was always going to be my responsibility. It’s… just the shifter way.”
The beast in her understood that. It was the same part that recognized that sometimes protecting the people you loved meant facing a horror that should never have existed in the first place. Her own father had done the same thing — and died for his trouble.
Like Theron Solbourne, Viktor was a good man willing to do the hardest thing to protect his family. Camille respected that as much as she feared it. If she made that final choice, would she just end up meeting her mother’s fate anyway? Would she choose him, only to have Viktor ripped from her because he needed to stand up for what was right at some point in the future?