Taste the Blood

Taste the Blood
MAX

Of course the obnoxious blonde prick that likes to test his mortality would be the one to videotape the entire debacle, but at least, this time, he has enough self preservation to admit to his treachery before I’m forced to watch the second quarter of the tape. The audacious teen calls out to me just as Corlys can be seen lunging from his vehicle toward Blanca with his arm cocked back in a closed fist and a snarl of hatred on his lips.
“It was me, Alpha Max,” says a dreaded male voice posed in the center cell. A defeated voice once so arrogant and full of mockery that I’m almost shocked to see the bearer looking as contrite as he does.
I pause the video clip gratefully, my relief, a selfish, deplorable truth that seeks to spare me the sight of what my negligence incited. The truth of what my arrogance caused. The violence that struck out in my name in hopes of vanquishing the only pure thing I have been gifted in this world. That fact alone angers me. The audacity of Corlys and Yvette to think that they knew better than the Alpha of their pack simply because they’d watched me grow up. Yvette sought to purge me of the very same compassion that held her place in my mother’s home for so long. The compassion that my mother ingrained in me, that she showered on her. A trait that I am more than entitled to have but know that I’m left wanting for.
Because the truth is much more selfish than all that. Much less valiant. It’s something I still don’t seem to have enough respect for even to voice aloud, but at the same time…I was so afraid of losing that nothing else mattered in that moment. Nothing…and no one. 
Jared was right when he told these boys what would have happened if Corlys had succeeded in his task of murdering Blanca and Alfred had not stepped in. I know he was right because I can still feel it. The rage. The panic. The helplessness. The absolute torment of knowing that she was about to die and I never chose to accept her…that she would be gone and I could never take back my decision…all of that would have been the catalyst that spawned an age of destruction. A new devil. A devil that would have painted the entire field with the blood of children and then likely their parents as well. Goddess knows I would have torn through the Shiftless encampment right after that, not wanting a single one of them to live if I couldn’t have my Blanca. I can see it. I can practically taste the blood.
So yeah, compassion was not my weakness. Compassion was not my motive. But it would have been my shame.
The realization stuns me because…I would have forfeited my life at the loss of hers, would have thrown it all away and now that I have her alive and well, the immediate threat demolished…I know…I still won’t make her my Luna. I can’t. Despite all the things that I said to her when she lay dying in my arms, she still remains the girl that murdered my brother. She still remains the slave that was spared her execution, making her the one female in all of creation that my pack would never accept. 
A quiet, dangerous thought rises inside of me. A thought so distant from the mentality of the man I was groomed to become that for a moment I feel split in half. Suddenly, it’s like there are two sides of me and one of them is a complete stranger. A stranger telling me that I can still have her, I can still have Blanca and everything does not have to be this hard. Telling me that she can be my mate if I want her to be, that I can keep her if I am willing to pay the price. All I would have to do…is step down as Alpha of the pack, then I could marry her and mark her and we could live out our days in my mother’s house.
For a moment, I allow myself to get excited, but then I realize…that’s just not how things work. There are only two ways for something like that to occur and neither of them would put me in the position to protect her in the way I can now. One, someone more powerful challenges me and I concede, or two, I go rogue.
Not to toot my own horn, but number one just isn’t likely to happen. And yeah, you read that right, it’s like that, of course it is. 
As far as number two goes, it’s self explanatory. Dragging her, a Shiftless female once sentenced to die, with me into an unsteady and unstable future, a future in which we live the rest of our lives out in shame while being hunted is not a romance worth swooning over. Any child we ever had would be damned from birth whether born Shiftless or Alpha and that just wouldn’t be fair.
Beyond that, I risk condemning an entire people, because a pack without an Alpha does not succeed and when it fails it will fall to an invasion or else a civil war.
Save me from myself will you?
Fuck!