Chapter 11

Chapter 11
It came off as a little more irritated than I meant. Erik never made his various lovers any secret to me, and honestly it never bothered me, but ever since he started in with the promises and the talking about how he wanted me to be his real mate and all that, I started getting a little jealous, and more than a little curious.

He looked back up at me, staring at my face for a second before he opened his mouth and then closed it again without speaking.

“What is it, Erik? What aren’t you telling me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was a lot shakier than I’d ever heard it. He sounded... vulnerable? If I was about to laugh when he made that retirement home joke, hearing the little crackle in his normally smug-as-allhell voice had exactly the opposite effect. “I just... I don’t know. It sounds stupid, but...”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “none of this sounds stupid. You just told me you loved me for Christ’s sake.” I was on the verge of tears from his unexpected revelation, but somehow I managed to hold them off. “How could you think that’s stupid?”

“Not that,” he grumbled. “The stuff about the pack and the politics and everything else. I shouldn’t care, you know? I should just tell them to take a hike if they don’t like the way I do things. I mean, I’m the alpha, right? And no, it’s not just the addiction. I feel things for you I didn’t even know I could feel.”

“You are,” I said, “but I know you have other things to think about. You can’t just do whatever you want, or you’d be some kind of a weird, crooked, half-animal king. You were elected, you can’t just—”

Erik looked me straight in the eye. “Chosen. We live in different worlds, Izzy. Very, very different worlds. We don’t care about democracy or kings or anything else.”

His seriousness caught me a little off guard. I cocked an eyebrow, not really sure why he turned so quickly. “All I meant was that you had to think of other people.”

He snarled, pulling his lips back over his teeth and giving me one hell of a charge. “No,” he growled, “I don’t. I don’t have to care one bit about what anyone else thinks. I am in charge.”

I watched Erik’s face for a second. He was chewing hard on the inside of his mouth. There was something deeper going on than just some dumb Jamesburg politics, which Erik always had a dismissive attitude about.

“You’re scared they’re going to throw you out, aren’t you?” I clapped my hand over my mouth as soon as I spoke. Not out of fear or anything, but because it was actually meant to be a thought for the inside of my head, not something to air.

Erik’s response was a glare. “Where did that come from?”

“I... I mean, why hide it? You’re worried that if you come out with this relationship that we both obviously get so much out of, that they’ll suddenly see you as... I don’t know, half an alpha or something, right? They’ll think you’re too weak to resist a stupid human?”

He grunted a laugh. “They’d like to have the balls to try to go at me.”

“Well what is it then? Why is it that every time someone challenges you, you tighten up your lips and start frowning? Why can’t you answer me with a straight face and not go off on some tangent about how great and

powerful you are? You were elected, Erik, you know—” “Chosen,” he said softly. “We call it choosing, not electing.” I shot him a side-long glare.

“Sorry,” he said.

“If you have a problem, why can’t you talk about it with me? That’s what relationships are, Erik. If you think that what you want is a serious...

anything with me, then you need to wrap your head around that.”

I sat down, hard, and drank some coffee that was really old. “This coffee is disgusting, and the way you’re acting right now it’s really hard not to call you a baby.”

“You don’t understand,” Erik said. “You don’t know how this place works. Alphas don’t just get up and quit. We don’t just resign when we get caught in a sex scandal. If you’re an alpha, you’re an alpha for life, even after your term is over, you—”

“What really happened to Atlas?” I asked.

Erik fell dead silent.

“What happened?” I prodded. “You said he went crazy like werebears do, and then after his mate stole all the money and left he jumped off a building. There’s more to it, even if you don’t know what it is, there’s more to the story.”

I took another drink of the old coffee and immediately wished I hadn’t, though it kept my hands busy.

Erik shook his head again, and shrugged. “That’s all I know. All anyone knows.”

Outside the window, a couple of cars stopped at the light honked their horns, and someone started shouting. It was so quiet in the apartment that it almost felt like we’d been invaded. And then, of course, I realized that we had, in a way, and we were just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“You can tell me anything, Erik,” I said. “We have to trust each other, you know?”

“I know,” he said in a quiet grumble. “It’s just... how can I? I mean... no wait, I said that wrong.”

I was already on my feet by the time he finished. “To take a phrase from you,” I said, “what is that supposed to mean? For all your stuff about love and everything, you doubt me too, don’t you? Underneath it all, that’s what it comes down to, huh? You’re scared of trusting me.”

“No,” Erik said. He stuck his hand out and I dodged again. “That’s not what I meant, Izzy, I’m just flustered and confused and irritated and... what are you doing?”

“You keep making all these promises, Erik,” I said. “You’ve been telling me for a year and a half that you were going to come up with some way to make the whole town feel comfortable with us being together – with you having a pureblood human for a mate. Over and over, you say the same thing, and now you’re... you’re acting like you agree with all their unease over me. Like you’re not sure I’m who you think I am.”

Erik reached out and grabbed my shoulders. “Isabel, listen to me,” he said. His voice was tight in his throat. I hit a nerve. “I just don’t know what to do. Atlas coming back, even if it’s a complete non-issue, has brought all this old prejudice back to the surface. What he did, or rather what his mate did, is on the front of everyone’s mind now. Can’t you see that?”

I took a deep breath, steadying myself. One after the other, I took Erik’s hands and removed them from my shoulders. “What I see,” I paused, considering my words carefully for a moment. “What I see is that you don’t have the courage to stand up for me. I have to believe that’s it. You know why? Because the only other alternative is that I have to believe the man who keeps telling me we’re meant to be and all this... I have to believe he thinks I’m a thief.”

“Izzy, no!” Erik stuck out his hand again, but I twisted away.

“I’m leaving,” I said. I grabbed my purse off the table and stuck my phone, my notepad, and almost dumped that raunchy cup of coffee into it. “I’m leaving. I’m done. If you are so worried about me stealing a bunch of money from Jamesburg, then fine. I’ll make this whole thing easy on you.

All right? Goodbye.”

“Wait!” Erik called after me, but I wasn’t hearing any of it.

I strode right to the door, grabbed the handle, and felt a stab in my heart the second I turned the door. How did this whole day – this whole life – turn around in the blink of an eye? And it wasn’t even zombie alphas I was worried about... hell, that hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about.

But I’d been down this road one too many times.

I’d had too many men give me the love run around when the reality was, they were perfectly happy to sleep with me, but weren’t going to admit it to their friends. This was the exact same thing, just on a whole other level. And of all the things I didn’t know, the one I did know is that I wasn’t going to put up with having my heart broken again. Not a chance.

If my heart was going to break, I thought as I closed my eyes to blot out his protesting and the sounds of his boots clomping after me, I was going to be the one who did the breaking.

Bandages don’t hurt unless you pull ‘em real slow.

This one, I ripped.