Coyote Wolf

25 | ALPHA DUTY

NAYLAN

The past week was the best week of my life.

I'd take it even without all the sex with Mavis — though, the sex with Mavis was a big part of why I was grinning from ear to ear even during insufferable status report meetings with my pack. I'd managed to call my mother and break the news about Mavis. She'd been shocked at first, asking a million and one questions, and then scolding me for not telling her right when I'd noticed the bond. She wanted to come down to Toronto to meet him, but I let her know that I would have to check in with Mavis first. I'd met his family, so I was sure he wasn't opposed to seeing my mother, but I was still nervous.

Mavis went back to his place but stuck around my pack more often than not. He spent most of his nights here, crawling out of bed sometime before noon to return to his family.

My wolf wasn't very happy about that, but I had to remind myself constantly that this was more than I'd ever anticipated in the first place. If he didn't want to move in with me, I was okay with that. He was less than a twenty-minute walk away. We spent a lot of time together now — and not tucked away by the riverside or lingering somewhere in the woods. I could hang out with him in public — hold his hand and kiss him. He was my mate and now clearly marked as such.

The mating bond did make my feelings more intense, just like I had anticipated. I could swim in the feelings radiating off him. I felt his thoughts, even though I didn't have the verbal context for why he was feeling the way he did. I knew that he liked me — a lot — and it helped to ease the frustration I felt with reining back some of the things I wanted to say to him.

I love you.

The words stayed close to the tip of my tongue whenever he was within my reach. His laugh — the way his eyes softened when he looked at me. Everything about him made my heart pound and my wolf desperate to push me into declarations of everlasting love. The thoughts sometimes even weirded me out. I've always been romantic, sure, but I wasn't Shakespearean about it. I think I would weird even myself out if I started saying supper flowery romantic things out of left field. I still just called Mavis, Mavis. The thought of intrinsic pet names made my face warm up and my stomach flip.

I couldn't weird Mavis out with a clumsy love confession.

Not now, at least. I needed to give him time to adjust to the arrangement.

I could wait.

"What's up? You're thinking too hard?" Mavis' voice was loud but didn't carry much over the sound of my motorcycle. He was riding with me — his hands wrapped around my waist and face plastered on my back as I drove us toward Georgiou's pizzeria.

"Nothing," I mouthed, forcing myself to pay attention to the road ahead. Mavis' clan and Gerogiou's pack were going to devise a way to catch the hyenas without hurting them or getting anyone else hurt. As Georgiou had mentioned, many of them were just kids who didn't know how to speak English. He'd organized for us to talk with a couple of new first-generation jackals here in Toronto. Hopefully, at least one of them would be able to communicate in a language the hyenas understood. Elijah was already up at Georgiou's — Mavis and I were running late, but I didn't think it was too much of a problem.

When we drove out of the highway and onto the main roads, and through the streets, I noticed Mavis' grip on me tightened a bit. He was still nervous around wolves. There were a lot of them downtown — in so many variants that I couldn't imagine the conflicting feeling that stirred in Mavis. I decided not to mention it, knowing he was trying to work on it by himself. It was probably why he couldn't see himself living with me — with my pack. It didn't matter that I was there. It mattered that there were too many wolves there.