Raise

Twenty

Gainey

Public speaking is not my forte. Not even a little. I'm more of a choke them out, not chat them up kind of guy. More hands on than words out. And although this room only contains four people, two of whom I consider family, it's still a few too many members of the public than I care to stand in front of. Especially when I am about to spill forth the sordid details of our twisted family.

No thank you. I really feel like I might be physically sick. But I don't let my feelings show. On the outside I am stoic. Controlled. Silent and still like the eye of the storm. No one but Benji would know that I am about to lose control.

He knows that on the inside, I am a wreck.

If internal sweating was a thing, I would be leaking from every single pore. But I have warrior training. Longridge training. I have been taught to keep all of my emotions undercover, shoving them down deep into the reserves where they won't be discovered. Perhaps ever.

It's something I have always done when things became overwhelming.
It's become a habit, even when I am not working. And at this present moment, I'm eternally grateful for the skill. I'm about to open a can of worms. Pandora's fucking box of horrors. In front of them. In front of Alice.

We may be nothing, but she is still my mate. She is someone to me, whether I want to admit it to myself or not. Whether I want to recognise it or not. And unpacking all of my craptastic life history before her feels a little like having surgery whilst I am awake.

Painful. And an inevitable bloody mess.

I haphazardly shift side to side, nervously changing the weight of my body from foot to foot. I run my hands through my hair time and time again. I scan my eyes across the room but I don't make eye contact. I can't. To get this all out, what I need to say, I need to stay as detached as possible.

I don't know where to begin so I just pick up where Benji left off. The beginning of the end really. As macabre as it sounds, it was the darkest of my days but it was also the start of a new dawn for me. A shift so complete, one tiny moment in time changed the entire future for my home pack.

For my family. And for me.

It was also the day that I swore I would never have a mate or take an Alpha role. I decided I would never complete the mate link, never choose a mate or have a significant other past anything other than physical need and perhaps to procreate. But that's it. I don't even care if I have any pups. No pups mean no name to carry on. No damaged lineage. No drama.

Alice needs to know this.

My parents downfall was the weakness that stemmed from their mating. Amorette's bitterness was born of her desire to mate an Alpha. Her failures breathed life into her quest to mate a high ranking wolf, so much so that she destroyed matings of other wolves, namely my parents.

So no. It's not for me. Having that bond, something that controls you, succumbing to the numb ideal of the mate ship, it only causes weakness.

And as much as I feel a biological pull to Alice, something I cannot describe, attempting to fight it's way into my black heart, I will not allow it to happen.

It's for our own good. Hers and mine.

I will keep this part of my thoughts to myself though. For now. Benji knows how I feel about mates and I also know how he feels. He still has the untouched, ridiculous, boyhood hope that he will be one of the lucky ones. The blessed few who find their destined mate and remain untouched by the tragedy that follows us like a plague. He wants to live happily ever after.

He is a fool.

I am not.

It's how we have always been. One a dreamer and one a realist. One a peace make and one a fighter. One a thinker and one a doer.