Ayn's Healing

Chapter 7 -Kari

"Really, Alpha, we have to eat there?" Timo asks disappointed when my father remembers to inform us that we will be also having dinner at the pack we are visiting. We'll only be back at Eagle Rock sometimes after midnight.

"Mia will live without you one evening, Beta," my father tells him, but he also doesn't seem excited at the idea of my mother going to bed alone. "Chris' Luna organized this big dinner for us..."

There is something in the way he specifies that it's the Luna inviting us for dinner which triggers all my alarms.

"Who else is coming to this big dinner, Alpha?" I ask in a voice that wants to be neutral but my words come out louder than I intended them.

"Her sister...with her two daughters" my dad answers and he almost sounds ashamed.

"I thought this is a renegotiation, not a matching event" and before I manage to put my fist through the dashboard like my body demands, followed by a swift confession that I have already found my mate, Xander uses the voice on me.

"Stop. We still need to wait two years for a new vehicle, and I want this one to last until then. "

I go through the motions of feeling my neck bow against my will under his sound as he continues "This is the Luna's way of showing her friendship to your mother."

Just as I am thinking that at least he didn't remind me to behave, which means I can be as disagreeable as needed to minimize the interaction with the two she-wolves, my father stops the car and turns towards me:

"Kari, you need to behave. You cannot cause any trouble at Chris' table"

I cannot hold back Storm from showing him a very sharp fang.

"You'll have to stand behind that statement when we are home" The Alpha adds and I feel the otherworldly purple eyes of Rock looking at me.

"I will" I state plainly, and Timo gawks at me completely horrified. The Beta mind links me to ask me if I realize that I just challenged our Alpha again.

I have done that frequently in the last year, and it never ended well for me. I tell him that I plan to fight my father until he kills me or I make him submit. Either way, this will be the last matching dinner I am doing.

"There is the other one your mom organized...unless you plan to challenge her too... or you get lucky tonight." Timo reminds me with a completely inappropriate wink.

I wish I could tell Timo how I am sure that I won't get lucky tonight because back home there is a certain skinny female- of great powers if I am to trust Storm - who is my mate, and who looked at me this morning with a dreamy smile on her face.

I would also tell him how I had to take a long calming breath to prevent myself from greeting her like I wanted to, by pinning her tight against a wall so that I could feel every curve of her body molded into mine, and then kissing her lips softly to start with and then, if that would have been well received, maybe exploring her mouth little bit rougher while carrying her up the stairs to my bedroom.

I then would mention to Timo how I remembered that I had to leave on the boring politics tour with my father and that I won't be seeing her for some days. Feeling my pain, Storm offered to mark the female as ours right there in my mother's hallway, and, if she wouldn't have scurried past me so quickly, wrapped in her flowery smell that reminded me she is a witch, I think I would have allowed him to.

Chris is one of my father's closest allies and the yearly meeting is not so much a negotiation as a pretext for them to get together and dissect Land Politics around a bottle of strong liquor. This year however Chris has news for us and he informed us that his son Finn had found his mate and was ready to take over the pack.