Katrina's Destiny, page 3
“Yes,” Katrina answered. Fake it til you make it would become her new motto. She scooped Thorn up into her arms and hugged him close as she joined Ceva. “Thank you for doing this for us.”
“No worries. I’ve wanted to come back and check on how things were going here since the curse was lifted.” Ceva held out her hand to Katrina, who grasped it firmly.
Katrina looked past Marcus and focused on the alphas. “We’ll be back in a week.”
“Have a good time,” Lily said as she wrapped Katrina and Thorn in a hug.
“Thanks, we intend to,” Katrina replied while keeping her mask of happiness firmly in place.
“Ready to go?” Ceva asked softly as if not wanting to scare her. Did she seem that fragile? Did people view her as weak?
“Yes,” Katrina stated and the world began to swirl around her. She pulled Thorn even closer.
From this moment on, I am taking control of my life and I’m setting my own course.
A small glimmer of excitement sparked within her for the first time in what felt like eons. Katrina grabbed hold of it as if her life depended on it.
Which it did.
***
Marcus watched helplessly as Katrina and Thorn disappeared, the lead weight in his stomach spreading, making him nauseous. However, any thoughts of slinking away to lick his wounds were dashed when his father looked at him pointedly.
“We need to talk,” Jensgar stated plainly before turning to walk back inside the pack house.
Marcus had known this day would come. No matter how prepared he thought he was, he knew this would be an obstacle course of sorts. His father was a pro at digging for answers. Before becoming the alpha of the Evergreen Pack, he’d been a general in the king’s armies.
Marcus knew keeping his reasons for behaving the way he had toward Katrina to himself was about to come to an end.
He hoped his father was ready to hear them.
Chapter Three
“So, spit it out,” his dad ordered before his alpha ass even touched the leather office chair behind his large wooden desk.
Surprisingly, Lily hadn’t followed them into the office. Maybe that was for the best, considering what Marcus would be forced to reveal. He had been dreading this day and had done everything in his power to avoid it. But he’d fallen in love, which had been the beginning of the end of him being able to keep his secret.
“I’m handling it,” Marcus replied, knowing full well that wasn’t going to fly. Jensgar’s withering look told Marcus: that’s bullshit. “Will you settle for I’m working it out? I need a bit more time?”
“From the look on Katrina’s face, I’d say you’re out of time.” The grim tone of his father’s voice reaffirmed what Marcus already suspected. He was losing Katrina.
She hadn’t even looked at him before she’d disappeared with Ceva. She’d been his sole focus for years. When his feelings had changed from duty to affection, Marcus knew his world would come crashing down just as it had been predicted.
He wiped the palm of his hand down his face and stared at the floor as if it would give him some sort of inspiration. He drew a blank.
“Marcus, look at me.”
When he looked up into his father’s eyes, Marcus was surprised to see not anger, but worse, guilt. “Have I done anything to make you believe you couldn’t share your concerns with me?”
Shit. “No of course not. You’ve been a great father to Amalia and me,” Marcus reassured.
“Then why won’t you confide in me the reason why you’re holding back from mating that wonderful woman? She’s been in love with you for years. Thorn looks to you as a father. Hell, you’re the only father he has known. I thought when the two of you found Bain it would be the end of this self-imposed purgatory. Instead, now it’s worse. The three of you aren’t even talking anymore. Is it Bain’s prior relationship with Net that bothers you?”
“No…yes. Hel,l I don’t know anymore.” I’m so screwed.
“Why couldn’t you love Katrina on your own before Bain?”
“Because we’re a triad. We work better that way. We both love Katrina and Thorn, and wish to take care of them.”
“Why do you need Bain for that?”
Jensgar was getting a bit too close to the truth and Marcus stood to leave. His dad didn’t command him to do anything. But the sheer power of being Marcus’s father and the pack’s alpha meant that stare held him in place, as would a tether he had no chance of breaking.
“You want to know why I can’t take Katrina as my mate? You want to know what’s been eating me up inside for years?” Marcus growled his question.
“Absolutely,” Jensgar growled back.
“Mom.” There it was. The one thing he’d prayed he’d never have to divulge to his father was now out and there was no backing away from it.
“Your mother?” His father’s voice came out as a whisper, and Marcus’s dread filled the room. “Explain.”
“Why don’t we leave it at I swore an oath and I cannot break it.” Marcus ran his hand across the back of his neck, squeezing in multiple places, trying to relieve his tight muscles. Stress always made his neck muscles stiff as a board.
“An oath to your mother.” Not a question, so Marcus remained silent. “This oath forbids you from mating with Katrina.”
“Sort of, in a roundabout way.” Marcus was being drawn in to reveal the truth that was floating below the surface of his responses.
“Tell me what’s going on, son.”
And that was all it took. “I swore to Mom that I wouldn’t do what you did to her.”
The shock on his father’s face might have been comical in any other situation. “I did to her?”
“Look, you’re a great man, and a great father. It doesn’t matter what she thought.”
“The hell it doesn’t. Explain.”
Marcus walked over to one of the office windows to focus on the woods. He couldn’t make himself look upon his father’s face when he said what he’d kept hidden for decades.
“I was young, and you had left days earlier for another battle somewhere. Mom was in the kitchen crying, she did that often when you were gone leading the King’s armies.” Marcus concentrated on a particularly large leaf growing on a maple tree twenty feet away. He knew he had to tell his father the rest but couldn’t seem to be able to work up the courage. He dug his claws into the palms of his hands in an effort to hold it all together.
“Why was she crying, Marcus?”
“Amalia, was maybe a toddler, so she probably doesn’t remember much of that time in our lives. When Mom noticed me standing in the doorway, she motioned me closer and looked at me straight in the eyes. She told me that she needed something from me that would make her happy. I was a kid who saw his mother crying. A lot. I wanted to make my mother stop crying. She wanted me to swear a blood oath, and I said I would.”
“A blood oath? What the hell? If you break it, you would die. She had to know that. Why would she condemn you like that?” Jensgar growled deep, his anger percolating.
“Because of you.” The words flew out of his mouth before he had a chance to temper his response. He’d wanted to work his way up to that point so that it wasn’t so harsh.
“Me?” His father’s voice had risen, but thankfully, he’d remained seated.
“Yeah,” Marcus answered. “Mom was becoming more and more despondent every time you left. At the time I would have done anything to make her happy. She took a kitchen knife and cut a line on the palm of my hand.” Marcus looked down at the fine line still scarring his palm. The constant reminder of what he’d done. “I swore my oath.”
“What did you swear?” His father’s voice was hushed. He dreaded the answer as much as Marcus did in having to give it.
“She wanted me to swear that if I chose to become a warrior that I’d never sentence my mate to being left alone.”
Heavy silence filled the room as Marcus stared at that damn leaf. It should have been on fire by now with how hard he was concentrating on it.
“Your mother was so unhappy with me that she made you swear to never do the same?”
“Yeah.” Plain and simple. Deciding that he might as well get it all out, he said, “She blamed you for her misery.”
“I never knew. She never said a word.” The grief in his father’s voice wasn’t a surprise. He’d loved his first mate deeply. “Why wouldn’t she have told me?”
“I can’t answer that. If I had to guess, she didn’t want you to feel guilty about doing your duty to the king.” He shrugged. “By the end of the year she had died and we were living in King Leonidas’s palace. There was never a reason to tell you. And, frankly, with everything we’d had to deal with to adjust to being without her, it sort of slipped into the recesses of my mind.”
“Until Katrina.”
“Until Katrina.” Marcus turned to face his father. “That’s when I felt the full impact of what I had done.”
“And Bain?”
“At first I was jealous of the way Katrina and Bain looked at each other until I realized she looked at both of us the same way. I spent time with him and got to know him better. I found out he was a great guy who was head over heels for Katrina and Thorn. At one point, I’d even offered to bow out so that Katrina and Bain could be happy together. They both refused adamantly, and told me that we were in this together or not at all.”
“You figured that the triad was the perfect solution. Since you both loved Katrina, if you made the triad there was never a chance of leaving her alone, even if you were killed in battle.”
“Exactly. It was the only way I could keep my vow while still being able to take Katrina as my mate.” Marcus had been naïve thinking it could be that easy to maneuver around a blood oath.
“Do they know?”
“No one knows, except the two of us now, and that’s as far as it’s going to go. I don’t want Katrina or Bain making decisions based on my oath. Bain was given enough to deal with when he found out about Net. He needs to make up his own mind, without considering what I vowed.”
“I keep nothing from Lily.”
Marcus nodded. “Understood, but no one else. The oath and its consequences are mine alone. I made the choice, and I have to live with that.”
“Only due to my failing your mother. If anyone is to blame for this, it’s me. I’ve caused you and your mother so much pain. How can you ever forgive me?”
“You are a great father. You had a duty to the King, and you were protecting all of us. Theirs is nothing to be forgiven.”
“But at what cost? You were only a child.”
Marcus was saved from answering when there was a soft knock on the office door preceded by Lily’s entrance. She immediately went to Jensgar and wrapped him in her arms. Marcus knew she’d felt her mate’s distress and was trying to comfort him. It would be the perfect time to get out of here, considering the walls were quickly closing in on him.
Marcus walked to the door and this time his father hadn’t tried to stop him. “I need to go for a run. I never meant for you to know. I’m sorry.” Then Marcus was out of there, using his wolf shifter speed to get him far away from the pack house.
When he was well beyond the tree line, Marcus stripped out of his clothes and shifted into his wolf. He stretched out his muscles, dug his claws into the moss-covered soil, and took a deep breath of fresh air. His need to run took over and he bolted into the forest, trying to put as much distance between himself and the pack as he could.
Marcus had to think without distractions, because right now, he was drowning in what sharing the oath had done to his father. Guilt was yet another burden he would have to bear for the rest of his days.
***
Jensgar sat back in his chair, holding tight to Lily in his lap, his arm wrapping her as close as he could hold her without hurting her as he told her what his son had shared. How had he missed something that crucial? His former mate’s suffering for all those years? And, fates, his young son having to bear up under the weight of an oath to a distraught mother was an inconceivable burden.
“Do I treat you well, mate?” Jensgar asked Lily. “Am I a good mate to you?”
Lily reached up and placed both of her small hands on either side of his head. “You are the best mate. I would want no other.”
“My son is paying the price for my shortcomings. Something has to be done to fix this.” There had to be a way. The fact that Marcus had been young and couldn’t really understand the consequences of his promise should come into play somehow.
“I’ll reach out to Ceva. She might have some answers on how to break a blood oath,” Lily told him with a confidence that Jensgar didn’t feel.
“Marcus didn’t want me to share this with anyone but you.” It wouldn’t be right to break that promise no matter how much he wanted Ceva’s help.
“You’re not the one sharing it, I am, and Ceva won’t speak a word of it.”
“I agree it’s our only chance. She alone has a direct line to the Gods.” He drew in a deep breath. “All right, ask her.” He’d deal with the fallout later, once his son was free.
Lily turned his head so that he was again facing her. When had he looked away? “Wipe that guilt off your face, and think logically. Who would ask a child to swear a blood oath in the first place?”
Jensgar opened his mouth to defend his late mate when it hit him: Lily was right. No one of sane mind would force a child to do such a thing. Now wasn’t the time to figure out what his former mate had done or her mental stability. He had to find a way to reverse the oath or his son’s future would be ruined.
Lily stood and said, “I’ll call Ceva and get her take on this.” She walked to the office door and opened it to find Bain waiting there with his fist in the air as if he was just about to knock.
“Bain, what can we do for you?” Jensgar asked quickly, in case this had anything to do with the current situation.
“I have a problem,” Bain replied. “A Goddess problem.”
Shit, this day just keeps getting better.
Chapter Four
Bain sat on the opposite end of the conference table from Net with several people between them. He was beyond pissed. While he was busy trying to figure out his life, and what to do about Katrina, Thorn, and Marcus, his newest issue was having a goddess popping up unannounced all the time.
Ceva sat beside Marcus and Net while Fenrir stood on the other side of Net, and, as always, he was in his wolf form. Alphas Jensgar and Lily sat beside their wolf god.
“Let’s get this over with,” Jensgar said. His mind was elsewhere as it had seemed to be over the last couple of days. “Net, please explain why you are ‘visiting’ Bain at all hours of the day and night.”
She didn’t even bother looking Bain, which was fine with him. “I am the Goddess of Nature and life. I go where I please.”
“Net,” Fenrir warned in a low, no-nonsense tone.
She turned and asked Bain, “Is it really so bad having me around on occasion?”
Bain wanted to say, “Yes,” but the grim expression on her face made him stop and reconsider being so harsh. “If it was on occasion during normal hours, and you let me know you were coming, that would be one thing. But you stalk me. You watch me when I’m sleeping, and randomly show up while I’m in the shower.” The last one had caused Bain to shift into his wolf and bare his canines at her. Not even that had stopped her from coming back.
Fenrir lowered his head and sighed. “We’ve talked about this, Net. Bain is no longer yours. He has no memory or instinct that you were his mate. You agreed to this in order to save his life.”
For the first time Net lowered her guard and let her pain show. “I wasn’t trying to be creepy, but it appears I have allowed my former emotions to cloud my judgment. I apologize for that.” She turned to Bain. “Since having my full form returned to me, those familiar feelings came flooding back like it hadn’t been centuries. It was as if I’d lost you only days ago, and the only way I could make that pain go away was being near you.”
“Why didn’t you come to me with this?” Fenrir asked. “I could have helped.”
“And admit I wasn’t in complete control of my actions? That wasn’t an acceptable option.”
“Net, you know how much you mean to this pack and us,” Lily explained as she motioned between herself and Jensgar. “There has to be some way to lessen your pain so that you can deal with these emotions.”
“There is,” Fenrir stated. “The longer Net stays away from Bain the better. Her pain will lessen and then she will be healed completely.”
“I’ve asked her to leave me every time she ‘appears,’ but she doesn’t go. How do you propose to make that happen?” Bain was so frustrated that he hadn’t tempered his disbelieving tone when addressing Fenrir.
“Considering it will take more then willpower alone, I will remain conscious of this situation until Net has dealt with this issue.” Fenrir moved toward the door, signaling the meeting was over. Suddenly, a frantic knock sounded on the door.
Diane, the chef, came bursting in without waiting for permission, which was beyond odd. “Fire,” she screamed. “There’s a fire in the woods to the east.”
Everyone stood and rushed from the room. Bain followed at a slower pace, knowing he’d be in the way while others fought the fire. That was until he overheard someone yell that they thought it was Katrina’s house. Without thinking about it, Bain shifted into his wolf right in the middle of the courtyard. Once he freed himself from his torn clothing, he launched his fully functioning wolf body—he had no idea why one worked and the other didn’t—into the forest in the direction of the smoke.
By the time he’d made it to the house, Katrina and Thorn’s new home was fully engulfed in flames. Hoses were laid out over the ground leading to the valves of various water mains scattered around the residential part of the pack lands. Members of the pack turned the firehouse hoses on the fire and beat the flames back until all that remained was a smoldering pile of ash and burnt timbers.
