Free Mated to the Pack by Alanis Knight

the gravity of
their situation, and the faces of Luke and Logan stared at her
through the haze of passion from which she was just beginning to
emerge.
    “Oh, my god,” Allison murmured.
    “They’ll never come back, now” Michael
lamented, running his hand harshly through his dripping hair.
    “We won’t tell them,” Allison suggested.
    “They’ll know,” Michael said.
    “But, you said the bond was broken,” Allison
argued. “Maybe they won’t know.”
    “They’ll know,” he repeated. “They’ll know,
and they’ll hate me forever.”
    As the clouds began to part and golden
sunlight peeked through the trees in streams, the two of them sat
in silence. What could be done? Was the pack forever broken? There
had to be some way to mend it.
    “I know!” Allison suddenly gasped, her face
lit with excitement.
    Michael looked at her with an eyebrow lifted
quizzically.
    “I’ll let myself get captured by Victor!”
she squealed with glee.
    “What?” Michael’s voice boomed more loudly
than the thunder ever had. “Absolutely not! I forbid it!”
    “You can’t forbid me! You don’t own me!”
Allison shouted.
    “I most certainly can, and I do!” he shouted
back. “You cannot do that! What if they… what if…”
    “Michael,” she said softly, her hand
brushing his cheek. “It’s the only way. They’ll come back if they
think I’m in danger. Won’t they?”
    “Well, yes, I’m sure they would,” he agreed,
clasping her delicate wrist. “But at what cost? And even if they do
come back, there’s no guarantee they’ll forgive me… or us.”
    “But it’s possible,” she said. “I don’t see
any other way. Do you?”
    “I don’t,” he admitted.
    “Then we must do what we must do,” she said.
“I trust you.”
    “I can’t help but think of the what if,” he
said.
    “Well, I can’t help but think what if we
don’t,” she said. “There is no other way.”
    Michael’s skin turned a sickly shade of
green, and he looked as though he might lose his lunch at any
moment. Allison could think of nothing else to say, but she
snuggled close to him and stroked his arm.
    “No,” Michael said suddenly.
    “Huh?”
    “I said no,” he repeated. “No, I won’t risk
you. There has to be another way.”
    “But you said…”
    “My decision is final,” he said. “I refuse
to put you at risk. We will find another way. We must.”
    She meant to protest, and her mouth opened
to do so, but the stony look on his face told her he would not be
swayed. She sighed heavily and sat back resignedly. Retrieving her
soggy clothing, she began to wriggle into it.
    “Thaddeus,” Michael said suddenly.
    “Who?” Allison asked absently as she
struggled to yank her shorts over her wet skin.
    “Thaddeus was the Alpha of our pack before…”
he paused, and she stopped struggling with her clothes to stare at
him. “Before he died.”
    “What happened to him?” she asked
gently.
    “Victor.”
    “Oh. Well, what about Thaddeus?”
    “On his death bed, he beseeched only one
thing of us,” Michael said. “And that was to remain a pack and
always look out for one another. An oath made to a dying Alpha can
never be broken. So you see, they have to come back! They’ve
simply forgotten about their oath in their distress.”
    “Well, how can we remind them?” Allison
asked.
    “We have to find them, first.”
    “You said you could use pack instincts to
find them,” Allison reminded him.
    “Normally I could but…” he paused.
    “What, Michael?”
    “My instincts seem to be severely hampered
at the moment,” he admitted, hanging his shoulders dejectedly.
    “By what?” she asked. Then she saw it in his
eyes, and she added, “By me.”
    He nodded.
    “It’s not supposed to happen this way,” he
told her. “We live as a pack, we love as a pack, we often die as a
pack, though that’s obviously not always the case. I don’t know
what came over me.”
    “You really should just forget about