Sequel: Slip

What We Left Unsaid

T E N

The alpha and the new beta female walked out of the office together with tired expressions, neither of them having the energy to switch gears so quickly into joking moods, especially when they both knew that they would still have to face the rest of the pack. The blonde woman was particularly not looking forward to it, but had made up her mind as soon as she stepped into the hallway that she would need to talk to her old friend as soon as she could find him.

It took all of two seconds for her to find him.

The pair stepped into the living room just in time to watch a certain spiky-haired guitarist launch a fist right into his fellow guitarist’s jaw. The shorter man’s head snapped back in the opposite direction, and the taller turned and rubbed his fingers over his red knuckles. His brown eyes flickered up to see the pair a moment later, but he didn’t look surprised.

“Relax, Matt, I’m done,” he said simply, starting to move toward them with his gaze fixed on the hallway behind them.

Behind him, amber eyes were blazing as the left handed guitarist turned his head back around, lifting one hand to his mouth and wiping away some of the blood that had appeared. Entirely too calmly, the man straightened his arms and stiffly folded up his sleeves. “With all due respect, Alpha, I’m not.”

Knowing instantly what he had in mind, Ava sprang forward, quickly dodging past the exiting man and stepping in front of her mate just as he started to stalk after his attacker. Catching him by the shoulders, she gave him a light shove to keep him in place. “Don’t be a fucking jackass; just leave him alone, Zacky!”

She was met with brutal amber eyes, the sheer outrage in them making her heart skip a beat. He leaned closer to her as he continued to glare furiously at her, obviously more wolf than man. “Do not get in my way,” he warned her stiffly, his words coming out as more of a low growl than anything else.

She was surprised at first that he was bothering with a warning rather than just launching an attack at her, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that the blood he was craving right now wasn’t hers... for once. Still, she met his gaze with more than a little bit of irritation. Carefully, making sure each word was over pronounced, she issued a warning of her own. “Do not order me around; you don’t own me.”

Rather than glaring or just pushing past her, the man smiled slowly, an evil glint in his still-amber gaze as he showed her red-stained teeth. “This,” he countered as he lifted a hand and pressed roughly against the mark at the junction of her neck and shoulder, “says that yeah, I fucking do.”

She roughly tugged away from his grip, watching as he barked out a low growl of a laugh. It died away the second her furious gaze moved to his neck and shoulder, where they both knew another marking remained hidden. When her gaze flickered back to his, he let out a snarl in warning, but her gaze only shifted to amber as she stepped back closer to him, pressing her face just in front of his.

Smiling back cruelly, she cocked her head to the side in an animalistic manner. “Then it looks like you’ve got a little bit of a problem controlling your possessions, huh?” she breathed out tauntingly, suddenly lashing out her hand and making a grab for his collar.

He blocked her move just in time, his hand capturing her wrist just before he fingers were able to curve around the fabric of his shirt. Before he was able to make another move, though, the both of them were grabbed roughly by the back of their necks and pulled away from each other. Then, they were pushed across the room and out through the open sliding door before being thrown forward.

As grass met their faces, snarling erupted from the both of them. “Outside!” was the only thing that Matt shouted in irritation before the porch door slammed shut again.

The two both sent a glare in the direction of the door that was still vibrating with the force at which it was slammed before turning their anger on each other. Zacky went for his usual attack of grabbing the woman by the throat as he launched at her without even getting to his feet, but the woman had launched herself at the same time, and managed to capture his arm in the process. She wasted no time in locking down on the limb and trying to position herself in an arm bar, but hissed out in pain instead when the fingers of his free hand clawed into the skin on the scruff of her neck and he threw her backwards, freeing his other arm.

Before she had a chance to even exhale the breath that was being knocked out of her as her back slammed into the ground, the man was above her, a hand already around her throat and cutting off her access to air as his face pressed close to hers and his amber eyes looked into hers predatorily.

“You think I don’t own you?” he asked with a mocking laugh as he straddled her waist. “Sweetheart, I own every single part of you, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it. You’re mine.”

The woman coughed as struggled against him, getting the smallest amount of momentum before she slammed up at an angle and knocked him off of her, breaking his hold on her neck. She latched onto his back as he rolled, quickly wrapping her arms tightly against his neck and throwing a leg around his waist so that she was able to bring her heel down harshly into his groin when they stopped on their sides. As he bent forward with a groan of pain, she tightened her grip around his neck and moved her mouth just behind his ear.

“You think that just because you were inside of me for thirty fucking seconds, that makes any difference?” she taunted, giving a breathy chuckle of her own as she tightened her arms once again, fighting against the hands that were trying to break her hold. “Please,” she mocked with a laugh, only to have the sound cut short when she received a harsh blow to her ribs that resulted in a loud crack. Hissing in pain, her grip relaxed just enough to allow her prisoner to escape.

“Oh, I know it makes no difference,” countered the man as he breathed heavily, an elbow already digging into the woman’s neck as he shifted positions quickly. A leg thrown over her thighs to keep them still, he used his free hand to find the rib he had broken and lean all of his weight into it, a malicious glint in his eye when he smirked up at her. “Did you expect it to change anything, Princess?” he asked with an almost pitying smile, his teeth showing more when his ears caught the sound of her muffled yelping as he shifted his weight. “What does change things is my teeth in your neck, and you will submit to your mate!”

With his focus so on further tormenting her with the broken rib, he made a stupid mistake, and the woman was quick to call him on it. Her jaws locked down around the side of the hand that had gotten just close enough for her to reach. She knew the pain of the bite, even deep as it was when she easily broke skin, wouldn’t be enough to free her, but it was enough to cause him to shift his arm just enough so as to give her access to oxygen again. With the pressure off of her neck, she was able to inhale deeply through her nose and roll her head, dragging her teeth across his hand and issuing several deep cuts. That was enough to have him completely refocusing, which gave her the opportunity to kick him away from her.

They both rolled apart, only to quickly get back to their feet and lunge at each other, both of them erupting into balls of fur, teeth, and claws before they made contact. In a snarling mess, the two wolves snapped at each other and did their best to dig their teeth into the other, tails raised and ears far forward. Though black-furred wolf heavily favored his front left paw, he was still able to put enough weight on it so as to not completely limit his movements. The smaller brown wolf had less limits to her movement, but her right side was tender enough that she subconsciously kept it facing away from the male.

Both wolves noticed the weaknesses in their opponents easily, and both did their best to exploit them. The male was better able to counter the blows aimed at him because he could predict which side she would attack from, and the female was able to jump just a few feet away and force the male to limp after her. Both wolves also knew that their temporary advantages wouldn’t last much longer, however, and so both put their all into the fight, rolling, slashing, clawing, and digging their teeth into their opponent at every opportunity.

After several minutes, their battle threw them into a tumbling mess when they reached the edge of a certain hill, both wolves forced apart by sheer momentum as they found themselves rolling down the hill. The black wolf landed particularly poorly on his injured paw, and the brown wolf ended up slamming into a tree trunk with her injured side, but neither of the two gave up the battle. Instead, they both shifted back to human forms and flew towards each other again, the woman managing to get the upper hand as she caught the male with unstable footing, sending them both to the ground with her landing in the dominant position.

Arm digging harshly into his air canal and hips straddling his upper waist as she leaned forward and glared down at him, the blonde cocked her head to the side, simply blinking away the blood that caught in her vision for a moment. “You want me to submit to you, Zacky?” she asked patronizingly, her gaze flicking in appreciation to the way his hair was matted with blood where she knew she had grazed him with her teeth earlier. When her amber gaze met his again, she leaned closer tauntingly, keeping her face just out of reach of his snapping jaw. “You’re gonna have to give me a goddamn reason to; your mark on my neck isn’t good enough.”

She had been much too focused on delivering her message and had neglected to truly immobilize him, and he hadn’t missed the opportunity. He had them flipped in only a second, her arm against his neck suddenly useless. He was quick to use his arms to pin hers down when she started to move them toward his throat, though he wasn’t able to get his hips in the truly dominant position, her legs circling his waist and preventing him from pinning them down as well. To a human bystander, their position would have looked very compromising, him over her and between her legs, both unclothed, but there wasn’t anything sexual about their behavior, simply aggressive. Neither of them made a sudden or a drastic move, however, their bodies pressed against each other’s they waited for the other to make the move by releasing their advantage. The position they were in left them in a momentary stalemate, which they both used to catch their breath.

As he glared down at her and slowly started inching his arms into a better position without releasing hers from under them, he flexed his jaw, at first subconsciously and then deliberately when his mind started to register the ache in it. Ava’s gaze involuntarily followed the movement, rolling her own jaw in response and unwittingly exposing more of her neck to him when her head turned slightly. He didn’t miss a beat, his head diving forward and his teeth dealing a harsh but quick bite to the vulnerable flesh. Even though they both knew that her slight head tilt was not a sign of concession, he pretended to take it as one, roughly pushing away from her and getting to his feet.

He placed a good distance between them before she even got to her feet, his good hand lifting to rub at his still-aching jaw as he watched the amber fade from the blonde’s gaze even as she continued to glare at him. “Now was that so hard?” he mocked cruelly as he flashed her a smug smile.

“That wasn’t a fucking submission and you know it!” she snapped back with anger obvious in her expression, but didn’t bother to try and attack him again to prove she could have one the fight. They were both tired and breathing heavy, and they had both burned up most of their anger in their battle. Plus, she knew that even though she certainly hadn’t submitted at all, he had still been able to deal the bite to her throat, and that was enough to say he had won that fight. And, as her gaze trailed down to the marking glaring up at her now completely exposed, she couldn’t stop her own smug smirk from appearing on her lips.

“What are you so fucking pleased about?” the male questioned warily when he saw the female’s expression change.

“Nothing, dear mate, absolutely nothing.”
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I hope you all had a happy Christmas... unless, of course, you don't appreciate wishes of that nature... in which case I sincerely hope you had a great day that just happened to fall on the twenty-fifth of December. c:

On top of that, I'd like to give a little shout out to pixiesticks650, sincere-smiles, MoMo_92, JodiVengeancefoREVer, Issues, and Ice_Cat for leaving awesome comments on the last chapter!

I know this chapter seems like a filler, because nothing really solid happened, but it did set a few things up that are going to be pretty important for the coming chapters. Hopefully it was entertaining enough for you guys!