Page 65 of Griffin Food

I glance down at paws. Then up at Atlas. My gaze is level with his.

I spin. Jump. Catch a flash of white fur and tail in my peripheral.

“Fuck! What am I?” This is not a regular wolf.

Atlas steps forward, sliding his fingers into the fur at my jaw. It feels…nice, indescribable. My wolf presses into the touch, idiot.

“Quite a surprise, Lark,” he says dryly. “And you’re a direwolf shifter.”

My tail starts to beat. My entire body wriggles with sheer joy. I yip. And then, without a second thought, I give Atlas a good, solid shoulder-barge. Twelve distinct presences fill my mind—the pride.

Not human minds. Nor wolves. Something far older.

I go to them, licking and bumping them until they pet me.

“Like a giant frisky pup,” Darrion grumbles in my mind, although he rubs the scruff at the back of my neck in a way that has me drooling with sappy pleasure.

But then, I come to a stop as my circle of the room brings me to where Rafe is chained to the wall. My tail stops beating. I gently nuzzle into his hand, and his fingers grasp my fur. I cannot feel him in my mind the way I can the others… sadness overcomes me that he is on the outside. I sit down and turn expectantly to Atlas.

He is still a bastard. But I sense he is a bastard with a plan.

“Is he a wolf shifter, too?” I never sensed it, yet there is an expectation in the air, a premonition of something more.

“No,” Atlas says. “He is not. But I intend to claim him anyway. You are part of this, both of you. Part of her.”

My pulse quickens. I have long suspected they have a plan, one that would eventually see us outed as Violet’s mates. But that was never their intention at all. Fate? Destiny? Violet has ever been at the center of something far more powerful than me. Rafe and I are merely ordinary men caught in her sweet snare. Only now we are all something more than we were—more than ordinary. Without Violet, I might never have met my wolf.

Yet, I understand, too, that we are but small pieces in a greater puzzle.

I have claimed a part of her. A mate. Gone from a lone, mute, wolf shifter to a member of a griffin pride.

But my first loyalty was always to Rafe, the man I knew and befriended before Violet stormed onto the scene.

“She loves him,” I say. “She will not want you to hurt him unduly—I do not want you to hurt him, either.”

As Atlas cracks his knuckles and sets his sights on Rafe, I may understand what is coming next, but that doesn’t mean I shall like it.

Rafe

Lark is a direwolf. I cannot get my head around it.

I’ve met wolf shifters, a good number of them, and I’ve seen them in both human and wolf forms. So I know that a shifter’s wolf is generally a big bastard compared to a regular wolf, and that one might wonder how something so huge can be contained in a regular-sized man.

Fine, the alphas are generally tall, strong men, but beta shifters, which I presumed Lark was, are average for want of a better word. Lark is a soldier, and he’s strong… yet never would I have expected this much beast to be lingering within him. He is fucking huge—not much smaller than a griffin if one were to ignore their great wingspan.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I choked up when he transitioned, and his inner animal broke free.

I hate Atlas, the lordly bastard in charge of this pride. We’ve lingered under his threat from the moment we arrived. And yet, I can respect him too, that he was the one to coax Lark’s wolf to the surface.

Lark’s part is over, accepted, and now Atlas has his sights on me. To what end, I have no clue. “I’m no wolf shifter,” I say.

“I did not think you were.”

Smug bastard. Like he knows something I do not. Well, good luck with trying to beat something out of me. There is no animal of any kind lurking in the back of my mind, not a bear, not a wolf, nor anything else. My parents are regular betas, as were my grandparents. I can trace my family back five generations in the little village where I grew up.

Lark gives the side of my face a big, wet lick.

I grunt, distracted from Atlas’s looming presence, and then Lark slinks off and takes up a position out of the way.