Male scarred werewolf (Rhett) x female reader - Part Three (nsfw) (Patreon)

Whoop! So this story continues to get way out of hand. I'm not complaining though!! This part is just over 6000 words long, and features information about Rhett's frankly apalling pack life before he left, an nsfw bit (not in werewoof form this time), and a cliffhanger at the end... 

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it, as always!! It'll be up on Tumblr in a while. 

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The first month of your relationship with Rhett passed in a bit of a blur. He wasn’t necessarily the easiest person to get to know, but you could tell he was trying, and that he was definitely very fond of you already. You met him most days at the garage, mostly since it was on your way home, and you got to know the others who worked there pretty well too, often chatting to them while Rhett finished up. He would never leave a job unfinished, unless it was too colossal for one day, in which case he would get to a suitable point and then finish. 

It was a relief to learn that he wasn’t prone to big romantic gestures, and that the Valentine’s Day bunch of flowers had been an exception. However, just over a month after you’d made it official - on the walk along the river which you’d spent either with your hand in his or snapping photos on your phone of his dogs as they hurtled around (even Princess) and blew off steam - he was waiting for you on the pavement outside the garage, a blousy white gardenia in his mouth. 

His silvery fur was mostly clean that day, the oil smudges limited to his hands and arms, and his hind legs, but he did have an adorable smear over his right eye which made him look more like a dog named Spot than a fearsome werewolf. You barely took much notice of the extensive, deep scarring anymore, drawn mostly by the intensity of his golden gaze. Now, as you drew near, he remained largely motionless except for the tip of his tail, which wagged softly at your approach. 

Silently, he nudged the flower into your hand and you knelt to hug him round the neck before he stood up. Over his shoulder, you saw Maro looking out of the window of his flower shop, and the sakura dryad gave you a wink before turning away. 

“Thank you,” you smiled at Rhett, kissing his scarred cheek and making him chuckle as he nuzzled you back. “And I’m loving the makeup,” you added, running a thumb over his blackened brow. 

He growled playfully at you and then reared up to his full seven foot height. 

“Come on, pretty boy. What’s the plan for this evening?”

He grinned wolfishly, showing a lot of very sharp, white teeth, and turned his eyes to the sky, snuffing the air. “It’s going to rain,” he murmured. “We should get going. I need to walk the dogs.”

“You want to stop and get some food on the way home?” you asked, glancing up at him as he turned to pad beside you, walking upright on his hind legs. 

Rhett’s expression was a little misty, and when you frowned curiously at him, he huffed a self-conscious little laugh, explaining, “You said ‘home’…”  When you obviously didn’t quite get his meaning, he cleared his throat and shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.”

It had been like this a lot lately; he would start to open up, but would then bottle it, deciding instead to keep it to himself. “Go on, tell me,” you insisted gently. 

With another embarrassed laugh, he said, “I just like that you think of my place as ‘home’ too, that’s all.”

Not wanting to keep him under the limelight any longer, you smiled and slipped your fingers into his warm, leathery palm and squeezed him fiercely. Non-verbal gestures meant a lot to your quiet, stoic werewolf, perhaps as much or more than words did. 

You thought about what little he’d told you about growing up in the woods with his pack, and you tried to suppress the shudder that ran down your spine hard enough to make your teeth rattle. He’d not told you much, but what he had told you, in stilted, fragmented moments, had been enough to make you realise that it was nothing short of a miracle that he was as stable as he was. It also explained why he had never learned to read, something which you hadn’t broached yet, but were keen to help him with if he wanted. 

Rhett noticed your silence and your shudder, and cocked his head, flicking the mangled stump of his left ear at you. “You alright?” he asked. “Cold?”

You shook your head. “No,” you smiled pensively. “No, I’m just thinking about you.”

“You looked serious…”

With a reassuring smile, you squeezed his fingers again and took a breath, hoping he wasn’t about to shy away from you at the next question. “I was hoping that maybe you’d tell me a bit more about your life before you came here, that’s all, but I don’t want to pry. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

He didn't respond immediately, but he did twitch his fingers to reassure you. He did that a lot when he was working out how to process the emotions inside him, and you gave him the space he needed. Eventually he just rasped, “Thank you.”

You'd thought that that would be the end of it, at least for the time being, but as you reached the furthest point of your walk with the dogs that evening - Rhett now in his human form to stretch out the stiffness in his muscles - he stared at his boots and cleared his throat. Instantly the atmosphere between the two of you changed, became charged, and your body tightened with attentive readiness. 

“You… You wanted to know more…” he began awkwardly without looking at you. 

You didn’t dare speak in case you chased his wavering confidence away, so you merely nodded once. 

With another sigh, he gave a bitter, rueful smile, and said, “I was born the eldest son of a ruthless alpha pair of rare white wolves. They taught us all to fight for every last little thing, and I had to prove that I was the strongest, the fastest, the best, the most deserving of my heritage.” There was a new bitterness to his earthy baritone that turned your stomach a little to hear. 

Reaching a bend in the river, with the dogs haring around in the spring meadow grass to your left, the two of you ground naturally to a halt. Rhett stuck his hands in his pockets and stared out at the water as it slid by. You merely looked up at him. He’d turned the left side of his face away from you, hiding those scars again, and you left him that privacy. He’d never told you where he got them from, and you’d not asked. Something told you that you might just be about to find out. 

“They were almost never challenged. If you think I’m a big wolf, my dad was huge. My mum was pretty big too, actually. They were both white wolves, which, among the packs in the northern forests, is seen as a sign of strength and good fortune. Our pack was one of the biggest, and… one of the most vicious. Any challenge to their authority, if it ever happened at all, and even the slightest failure, was met with… well… the challenger was either killed or maimed so badly they couldn’t keep up.”

Your eyes were wide with horror, but you kept silent. Rhett drew in a big breath and let it out slowly. 

“Anyway, my parents were killed by hunters for their pelts when I was sixteen. I took over leadership. My sister, Carys, is less than a year younger than me and built like my dad, and she has his temperament too. And… she didn't like that I’d inherited the alpha spot.”

He chewed his lip for a moment and you let the silence stretch. When you thought he’d stalled for good, you reached out and slipped your hand into his pocket, lacing your fingers with his and squeezing him. Letting out a shaky breath, he glanced fleetingly down at you and offered you a wonky smile. 

“She used to pick on my little brother, Charlie, as a way to taunt me and undermine me. Charlie is…” Rhett’s eyes filled with tears, his words clogging in his throat as he fought off the strongest emotion you’d ever seen him display. Choked, he forced himself to go on. “Charlie is somehow, despite living with that pack of animals, the sweetest, gentlest soul you’ve ever met. So, naturally, my parents were disgusted by him. They tried to drive him away, but I never let them. I challenged them every time, and because I was their heir, they tolerated it and let him stay. He was the whipping boy of the pack though. But Carys…” he shook his head, grinding his teeth audibly. “She’s an alpha bitch through and through. Finally she challenged me for leadership when I was seventeen, and she beat me. She carved up my face and while I was bleeding out, she took my pack and my little brother, and left me behind for dead.” 

Tears rimmed your own eyes as you listened. You hadn’t even known he had siblings, let alone that he’d left one behind and that the other had given him his scars and nearly killed him. You were still holding his hand, but you leaned close and planted a kiss on his bicep. The leather of his scruffy jacket was cool against your lips, but he radiated heat and anger and, you realised to your horror, shame. 

“I ran,” he croaked at last. “I should have gone back for Charlie, but I ran. I was just… done with it all. I found myself on my own for the first time in my life, and it turned out I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought I was. By the time I fell onto the forecourt of a remote gas station, I was a bleeding, exhausted wreck. The guy who owned it though had married a werewolf, and he took me in. Apparently Keith took in a lot of strays from the mountains. His wife had been one of them. He’d been her mate, though of course it was one-sided because he was a human and you lot don’t have mates like we do. He taught me everything I know about fixing shit.” 

Princess chose that moment to come loping back over and lean his head questioningly against Rhett’s thigh, whining softly. Rhett welcomed the distraction and reached down with his other hand to stroke the saluki’s soft ears reassuringly. He hadn’t looked at you again, and you let him stare out at the river as the evening shadows pressed in around you. It was a lot for you to process after all.  

“Keith died about a year later,” Rhett went on when he’d recovered a bit. “He was an alcoholic, and I think his body just gave out. His brother let me keep his dirt-bike and I took off again. I moved around a lot. I didn’t have a fucking clue how to fit in with normal society though. I had no idea how anything worked, I couldn’t really read, and no one would hire me for anything because I could barely remember how to shift from wolf to human at that point. Turns out employers don’t want to hire giant fur-balls all that often. Eventually I ended up on the streets here, and that’s when Peach found me. Not long after that, Hovis turned up, and then I got a job at the garage when Sasha and her partner broke down.”

You tilted your head questioningly and he laughed. 

“Sash had broken her arm, and despite being a buff orc and a talented mechanic, she couldn’t quite fix it, and Erin doesn’t know the first thing about fixing cars; Erin just runs the admin side of things. Sash was losing her temper, so I offered to fix it, and she gave me a job at the end of it.”

“I’m glad she took a chance on you,” you said, speaking at last. 

Impulsively, he leaned down and planted a kiss on your forehead. “She’s not the only one. Let’s go back?”

You nodded. The silence that hung between you was different as you made your way back to his house, as if something had shifted, matured in your budding relationship, and Rhett himself seemed more relaxed, more settled, if no more verbal than normal. He’d done more than his fair share of talking for one day though, you figured. 

Leaving the peace of the meadows behind, you felt the usual anxiety creeping in around the edges as you entered the decidedly rough part of town where he lived. The whoops of a nearby gang of gnolls made Rhett bristle and he tugged you instinctively closer to him. You used the opportunity to slide your arm around his narrow waist, feeling the lean, corded muscle of his back as he walked, and he looked down at you and smiled. 

As he’d predicted, the weather deteriorated, and when you were one street away from the house,  he tugged you by the wrist and yanked you along through the thrashing rain, his little pack scurrying behind you, until you arrived, laughing and winded and half-drowned, at his house. 

The dogs waited in the rain while he fetched a towel, drying them all off one at a time and then releasing them into the kitchen for the warmth to finish the job off. 

Rhett crossed to the fridge, shaking out his ponytail and letting his white hair fall around his face to dry off as well, and he drew out a beer. He held one silently up to you and you thanked him. He twisted the cap off and held it out to you. Before you drank, you chinked your bottle against his, and said, “Thank you, Rhett. It can’t have been easy or pleasant to tell me any of that. Thank you for trusting me with it.”

His lips twitched up into a lopsided smile, and he looked down at Hovis who was currently sprawled on his back, clearly hoping for a tummy rub. He poked the dog with his toe and chuckled softly before flicking his gaze back up to you. 

Those yellow eyes burned with such intensity that it nearly knocked the breath from you. It was a surprise, however, when he set his beer down on the counter, stepped around the tiny trip-hazard on the floor, and took your face in both his hands. He kissed you passionately, fiercely, closing his eyes and leaning into the gesture so far that he backed you up against the closed kitchen door behind you. 

Your back hit the wood with thud and you let out a grunt. Beer still held in one hand, you tangled your other in his white hair and pulled him even closer to you, nipping his lower lip hard enough to make him growl. It was not the impassioned growl of a human, but the feral, deep, low-frequency growl that only a wolf in human form can produce. He bared his teeth in a half-snarl and returned his attention to your lips. He bit sucked at you until your skin throbbed and tingled, and as he ground his hips against you, back bowing, one leg on either side of yours, you felt him growing hard.

He shifted his focus, roughly tilting your head to one side and kissing up the length of your jaw, biting and mouthing at your neck in a way that spoke of possession and dominance without entitlement or ownership. It was intoxicating. He nipped at your ear, growling again, hissing, “I want you…”

This was as far as you’d ever got with him. You’d had some pretty heavy sessions on the sofa where you’d kissed each other breathless, but he’d always backed off, fighting the change that always threatened to sweep over him. Now, however, he didn’t seem to be in so much danger of that, but his eyes were burning with lust and he couldn’t seem to stop growling. 

You smiled and nodded. It felt right.

Rhett took your beer gently from your fingers and set it down on the counter beside his, opening the door and herding you out while keeping the damp dogs contained. You’d barely made it three paces towards his bedroom before he had come up behind you and simply picked you up. The indignant squawk of surprise that you let out did nothing to dampen his desire, and he nuzzled briefly at your neck as he carried you into his bedroom and dropped you onto his bed. 

He made no move to take his own clothes off, but his palms slid underneath your top and he let out a delicious moan as they skated up your stomach and towards your breasts. You might not have thought they were anything special, but he seemed to love them, unclasping your bra after he’d practically ripped your top off over your head, and leaning forwards, kissing his way up between them while cupping their weight in his hands. 

Taking one nipple between finger and thumb, he rolled it while he moved his mouth to the other and sucked a kiss over it hard enough to make your spine arch. A guttural groan left your throat and he did it again, apparently just to make you make that noise once more. 

It seemed as though revealing his past to you had unlocked the door to the last pieces of himself that he had been keeping locked away. You knew him now, better than anyone he had let into his life since leaving his pack. That intoxicating knowledge fuelled what had been burning slowly inside both of you since you had begun this, and now, as he slid the last of your clothes off and gazed hungrily at you, you smiled. 

Rhett took it for the invitation it was, and lowered his mouth to you. He licked tentatively at first, but after that initial taste, he began to lose himself in you. He laved over you in a hot stripe, curling his tongue slightly to circle your now aching clit before taking it between his lips and sucking none-too-gently on it. He drew a cascade of sounds from you, with his hands gripping your thighs, fingertips digging in hard enough that he might well leave tender bruises there as he devoured you. 

Drawing back a moment, he kissed down the inside of first one thigh and then the other, breathless, chest heaving, lips wet and eyes glowing. His pupils had soared wide enough that his bright irises were almost eclipsed, and as you reached down and held out your hand to him, he nuzzled his head instinctively into your palm, letting you grip and tug on his silvery white hair. Gorgeous grunts and groans left his throat at the tension your fingers put on his hair, and he rasped again, “I want you…”

You smiled and eyed his clothing deliberately. With a grunt of frustration this time, he sat up and tugged off his t-shirt to reveal his glacially white skin and a torso marred and crisscrossed with the evidence of years of fighting and injuries. A slight warmth coloured his cheeks and he turned his face away, yet again trying to shield you from the impact of the left side side. 

“No,” you whispered. “Not this time.” 

He knew what you meant, and after briefly looking down, as if preparing himself, he looked back at you head on. When he saw your smile, his shoulders dropped a bit, and he gave a bashful chuckle. “I’m sorry,” he said. 

“Don’t be. Just finish getting undressed.”

“Wait,” he asked, his eyes widening. “I don’t… I don’t have… ach… shit…”

“A condom?” you asked, and he nodded, cheeks flushing. 

“It’s… been a while.”

You rolled off the bed with a smile and said, “You finish undressing. I’ve actually got one in my bag.” He watched you climb off the bed and stalk across the room with a gaze that was very definitely predatory. Instead of feeling threatened, however, you preened under it, letting your hips sway just a little more than usual, and by the time you returned with the packet, you found him standing naked beside the bed. 

You tore the packet open with your teeth, slowly, deliberately, and turned your eyes to his hard cock. In this form, he had no knot, but you knew that as a wolf, it would be much harder to take him. He was beautiful though, and something of your admiration must have showed in your eyes because he snarled and snapped his jaw. Oh, he was an alpha alright, whether or not he lived like one. 

As you came to stand beside him and held out the opened packet to him, he instead let his hands come to rest at your hips with surprising gentleness. He brought his nose to your neck and inhaled the scent of you, his cock twitching with interest and printing a dab of pre-come onto your lower stomach as he drew close. His teeth raked across your pulse. And he whispered, somewhat falteringly, “I’ve… I’ve never done this as… as a human before.”

That surprised you, but you smiled and lay back. “Well, maybe next time you can show me what that’s like, but the basic mechanics are the same, I’m sure…” you grinned playfully, and were met with a deep growl that reverberated in his chest. 

He brought his palms slowly up your thighs and circled his thumb carefully over your clit, waking you up again. You couldn’t help but notice how his hands trembled as he rolled the condom down his cock, but once it was on, he looked up at you and you smiled again. You bent one knee, bringing your heel closer to you, and slid your fingers down your body, playing with yourself slowly, decadently, in a way that drew a whimper from him. 

“Please,” he whispered, cock bobbing. 

In answer, you moved your other leg out wards, opening yourself up for him, and he leaned forwards, guiding his tip to your entrance. 

The noise he made as he slid into you, inch by torturous inch, head bowing, back curving, chest heaving, filled the room. A deep, primal growl followed hot on its heels, and he let out a string of curses as he sank all the way into you, stretching you just perfectly. Cautiously he started to rock his hips back and forth, loosing a shaky breath as your nails raked gently across his scarred torso. 

“You’re perfect,” he snarled softly, picking up his pace and opening his eyes again. “Fuck, you’re so perfect.”

You brought your hand up to the left side of his face and caressed the scars there, making his eyes roll upwards. With another snarl through bared teeth, he drove harder into you, lifting your leg, angling your hips, and hitting that spot that made your head spin, and he repeated it. Every muscle in his body strained so beautifully and you felt a heat beginning to coil inside you. You’d never come from just this bfore, but perhaps you might this time, you wondered dazedly. 

Words began to fall from your lips too as he picked up a regular rhythm that was just shy of punishing. “You feel so good, Rhett,” you managed to moan right before his teeth closed on your neck and he snarled more viciously. 

“Shit,” he hissed, breath fanning over your hot skin. “Shit, I’m losing it… you’re just… you’re…” and then with a roar that took you both by surprise, he came. His hips rammed tight against yours as he released. 

His arms were trembling and his face was twisted in a mask of pleasure or pain, you couldn’t tell which, and perhaps it was both as he fought to stave off a transformation even while the pleasure of his orgasm still swept through him. 

“Rhett?”

Sweat beaded at his temples and dampened the hair at the nape of his neck, a vein pulsed visibly, and he rammed his eyes shut as he froze in place, hardly daring to breathe for a moment. A shudder ran through him and he withdrew, making you groan at the loss of him inside you. 

“Did… Did I hurt you?” he panted hoarsely. 

“No,” you smiled. 

“You… you didn’t…?” he asked, turning now-doleful, yellow eyes up to you. 

“Yeah, but you did, and that was pretty powerful,” you grinned. He wasn’t convinced though, and grimaced, looking away. 

Once he’d sorted himself out, however, perched on the edge of the bed with his back to you, he just stayed there.

You sat up and ran your hand down his spine, fingertips bumping over the raised claw and bite marks all over his back. You felt him shiver as you brought your lips to each of them in turn, and gradually he began to grow more pliant in your hands. You drew him back down onto the bed to lie beside you, covering your bodies with the duvet, and at first he lay, awkward and rigid, staring at the ceiling while you curled up against his side, your head at the hollow of his shoulder. You trailed your fingers over his chest too, and then turned to look up at his face. You were lying on his left side, and you could see the scars clearly, even in the dimness of the room. You refrained from touching those. 

With a huge sigh, Rhett turned his head a little and his eyes met yours. 

You smiled and stretched up, planting a kiss on his pale lips. As if the gesture had broken a spell, he smiled, eyes crinkling slightly at the corners, and he hugged you tightly with his left arm, tipping you right up against him so that the front of your body was pressed close against his. He was so warm, and you brought one thigh up to rest over his. He was slender, all muscle and sinew, his body hard and unforgiving beneath you, but his eyes were soft now. He kissed you on the top of the head and let his thumb play across the top of your shoulder and arm as he held you. 

His other hand wandered to your waist and he began to explore your body again. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, almost in awe of the figure which you’d never thought much of. 

When you snorted reflexively, he growled softly and slipped his fingers between your legs, finding your clit swollen. 

His soft inhale of surprise made you laugh again, as he murmured, “You’re so wet…” He circled your clit with his fingertip, eliciting a deep moan from you. You were still sensitive from taking him so deep, but the caress of his skin against you drew a series of deep, rippling shudders from you that had you with your head thrown back in no time at all. 

Rhett seemed utterly entranced by what was happening to you as you got closer and closer to coming from his touch. He shuffled, shifting positions so that he could lean over you, and as he quickened his pace, you almost sobbed. You were that tortuously close, but it wasn’t quite enough. “Please, Rhett…” you begged. 

His mouth closed around the bud of your nipple and he licked his tongue around it, but still it wasn’t enough. 

With a desperate whimper, you opened your eyes and found that his were locked on your face with a sense of utter wonder lighting every line of his face. Finally he moved, switching the attentions of his two fingertips with that of his thumb, and sinking those two fingers inside you to caress that slightly rough spot that he could only just reach. You bucked wildly as his touch connected, and, with his thumb pressed against the underside of your clit, you reached your hands out for his shoulders and came hard, clenching around him and clinging to him as light and sound washed through you in a blissful cacophony. 

Rhett kept his fingers and thumb in place, prolonging it as you rode your orgasm through in a series of crashing waves, and when you lay back, still twitching, in the pillows, you saw that he was half hard again. He leaned down and licked at you, cleaning you with his tongue and making you jerk and twitch again. When he sat up, you reached for his cock, intending to stroke him, but he shook his head and smiled, and you let your hand fall back to the sheet beneath you. It was probably for the best anyway. 

He brought his hand to his mouth and licked his fingers clean and then lay down beside you again. After a moment, with you lying there with your heartbeat pounding and your body tingling, you shot him a sideways look. He was on his left side, head on the pillow, watching your chest rise and fall with a dopey smile on his face. When he saw you looking at him, however, his expression faltered and he looked away. 

“Rhett?”

“I… I nearly lost it again,” he said. “I nearly shifted…”

“Well, maybe next time you’ll just have to start out as a wolf. Unless you’ll be tempted to shift the other way?”

“No, it doesn’t work like that,” he said before he’d really worked out what you’d said. You watched the realisation drop through him like a stone, and fought not to giggle at his shock. “What?”

You shrugged and rolled over, snuggling backwards into him and letting him form a perfect shell around your body. “You heard me,” was all you said. 

The two of you lay there for a long time in quiet bliss, Rhett inhaling the scent of your skin with his nose pressed to the nape of your neck, but eventually he grunted and his grip on your waist tightened. 

“What’s wrong?” you murmured, half asleep, even though it wasn’t particularly late. 

“Being so close to you like this… my body still wants to shift,” he grumbled. 

“So shift?”

He growled softly in frustration. “It’s… You don’t want to see that. I’ll… I’ll be back in a minute.”

You watched him go, naked, from the room, and tried not to listen too closely to the sounds that came from next door. The pop and crack of shifting bones, followed by the rumble of his snarling howl as his six foot, slender human frame became a muscular, seven foot tall wolf, was… disconcerting to say the least, but it wasn’t you who had to go through that, so you forced yourself not to feel queasy and not to dwell on the imaginary details. 

When he didn’t come back in for a good five minutes, you dressed and stepped out into the little hallway that connected the kitchen, the living room, and his bedroom, and found him kneeling on all fours, head bowed, whimpering softly with each exhale. You darted to his side and touched his shoulder, and he flicked his eyes to look askance at you. “You alright?”

He nodded. “That was a tough one,” he grunted. Still on all fours, he moved cautiously towards the living room and you followed meekly in his wake. “Full moon is coming up, which always makes them rougher too.”

“I kind of thought that was just a myth,” you commented, and he shook his head. 

“We have to shift on the full moon - we don’t get a choice - and it’s always painful. All our personality traits tend to be more exaggerated around then too, so us alphas can get… possessive or more aggressive…”

You grinned. “Maybe not the best time to test out your other form in the bedroom then.”

He shot you a wide, toothy grin.

“You just curl up and I’ll grab some food. You want that beer now?”

“Yes please…” he croaked, flopping down along the entire length of the couch, which groaned as it took his weight. 

In the kitchen you found the dogs all piled up in a bundle, but Princess shot you a disdainful look as you opened the door and stepped inside. “You really don’t like me, do you?” you murmured at the saluki. 

Hovis stretched and wiggled over to you, his tiny scrap of a tail barely distinguishable from the rest of his rusty, wire-wool coat. He wagged his whole back end so enthusiastically that you were surprised he didn’t just topple over like a kidney bean. You stopped to give him a tickle on your way to the counter to collect the bottles, and then returned to the living room to find that Rhett was asleep. 

Rain drummed on the roof, lashing the windowpanes as the weather worsened, and shortly Peach came hobbling out on her three legs, looking for someone to reassure her as a dull rumble of thunder shook the house. You sat on the floor with your beer and she came over to lay her head in your lap, shortly followed by Hovis, and then, reluctantly, Princess. He curled up beside you and rested his chin on your thigh, looking up at you with his big, dark eyes. 

“Hey there,” you murmured, giving each of them a stroke. “It’s ok. It’s just a storm. It’ll pass.”

From the other side of the room, Rhett shifted slightly, and he said in a croaky voice, “It was a night like this when I found Princess.”

“Oh?” you asked, still stroking the lanky hound’s silky head. 

“Mmm. He’d been tied up to a fence post and abandoned. He was soaked through.”

You leaned down and kissed his head. “Well, you’re in a safe and happy home now, your Highness,” you smiled and for your efforts, you were rewarded with a doggy sneeze from the saluki, shortly followed by a gentle wag of his tail. “Oh, so you don’t hate me after all,” you grinned.

Rhett was staring at you from the sofa with his muzzle on his paws. Then his ears twitched back and he groaned. “Ah shit. I forgot to put the rubbish out. They collect it tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll go,” you said as he started to get up. “You look wiped out, and besides, this lot have only just stopped smelling of wet dog. I don’t want to sleep with that smell on you tonight.”

His tail wagged and he smiled gratefully up at you. “I do not deserve you,” he said quietly as you politely shuffled the dogs off your legs. Peach immediately headed over to Rhett in search of reassurance, but Hovis trotted after you as you left the room, pausing to kiss Rhett on the muzzle before you went. 

You tried to tell the little oven scourer to stay behind, but he refused until Rhett growled softly and he came scuttling back. 

“Take my jacket or you’ll get soaked!” Rhett called sleepily after you as you took the rubbish bag out towards the dustbin at the side of the house. You left the back door open ajar behind you, and, with his jacket held over your head, you sprinted for the bin. Having dumped the bag in it, you wheeled it out towards the front of the house, ready for collection, but as you came out of the shadow of the side of the house, your feet froze in place. 

There, lying on the gravel driveway, soaked and more than a little bloody, was the body of a slender, small, white werewolf. There was almost no movement in the wolf’s chest, and you got no reaction as you let the dustbin clatter down onto the gravel. 

“Rhett!” you screamed. 

Seconds later, the door swung open behind you, ricocheting off the wall as Rhett barrelled out into the rain. “What?” he gasped, staring at you with wild, wide eyes, his chest heaving. 

You turned and pointed at the wolf and a broken yelp left Rhett’s throat. 

He surged forwards with another wordless cry and knelt beside the wolf, stroking his clawed fingers through the matted, bloodstained, white fur. “Charlie?” he whimpered. “Oh gods, Charlie? Can you hear me?”

He shook his little brother gently, but when he got no response, he scooped him up and strode back through the rain towards the house. 

To be continued!

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