Louve dragged Aella out of the pack house and towards the underground bunker, which was a couple of metres away from the large pack house and towards the pack gardens. Louve could see from this distance, a gaping hole in the ground about six metres wide and four metres long.

There were several workers situated at the mouth of the bunker. They were constructing a sort of elevation at the mouth of the bunker with smooth stones gotten from the creek. The dark gaping hole of the bunker reminded Louve of the wells that were common to her hometown of Texas. The male wolves in her father's pack used to dig those wells for irrigation when she was a kid, and she had fallen into quite a number of shallow ones while growing up.

They got to the mouth of the bunker and she looked around. The workers all looked harried and rushed. Their grim faces mirrored the subdued feeling of anticipated danger that Louve had been feeling for several days now. She could sense feelings and emotions better than most wolves as she was a very emotional person herself. She could smell the sharp, almost salty tang of fear that permeated the whole pack house and it's surroundings.

The people were scared, she thought. They knew that war was very near.

"Come on." She said to Aella without sparing her a glance and dragged her even closer to the mouth of the bunker. They both looked down and saw a metal ladder that led down to the belly of the bunker. Louve went first, her hands outstretched on both sides for balance. When she got to the bottom she called up. "You can come now! it's pretty safe."

A few seconds and several grunts later, Aella joined her at the bottom. The whole bunker would have been very dark but for several torches that were set at intervals around the bunker. The torches cast gloomy shadows that danced around the walls. Louve looked at Aella as she came down. The semi-dark room sharpened the bones of her jaw and cheeks and set the corners of her face into relief. Coupled with her naturally dark hair and unhappy face, Louve thought that the other woman looked pretty grostesque.

The whole room was rectangular in shape. Several doors ran round the perimeter of the bunker, giving it a sort of honeycomb look. Louve could hear some men working and talking to themselves in several of the rooms.

She gestured to Aella to follow her. "Come on." She said. "Let's see what the men are up to."

They crossed the large room to one of the doors on the opposite side and peered inside. The room had been built with around six clay beds erected in it. The beds were small, clearly built for children. When the men that were working saw Louve, they all stopped and murmured greetings.

"Good afternoon!" She greeted back. "Carry on with your work, we were just looking around." She said and turned back, leading Aella to another room. This one had shelves on which food items were arranged. The bunker was clearly being stacked with food in case the war drags on for longer than anyone expects.

"How safe is this bunker thing?" Aella asked, folding her arms and looking around at the food items on the shelves. "I mean, it's all built out of clay, right? Clay isn't the best thing to build stuff out of. What if it, you know, collapses on all the women and kids?"

Aella's last words sent a chill up Louve's spine. She looked at the other woman and saw how truly unhappy she looked. She had sort of ignored the probability that whatever problems Aella was having with Logan was something that could not be easily sorted out. They were mates, she thought. Mates fought every time, and they settled their fight fast too.

But it seemed that what was going on between Aella and her cousin ran deeper than mere petty fights. And for the first time since she had met Aella, she wondered just what the woman was all about.

She put up a bright smile on her face and moved to one end of the room. She hit the wall with her fist, producing a very dull, contained sound. As the sound a drum filled with water would produce, Aella thought.

"You hear that?" Louve asked her, still smiling. "The walls have been packed full with seven inches worth of clay and stones. Nothing could bring this down."

Louve saw that Aella still looked unconvinced. In fact, she looked as though everything was bound to fail. She walked back to where the other woman stood and placed a hand on her shoulder, leading her outside the storage room and back to the general room.

"All these doesn't seem to be cheering you up. What's really wrong, Aella? Talk to me." Louve said. "Is it about you and my cousin? If it is, I don't know if it would be a relief to know that I'm also having problems with Casper."

There was a brief moment of silence where Aella chewed the end of her bottom lip thoughtfully and considered Louve's words. Then she spoke up. "Louve, I'm worried about my relationship with Logan. There's so much that is wrong between us and I can't seem to catch up, neither can I change anything. He barely looks at me, he barely even talks to me. He avoids our room like it's full of the plague or something. And anytime he even spares me more than just a glance, there is usually distrust and doubt in his eyes. I can't even remember the last time we got intimate as mates. I know it had been hard at first to trust me but I thought he was already starting to trust me. I feel like...like it's only the mating bond between us that is making him tolerate me even if it's only a little bit."

Louve looked at the other woman and saw how worry had pulled the smooth skin of her face together, how it had formed several small wrinkles on her forehead. There were tears of hopelessness in her eyes and her arms were folded around her body as though she was shielding it from more pain.

Then before she could respond to what Aella had told her, the woman began to cry: huge racking sobs that sounded forced. As though crying was not something that came easily to her.

Louve sighed and pulled Aella closer to her body, rubbing her shoulders in consolation. "Casper made me feel like I was Inconsequential, as though I was worth nothing more than the babies I could produce." She said. She could feel Aella's eyes boring into her. "What did he do?" Aella whispered.

"He and some other Head Wolves in the Council seem to believe that I cannot be part of the council or make decisions on behalf of the back because 'I am a woman'. And my dear mate seemed to believe that I was created only to produce babies for him." Louve said and laughed without humour.

"He apologized after that, of course." She continued. "But I wasn't ready for it. I can't get past the way his words had made me feel. At least not immediately."

She saw Aella's tears turn to a frown, the growth deepening the shadows cast across her face. "That's just utter bullshit! I bet you're smarter than any of the men in that council. Most especially that halfwit Elias!" Aella exclaimed.

Louve laughed. "Okay, enough of your justified anger." She said, then walked over to the ladder that led up. "Let's get out of this bunker, shall we? I hate feeling claustrophobic."