Logan woke up the next morning feeling like he had been run over by a tractor. His whole body ached, and his head was banging like a tribal drum. His eyes were prickly with unshed tears and his throat was extremely dry.

He groaned and rolled to the other side of the bed. He flung his arm out, searching for any warmth from Aella but he felt none. He frowned and opened his eyes which had been gummed shut by sleep, and sat up. The arm which he had flung to the side was stiff and full of pins and needles. He groaned and flexed the arm a little bit, trying to resume blood flow to it.

"Fuck it." He muttered under his breath and tried to move out of bed but was attacked by a sharp pain to his head. His vision swimmed as vertigo came over him and he closed his eyes for some seconds, trying to regain his bearing. He felt like a narcotic patient going through withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps, I am going through withdrawal symptoms, he thought. One of the few things he really cared about was the danger of being pulled away from him and there was little to no thing he could do about it.

When he opened his eyes again, the vertigo had gone down. He picked up a glass of water that was on the dressing table beside him and took a sip, then moved to the edge of the bed. He took his head in his hands and ran shaky fingers between the strands of his hair. His ponytail had come loose and his hair flowed down his shoulders in coal-black waves.

He looked down at his shaky fingers. He could feel the anxiety from the previous night coming back. How did it feel so strange that only the previous day, he had arrived to the pack in high spirits? He felt like he had never been happy a day in his entire life.

He heard a slow creak and looked up from his shaky fingers to see Aella coming out from the bathroom. She had a white towel on and her hair was wet, the sign of having had a shower. Her wet hair clung to her shoulders like smoky black tendrils, and even from this distance, he could see the water droplets that darkened her already dark eyelashes. She smiled at him and he thought just how beautiful a woman she was. She definitely did not deserve a man who could not protect her from the worst; a man who could not bring himself to trust her. Even now, he was not sure he has regained his trust for her. He loved her. Heck, he was in love with her, hit him he could not yet bring himself to put his trust in her hands.

"Hey!" Aella said cheerfully from the bathroom door. "How are you feeling now?"

He sighed and leaned backwards on the bed, staring at the ceiling. "I don't know, Aella. I just don't know."

She nodded as though she understood how he was feeling, then unwrapped the towel around her body. She wrapped the towel around her dripping hair and padded naked towards the closet.

On a normal day, a sight of her walking around the room naked would have turned him on, but today wasn't one of those days. Hell, he was too sad to even get a hard-on! It was as though he had hit rock bottom emotionally, and nothing, not even the sight of his naked mate could cheer him up.

A few minutes later, she walked out of the closet dressed in nothing but a black button shirt of his that was too big for her. She had folded the sleeves up but it was falling anyway. She came towards the bed and sat beside him, then held his hands and looked into his eyes.

He could read the questions in her eyes, questions that he didn't know how to answer. He could feel the connection between them, almost as physical as the bed on which they were sitting on. She seemed to reach into an inner dark core that he didn't even know he possessed, then he heard her voice in his mind as she spoke through their shared mind link.

Baby, are you okay? She asked.

He sighed, his sigh moving between their minds like a gust of wind. I don't know, Aella. He murmured. I just want...I need you to hold me, to tell me everything would be fine. I need you to cuddle away all my problems, if that is even possible. I just need your touch, love. Just hold me.

Aella smiled at his last words and pulled him closer to her. He laid his head on her shoulder and she slowly guided them to the middle of the bed. She laid her back against the pillows and he rested his head on her chest.

She began to sing softly in his ear: a short tune that reminded Logan of a bouncy country music, but she sang it slowly enough for his benefit. Suddenly Logan began to remember where he had heard that tune. His mother used to croon it to him every night when he was a little boy. The lyrics spoke of something about little wolf cubs coming home after an adventure in the forest. It began to soothe Logan's frayed nerves, and he let out a relaxed sigh and blinked his eyes slowly. He let Aella rub her smooth hands on his back, let her ease away the pain and hurt and betrayal that he felt.

Soon Logan felt himself slipping in to another bout of sleep. His eyes started to feel heavy and soon, he began to snore softly as he slept.

His dreams this time were more peaceful. He dreamt of killing all the members of the rogue pack, starting from their leader. He dreamt of Louve and Casper and all the rest of the pack members smiling up at him proudly. He dreamt of his mother standing in the pack gardens among the white tulips she loved so much, and stretching her hands towards him, smiling. He dreamt of coming home to Aella and seeing her before a window. She turned away from the window to look at him as he walked in and smiled, her hands circling an obvious bump in her stomach. She was pregnant, with his baby.

Someone was calling his name from the fringes of his consciousness but he didn't want to answer, for fear of leaving his satisfying dreams. He was scared, scared of waking up to the grim prospects of reality. 

"Logan!" Someone called his name forcefully and he opened his eyes reluctantly. He was no longer on Aella's chest. Instead, she had been replaced by a couple of pillows. He grunted and turned over to look at the person, and saw that it was Louve.

She was looking down at him with all the stern looks and briskness of a kindergarten teacher. Her hands were akimbo and she was frowning. 

"Come on, get up." She said, stretching her hand towards him. "The warriors from my father's pack are here."