A/N: This one's a bit longer. I had a lot of ground to cover. Leah's got a lot on her mind these days. Thanks again to all at Project Team Beta, especially Evelyn and MunkeeRajah, who beta'd this chapter.

Stephanie Meyer owns Twilight. I own an over-active imagination and a little too much free time on my hands.

Chapter 4 – No Control

Leah POV

I ran the whole way back from the Cullens' house on two feet. In wolf form, the trip took ten minutes. As a human, it took more than an hour, even running flat-out as fast as I could. But I couldn't phase.

There was a small chance Jake didn't know yet why I'd run out. I needed to get my own mind wrapped around what had just happened before I could talk to anyone else about it, even Jake.

I walked into the house to find Mom at the kitchen sink, shoving scraps into the garbage disposal. Seth sat at the breakfast table, working through half a hog's worth of bacon and an Everest-sized mound of scrambled eggs. They both looked up at me, stunned. I was covered in dirt and sweat.

I must have looked as bad as I felt because Seth jumped to his feet. He rounded the table in two strides and grabbed my arm as if he thought I was going to fall over. "Oh my God, Leah! What happened to you? Jake called to say you were on your way home, but that was over an hour ago, and he didn't want to say anything more on the phone. Where were you?"

I shook him off and gave him a quick elbow to the gut to get him to back away. I so did not want to be touched right now.

"Nahuel's back," I said, relieved when my voice didn't shake or catch on that name. "Jake's going to need everyone to run extra patrols. There's a shit storm on the way. Maybe you should head over to the leeches' nest. I'm sure Jake's still there. He can fill you in."

I pushed him out of my way and risked a quick glance at my mom. Hands on hips, squinting like she was trying to read a pill bottle without her glasses—no, she was not fooled. She always knew when I was hiding something. I needed to be alone. I needed them both out of the house, but how to get rid of them? Today was Saturday, so neither of them had to work.

"Leah, what are you hiding?" Mom demanded. "Why can't you tell Seth what's going on?"

I snapped at her, trying to sound like the normal, bitchy old Leah they expected me to be. "I don't have time for this. Neither do you. Don't you have a date with Charlie? If you blow him off one more time, you can kiss that relationship good-bye, don't you think?"

She flinched. Things hadn't been going that great lately between Mom and Bella's chief-of-police father. Because of Seth and me, she had to hide too much of her life from Charlie and he knew it. It was putting a major strain on their relationship. Personally, I thought Mom should dump his self-deluding ass. After six years, he still didn't want to know the truth about his own family and stubbornly turned a blind eye to all the weird stuff that went on around him. This afternoon's fishing trip was supposed to help Mom and Charlie "recapture the romance." Of course, only Charlie Swan would associate fishing with romance.

Relieved that my diversion worked, but still feeling like shit for playing hardball with my mom, I spun on my heel and headed down the hall. "Seth, get your ass over to the Cullens' house and talk to Jake," I ordered over my shoulder. "I'm going to take a shower."

The shaking and sobbing didn't start until I was alone under the spray.

Scalding water hammered my body as I stood staring at my feet, my forehead and palms pressed hard against the slick shower wall. Slowly, I pushed away from the tile, then swiftly smacked my forehead back against the wall. Push back, smack. Push back, smack. I fell into a comforting, self-abusing rhythm.

If I hit my head long enough and hard enough, maybe I could bash the image of those questioning, teak-toned eyes right out of my mind.

It didn't take long to exhaust our antique water heater. I didn't care. I continued to stand under the cold spray, my head pressed to the wall. I watched the beads of water beat the forest's black soil from my toes and carry it down the drain.

If only I could wash away the past few hours of my life as easily as that dirt.

SSW/SSW/SSW

By the time I'd pulled myself back together and put on some clothes more than an hour after arriving home, the house was quiet. My head, however, was not.

For everyone else in both packs, imprinting had been an explosion of bliss and completion. Jake, Quil, even Sam, were utterly, nauseatingly in love with their imprints from the moment that damned psychic cable latched on to the center of their chests. So why was this so hard for me?

I knew the answer. Nothing was ever easy for me.

My imprint wasn't someone else from my tribe with whom I could share common ground and experiences. Even Jake and Quil, imprinting on infants, drew a better hand than I'd been dealt. Their imprints had been clean slates with no histories or regrets of their own. The only thing I knew for sure about Nahuel was that he'd already lived the equivalent of two human lifetimes. I knew nothing about how his century and a half of experiences had shaped him as a person.

I had only a vague idea of where he was from, and none whatsoever of how he'd spent the first hundred or so years of his life. I didn't know how he lived, if he'd killed people for their blood or lived a "vegetarian" lifestyle like the Cullens. Had he ever had a job? Seen the world? Eaten a cheeseburger? Been in love?

Hell, I couldn't even picture what he really looked like. Whenever I tried to envision his face, all I could see were blazing, honey-brown eyes. Those eyes … just thinking about them was enough to make my heart race, and blood pool and tingle in body parts that I hadn't thought about very much in the past six years. My head and heart might be afraid of Nahuel, but my body definitely was not.

I headed for the kitchen, hoping the human Hoover hadn't sucked down every last bit of bacon. Not that I had any appetite, but I knew my body needed nourishment to help deal with the emotional turmoil I was going through. If I chewed a hundred times and swallowed quickly, maybe the bacon would actually make it past the bowling-ball sized knot hovering between my throat and my stomach.

I stepped into the kitchen to find that, although Seth and Mom were gone, I was not alone.

Jake sat at our kitchen table with a cup of joe and a bakery bag from my favorite coffee shop in front of him. He'd added a black T-shirt and running shoes to the cut-offs he'd been wearing earlier.

He gazed at me wordlessly, his eyes soft and dark, sweet and comforting. Like a fucking Hostess cupcake.

Shakes chased each other up my arms and down my legs. When the tremors reached my knees, they sucked all the strength out of the damn things. I staggered two steps to the table and flopped down in the chair across from Jake.

He knows. Shit! Of course he knows …

"Who else knows?" I snarled, gripping the edge of the table. I wasn't sure what I would do with my hands if I let go—hug him or strangle him. I couldn't risk doing either.

He studied me for a few moments with those damned puppy dog eyes. Then, he leaned forward and pushed the coffee toward me. He produced a grapefruit-sized chocolate chip muffin from the bag and placed it in front of me.

"Just me …" he said. Well, thank heaven for small favors. "… and Edward."

I am SUCH a moron. Of course the mind-reader would know I'd imprinted. After all, he'd had a ring-side seat for the big event, hadn't he? "Will he keep his mouth shut?"

Annoyance slipped into Jake's expression. "You know, he doesn't want to be a psychic peeping Tom. He really does his best to respect people's privacy." Never thought I'd live to see the day when Jake would defend his former rival. But then, I'd also never thought I'd live to see any day like this one.

Jake's anger was fleeting. Suddenly, he was gentle again. "Leah, what are you going to do?" He sounded as if he thought I actually had some say in what was going to happen to my life now.

I sighed and reached for the coffee, popped off the lid and took a long pull of the scorching liquid. "Damned if I know," I replied. "What can I do? Do I have any choices left anymore?"

"There are always choices in life," Jake said. "Even when there aren't any choices that you think you can live with." Just what I needed—Jake going "Yoda" on me.

"But there has to be a reason this happened," he continued, reaching across the table to grab my hand. On any other day, I'd have slapped him away. I guess it speaks to how shaky I was that I allowed him to hold my hand. "Have you considered that maybe this is a good thing?"

I pulled my hand out of his and gripped the table edge again, because now I was sure: if I let go, I was going to choke the life out of him. "No, Jake. This may totally surprise you, but I'm really having a hard time finding the silver lining in having my entire life turned upside-down by an uncontrollable biological imperative. Again."

Jake's lips pressed into a firm line. He drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, then barked one word: "Sam."

Startled, I blinked rapidly for ten seconds. "Huh?" I replied eloquently. "What the hell does Sam have to do with this?"

He grinned widely. "Exactly. Think about Sam. What do you feel?"

I considered his command. How did I feel? Confused, cornered, frustrated, frightened … about my situation, about him. But about Sam? I was shocked to discover I really didn't feel anything at all.

For years, I'd carried around a hard lump of anger, resentment and betrayal. It had festered in the hole where my heart had been, slowly poisoning my whole system. In time, I'd learned to cope with the debilitating effects of my self-poisoning anger. I wasn't well, wasn't a full person anymore, but at least I wasn't crippled, either.

Now, like a boil that had finally been drained, the lump had deflated, leaving no wound in its place. Stunned, I realized I felt whole for the first time in years. Scared shitless, yes, but whole.

Damned if I was going to give Jake the satisfaction of admitting my Sam problem seemed to be cured. Because right now all I could think was that the "cure" was, in its own way, just as bad as the problem had been.

"You know it doesn't even make sense for me to imprint. I mean, what's the point?"

Confusion replaced his smug self-satisfaction. "I'm not following you."

"The whole point of imprinting is the genetic preservation of the species, right?"

"That's Sam and Carlisle's theory," he agreed.

"Okay, if that's the case, then what good does it do to have a genetic dead-end, a woman who's not capable of having little wolf-gene-carrying babies, imprint?" I demanded. "Not to mention, having her imprint on a man whose DNA is so totally different from hers that they probably couldn't procreate even if the woman's plumbing actually did work? Carlisle tested me, remember?"

The gentle look was back in his eyes and I had to bite my tongue not to start bawling again. It really is Armageddon of biblical proportions. Jake gets all sweet and sappy on me, and I fall apart. Mental gag!

"Carlisle's tests could be wrong," he said. "Maybe your … plumbing … hasn't worked because it hasn't needed to. Maybe this is a second chance to get something you thought you couldn't have." His words conjured up another conversation, one from six years ago, about plumbing, imprinting and wanting most what you knew you could never have.

I scrubbed hard at my eyes. I suddenly felt like I needed to go back to bed and sleep for about sixty years. "I don't know," I conceded. "And I just can't think about it now. We can't think about it right now. Joham is coming here, isn't he?"

He sighed, stood up from the table and began pacing, his long legs eating up the tiny kitchen's scarce floor space in just a few strides.

"Yeah, that seems the most probable course of action for him," Jake said, snapping into Alpha mode. "He wants Ness and Nahuel for his breeding program, and they're here. So he'll be here too, eventually. I sent Seth to run guard duty around the house. He, Jasper and Emmett will keep things locked down until we can set up a patrol schedule with our pack and Sam's guys."

I worked on my coffee and muffin while Jake paced the kitchen and filled me in on what I'd missed after fleeing the Cullens' house like a tail-stomped cat. Nahuel had supplied more details, including how he'd escaped from Joham. That part of the story bothered me, because it required us to believe that one of his half-sisters had taken pity on him and helped him get away when Joham was off hunting in a neighboring village. Jake seemed to buy it, however.

One thing was clear from Nahuel's tale: Joham had no regard at all for human life. He envisioned himself as the father of a master race. The human women he'd impregnated were nothing more than cattle to him, their half-breed children just a means to an end. He didn't have much regard for other vampires either it seemed, since he'd killed Huilen without hesitation.

I remembered how I'd felt when my dad died. Lost and alone, orphaned even though I still had my mother. How much worse must it be for Nahuel? He'd witnessed the brutal murder of the only parent he'd ever known. No wonder he was a mess. I felt guilty for calling him a coward.

"After Nahuel calmed down, Edward was able to read him," Jake said. "Seems that he wasn't intentionally blocking Edward. He was just so rattled that he was thinking in his mother's native language, which is, apparently, one of the few Edward actually doesn't know. Between the unknown language and the chaos in Nahuel's mind, Edward was having trouble reading him."

Of course, Carlisle and Jake had committed the Cullens and our wolf pack to protecting Nahuel and Renesmee from Joham. Jake had talked to Sam already, and Sam had pledged his pack's help and protection, too. Everyone seemed confident Joham would come to Forks, and I had to agree. Unfortunately, Alice's inability to see around half-vamps like Nahuel, and any of his sisters who might be working with Joham, was severely hindering our ability to plan for his arrival.

"If Alice can find a big enough blank spot in her visions, then that's most likely when Joham's army will arrive," Jake said. "She won't be able to see how many are coming, or what their plans are, but at least she might be able to figure out when to expect them."

"Makes sense," I agreed. The morning's shock was beginning to settle into a comfortable numbness. I wasn't great, but at least I felt more functional. Until Jake threw his next thunder bolt.

"We need to hide Nahuel somewhere while we wait," he said. He paused for a moment, studying me. I still sat at the kitchen table, while Jake leaned against the counter, arms folded over his massive chest. "I want to hide him here, on the res."

They say the blood drains out of your head just before it explodes.

"This is the safest way for everyone," Jake hurried to explain, seeing my stunned expression. "There are more than enough of us here to protect him, and it keeps him separated from Nessie. It would be stupid to make it easy for Joham by having both of them in the same spot. I'll be staying with the Cullens and Ness until this is resolved, and Sam and Emily have the kids, so they're out of the question …"

"Bring him here."

What? 'Bring him here?' Did I say that? Out loud?

"Are you sure, Leah?" Jake sounded as stunned as I felt.

Yeah, I guess that did come out aloud.

"That would be the best solution, to have him right here where you and Seth can keep an eye on him," he continued. "And he would blend in better here than in Forks, even if we did have somewhere there to stash him."

The thought of having him in my home made my gut twist into knots. The only thing worse than having him in my face twenty-four-seven would be not seeing him at all. Not knowing if he was safe or afraid or alone …

I moaned when I realized the direction my thoughts were taking, and dropped my head onto the table.

"Forget it," Jake said instantly. "I'll think of something else."

I lifted my head and pinned him with a glare. "No," I growled. "If he's going to have to hide, then I need it to be here."

Jake thought about it for a moment more, drumming his meaty fingers on the countertop. "Okay," he finally agreed. "I'll bring him tonight, after you've had some time to tell Seth and Sue that he'll be staying here."

He strode toward the front door and I dragged myself out of the chair to follow him. At the door, he paused with his hand on the knob, looking down at his feet. "Are you going to tell them? I mean, about … imprinting?"

I didn't even have to think about my answer. "No. I need time to figure this out on my own, and I won't be able to do that with my family poking their noses into this. Can you shield me from the pack? I can't deal with them right now either."

He nodded. "No problem. It's going to be okay, Leah," he said, still not looking at me. "I don't know how I know that, but I do."

I blew a weary breath through my teeth. "Yeah, well, I hope you're right."

Then, because I needed to ask, and no one else but Jake would have any idea of the answer … "Do you think he knows?"

Jake lifted his eyes to meet mine. He didn't need to ask what I meant.

"Ness did," he said, "before she was even born. So, yeah, I think he probably knows."

He opened the door and stepped out onto our rickety front porch. "He just may not realize what he knows. Not yet."

End Note: If you've read this far, I've got to be doing something right. Or maybe you're sticking with me because I'm doing something terribly wrong and it's pissing you off. Either way, please let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!