Page 115 of Ava: Part Three

When they looked at her, she didn’t miss the subtle sniffs. And when Zeke came to stand beside her and took her hand, they didn’t hide their shock, either.

Her father’s Beta was the first to come to her with a smile. He had always been part of the family, so she welcomed his embrace.

“Welcome home, Ava.”

“Now come on, they made food,” Nate said, already walking to the house.

She didn’t know what her life would be like now, but she knew one thing. She looked up at Zeke and smiled.

She would always have Ezekiel Michelson.

Chapter 67

Zekesatthroughwhatfelt like hours of awkward conversations and a lot of food.

He noticed Ava didn’t mingle as much as her brothers with the rest of the pack and kept her answers very vague about why she was home early. He’d heard a few of them whisper that she had probably been kicked out for being a handful and disgraced the pack. He wanted to throttle them for being so disrespectful.

But this was Ava’s pack, so he couldn’t pick a fight.

Not when they were all looking at him like he was about to murder them all.

He now understood why Ava had a hard time following the rules. There was nothing like that here. Omegas mingled and joked with Alphas, and he was sure the man cooking all the food had Alpha blood running through his veins. The children were running freely in and out. He’d been observing it all from a bench outside the backyard of the small house Ava had grown up in.

Okay, it wasn’t small, but where the hell was he going to sleep? And how was he going to touch his mate without getting killed by her brothers?

This was a very unique situation for him. He never usually cared about things like that, but now he wanted Ava’s family to like him. They had a special relationship that he’d never had with his father, even when things were okay between them.

“Here.”

He looked up to see Caleb holding out a beer to him.

“Thank you.”

He took a sip.

“So you’re sleeping with my sister?”

He almost choked on the beer when he heard that deceptively calm question. Caleb was like a pot full of raging emotions waiting to boil over if he said something wrong.

“Um... I... She’s my true mate,” he answered honestly.

Caleb’s eyes widened.

“That’s not possible. That doesn’t happen,” Caleb said.

“It’s a very long story that I think you should hear from your sister and father,” he said. “But I promise you, I will not hurt your sister because she’s a part of me.”

Caleb sipped his beer for a while and then stood to walk back into the house without another word. Zeke assumed he was going to speak to his father to demand an explanation.

Ava walked out of the house and smiled when she saw him. She’d changed into a dress and was barefoot.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes,” he answered quickly.

He put the beer down and followed Ava around the house. They walked a little up the road they had driven in on before she led him down a footpath.

“I love these woods. When I was little, I couldn’t wait to shift and run through them like everyone else,” she said, turning to face him.

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