Page 10 of Cruel Alpha

“Issa song!” she said, beginning to clap her hands together in a clumsy rhythm, singing, “Do do, do do do do!”

I glanced over at Alyssa, still looking miserable next to me. Her eyes were screwed shut like she was bracing for something, and I tried changing tack.

“What other songs do you know?” I asked, unable to hold back a smile as the question was met with an onslaught of enthusiastic answers. Jack had perked up a little and was yelling his own answers. Half of the names were indistinguishable to me, but there were a few I recognized in there.

“Old Macdonald?” I said, feigning ignorance. “What’s that song? Can you teach it to me?”

The twins were only too happy to comply, launching into a tuneless rendition ofOld Macdonald,complete with little actions to indicate which animal was which. It was… kind of adorable, actually. They both looked so like Alyssa, with wide hazel eyes and matching mops of curly hair; theirs was darker than their mom’s, closer to black than to her rich mahogany, but it did nothing to lessen the similarity. I tried to concentrate on the features that reminded me of her, choosing not to linger on anything that might draw me a picture of their father. That particular bogeyman was better off staying formless and shadowed in my mind.

I risked a glance over at Alyssa as the twins launched into a third verse; having informed us that Old Macdonald had pigs and chickens on his farm, they had now moved on to cows. She was still sitting curled up in the seat, her eyes closed, but the furrow between her eyebrows had smoothed out, and the sharp tang of distress had faded from the air. With her head resting on the window, she might have been asleep, though I knew she couldn’t be with the amount of noise coming from the backseat. If I hadn’t been driving, I might have taken the opportunity to look my fill, but my eyes had to stay on the road: we were approaching the Ferris bridge.

Chapter 5 - Alyssa

Homecoming.The word was tinged with a rosy hue, warm and inviting, comforting and safe. I’d never understood it: Lapine was the only place I’d ever called “home”, but it wasn’t somewhere I’d ever hoped to come back to.

The familiar stone cottages, hewn from Lapine’s deep red rock, sat just as I remembered them, arranged in little clusters rather than the straight streets that humans preferred. The road between them was bumpy—people on Lapine didn’t use cars enough to warrant laying down tarmac—and the twins screamed in glee as they were bumped and jostled in their seats. I couldn’t share their excitement. The eyes of every person we passed were on us, watching me return with the same morbid curiosity with which they’d watched me leave.

At least this time, there was a sheet of glass between me and the judgment of the Pack. Just over three years ago, I had to walk between these cottages, my head held high and my eyes on the road ahead, while the eyes of Lapine followed me. Not one of them had stood up for me or offered me sympathy or wished me good luck; they had only stared at the disgraced half-breed who didn’t know her place as she finally turned her back on them.

It hadn’t been my choice to leave; as much as I’d dreamed of it since I was small, I was eighteen and pregnant and mateless. My Pack may have ridiculed me, feared me, and ostracized me, but they were still my Pack. That counted for something on the islands, or so I’d thought. Caleb’s father hadn’t agreed. Apparently, if you were a half-breed and an outcast and you were claiming not only that the Alpha Heir was your mate but that he’d knocked you up, then you were no longer worthy to call Lapine home.

Banishment was usually a punishment reserved only for the worst of the worst: for traitors, for men who’d challenged the Alpha and lost, for murderers and thieves. I had walked the same path as the worst of the worst because I’d told the truth to a man who didn’t want to hear it. I remembered seeing Brandon Doyle standing in his yard when I’d walked past; Brandon’s mate, Hannah, frequently had bruises in circles around her wrists and red welts on her face, but Brandon hadn’t been banished from the Pack, hadn’t been humiliated and forced to leave behind everything he’d ever known. The injustice of it had burned like vomit in my throat, but there’d been nothing to do other than keep walking.

So I kept walking. I kept walking and walking and walking until I came to the Arbor Bridge. When I crossed it, I didn’t look back. I didn’t expect that I would ever set foot on Lapine again. Fate, it seemed, had other plans.

Caleb pulled up outside a home in the eastern part of town, not too far from the center. Curtains of nearby cottages twitched as we stepped out of the vehicle, and I tried my best to ignore them while I unbuckled Jack from his car seat. Across from me, Caleb was struggling to do the same with Emmy. He’d been surprisingly good with them in the first couple of hours of the journey, when I’d been too exhausted and too filled with dread at the thought of really coming back here. If it had been any other guy, it would have sent my heart fluttering, but instead, it had made something ugly and resentful curl up in my gut. I didn’t want to know that he might have made a good father. I wanted to keep believing what I’d always told myself: that he would be just like most of the men on Lapine, ignoring his own children until they made too much noise, and he snapped at me to shut them up. I didn’t want to know that he would take the strain of entertaining them when I was too overwhelmed or that he would listen patiently to their off-key, off-beat singing until they tired themselves out.

One thing that seemed to be beyond him, though, was unfastening Emmy’s car seat. Those things were a bastard, in all fairness, but I watched him frown and struggle for a few seconds longer, just for the petty satisfaction of it.

“There’s a third button on the top,” I said once I’d watched my fill. Jack was already out of the car and on my hip, just starting to wake up after the nap he’d taken for the second half of the trip. “You’ve gotta press all three at exactly the same time.”

Caleb grunted as he found the elusive third button, pressing down deliberately. The seatbelt came free with aclick,and he grinned in triumph. It wasn’t adorable, not even a little bit.

Emmy had clearly gotten used to being held by Caleb because she held her arms up to him sleepily as he pulled her out of the car, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. The sight made a new string of anxiety twist itself into a knot in my stomach. How long would he stick around? If we were going to stay on Lapine for the foreseeable future, would he come to visit regularly, or would he go back to pretending we didn’t exist? I couldn’t let Emmy and Jack get attached to him only to have him disappear from our lives. I wouldn’t have them feeling the way I’d always felt: cast aside, unworthy and unwanted.

I jumped when Caleb slammed the car door closed, rushing to follow him up to the cheerful red front door of the cottage. He rapped a sharp knock, and we waited.

When I’d last seen Julia Thorne, she’d been a high school junior, skinny and shy, but the woman who answered the door was commanding and confident. She’d shot up in height over the last few years, so she towered over me, willowy and slender. The biggest change, though, was her hair. It was still long and black and silky smooth, but now Julia wore it pulled back, revealing what she’d always sought to hide as a high schooler: her right eye was not the same piercing blue as her left but was instead entirely milky white. No iris, no pupil.

Her good eye looked from Caleb to me and back again.

“You couldn’t have radioed?” she said, cocking her hip and leaning against the doorframe. My heart sank: did she not know we were coming? Had she not agreed to this?

“No,” said Caleb. “Move, people are looking.”

Julia rolled her eyes but stepped back to let us in. I kept my head down as I slipped past her, embarrassed to turn up on her doorstep unannounced with a pair of toddlers in tow. She didn’t even know that Caleb was going to ask her—no,tellher that we would be staying with her for the foreseeable future. My own family had barely wanted me around; staying with someone who’d had me foisted on her against her will was going to be hell.

Inside, her cottage was much like the one I had grown up in: the downstairs was mostly one large open room, with a fireplace, a couch, and an easy chair at one end, and a small kitchen-diner at the other. The atmosphere was warm and inviting, quite the opposite of how I remembered the large Alpha residence in the center of town.

Caleb started talking as soon as the door closed behind us, telling his sister what had happened on the Arbor road, but she cut him off almost immediately.

“Will you can it until I’ve greeted my guests?”

Caleb’s mouth snapped shut, and he glared at her but did not continue. Julia turned abruptly to me, smiling wide and radiant.

“Alyssa! How the hell are you?” I was surprised she remembered my name, but it was a pleasant, warm feeling. I smiled back at her.

“I’ve been better,” I said.

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