Page 96 of Purchased

“So we’re all ending up here, in your pack. A whole pack of murderous shifters. Are you worried?”

“No more than usual. Are you ready to be released from captivity and welcomed into the bosom of your family?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll stay here for now. You can stay down here as long as you like. I’ll keep you safe from yourself and everybody else.”

He wraps his arms around me, and makes a nuzzled apology in my ear.

“I’m sorry, Beatrix. I’m sorry for all this shit. If I had just left it alone, Volkov wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t have gone to Bordeaux, there would never have been a file, no bad dreams. I could have made this so simple, but I fucked it up for both of us by trying to dig because I had this stupid obsession with whether or not anybody else had ever been with you. I’ve blamed you for all of this, but most of the time it was me putting you in situations you should never have been in.”

“So I’m down here because of you. Not because of me,” I say, trying not to be too smug, but being a little smug anyway.

“Maybe you should have been down here all along. Maybe down here isn’t so much a place as it is a state of being. Locked away, just you and me, focusing on ourselves, not worrying about our pasts, or what people want from us. And maybe I should worry less about what you do in the world. Maybe murder is a viable way of handling people who are problems…”

He’s never this open with me. Maybe the therapy has done him good, even if it wasn’t actually therapy.

“I don’t kill anybody who isn’t a threat,” I say. “I never have.”

“Why didn’t you say that when I put you down here?”

I let a little smile emerge. “Because I like it when you’re forceful and possessive and when you make the decisions.”

“You like it when I am the alpha.”

“Yes.”

“Twisted little monster,” he growls lovingly. “Do not worry. I will always be your alpha, and this dungeon will always be here if you need it.”

CHAPTER25

Beatrix

I am even more shy to meet my family than I was to meet his, but I let myself be taken up to the wolves who have, as I understand it, been causing havoc in the village and surrounds. The first thing I see are three young men. They could be brothers. They look strong. They look like they’re trouble. I recognize the expression in their eyes as one that I’ve worn many times myself, and just like that a sense of belonging washes over me. It’s not that they look like me on the outside, though they do have strong features and dark hair, it’s that they feel like me in the room.

“Oh, my goodness!”

An elderly woman grabs me by the face, her hands clasped on my cheeks, looks into my eyes, and cries. She keeps saying something over and over. I don’t recognize it, because I don’t speak the language. It sounds old.

“She says you are the image of her little sister,” Volkov tells me. He’s here looking formal and together and respectable, when in truth he is every bit the snake I always thought he was.

“This is my aunt?” I ask him the question while I formulate a plan of what to do about him.

“This is your aunt’s cousin. Her little sister was your mother’s… I lost track of the connection. She’s a relation.”

“Excuse me,” I say to the woman, lifting a finger and moving back from her, sliding her hands from my face because I need to attend to something else. “I just have to do one thing. It’s very important. I’m so sorry. I just…”

I take a step up on a chair, so I can get the right kind of height, and I smack Volkov right in the face. He takes the blow with grace, or like a brick wall would. Either way, he takes it.

I see Armand out of the corner of my eye. He starts to make a move toward me, then decides against it. Good decision. I start my rant, to the laughter of the younger wolves.

“You were related to me, and you didn’t tell me. You were sitting right in front of me, pretending to be a fucking therapist, hearing all my thoughts, and you just… didn’t tell me. You could have told me the first day you were here. But you sat silently in a room, and…” I trail off, inadvertently giving him a chance to explain.

“I had to be sure of who you were. I didn’t know right away. Then you ran off to the city and killed some gendarmes and in addition to the man in the village, and then of course, the file.”

“The file.” I widen my eyes.

“I didn’t really know until you threw the evidence in my face. And by then I felt as though I had come too far. I am sorry to have deceived you.”

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