Page 33 of Brutal Alpha Bully

Andthatmakesmelaugh, because he’s right. And even after all this time, somehow he knows me better than anyone else.

“Yeah,” I say, scrubbing my hand over my face. “Something like that.”

For the next hour, the two of us walk through the gnarled trees and burnt roots, looking for anything that might point to a more obvious reason for the recent patterns in daemon fire. Because the thing about these fires, usually, is that they’re random. No pattern—just whichever place in the earth gets weak enough to let the daemonic energy through.

“So,” Soren says after a long stretch of nothing but the silence of us and the charred woods. “Are we going to talk about the Seraphina thing?”

I straighten up, eyeing him. “What is there to talk about?”

He presses his lips together, raising his eyebrows. “I mean, other than the fact that you hated her in high school and now the two of you are roommates?”

So maybe there are some things Soren still doesn’t know about me. Some secrets that I’ve managed to keep well.

“I did not hate her in high school,” I say, though I know that’s not what he’s getting at.

“Okay. Whatever you say, man.” He stops, reaching out to touch one of the trees. “I’m just saying, you skip town and only come home for your old man’s house, and now that you’re here, it just feels like… I don’t know. Getting the squad back togetherfeels like you’re staying. Letting her and that little girl stay there, keeping them safe from Declan—that feels like staying to me.”

What he’s not saying is that it feels like there’s something more between Seraphina and me, but he’s not spelling out the implication. I don’t need him to.

Even if I was honest with him, there would be nothing to tell him about this time around her. She’d thought so little of me, she’d assumed that I would take Declan up on his disgusting offer, or that I wouldkidnapher when I was trying to do what was best. She hates the idea of her daughter talking to me.

And I can see in her eyes that she still resents me for the way I treated her in high school. The fact that I’ve never apologized for the way I treated her.

Beyondallthat, there’s still the glaring fact that I rejected her. She claimed me as her mate, and I told her plainly, in front of Soren and everyone else, that I didn’t feel it.

It’s far too late now to turn around and admit that I was lying about something as sacred as the mating bond. The most ancient, natural, and inherent of our traditions.

As a teenager, when I realized why I was so drawn to Seraphina, I’d gone to my father with the question of what to do. Naively, perhaps, I thought that he might counsel me to honor that bond. That nature, and the gods, knew far more than I did about which pairing would be right for me.

But the look on his face was nowhere near accepting or understanding.

“Tellnobodyabout this,” he hissed, taking me aside and closing the door to his office. “The last thing we need is for whispers to move about the pack that you won’t have a strong luna at your side.”

He was worried. Worried about my brothers, and their increasingly selfish behavior. Worried about my uncle, my father’s adopted brother, who had just returned to town without warning.

I didn’t like what my father had said about Seraphina, about keeping the knowledge of the bond to myself. And I didn’t obey his direction to stay as far away from her as I could. Maybe if I had done that, all this could have been avoided.

Instead, the bond developed, and Seraphina realized it, too. Maybe she didn’t mean to try to claim me that day the way she did. But I’d had no choice. I had to follow my father’s orders and make sure nobody in the town thought she was telling the truth.

To be a good alpha supreme, I would need to have a good luna. And according to the pack, Seraphina Winward was not that. Nature and the gods and all their divine knowledge be damned.

Now, as Soren and I pick our way back through the wreckage of the forest to my father’s house, my mind turns over with thoughts of Seraphina and Nora. How much I’ve enjoyed having them live with me. What it’s been like to come home to them every day.

Maybe when I leave Silverville, I could bring them back with me to Chicago. Declan wouldn’t follow Seraphina there, certainly not if he knew I was with them. We wouldn’t have to worry about what people in Silverville thought.

If I took Seraphina with me back to Illinois, maybe I could broach the subject of us again. Apologize.

Or maybe it wouldn’t matter where we were.

Maybe Seraphina is smart enough to carry the past with her, to use it as a shield to make sure a man like me could never hurt her again.

Chapter 16 - Seraphina

Once I get the go-ahead from Xeran to use magic on the house, I wake up each morning with a renewed sense of purpose. I clean the rooms efficiently, fixing holes and patching things up, sweeping dirt right out the windows, then cleaning the windows until they shine and let in all the beautiful natural light.

Out back, I discover a decrepit, overgrown garden and realize it looks like it’s been dead for much longer than the house has been empty. It must have belonged to Xeran’s mother. Gently, I bag up the husks of the old plants and find new seeds in a garden shed to plant, not using my magic to encourage their growth but using it to ensure the soil is rich with nutrients and that they’re watered properly.

Nora joins me for most of the projects, and I realize she’s getting the same sense of satisfaction I am. It reminds me of when my grandmother first died and we moved into her place, going through it room by room, slowly making it our own.

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