Page 6 of The Alpha's Second Chance Mate

“I would say not,” I grunted.

“A day or two later, he demoted all of us. We weren’t in his inner circle anymore. Our services were no longer needed. He took it even further with Chris and outright banished him from the pack.”

This was the information everyone was too scared to tell me. No wonder. Something like this was unheard of. An alpha banishing his enforcer? It was insane.

“Hebanishedhim?”

“Yeah,” Ricky said, his voice low and grim. “Fucking crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. He ran the rest of us off a few weeks later. We found other packs to take us in.”

“And you guys never figured out what the hell was going on?” I exclaimed.

“No. He chucked us out before we could dig any deeper. Cole, I gotta be honest, something weird was going on. The last year or two, your dad was acting strange.”

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my forehead with my free hand. “Thanks for the information, Ricky.”

“No problem. Any time.”

“Hey, Ricky?”

“Yeah?”

“It sounds like things ended badly with you guys and Dad, but I’m in charge now. You all ever want to come on back home, you let me know. You’ll be welcomed back with open arms. I won’t turn my back on old friends like my father did. All right?”

Ricky chuckled softly. “That sounds good, Cole. I appreciate it. I’ll talk to the others. Most of us have settled in with new packs, but… well, there’s something nice about home.”

“Yeah,” I grunted. “Sure is. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Goodbye, Cole.”

I glared at the piles of papers, each one pointing to something that I couldn’t figure out. What the hell had Dad done to get the pack into this situation? Whatever it was, no one knew. As soon as his closest people had started to figure it out, he’d pushed them away, shoving them completely out of the pack before they could reveal his secrets.

The door of the office opened, and Farrah walked in.

“Hey, sis,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Hey,” she said curtly.

I sagged back in my chair as she paced the room, looking out of sorts and anxious. Nothing at all like her usual self.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Huh?” Her head snapped around to look at me. “Yeah. I’m fine. Did you figure anything out about the financial stuff?” she asked, obviously changing the subject, but I allowed it.

“Nothing more than I already told you.” I frowned at her in confusion. “Hey, did you know Dad banished the betas and the enforcer?”

She stopped pacing and froze in place. “What?” Her anxiety vanished, and she became more like her old self. “Dad said they got pissed at him for not giving them more power over the pack, so they left. Said they got pissy with him and quit. When I got home and they weren’t around, I asked about them, but everyone gave me the same line.”

“And you believed that? Farrah, you’ve known Ricky and the others as long as I have. Does that make sense at all to you?”

Sighing, she flopped into the seat opposite me. “I didn’t question it. Honestly, I was still too shocked by his death to worry about other people. I’ve been gone a long time. Long enough to not realize how bad off he was. Cole, Dad was only fifty-seven when he died. That’s not old. Not atall. Rumors are he was drinking heavily, and he’d gained weight, even with shifter metabolism. I should have talked to you about Ricky and the others earlier, but it slipped my mind.”

“Maybe he spent all the pack money on alcohol,” I said, half-joking.

“God, do you know how much liquor it takes to get a wolf drunk? If he kept drinking as much as he did after Mom died, you might be on to something.”

I grunted noncommittally. Even if he had, that wouldn’t explain the sheer amount of money that was missing. Someone should have been here to keep things in order.

That guilt I’d felt when I was first told of my father’s death crept back in. Maybe if I hadn’t run off all those years ago, things would have turned out differently. If I’d stayed, I could have stopped whatever had happened. Farrah had been the first to return home after his death and had tried to put things in order,only to find absolute chaos. She was the one who’d called me and begged me to return.

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