Page 85 of Wolf Cursed
I snorted. “I’m already a target.”
Neither one bothered to argue that.
“So, does Kai want to be alpha?” I asked.
“He’s never refused the recognition,” Idrissa said. “Why?”
I didn’t answer.
My thoughts were taking me into territory I wasn’t sure I liked. For one, Kai knew about my mark. And according to him, whoever broke the curse would also become alpha of the pack. If he was in line to become alpha already, didn’t that make me a threat to him?
The twins claimed he’d never shown interest in anyone before, which was a nice sort of flattery for me. Except what if he was only showing interest now in order to get close to the one person who threatened to take away the one thing he wanted? What if he was only manipulating me so he could get me to break the curse and then get me out of the way so he could claim his alpha role?
I needed to play this carefully. Idrissa was right. I was even more of a target than I’d thought. And I was done playing the victim in my life. It was time to take control.
Chapter Seventeen
For the next several days, I bounced between working at the Throttle and training with the twins. Idrissa and Isaac tag-teamed it so that I was constantly with one of them, sparring, conditioning, or doing some weird wolf-triggering exercise that Isaac dreamed up. None of it stirred my wolf to make an appearance, but it did exhaust me as a human, that was for damn sure. Every night, I fell into bed, too tired to panic about any of the terrifying things going on in my life.
Oscar and I maintained our routine. Work during the day. Dinner at night. He grilled me about my training, but he also spent time telling me stories about growing up in the Falls. He even told me a few about my father as a kid.
Silas and Presley left me alone. I didn’t see them at all, which was both a relief and terrifying. They’d gotten what they wanted. I was going to fight. Even Drake left me alone, ignoring me or keeping our conversations strictly about work. Invoices. Customers. Not a single accusation that I was a witch or a spy for witches. Twice, I caught him studying my necklace, but I refused to break the silence between us to ask why. Instead, I made sure to always have it tucked away underneath my shirt after that.
Drake wasn’t a good person.
I wasn’t sure how I knew or why I knew, but the feeling only seemed to grow more certain with each passing day. Besides, he’d thrown me under the bus during my interrogation, and I wanted nothing to do with him.
I saw Kai mostly in passing, and even when I was forced to interact with him, it was brief and clipped. Just like before our kiss, he was distant and completely uninterested in me. The fact that he’d gone from hot to cold so thoroughly only fed my suspicions. He’d gotten close to me and tried to gain my trust so he could find my weakness, and now that the fight was looming, he’d left me to face it on my own. Hell, maybe he didn’t even care about breaking the curse so long as I was out of the picture.
That hurt way more than I wanted to admit, and despite his betrayal, I felt the constant tug to be near him. When he was in the shop, I knew exactly where he was. Like a hot-guy GPS, except I was pretty sure it was my lady parts pointing the way.
At least, Devon and the other guys had stopped coming around to flirt with me. I did wonder if Kai had something to do with that, but I wasn’t about to ask him either.
At night, when my eyes were drooping closed from exhaustion, Oscar talked to me about wolf culture and proper etiquette for when the fight came. I tried not to let it terrify me more when he talked about deferring to a stronger beast by showing my belly. Or never turning my back on a threat.
I was definitely going to die.
There was no way around it.
I could either run and risk them hunting me down—not to mention Vorack—or march myself right into the executioner’s arena.
Sometimes, I wondered what my dad would think if he could see me now. He’d said, “Don’t let them put you in a cage,” and in some ways, that’s exactly what he’d done when he’d died and sent me here.
But I couldn’t hate him.
He was my dad, and he’d loved me the best way he’d known how.
That would have to be enough.
To escape the constant stress of my own thoughts, I poured myself into learning the client invoicing system and motorcycles in general. Oscar had trained me on the basics, and I was using my free time between customers to go back and audit any unpaid invoices he had. And Google motorcycle parts I didn’t understand.
My phone rang while I was knee-deep in line items and part names I had never heard of.
“Hey,” I said when I saw Idrissa’s name pop up on my screen.
“Hey, I need to bail on our training session tonight,” she said. “My dad’s taking me to an auction in Grandville to see about this DRZ.”
“I don’t know what those letters mean, but okay. Have fun?” I said uncertainly.
