Page 26 of The Breeding Cave
THIRTEEN
LUCIANO
All the fury dissipated from me, and I snapped my gaze toward the front room. Only a few people knew about my packhouse, and those people knew not to disturb me here unless something happened.
Yeosin flashed through my mind. I tightened my hands into fists, my claws slicing into my palms, and I walked to the front door. If it was Joseph, returning to tell me that Yeosin was refusing to come, I swore?—
The bang became louder, and a low growl rumbled from underneath the door.
“Luciano!” a familiar voice shouted. “I know you’re in there. Open the door!”
After unclenching my hands, I yanked the door open to see Alpha Theo standing outside in his beast form, blood dripping off his extended canines, eyes a blazing gold, and claws torn right into the doorframe, making it crumble.
At one point, he had been my sworn enemy. We fought against each other in bloody war after bloody war. But decades ago, the Dragon Clan took advantage of the war between the packs. They had ripped us apart one by one by one until there was nobody left except the alphas and a few packmates.
“Theo,” I said. “What are you doing?—”
He stormed into the house, his beast form slowly disappearing back into his human body. “Elizabeth is gone.”
While we had never seen eye to eye, we had set aside our differences after we defeated the Dragon Clan in order to rebuild. We had carved out The Breeding Caves in Pine Grove to repopulate so our species wouldn’t die. And from what I remember …
“Elizabeth?” I asked. “Isn’t that the woman you invited to The Breeding Cave years ago?”
“She’s gone,” he said, voice shaking in rage. “She’s gone!”
“What happened to her?”
“My home was ransacked … and I found this”—he pulled out a dragon scale—“in the mess they’d left. After we had tried for years, she’d finally become pregnant. She was carrying my pup.”
“We’ll help find her,” I said, my mind drifting to Yeosin for a moment, hoping she was safe. If something happened to her, I didn’t know what I would do. “And when we do, you should think about bringing her to live with the others.”
He gritted his teeth and snapped his gaze away. “I shouldn’t have to.”
There was nothing wrong with living with the remainder of our pack so deep in Pine Grove that the Dragon Clan wouldn’t be able to find them. I couldn’t do it because I had a business to attend to, but Elizabeth could.
And maybe Yeosin too … especially if she had someone following her.
“We should kill the Dragon Clan,” he said.
“We don’t have the beasts for it,” I said. “We barely survived last time.”
“We might not have the beasts, but we have the money. We can pay for it.”
“Pay who?”
“The Colossals.”
“Fuck no,” I growled. “They’re nothing but trouble. Once we make an alliance with them, they might kill our enemies, but they’ll steal our packs, our women, and the little children we have left.”
When he didn’t respond, I bit back a growl. He wasn’t asking me. He was telling me.
“You already met with them without running it by me first?”
“We don’t make decisions together.”
“We have to look out for our own.”
He paused. “They have a daughter they want you to meet.”
