Page 309 of Claimed By the Rival Alpha
I nodded. Lance was a smart guy, so of course he would’ve put two and two together. “That reminds me, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“How did you gain Troy’s trust so quickly?”
“Oh.” He heaved a sigh. “I had to go through his ‘initiation.’” He put air quotes around the word. “His word, not mine. It was a series of tests to prove my loyalty.”
“What kind of tests?”
He didn’t say anything for a while. When he finally opened his mouth again, he said, “Testsno oneshould have to go through. Especially not a teenager.” He rubbed his shoulder and looked away. “I still get nightmares about them. Sometimes.”
His words dredged up a memory I’d tried hard to forget. It was of Evan in those last minutes.
“Where were you,” he’d demanded of me, “when the Kings tortured me to break me and force me to kill to prove my loyaltyto them?” Thinking of his words then, the unhinged glint in his eyes, how hard he’d breathed as he pointed the gun at me. With a rush of old guilt, I wondered if that torture he mentioned was anything like what Lance had gone through.
“I spoke to the kid who survived the kidnapping,” I said. “Samuel Granby.”
Lance’s eyes flicked to me. “I didn’t know there were any survivors.”
“A hunting party found him wandering the forest, half-dead and out of his mind.”
“Huh.” He frowned. “What did he have to say?”
“Nothing, really. He believed a shadowy figure with long talons attacked him. The poor kid hasn’t mentally recovered from whatever he actually saw.”
“Damn.”
“What blows my mind is that Gregor kept trying to open the portal with these kids even after he kept failing.”
Lance sighed. “Gregor was losing his grip on his reality by then. He firmly believed the portals were real. No logic would have broken through to him. Besides, his first real attempt had been stopped before he could see it through.”
“His first real attempt? Oh, you mean Blossom.”
He nodded. “He’d probably had his men kidnap her when she was close to giving birth to get her blood.”
This confused me at first. Mom had made it pretty clear to me that Gregor was thorough about keeping his research hidden or destroyed. But then I remembered that he would have seen textsabout needing the blood of a child or a pack mother. It wasn’t hard to assume that he might have tried to use Blossom to increase the portal’s effectiveness.
It was also possible that Gregor didn’t care that Blossom was pregnant, that he intended to use her blood even if he ended up killing the baby. I shuddered. Trying to figure out his fucked-up logic made me sick.
“We need to keep Bryn safe,” Lance said suddenly. “No matter what.”
“Yes.”
“I appreciate you keeping my secret,” he said. “It’s helping me protect her.”
Something about that rubbed me the wrong way. How had I gotten to this point? I was keeping so much from Bryn, from friends, family, and pack. Was protecting Lance’s secret really the key to keeping Bryn safe? Would I really be screwing with Fate’s plans if I told Bryn she had another brother? She would be so happy to know she had family—even if that family was Lance.
Or was I just helping Lance hold onto a lie that he was used to keeping? A lie that might not serve him as much now that he and I had become a team.
Anger pushed my blood faster in my veins, and I stared at Lance. If he hadn’t demanded I keep this from Bryn, I wouldn’t have to carry this massive lie on my shoulders. As if he could read my mind, he started speaking.
“Keeping this between us is the only way,” he insisted. It wasn’t the first time he’d said this, but this time, it was far less convincing. He sneered at me. “When I first joined the Kings,keeping her in the dark about who I was, who webothwere, was because Gregor and Troy would have killed her if they discovered the truth. Don’t forget that it wasyourfather who kidnapped our mother and drove her to her death.”
He'd gone too far. I got to my feet, my fists balled at my sides.
“Maybe you don’t know this,” I hissed, “but Blossom,yourmother, was the one who told me I was Bryn’s protector. She never mentioned you.”
Lance got to his feet as well. “When she came to me and told meIhad to protect Bryn, she didn’t mention you, either.”
