Page 72 of Pack Rage
He scoffed. “You were born a fool, and you’re about to die one. This pack will never be yours.”
“Maybe that’s for the best. This pack is almost entirely corrupt,” I replied calmly, pulling off my own shirt. “Maybe I should burn it all down and start over, once I’ve put you in the ground.” His eyes widened in shock when he saw the bite mark Flor’s wolf had put on my neck, close to my collarbone.
“The whore’s fuckingyou,too?” His question was a hiss, but the shifters around us heard.
“Flor, you mean? No, never,” I answered honestly, and swallowed hard. I needed to fight his control, so at least the shifters nearby would hear the truth in my next words. They needed to doubt him.
I am Finnick Dimitrivich, I reminded myself.He is not my Alpha.To my surprise, I realized it was true. The Alpha bond was a wisp of a connection, nothing more.
Of course it was. After an Alpha challenge was made, the Alpha could not draw on the challenger’s bond, if they were from the same pack, which meant…Holy shit.The commands I’d been burdened with, not to share what went on in my pack, my family, were nothing but thread, easily broken.
I could speak the truth out loud now, and let everyone hear.
I raised my voice. “Though you would ask that kind of question, wouldn’t you? I’ve walked in on your true mate fucking more than one other male how many times now? At least three, and from the sounds and smells in the Mansion, Mother has been unfaithful for a good decade. As have you.”
That was all it took. My father’s eyes blurred into a mixture of his and his wolf’s, and he readied himself to attack.
“Now, now, dearest son, is that any way to speak of your mother?”
Brand whirled on his toes, snarling as he faced the source of the words, and I saw just where Niall had gone.
He marched in front of Mother now, escorting her to Father’s side. But not just her, a group of males I recognized, though twoof them shocked me. Armed with a gun in one hand and a sword in the other, Niall sneered as he approached, but my gaze was on the shifter behind him. One with silver teeth that glinted when he lifted one lip as he passed me, then carefully concealed them again, ducking his head.
Ivan, the Russian wizard. She’d brought him into the heart of our packlands. Behind him marched four dozen shifters dressed in strange camouflage, with Cyrillic writing on the shoulder patches. They smelled of silver and blood, and the rest of the crowd shrank back as the stench grew thicker.
The air itself grew warmer, as if the weather outside had been cut off again.Wait.It had been. The bubble that kept the moon’s power from reaching us, that had kept Luke from taking on his father’s Alpha strength, had opened for her, then closed again. I needed to break that spell, somehow. But first I needed to understand what she’d done to create it.
Wearing the black vicuna wool pantsuit she loved best, with heeled black boots and an odd, ragged fur stole I’d never seen before, her hair done up in an immaculate bun, Mother stopped in front of me, assessing. Her lip curled, at the state of my clothing, I assumed. Or maybe it was at the mate mark on my neck. She didn’t speak, though. She’d taught me that the first one to break a silence was the loser of the battle of wits.
I didn’t care. I wasn’t fighting her way anymore, not measuring myself against my parents’ bloodthirstiness or intellect. What mattered was my heart, the bonds to my mate and brothers. What mattered now was saving them, and all the shifters in our care, from this Long Hunt. The vulnerable and the young who were not here now, and who could never stand up to her innate evil or magic, were what I fought for.
“How?” I asked. She tilted her head, waiting for me to elaborate. “How did you cut the Council ring off from the rest of the world? What kind of sacrifice did this take?”
Her smile was the one she had given me so rarely, when I’d done a particularly thorough job of torturing one of the shifters she’d assigned me during my training, as her tool. As part of her evil. “Always such a clever boy. It took time, and blood, of course. Almost too much of mine to recover. But I had to have the power to forge a new future for our family, after all.”
Her voice was strangely muffled, and I could tell no one heard her words but me. Then she flicked a tassel at the neckline of her black stole. It was fur.Wolffur, and I recognized the scent that rose from it when she touched it.
“Torran?” I managed to ask, though bile rose in my throat. “Your lover?”
Her lips curled into a smile, but her eyes were pained. “A true sacrifice has a real cost, son. As you’ll discover soon enough.” I had no idea what she meant, but I knew I had to do whatever it took to make sure I never found out. “Hello, Aidan, darling. Sorry to be running late. Are we dealing with traitors and rogues yet? Because I found one that our Council has been looking for, lurking right outside our pack’s border.”
Niall snapped his fingers, and two of the Russians stepped from the back of the newcomers, hauling Glen between them. He was unconscious, blood running freely from small wounds on his neck, but still breathing, from what I could see and hear. There didn’t seem to be any other obvious wounds, but the ones on his neck were enough.
“Give him to me!” Brand snarled, and the Enforcers did just that, half-throwing Glen onto the bloodsoaked earth of the ring where Brand and Flor were being guarded. Flor started cursing as she crawled to Glen, her hands moving over his body, hissing when she noted the blood that ran from his neck only to vanish. It was the same type of wound Brand had worn; it was feeding Mother’s power.
“Bearman?” Flor asked, her voice strained.
Brand growled louder and lifted Glen off the ground, cradling him in those massive arms like a baby. Flor stood at their side, her teeth bared as she stared Mother down.
My own wolf was beyond rage, entering the cold, calculating place I’d built from years of torture and harsh lessons. My only goal was to kill every one of my enemies. Every hand that had been lifted against Flor, or Glen, or any of our loved ones.
I thought of the “arrangements” Grigor had described. I understood it completely now.We’ll have flowers for the rest of our lives, I promised my wolf silently, waiting. Watching the most dangerous enemy, the one who needed to die as soon as possible, and who would be the hardest to kill.
Mother. The sacrifice she’d made had given her evil a strength that was sickening. To my wolf’s eyes, she glowed with power like a dark moon. No, like a red moon, pulsing with stolen blood.
I couldn’t take her on alone. Not even with Brand by my side, and the others. Cut off from the moon’s power as we were, trapped in this circle, surrounded by silver and enemies, we had no way to win.
Mother was a psychopath. But she could channel her power into Father, now that she was here, and help him in that way in the fight against me. I could defeat him, possibly even after he’d juiced himself up on the strength of our gathered pack. But both of them, when Mother was bloated with magic, wearing her own lover’s pelt on her neck, and carrying his strength in her veins?
