Page 8 of Pack Rage
I’d only just found her again. “I need to see her.”
“Of course.” Sergeant didn’t meet my eyes.
Glen took me by the hand as Sergeant led us down a hallway to a room that I’d been in before, after my first battle at Southern. There were two rogues standing outside, both armed with swords. They nodded at me and Glen, murmured, “Alpha,” to Sergeant, then let us in.
“Mama?” I asked quietly, uncertain what kind of reception I’d get. Sometimes I was a stranger to her now, sometimes an enemy. Once or twice, she’d seen me as her daughter. Of course it had always been hard, with Mama. Even when I was a little girl, she’d looked right through me more often than not, her mind broken by her mate’s infidelities.
She lay on the bed, white bandages wrapped around her abdomen, and a sheet up to her hips. Her hair, almost as white as the sheets, wreathed her face on the pillow as she gazed out the window.
But when I spoke, her golden eyes swung to me. Taking me in.
I held my breath, until she asked, her voice shaking, “Is that you, my baby girl?” Her lined face creased into a smile as she recognized me. “I’d know those eyes anywhere. I’ve missed you so much, sweetheart. So much.”
Chapter 4
Guests and Prisoners
FINNICK
I’d had years to learn precisely how to hide my pain. Both the physical pain inflicted on me from childhood, as a method of toughening me up, and the deeper pain of knowing my parents didn’t love me. Or at least, not as much as they loved the power or influence I could help them amass.
I’d gotten good at hiding my reactions, until the pain coloring my connection with Flor threatened to make me forget all my hard-won lessons, and bawl like a baby in the lower levels of the Eastern pack Mansion. I wasn’t certain what was happening to her, but it felt like she was dying. My own vision went black as energy rushed out of me like it was dropping down into a bottomless well.
To my relief, I passed out briefly, coming to before the guards who watched those halls even realized what had happened. I made my way up to my room, and slept that night like a dead man.
When I woke, I still felt half-dead, but I had work to do.I spent the next few hours learning all I could from the house staff about what had happened, though it was difficult to gather intelwhen every move was being recorded and watched by the men in the tech room below.
I did find out a few things, though. Mother had gone to Southern, met with Torran, and was on her way back, with prisoners. “And a guest,” the soft-spoken maid whispered, her lips hardly moving. Both of our faces were turned away from the camera in the corner of the parlor, where she was serving me tea. “We’re to make up the best guest room, for one.” She placed a few sandwiches on a plate and passed it over. “For one of the Heirs.”
“Brand Becker?” The others had all been given rooms in my wing when they’d fostered here. Brand’s was across from mine.
“No, he’ll stay in his old room. The other one.”
I blinked. If Brand wasn’t the Heir who was coming… “Luke?”
Her eyes dropped once, a silent yes, and she gave a little curtsey before leaving the room.
The Mansion was silent, the staff staying out of sight more than normal, a calm before a storm. Unusually, Father hadn’t come home the evening before. It was possible that he’d stayed in the city at the penthouse apartment he kept for late meetings and socializing.
It was also possible he was with another woman. My gut twisted as I remembered the agony of being unfaithful to Flor, even with an incomplete bond. My parents were true mates; Father had shared the story of their meeting once, at a Conclave here at Eastern, thirty-two years ago. He’d spoken about how impossible it was to refuse that metaphysical connection. Apparently, both my parents had figured out how to work around it, in order to have their many affairs.
Calvin Callaway had claimed my mother was a witch, that she wasn’t from a small pack on the Georgia side of the border,but from the Florida side.From a coven, one that was known to harbor dark witches.
The same coven that Callaway had secretly contracted to kill his own true mate, Lily.
I’d never considered that my own mother might have magic. Might be guilty of an unforgivable crime, which she had somehow hidden for my whole life. Now that Callaway had said it out loud, though, so much I’d wondered about began to make sense.
I had no knowledge of magic. Almost no shifters did, since it was forbidden to speak about it. But if witches could manipulate bonds… Maybe she’d been able to do something to her own mating bond to make infidelity painless, for both mates.
What else could she do? What else had she done? I’d known she, Niall, and Torran had murdered more than one visiting shifter, one of them an Heir to a small but influential Italian pack. A pack that should be abducting Tana from the sidewalk outside her school any minute now, I thought, checking my phone.
My sister walked to a nearby dance studio seven blocks from the pack schoolhouse in the city. It was a safe walk, with cameras always on, and guards in place.
Cameras and guards that I’d made certain the Italians knew about. I had to trust they would honor our contract and take her out of the packlands, and the country, and keep her hidden for as long as she needed.
For as long as my parents were alive.
The ornate clock on the mantel chimed once, and my phone buzzed in my hand at the same time, with what appeared to be a spam text about a local human politician. My heart raced, knowing what it meant, that she was safely away. I had given them the private code words she and I had used since wewere children that meant everything was okay. She would know exactly who had sent these unfamiliar shifters.
