Page 3 of Targeted By Temptation
But that was a tactic that would backfire because the Stravons would feel threatened. And they were getting a raw deal no matter how Boaz presented it. They would lose access to the river and therefore their shipping routes and warehouse access. And what they got in return was they were allowed to exist as a pack.
My phone buzzed. Once, twice, three and four times. It was each of my brothers saying they’d heard about my assignment and asking if I wanted backup.
Can’t,I typed into our group chat.Boaz insists I do this alone.
Want me to kick his butt?That was Lake.
He may be a Grey, but he’s also our Alpha, and you can’t go around saying he’s made a mistake.
Take your gun, Thiago insisted.
I’m planning on it.
I don’t trust them, Riggs told me.
Boaz wanted this to be easy, but I suspected some of the Stravon pack wouldn’t see it that way. And I understood. I’d be more than peeved if presented with this treaty. Many of their pack members were young and hot-headed. And while I didn’t expect a shooting match, they might shift and try to bleed my beast.
So I had to be ready. I studied a map of their compound and where I’d park. Our pack didn’t live together, and we had an office building as our headquarters. But the Stravons followed the old rules and everyone lived on pack land. Therefore, it was reasonable to assume they’d be more possessive about some of it being taken away.
I tried to put myself in their position, and I’d be territorial too if that happened to us.
Tomorrow I’d be representing the pack and Boaz as I walked into Stravon territory alone. But something in my gut told me nothing about tomorrow was going to be easy.
2
REIGN
It’s time.
The two words stared back at me on the phone. I didn’t need clarification. I knew exactly what my father meant. My time here at the university where I cosplayed a twenty-something-year-old paving their future was coming to an end. To be honest, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it had.
If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have left it unopened and unread. But I couldn’t. As it was, I was taking too long to reply—too long being three minutes. Waiting any more would result in a shitty situation becoming shittier. I knew what lines I could cross and by how much, and this wasn’t one I should even toe.
I’d been dreading this moment since I started my grad work. Heck, since I first pushed to get my undergrad degree. At best I had been buying some time. No part of me was foolish enough to believe otherwise. Using school as my excuse was never meant to last forever, but it had been the best thing I could think of at the time.
I’ll be there,I typed back and hit send.
A car will be there at fourcame back almost instantly.
Crap. Four o’clock. So much for being able to tie up loose ends. My father wasn’t even giving me a whole day to vacate. I’d be lucky to pack a suitcase and try to catch my advisor before I left. Professor Dean was going to be pissed. He’d worked so hard to get me the financial package he did, and here I was walking away from years of education less than a year before graduation.
Knowing this was coming was one thing. Feeling the pressure of it happening was another. If I had thought for even a split second I could flee and get out of his control, I’d have done so years ago. But I knew better. No one escaped my father. No. One.
He had power and money and the lack of conscience to use them all to their fullest extent. He didn’t care who he hurt along the way so long as he got what he wanted when all was said and done. Being his son didn’t make that any less true for me.
I’d always been his possession, a way to get ahead. Not once in my entire life did my father look at me and say, “I love you.” Why? Because he didn’t love me. The only person he might possibly have loved was my omega dad, but even with him, I had my doubts. My dad had simply been a different kind of possession.
I knew from the time I was old enough to remember that I was nothing more to my father than something to own and use to his advantage, a means to an end. Looking back, it was probably easier that way. If I’d thought he loved me to discover he cared only about what I could give him, it might’ve destroyed me.
For a long time, I thought my omega dad felt the same about me. He left a long time ago, something my father must’ve allowed,because if he didn’t, there was no way my omega father would’ve gotten away.
I hated him for a long time. I was his son, the one he carried for nine months, the one he held in his arms as a newborn. How could he leave me? Why was I not good enough? Did he never really want me in the first place?
It took me years of anger before I saw for the first time it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough for him or that he didn’t love me. It was that it had been his only way out. He didn’t have school to give him space to figure life out. He was trapped in our estate, every move noted by someone, having to play the role of perfect husband and being suffocated by it.
I doubted I’d ever know how he managed to convince my father to allow him to leave. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was leaving me there. Maybe he had something on the bastard. But somewhere along the line, it no longer mattered.
His freedom had been short, and I hated that for him. He got sick and passed away, something I didn’t learn about until years later… another thing I hated my father for. It was bad enough I’d felt abandoned by the person who should love me most, but then to not be able to grieve them properly. If I hadn’t looked him up while on a campus computer, the only ones not being monitored by him, I’d never have even known.
