by Hettie Ivers
Her eyes drifted as she paused in contemplation. “It paid off. He got the acknowledgement he’d desperately sought. And he gained their trust.” Morose eyes returned to me, and I felt my smile fading, knowing at least in part where this tale was headed. “They involved him in assignments and gave him access to information not even Mateus had been privy to during his tenure.”
Her brow furrowed. “But it wasn’t enough for him to be the most elevated human pack member. He was still human. And he knew for that innate failing he would always be considered inferior within the realm of his new world.”
She bit her lip, her eyes searching the ceiling. “I think it was when he was twenty-three that he first approached Alex to ask if he would change him,” she all too casually revealed. “Alex refused.”
I swallowed against the pain that lanced my heart.
Raul had wanted to be a werewolf? He’d asked to be turned? To become one of them?
“Then he asked Alex again when he was twenty-four. Alex said no.”
Raul had wanted to be a permanent, central part of this terrible world? My stomach twisted. My jaw had likely dropped as well. But Guadalupe wasn’t looking at me. Her focus was on transferring the coffee that was ready at last into a sizable silver serving pot.
Time stood still while I waited. It might have taken her one minute, or one hour, to transfer the coffee. Either way, it didn’t much matter. I was lost. Raul had chosen this life over his human one?
I tried not to view it as him choosing them over me—to remember that he had been forced into this world by Mateus. How could I fault him for trying to make the most of the shitty hand he’d been dealt? Yet it hurt.
“Now, I don’t claim to know the sordid details of how Raul and her majesty began their courtship,” Guadalupe resumed, not even attempting to mask her disapproval of the union, and further perplexing me with her disparaging reference to Alessandra. “But when Alex found out, it didn’t go over well.” Her expression suggested it went a lot worse.
“Alex believed Raul was attempting to manipulate Alessandra’s affections in order to get what he wanted, knowing that if she became attached to him, she’d want him to be turned as much as he did.”
“No,” I immediately shook my head. “No, that’s just not true,” I defended. “Raul would never do something like that. He just wouldn’t!”
“’Course he wouldn’t,” Alcaeus spoke up from behind me, causing me to jump and rattle the coffee mugs. Shit.
Guadalupe didn’t flinch. “No one asked you, you big eavesdropping son of a bitch.”
“Woman, I’ve been eavesdropping on your gossip for fifty years. It’s my favorite pastime. I keep hoping one day I’ll hear you confess your eternal love and undying attraction for me.”
“In your wet dreams, old man,” she retorted, much to Alcaeus’ amusement.
Puzzled by their banter, and still attempting to digest the startling information about Raul, I was relieved to know that I’d not gotten Guadalupe in trouble.
“If you’re done spreading idle pack gossip about Milena’s brother, I’ll just be stealing my favorite vessel back now.” Alcaeus gave my shoulder a squeeze before picking up the tray I’d prepared in one hand and the silver coffee pot in his other. “’Sides, she’ll get way better gossip about Raul out of your daughter, I suspect.”
Guadalupe said nothing, but then let fly what sounded like a snarky comeback in Portuguese under her breath as Alcaeus and I made our exit.
CHAPTER FOUR
While Alcaeus finished catching Alessandra up on the morning’s events, I found myself once more stealing furtive glances at Alex, who was seated next to his sister on the couch in Alcaeus’ study. On several occasions, his eyes were already upon me when I looked over at him, prompting the most ridiculous onslaught of nervous butterflies, which consequently resulted in even more embarrassing schoolgirl reactions from me, as I tried in vain to pretend I hadn’t noticed and wasn’t affected by him in the least.
I was behaving as if I’d regressed to the age of twelve and was experiencing my first crush, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. It was shaping up to be the worst morning of my new unnatural life.
I was sitting in another comfortably worn, oversized, leather armchair, which, Alcaeus had assured me, was the very best seat in the whole house. Kaleb was in a stiff-backed chair next to mine sipping his coffee, but I no longer had any desire to ogle him. He was way less attractive to me now that I knew he’d spent time in America on missions with Mateus—despite the fact I had no fucking clue what that even meant. Besides that, he was quite dull, I’d decided. It figured that the only potentially decent guy in the bunch would prove painfully insipid.
“I don’t understand,” Alessandra interjected. “If Milena’s not related to Joaquin or to any of the Salvatella clan, how did she inherit Joaquin’s Alpha blood magic?”
“Simple, same way Alex inherited all of Dad’s power, and, it would seem, Renata’s power as well,” Alcaeus said from where he sat perched atop his own massive oak desk.
Alessandra’s ponytail tossed from side to side. “You’ve lost me.”
“Look, we’ve all questioned over the years why and how Dad managed to singularly will all of his abilities to Alex, right?” He tipped his head to the side. “In truth, I’ve struggled more with the ‘why,’ myself, often contemplating the state of Dad’s sanity there at the end and wondering whether he secretly hated me my whole life, given his decision to bequeath insurmountable power to the five-year-old hellion he left in my guardianship.”
Alessandra snickered, then patted Alex’s knee. “He’s teasing, you were a perfectly brilliant and wonderful child,” she praised. “You simply had a rambunctious nature that was a bit challenging at times.”
Alcaeus howled with laughter at that, while Remy gasped, his eyes bugging wide at his stepsister from where he was standing beside a grand bookshelf. Kai covered his face with his hands. Even Alex had the grace to roll his eyes at Alessandra’s outlandish sugarcoating of the situation.
“Rambunctious? He burned Alcaeus’ house to the ground, Lessa,” Remy reminded. “Five times!”
“He was hurting inside!” she contended. “My God, he’d lost both of his parents!”
“He was a spoiled brat and a monster,” Remy countered.
“Right here, guys,” Alex injected under his breath with a little waved salute that caused Alcaeus to crack up again.
“He was acting out, Remy,” Alessandra rationalized. “Which was understandable, given all the early trauma he’d been put through.”
“Ugh, stop! Stop!” Remy groaned in disgust, holding his hands up in capitulation. “There’s no talking to you when you get like this—with your head stuck clear up Alex’s ass.”
“Oh, bite me, Pepé! You’re just trying to make him look bad in front of Milena.”
“Like I need to?” Remy puffed. “He does that all on his own.”
Pepé? Did I even want to know? Nah.
“You’ve been instigating it! Milena is clearly his mate, and you and Alcaeus both need to stop provoking his anger with your unwelcome attentions toward her. Can’t you see how hard he’s trying?”
“Tell it to the brother who just bit her!” Remy scoffed. “By God, if anything, it’s your perpetual minimizing of Alex’s bad behavior that has exacerbated it all these years.”
“Lay off of her, already!” Alex fired at Remy in defense of his sister.
Or … surrogate mother, rather, as she was appearing more and more to be. I estimated they all needed at least a century of family counseling at this point. And I felt certain Kai agreed with me on that, based on the way he was quietly groaning behind his hands from where he stood leaning against the door. I’d been strangely disappointed to note he’d pulled a shirt on while I’d been in the kitchen with Guadalupe.
“As I was saying,” Alcaeus said, attempting to diffuse the mounting discord and steer everyone back to the discussion at hand, “on a good day with
Alex, I like to assume Dad did what he did because at the time Alex was still at great risk and required the most protection due to his persecution by the Salvatella pack. Other times, I’m convinced Dad did it as a cruel joke so he could laugh his ass off at me from the afterlife. While we may never know his exact reasons why, I believe we’re imminently closer to understanding the ‘how’ part of the equation.”
“So how?” Alessandra pressed.
“He conjured a spell to bypass the natural order of things. Rigged the system the same way Joaquin did in order to pass his powers to Hector.”
“Hector?” Alessandra nearly shrieked. “Our Hector? Hector Varela? How did Joaquin even know Hector?”
I’d wanted to shriek much the same. And judging from the mystified expressions on the faces of just about everyone else in the room, with the exception of Kai and Alcaeus, I wasn’t alone in my confusion. Joaquin Salvatella had known my grandfather, Hector?
“When Dad and I met up with Joaquin Salvatella in Paraguay at the end of 1868,” Alcaeus recounted, “he was traveling with just one companion. A nine-year-old boy. Hector.”
“What? Why didn’t I know this? You never told me you acquired Hector from Joaquin Salvatella,” Alex said.
“Yeah, Al!” Alessandra echoed Alex’s sentiment. “You and Dad said Hector was the orphaned servant of an old friend you’d met up with in Asunción.”
“Exactly,” Alcaeus said, “and that was the truth.”
“But not the whole truth?” Remy asked.
“No,” Alcaeus admitted. “The whole truth is that Joaquin told us Hector was the orphaned child of one of his longtime, loyal human servants. A servant who had been killed by Joaquin’s former pack in retaliation for confirming the truth to him about what had happened to his mate Sofia and her family.”
My blood ran cold. The Salvatellas had murdered Hector’s family too? My great-grandparents?
“And as Joaquin was planning on getting himself killed in short order in the War of the Triple Alliance, his dying request to us was that Dad and I take the boy with us back to Brazil and keep him under our protection as a servant in our household for the rest of his life, in order to shield him from any potential future harm or retribution at the hands of the Salvatella pack.”
“Holy shit!” Alessandra exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? You mean to tell us that for all that time, the mythical, magically disappearing Alpha blood of Joaquin that the whole supernatural world was busy scheming and killing each other over was right under our noses? Inside of quiet little Hector?”
“Pretty much.”
“And you never thought to tell me?” Alex exploded to his feet. “I’m fucking Alpha! Those assholes have been trying to kill me my whole life! You didn’t consider the fact that we’ve been harboring an enemy of the Salvatella pack to be potentially important information for me to have? For all of us to have? Fuck’s sake, that’s twice now, Al!”
“Ah … I’m going to have to categorically agree with Alex on this one,” Remy inserted with a raised forefinger. “This is fucked up, Alcaeus.”
“Hold on,” Alcaeus appealed, hopping down off of his desk in favor of standing at the center of his now tense study. “Calm down and let me finish. At Joaquin’s request, Dad and I swore to keep and protect any and all future offspring of Hector’s as members of our household and human pack.” Alcaeus’ eyes fell upon me then. Five other sets of eyes followed suit.
I fidgeted in my seat as the room went silent. Alessandra tugged Alex’s hand until he sat back down next to her.
“There’s more,” Alcaeus continued. “Joaquin told us that he had once healed Hector using a significant amount of his own blood, as well as some powerful magic, and that as a result he suspected the boy might be a bit different from other humans in terms of resistance to compulsion and mind penetration. He also said he’d probably live longer than the average human.”
“Christ!” Remy swore. “So that’s why Raul …? And Milena …? Fuck, I can’t believe you didn’t tell us this before, Al! What were you thinking?”
“In the first place, Dad and I were sworn to secrecy about where Hector had come from. And in the second, the resistance to mind penetration never came up as an issue until recently with Raul,” Alcaeus defended. “Hector never stepped so much as a toe out of line. We trusted him implicitly, so we never had reason to test Joaquin’s theory. Mateus also consistently appeared to follow orders, so we foolishly trusted him based on Hector’s track record. Shame on us for that one.”
“But why in the world Hector?” Alessandra questioned. “Why would Joaquin bequeath his legendary Alpha blood to some little nobody servant boy? To a random human?”
Ouch.
Alcaeus cleared his throat and gave his sister a meaningful look that caused her hand to fly to her mouth and her head to swivel back to me.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, Milena.” She winced. “I did not intend that the way it sounded.”
I waved a flippant hand and mumbled something or other about it not mattering, my cheeks flaming nonetheless as all eyes sought me again.
“She really didn’t … she didn’t mean it … like that …” Alex fumbled, his concerned black eyes communicating the reassurance and comfort he’d failed with words to convey.
I decided “concerned” was definitely a sexy look on Alex. So sexy I had to avert my eyes before my she-wolf did something crazy. Like throw herself at him.
“Listen, when Joaquin asked me to be the guardian of Hector and his future bloodline, and made a big deal about me swearing a bunch of wacky oaths to that effect, quite frankly,” Alcaeus confessed, “I largely dismissed it as merely humoring the eccentric dying wish of a grief-stricken, lunatic Alpha. I didn’t much consider or care who Hector was to Joaquin, because to me, Hector was simply an agreeable kid who’d obviously been traumatized by the loss of his parents and needed a good home. Why wouldn’t I oblige? It was the right thing to do. The kid had nothing! He didn’t even have a last name until I made one up for him.”
Nice. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, though I recognized it was yet another reason to be thankful Mateus had never acknowledged me as his child. Otherwise, I could’ve been living my whole life with a fake last name made up by Alcaeus, rather than carrying on my mother’s family surname. And feeling like a third-generation Reinoso charity case.
Alcaeus grinned at me and further confided, “But mostly, I did it because at nine your grandpop had himself some hilariously huge old man ears on his little head. It was pretty stinkin’ cute. I’ll show you photos,” he promised with a wink.
I fought my twitching lips, not wanting to give in and laugh at Alcaeus’ infectious levity and inappropriately humorous spin on what was by all accounts a horrendously twisted and tragic tale.
“So when I agreed to be the guardian of Hector’s future bloodline,” Alcaeus explained, “I had no cause whatsoever to imagine Joaquin had bequeathed his fabled blood magic to Hector. Because I didn’t know then that Hector’s real last name was Morales, or that Hector was Joaquin’s slain mate Sofia Morales’ youngest brother, and the sole family member, unbeknownst to the Salvatellas at the time, to survive the Morales massacre.”
What? Hector was the brother of Joaquin’s slain mate, Sofia?
The room fell deathly quiet as the bomb Alcaeus had dropped worked its way into everyone’s cognizance. I snuck a glance at Alex, only to find he was already staring at me. I realized that everyone was looking at me.
Wait a minute. I was related to Joaquin’s mate, Sofia? Me? The Salvatellas had murdered my ancestors?
“Christ, I knew it!” Remy proclaimed. “I knew there was something exceptional and predestined about Milena’s deliverance to us from the start.”
“You’re hardly the only one who knew it,” Alex spurned.
“Oh … dear … God …” Alessandra exhaled. “This is bad. Very bad.”
“Depends on how you look at it,” Alcaeus debated. “I mean, certainly, I never
envisioned that wily warlock Joaquin was dragging me into his mastermind scheme to fuck over his greedy, bloodthirsty family members and avenge his murdered mate and her family. If Milena wasn’t so fucking hot and adorable, and if I didn’t feel like such a total badass right now to be shouldering the burden of carrying Joaquin’s blood magic for her, I’d probably feel cheap and used by the ordeal.”
“I’m so sure,” Remy drawled.
“Still”—Alcaeus wagged his brows at me—“I might need Milena to hold me a few times before this whole sordid affair is over.”
Alex took the bait and commenced growling at his brother.
“Alcaeus, quit it,” Alessandra scolded. “This isn’t funny! And you and Remy need to stop antagonizing Alex. Back off of his mate, already.”
“Aw, come on! This is the most fun we’ve had at Alex’s expense his entire life.”
“And it’s so damn easy,” Remy chimed in with a chuckle. “Even our subtlest interest and attention to Milena sets him off.”
“Whatever! I passed a Milena look-alike in the gardens on my way over here,” Alessandra said. “That’s hardly subtle, Remy! How do you think it makes your little brother feel to know that you’re picking up human girls that resemble his mate to fuck?”
Alex? What about me?
“Can we please attempt to stay on topic?” Kai entreated.
“I think it makes him feel pretty damn good when it’s his dick fucking them,” Remy retorted.
Alessandra’s eyes flew wide. “Alex!” She turned to glare at her astonishingly sheepish-looking baby brother. “You didn’t!”
The unmitigated glee shared between Remy and Alcaeus at seeing Alessandra’s outrage was hard to miss. Had they been standing closer, I suspected they would’ve high-fived at getting their little brother into trouble with his “mommy.”
“Oh, and he flaunted the fact that he’d slept with her to Milena just a few hours ago,” Remy added for good measure. “Just before Milena started her rapid transformation.”