Revenge of the Wronged

by Hettie Ivers

  I wasn’t sure why I’d said it. Maybe to be nasty. Or to prey on her insecurities in the hope that it would cause her to abandon this insane mission. I knew she considered what happened in Madrid to be her fault. She’d said as much earlier. It was a low blow that hit its mark.

  “I was never perfect! I tried, but I wasn’t.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she was the child-woman once more. “I thought … if I could just be perfect enough … that he’d see how much better I was that way. I thought if I could be good enough, that maybe I could … make up for all the pain he’d been through in his life. I just wanted to make him proud of me.”

  She was such a train wreck I could almost feel pity for her had she not been an eater of souls orchestrating a plan that included potentially destroying the human race.

  “Everyone thought Kai was the big winner in our mate pairing,” she confided, brushing a stray lock of blond hair from her face with long, delicate fingers. “I remember seeing it in their eyes how sorry everyone was for me that fate had paired me with the mysterious, sadistic werelock doctor.” Blushing, she smiled shyly at me through her glassy eyes like we were on our way to becoming besties—as if she hadn’t just slapped the shit out of me and announced her plan to kill me painfully.

  “Kai’s always been different. Backward.”

  I barely suppressed a snort of derision at her daring to label Kai “backward” when she was the one draining souls and embracing the possibility of becoming the Rogue.

  “All werewolves are born in human form, and most shift into wolves for the first time after puberty. But Kai only remembers being a wolf. He didn’t find his human form until he was nearly sixteen, and only with the assistance of Lessa’s father, Antonio.” She smiled kindly at my confusion. “Antonio found Kai living in the wild, a barely tolerated member of a pack of common arctic wolves, and he recognized him for what he truly was.”

  “Kai was raised by real wolves?” I asked through my slack jaw. “Not werewolves? Or werelocks?”

  She nodded, sniffling prettily as she dabbed at her fading tears. Fuck, she was one of those annoying, pretty criers on top of everything else.

  I would never have guessed Kai’s early rearing given how stiff and proper he could be. Yet at the same time it made strange sense. I’d often felt safest with Kai, despite his purportedly darker nature, and I’d considered his behavior the most humane, civil, and predictable of the werelocks. It fit that he had been raised by actual animals.

  “Kai suspects his werelock parents, whoever they were, cast a spell to change and keep him in wolf form as an infant in order to conceal his identity and allow him to better protect himself. So you see, he had to learn how to behave as a human,” she explained with a watery titter. “Which wasn’t an easy transition for him.”

  “He’s done a lot better than most,” I muttered wryly, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “You have to understand, I was the sweetheart of high werelock society,” Maribel relayed without modesty. “Born into one of the most distinguished werelock families in France. Considered a prodigy by supernatural standards.”

  I’ll never know how I managed to restrain an eye-roll. Idly, I wondered if she and Alex had sat around swapping tales of their own greatness with one another back when they’d dated. God, how it irked me that he’d loved her.

  “And there was Kai. So dark. So damaged.” This she said with a whimsical grin. “The night we met, the moment Lessa introduced us, it was a strike of lightning.” Childlike reverence lit her features. “I wanted to impress him so much—like I’d never wanted to impress anyone before. And my whole life had been about impressing everyone.

  “I agreed to take a stroll through the woods with him—even though I wasn’t dressed for the occasion—and I remember droning on and on like some nervous débutante, telling him everything about my amazing family, about my father’s accomplishments, followed by a litany of my own.”

  She bit her lip in a coquettish manner that made me want to smash her face in. “When I finally stopped my nervous babbling long enough to apologize for my rudeness and ask him about himself, he told me, ‘I’m Kai. I’ve no surname. No family. You already know I’m a doctor and the history of how I came to join the Reinoso pack. I’m sure you’ve heard many rumors about me as well. You’d do well to assume they’re true.’ ”

  Maribel clasped my hands in her cold ones as her bright eyes clouded over with remembrance—a mixture of exquisite joy and insurmountable pain etched in her features. She had loved Kai very much in life; that was certain. And she still did.

  “He’d begun circling me as he said this, eyeing me up and down in the most thorough, insolent manner I’d ever experienced. Naturally, I’d known the eyes of countless men undressing me before, but Kai took it so much further. He looked me over as if he was seeing beyond my clothing, beyond my skin and bones, even beyond my innards—to the soul that lay hidden beneath everything I had believed myself to be. And he said, ‘You strike me as the type who was afraid to play in the dirt as a little girl.’ Of course,” she imparted with an anxious giggle, “I laughed his very accurate assessment off as if he was merely flirting with me or being ridiculous, but inside, I panicked.”

  Her glazed, sad eyes connected unseeingly with mine. “Because the reality I’d spent a lifetime so carefully constructing in order to conceal my truest nature was shattered a moment later when he tipped his head and challenged, ‘I believe you’re still afraid. Why?’ When I once more laughed his words off, professing ignorance as to what he could possibly mean by such an outrageous supposition, he stood there and began casually removing his suit right in front of me, until he was stark naked, his enormous erection pointing straight to the full moon above, patiently waiting for me to cease my nervous rambling. When I finally did, he held his hand out to me and concluded, ‘I think you’re scared you’ll like it too much.’ ”

  She licked her lips as heat stole up the length of her neck to her hairline. Even her icy hands had warmed in mine. “Then he smiled at me for the first time since Lessa had introduced us. Just a little one that was almost shy, despite his incredibly brazen behavior. I knew in that moment my world would never be the same again. I put my hand in his and he raised it to his lips. Then he lowered it to his cock. And I was lost. Utterly, hopelessly captivated by him as he moved my hand up and down his hard, swollen—”

  I coughed noisily, practically choking on my own saliva as I resisted the urge to pull my hands from hers, struggling with how best to interrupt this inappropriate tangent into TMI territory.

  “He never asked permission, just used the hand I’d give him to masturbate himself. And I let him. I let him crudely pump against my palm until he’d splattered cum all over the front of my evening gown.”

  Ugh … gee-zus. I so did not need to hear this play-by-play about Kai!

  “No man had ever done such a thing to me. They wouldn’t have dared. And I loved it!” she proclaimed with breathless excitement, her pupils dilated, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “It made me so hot I nearly came myself—just standing there watching him defile my couture gown like that. By sunrise that gown was completely destroyed and I was covered from head to toe in dirt. And Kai’s cum.”

  O-kaay … enough already. “You still love him,” I interjected. “And he still loves you! Why are you determined to sever something you clearly never wanted to lose?”

  Instantly, the dreamy light in her eyes was snuffed out. “Because I finally love him enough to make the greatest sacrifice of all.” She withdrew her hands from mine. A chill sped up my spine.

  “Alex and Lessa thought Kai tried to change me. They accused him of being incapable of loving me the way that I was. But they were wrong.”

  Tears sprang to her doe eyes. “Kai always loved me—exactly the way I was. He loved me better than I ever loved myself. The woman he saw and loved in me had never been good enough for me to love.” She offered me a one-shouldered shrug, a half-smile tugging her tremb
ling lips—the perfect portrait of feminine vulnerability. “He loved the me I’d spent a lifetime trying to hide. To change. And I didn’t want him to love her. I didn’t want him to encourage her to run free.”

  The honesty of her quiet confession suddenly made me want to comfort her, to allow myself to like her—to forgive her for her sheer awfulness and horrendous shortcomings as a celestial being.

  “The truth is, in life Kai loved me better than I was ever able to love him. Because it was always me who was trying to change him. To make him see me the way I’d pretended to be my whole life rather than how I really was.” She huffed a dry laugh as her tears spilled over. “I spent my life trying to please and impress everyone—trying to be perfect enough for everyone to love me. But I never loved myself. And the fact Kai could love the darkest, most shameful, secret parts of me that I’d always denied existed, scared the devil out of me.”

  Her words resonated with my own deep-seated insecurities in a manner that was unsettling. I didn’t need to hear anymore. I needed to wake up and tell Alex that I loved him. Before it was too late.

  “Kai used to say that no one ever found daybreak by avoiding night, but only by passing through the night. He feared that by hiding from and suppressing my darker nature, I would succeed in blocking out the very light that could only be found on the other side of night.” She nodded slowly, gravely, her features hardening, reflecting the determination of a woman about to greet her executioner. “He was right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  My stomach roiled. My she-wolf’s adrenaline spiked. I sensed a shift of powerful magic just as Maribel’s delicate, darkly fringed eyelashes fluttered shut. A man screamed in the distance as if he’d just met a fate worse than death—a horrible, bloodcurdling sound.

  “W-what—was that?”

  “First sacrifice of the morning.” Maribel’s tone was nonchalant as cold indigo eyes flickered open to impassively meet my terrified gaze. “He was in the way of my plans. And I need an extra power surge from a gifted magical life force for today’s agenda.” Then she gasped, “Merde,” her eyes popping wide. She snapped her fingers and stomped her foot in classic “doggonit” fashion.

  “I believe Lessa favored that particular werelock,” she said with a pouty frown. “Will you convey my apologies to her for killing him, please?”

  My mouth hung open for what must’ve been the hundredth time this dream sequence.

  “It was an oversight,” she defended, fingering her collarbone, looking more embarrassed than contrite. “Our line of conversation distracted me.”

  While I was internally flaying myself for being dumb enough to ever feel sorry for this crazy bitch for even one hot second, she held up a forefinger, eyes flashing with excitement. “I know. I’ll off a few more werelock soldiers for their souls and leave this one’s intact.” She beamed with self-satisfaction at her own sadistic solution. “That should make Lessa feel better, don’t you think?”

  It was bad enough to imagine Maribel killing nameless innocent people and feeding off of their souls. It was something far worse entirely to realize the man who’d screamed was one of Alex’s soldiers—maybe one I’d met just last night.

  When I didn’t reply, she waived an airy hand. “It’ll have to do.”

  As I fought back a wave of nausea, I was forced to recognize the irony and the severity of the situation at hand. Maribel was by far a greater danger to us all than any threat posed by the Salvatella pack. I had to try and reason with her despite her obvious lunacy. Someone needed to put a stop to her ill-fated plans.

  Steadfastly ignoring the voice in my head that argued those who were already dead were past the point of reason, I stammered, “I—you … you’re a good person, Maribel.” I could only hope I sounded like I meant it. “Kai … Kai said you were. He told me you always saw the good in people … that you were wired to always do the right thing.”

  “Actually,” she said with a droll, exaggerated sigh, “as I recall, Kai was describing you when he said those things.”

  Crap. “Yes, well … but he was drawing parallels to you.”

  “It matters little, Milena. I am not who I was. Consider my wiring altered. Permanently.”

  “I don’t believe it. Please, don’t do this? Don’t do it to Kai. He doesn’t want this.”

  “You presume to tell me what my mate wants?”

  “Exactly, Kai is your mate. He still loves you!”

  “And it’s his love for me that would kill him if I let it.” She shook her head. “No. I’ve moved beyond the curse our species would profess to be love. Even your Pollyanna brain will come to see in time that I’m right.”

  “God, why do you hate me so much?” The moment I pieced it together and the statement passed my lips, realization solidified. Deep down, perfect, perfectly evil Maribel hated my guts. But why?

  “Hate you? You’re a critical means to an end for me, Milena. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  “But you do. You do hate me.”

  Her features reflected surprise, before shuttering once more. “Perhaps I resent you your propensity for forgiveness,” she considered, her voice devoid of emotion. “Or maybe I envy you your effortless goodness.” The imitation of a smile that she gave me was sad, not unkind or mocking. “You are what I tried to be. Pretended to be,” she amended, “yet never truly was.”

  “But Kai loved—loves you, exactly as you are. You said so yourself! He doesn’t want to be severed from you. For all this time, he’s wished that he’d died with you. I know he has! He misses you so much it kills him inside. I’ve felt it.”

  “Have you?” Her head snapped up, and her eyes were flinty. “When his erection was grinding you into the shower wall? Was that the moment you felt how much he missed me? Or was it when his canines were imbedded in your throat that you realized how much he still loves me?”

  I gulped. Awk-ward. “I was in heat … and I propositioned—threw myself at him—”

  Maribel laughed gaily, as if it didn’t matter. I knew better. “It happened before you. Worse. With Lupe.”

  Kai and Lupe? It was true after all? Jesus, romantic episodes within the Reinoso pack were proving to be more scandalous than any of Lupe’s telenovelas.

  “I believe he actually … loved her.” Maribel practically spat on the ground as she expelled the “L” word. “You can’t imagine the way he kissed her.”

  Actually, I kinda could.

  Her eyes squeezed shut, and her features contorted with such pain. “He attacked her like he was starving … dying … like he would’ve given anything to be buried inside of her.”

  I recalled the mischievous look in Lupe’s eyes when we’d discussed Kai’s sexuality in the kitchen. “I know a woman who made out with him forty-eight years ago,” she had told me.

  “That was when I knew for certain I had to do whatever it took to find a way to free him,” Maribel said. “I knew that if I severed our connection, he would thrive and be happy again. Without me.”

  Before I could formulate a retort, an anguished, shrill female scream pierced through my consciousness, sending palpable shockwaves through my system and dreamscape, like aftershocks from an earthquake.

  “Who was that?” I glared at Maribel in accusation. “What have you done now?”

  “Me?” she had the nerve to balk. “Don’t be so melodramatic. That bitch I happen to like. She’ll live. For now.”

  “God. How can you be like this? How can you just … do these things? To—to Lessa? To Kai? To your friends? To Alex’s soldiers? Your own former pack?”

  She stilled, and for split second I thought I’d struck a nerve. Until she leveled me with a look of imperious apathy.

  “You and I aren’t friends, Milena. Try to remember that fact.” She leaned closer, invading my personal space and calmly meeting my enraged features with eyes as cold as ice. “I killed your mother, you know. Weakened her system and accelerated her cancer,” she stoically confessed.

  Despite
all of the vile revelations she’d heretofore spewed, that particular bombshell I never saw coming. She knew it, too. A gentle smile curved her well-formed lips as she observed how her little admission impacted me on multiple levels.

  Blood pounded in my ears, almost loud enough to drown out the wounded howl of my own she-wolf, of the panicked cries for help from the same woman who’d screamed a moment ago. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. And I couldn’t fathom how I’d ever viewed such a monster as beautiful before.

  The dead thing before me now was forever beyond ugly—a hideous, demented creature through and through. Beyond my ability to pity. Beyond my wherewithal to forgive. Beyond redemption.

  “Mateus too,” she added with an impudent eye flutter. “And by afflicting Mateus with bone cancer, I also took Raul from you,” she pointed out with a smirk. “Tell me, are you prepared to stake Bethany’s life on rumors of my former benevolence? I can get her killed before you even awake from this nightmare.” When she pulled back to assess my reaction, her features were cruel. Unrepentant.

  I wouldn’t risk Bethany’s life for anything.

  Her smirk broadened. “Pollyanna has a price after all.”

  Gnashing my teeth, I gritted, “What is it you want me to do?”

  She clapped her hands with a celebratory titter, bouncing on her heels with giddy excitement. “Not much. I’m handling the hard work. All I require is your cooperation with two critical matters.” She raised one elegant pointer finger. “First and foremost, you must control the ricochet effect as I’m extracting the heart of the blood curse.”

  “What?”

  “What … what?” She scowled. “What do you mean, what?” she imitated my shrill squawk with embarrassing accuracy—and a discordant American accent that was insulting. “You told Alex yesterday you thought you could control the ricochet?”