by Hettie Ivers
“Wow. Tough break. Hey, listen, I gotta jet—”
“Alcaeus, wait! I have an emergency, and I need your help.”
“I’m listening.”
“Wyatt’s gone missing.”
“What?”
“Wyatt’s missing!” she screamed into the receiver.
“Lessa, calm down. How can he be missing? Just enter his mind and find his location. I thought you practically lived inside his head already, constantly rearranging his memories and impressions of you.”
“This isn’t a joke!” she shrieked. “His mind is blocked. He hasn’t been to any of his homes in the past twenty-four hours, nor has he been to his office. I have tracking devices on all of his cars as well as his shoes, and they’re all accounted for. There’s been no activity on any of his credit cards, and his cell phone tracking has been disabled.”
Yikes. My sister was more than a bloodhound. She had all the stalker bases covered. And then some.
“And I’ve checked the surveillance activity for all the hidden cameras I set up in his homes and his cars and office,” she continued, “and there’s nothing, Al. Nothing. No sign whatsoever of what happened to him. My mate has vanished off the face of the earth. You have to help me find him.”
“Okay, okay, when did you last see or speak with him?” I cast my eyes to the ceiling. “Or track him on any one of the many hundreds of tracking devices that you have on him in a given day?”
“About two days ago. I spoke to him in the afternoon on the day of the Denver meeting. Al, I know something’s not right. I’m not going crazy or being paranoid. As much as it terrifies me to believe it, a powerful werelock had to have blocked his mind from me. It’s the only explanation.”
Fuck. Humans didn’t just disappear like that—certainly not when my sister was responsible for stalking them. And Lessa was right: the most disturbing part was Wyatt’s mind being blocked. If Wyatt had been taken hostage by an enemy werelock, it was a threat not only to my sister’s life but also to Avery’s life, as well as to her daughter’s, given how much information Wyatt had about them.
I had a bad feeling I knew just the werelock who was behind this, too.
“Okay. Try and stay calm, Lessa, and keep trying to tap his mind. I’m going to do a little investigating myself. I’ll call you back.”
After I hung up the phone with Lessa, I immediately dialed the number for “Scary Stranger” that I had memorized yesterday.
Following my initial blowjob love confession to Avery in the kitchen last night, I’d gently grilled her over sandwiches about her relationship with Raul. She’d laughed and reassured me that she was “not into Raul like that” and had explained that she didn’t think Raul was actually into her in that way either—that she thought he’d only staged a phony engagement between them in the restaurant just prior to Gabriel’s surprise arrival in order to throw the Salvatella Alpha off and help her get away from Gabriel quickly.
She’d also insisted that she’d only met Raul the day before she’d met me. I’d scented no lie in any of it.
And the fact that Raul had disobeyed Gabe, his own Alpha, in order to defend Avery’s life last night was significant—I just wasn’t sure what it meant or what Raul’s game was this time. He was obviously eager to get his hands on Sloane. Yet Avery had said that Raul had offered to go on the run with her and Sloane, rather than try to convince her to join the Salvatella pack.
“Chaos,” Raul greeted me in a sleep-roughened voice the third time I redialed his number. “What the fuck, brah? It’s five in the morning here.”
“Congratulations. It’s three in the morning here.”
A two-hour time difference likely placed him in Bariloche, the location of one of the Salvatella pack’s main strongholds. The fact that he knew that it was me calling from an unlisted number in New York City meant he was either stalking me Lessa-style or he’d only given this particular number to Avery.
“How’s my girl?”
I ignored his taunt and got to the point. “What do you want this time, Raul?”
“What the hell? You called me, dude.”
“Drop the surfer-boy shtick. I’m serious.”
He laughed. After a pause, he said, “I want an agreement from the Reinoso pack that Avery and her daughter Sloane are off-limits. I want Milena to call off her hunt for the Rogue, and I want her to quit lobbying and rallying other packs against the Rogue as well.”
He didn’t sound at all sleepy or surfer-boy blasé as he said it. In fact, he sounded like an Alpha—which was even scarier. Because it was Raul. And because he was Milena’s brother. Raul had inherited his werelock blood power from the same source that Milena had. And Milena’s powers had grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade.
On top of that, Raul had also inherited Nuriel Salvatella’s werelock powers—which was the only reason he could teleport. Milena had never gained that ability.
Undead Maribel had transferred Nuriel’s powers directly to Raul ten years ago after she’d used Lupe’s form as a channel through which to direct her power from the ether and destroy Nuriel in a rather gruesome—albeit well-deserved—display of violence.
Upon his death, Nuriel’s powers should have rightfully transferred to his brother, Gabriel, as was the natural law of the werelock species.
My siblings and I had never quite understood why Maribel, a former member of our Reinoso pack, had chosen to rig the system in Raul’s favor in this regard. Why hadn’t Maribel gifted Nuriel’s power to her beloved Kai? Or to Lessa, who had been Maribel’s best friend in life? Or even to Alex, who had served as Maribel’s Alpha?
We’d been anxious at first about what it would mean as far as Raul’s power accumulation and development, but we’d more or less ceased fretting over it when several years passed and Raul’s powers hadn’t seemed to have changed or developed any further—as far as we knew—and when he remained in his position as Gabriel’s head Beta, whereas Milena had already become the Alpha of our pack.
“Are you still there?” Raul asked. “I’m about to hang up and go back to sleep.”
“Avery’s my mate, Raul. No one in my pack will ever harm my mate or my daughter, Sloane.”
He chuckled. “Wow. That’s good to hear. I had my doubts about your intentions, but after seeing you and Avery together yesterday, I was almost convinced that you two might actually be true mates.”
“We are true mates, Raul. There’s no question about it. And we’ve both been marked now.”
“Well, congrats, man.” He paused. “And you’ve told Milena? And she’s agreed to back off and accept the Rogue as her adopted niece?”
When I didn’t answer right away, he continued. “Let me guess: that’s a no, you haven’t told Milena yet? That’s what I thought. So look, I’ll just hold onto my collateral while you sort things out with Milena and Alex and get me the agreement I want from your pack.”
“What collateral?”
“Oh, I think you know, Chaos, or you wouldn’t be calling me at this hour.”
Little shit. I could hear the smirk on his face through the phone line. Fuck. He definitely had Wyatt.
“No, I don’t know, Raul,” I denied.
“Well, then, you’ll find out soon enough. Give my regards to your sister while you still can. And don’t fuck this up,” he said in warning just before the line went dead.
Alcaeus
After Raul hung up on me, I immediately dialed Lessa. She answered on the first ring.
“Bad news,” I told her. “Raul has Wyatt.” There was no time to mince words.
I moved the phone away from my ear as screams of profanity and crashing noises sounded from the other end of the line. Finally, she regained her composure enough to snarl, “What does that bastard want?”
“He wants an agreement from our pack that we’ll back off from hunting the Rogue and from petitioning other packs to hunt it.”
“That conniving sonofa—”
“Just listen, Lessa.
He wants an agreement from Milena that Wyatt’s friend—Avery, the Rogue’s mother—and her daughter, Sloane, are off-limits.” I cleared my throat and went for it. “Which, by the way, kinda works out well for me. Because um … since I last saw you, I’ve mated with the Rogue’s mom, Avery. We’re marked and everything. It’s a done deal. She’s really amazing, and you’re totally going to get along with her way better than you do Milena—I promise.”
There was dead silence on the line.
“Lessa? Are you still there?” She didn’t answer, but I continued anyway. “So we’re getting married, and I’m adopting her daughter, Sloane. I know she’s supposedly the Rogue and all, but c’mon, how much harder could it be to raise the Rogue than it was for us to raise Alex?”
When she finally answered, based on her numb, shell-shocked reaction to the multiple bombs I’d just dropped on her at once, I couldn’t tell whether or not Lessa believed me that Avery was my true mate. But ultimately, it really didn’t matter. The fact that Raul was holding Wyatt hostage was enough to get my sister on board with the plan of protecting Avery and Sloane and backing me up when I went to break the news to Alex and Milena about everything.
I reasoned to her that this all worked in her favor as well—assuming things went as planned and we recovered Wyatt safely. Lessa had been anxious about how Wyatt would handle her betrayal when he inevitably found out that she had used him to try and set up Avery and capture Sloane. But if she switched to team protect-the-Rogue now, then at least she could try and spin it to Wyatt that she’d betrayed him because she was trying to capture Sloane in order to protect her, not kill her.
She balked that it was a ludicrous spin, but really, why not? Based on what she’d told me about the level of tinkering she’d already been up to in Wyatt’s head, the guy didn’t sound all that astute.
I returned to my bedroom to find Avery still completely naked, sitting at my writing desk. I knew it was a visual that would stay with me and that I’d probably never again be able to get any work done at that desk.
She’d just finished up whatever she’d been doing on my computer and was taking measures to erase her recent activity as I stepped up behind her, placing my hands on her shoulders. I bent my head to kiss the mark I’d made last night on her neck.
“Sorry that took so long.”
“Hmm?” she responded distractedly, intent on her task.
I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to her about Wyatt. And I still needed more information from her about how she’d survived the rogue attack and her initial transformation before I could present the facts to Milena and Alex.
Maybe I could just tell her about Wyatt after we recovered him safely?
“Do these hurt?” I asked without thinking as my fingertips traced the scars on her upper back. “I mean bother—do they bother you?” I amended awkwardly. Personally, I was anxious to remove them—to heal them permanently with my magic—but I didn’t know how to present the option to her in a way that wouldn’t offend her. “You know, as a reminder of … stuff.”
Stuff that she hadn’t shared with me when I’d asked her about her scars in the shower, and then again in the bathtub last night.
She chuckled softly to herself and shook her head as she powered off the laptop. “Nope. Do they bother you?” she countered, before amending in a wry tone, “I mean hurt—do they hurt you? You know, as a reminder of stuff you weren’t around to save me from?”
As she pushed away from my writing desk, I backed up to allow her space. I was still trying to process what she’d just said as she stood and turned to face me. I couldn’t read her expression. And I couldn’t sense her emotions well enough in that moment to know whether I’d upset or insulted her.
She sighed. “Chaos, the scars”—she shook her head—“you’re going to have to get over them.”
“Over them? I don’t even know how you got them yet. How am I supposed to get over them?”
“Because they’re not relevant. These scars on me … they’re like stamps in an old, expired passport book. They only hint at the places I’ve been before. They don’t tell the story of what those places made of me—of the things that I learned along the way. They can’t tell you where I am today, or where I might be going next. They’re simply not relevant anymore.”
“Then why can’t you tell me about how you got them?”
“Because there are better things for us to talk about,” she said with a shrug. “More important things—like the things about me that matter now.” She reached up and cupped my cheek. “You don’t need to know the details of all the bad things that have happened in my past to know who I am. Who I am is right in front of you. The things that happen to us in life—that’s just circumstance. What we make of them … that’s who we are.”
She dropped her hand, making a “pfft” sound. “Hellfire, if you don’t know that yet after four centuries, then I don’t know what you’ve been doing for all this time.”
She crossed to my closet, disappearing inside.
“Of course I know that,” I said defensively.
I followed her and found her rifling through my clothes.
Wait—was she upset or not upset? She didn’t smell upset, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t figure it out. And I couldn’t stop staring at her ass.
“I need something to wear,” she muttered as she searched.
She didn’t sound upset.
“Are you going to help me by conjuring women’s clothing for me, or do I have to try and find something of yours that I can make fit?”
I preferred to keep her naked for as long as possible. Was that an option? I was still naked. Why did she need to be dressed?
I avoided the clothing question altogether and asked, “You’re not upset?”
She giggled. “No. But I can tell already that your hero complex is going to get on my last nerve if you don’t get it under control soon.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “This isn’t about a hero complex. I need to know things about you, Avery. I’m just trying to get to know you better. If I’m going to be able to convince my brother and Milena that Sloane isn’t the threat that they believe she is, then I need to know some basic things about you both—and that includes your past.”
“Okay, fine,” she relented. “I get it. So ask me something more relevant to now. To Sloane.”
Wow, sometimes I impressed myself with my ability to pivot and spin shit. I took a deep breath and went in for the big ones.
“Well, you still haven’t fully explained to me how you survived a rogue attack or your initial transformation.” I held my hand up to halt her when she opened her mouth to deny it. “I know you said you got lucky, but Alex and Milena will definitely ask about both, and they won’t believe that no werelock helped you or that it was luck.”
She pursed her lips and remained silent.
So I asked the question I least wanted to hear an answer to next. “And I need to know the identity of Sloane’s birth father. Was it your fiancé who was killed by the rogue?”
Please say yes. Please say yes.
She shook her head. “No.”
Fuck. Breathe. Don’t look upset.
After hearing the information Remy had gathered from the North Carolina pack on Avery’s “Holly Bishop Carmichael” identity, Kai had been convinced, based on Sloane’s date of birth, that Avery had been raped and impregnated by the rogue werewolf who had attacked her.
“So … Kai thinks that … well, he says that based on the birthdate the North Carolina pack gave us for Sloane, your date of conception would likely be …” I paused to swallow. I had been mentally preparing myself for this ever since I’d first heard about Holly Bishop Carmichael. It was best to just push it out and get it over with. “He thinks you were raped and impregnated by the rogue who attacked you.”
Proud brown eyes met mine directly, daring me to show pity, as she nodded and replied simply, “Yep. That’d be right.”
Fuck.
/> Breathe.
Think before you talk and react.
Damnit to hell, what exactly was a fucking hero complex anyway? What could I say to her now that wouldn’t sound like whatever that complex was that she kept accusing me of? Shit. It was all such confusing, uncharted territory I was attempting—when all I wanted to do was go out and kill something right now.
I’d been staring at her for too long without saying anything. I had to say something. I decided to just be myself and handle it how I normally would, while making a mental note to ask Remy what a hero complex was the next time we spoke.
“Avery, I’m really sorry that happened to you. And I just want you to know that you don’t have to act so tough about everything all the time. It’s okay to be vulnerable with me—”
“Wrong.” She held up a silencing palm.
Gah! Fuck. I’d blown it right out of the gates!
“You’re still not hearing me, Chaos. This has nothing to do with being tough. What I’m doing is giving that incident the emotional significance and space within the story of my life that it deserves. That’s the difference between being a victim while being victimized, and playing the role of a victim in perpetuity.” She planted her hands on her hips. “I’m sorry if your previous rescue cases never grasped that distinction, but I’m not interested in having you try and use my pain to make your dick feel bigger, so get over it.”
I was catching serious flies now. It occurred to me that I probably should’ve been offended by what she was saying to me. I was pretty sure she’d just called me out for being some kind of dinosaur chauvinist.
But my dick—the dinosaur chauvinist that he was—didn’t get that memo, because he was standing straight up at attention now, looking for the fastest route to getting himself buried between her shapely, naked thighs again.
I took a step forward, planting a concerned expression on my face as I reminded myself not to glance down at her breasts that were jiggling in my peripheral vision when she was lecturing me like this.
She continued, “That rogue attack: circumstance. The daughter I have as a result of that rogue attack—that’s the story of who I am. Today. You want to see me vulnerable? Talk to me about my child. Don’t talk to me about something that happened nearly ten years ago that amounted to a blip of time in the grand scheme of my life.”