“It’s quite real, I assure you,” Kristofer said. “I just apologize for them being sent out early. I don’t know how it’s done in America, but in my country we wait for them to be sent out until after the Bridenapping.”
“How it’s done in America?” she choked out.
“Are you or aren’t you?” Lottie mouthed at her.
Caitlyn shrugged and held her free hand up, palm open. Who knew?
“How it’s done in America is that it’s not done any more,” she said to Kristofer. “That is a very old tradition that has not been enforced in over a hundred years. Nobody does it. That is not how Alphas meet their mates here. In fact,” she continued, “I looked it up online and it isn’t even legal any more. So you need to send out an announcement explaining there’s been a mistake.”
Paige rolled her eyes and mouthed the word “liar” at her.
“Oh, it’s quite legal,” Kristofer said, his tone still light and amused. “I had my pack’s attorneys research it.”
Great. Just great. His pack was rich as hell, so they would have excellent attorneys.
“You are saying that you actually want to marry me?” she said through gritted teeth. “Does the word ‘marry’ mean the same thing in your country that it does here? I would live with you as your lawfully wedded wife for the rest of our lives, and we would forsake all others, and we would have children together?”
“I believe it means the same thing everywhere. I knew as soon as I set eyes on you that I would marry you. I just needed time, as the new Alpha, to get all of the pack’s affairs in order, and now that is done, everything is in place for you to move in.”
Getting the pack’s affairs in order included re-establishing their pack property lines – and seizing the land which had been in her family for more than a hundred years. And their orange groves, and their blueberry orchards, and their strawberry fields, and the business which her great-grandparents had built up selling their produce to grocery stores all over the West Coast…which meant they’d lost their livelihood.
“Why would you want to marry me?”
“Why?” He actually sounded surprised at the question. “Because you’re beautiful and intelligent and kind, and because you are my…there isn’t a word for it in English. My fate, my destined one. In my country we call it laluko.”
Beautiful? Her?
She was momentarily stunned into silence. She remembered the way that he’d made her feel at the town’s “Alpha Welcome” reception a year ago. He’d called her over to him, and talked to her as if she was the most fascinating and desirable woman on Earth. His retinue had kept all other women at bay. And women were trying very hard to swarm around him.
He’d stared into her eyes, he’d asked her question after question about herself and her family and the vast swaths of property that they owned, the property that was bordering his pack’s lands. Little did she know he’d only been gathering recon; two days later her family had been served with papers stating that the pack was seizing all of their property.
The Verhold pack claimed that her great grandfather had never actually legally purchased the land from the werewolf who’d been Alpha of the pack at the time. Everyone knew that he’d traded his share of a silver mine for that land, and the Verhold pack had benefitted handsomely from the transaction. The deed to the land had been filed at the town’s hall of records, her family had built up their business on that land and owned it for generations. But when the Verhold pack filed their legal challenge – it turned out that the deed had mysteriously vanished.
Her family’s lawyers had demanded all video security footage that would cover the hall of records building from the date that Kristofer had arrived in America. Mysteriously, some sort of technical malfunction had eaten the last several months’ worth of video – so they couldn’t prove that someone from the Verhold pack must gone there and stolen the Bellefont’s deed.
It was an ongoing legal battle between Caitlin’s family and the Verhold Pack, and so far, Caitlin’s family was losing big time.
Focus, Caitlin. Your future is on the line. “Why would you just spring this on me out of the blue?”
“Well, I have tried to call you many times,” he pointed out, in maddeningly reasonable tones.
“Because you want to steal what little my family has left of our property! The last damned time I let you sweet talk me, you were just gathering intel so you could rob us of everything that we have!”
“Caitlin,” he said, his voice gently chiding. “That land legitimately belongs to my pack, and my pack’s welfare must come before all else. I had no choice. We can talk about it more after you get here. In the meantime, I had a few questions for you. I need to know your favorite foods and what size you are?”
“What size I am? You want me to lose weight?” she choked out. She heard Lottie and Paige gasp in outrage, and Lottie grabbed a letter opener and made a stabbing motion.
“Oh hell no. No he didn’t. Screw you, wolf!” Lottie yelled out loudly. “I’ll make your damned pelt into a purse! And boots! And a belt!” Lottie cared a great deal about accessorizing, even when she was very angry.
“No, I do not want you to lose weight.” He sounded puzzled. “I hope you do not. I need to know your size so I can have a wardrobe waiting for you. Let’s see, I’m thinking 18 or 20. I’ll order both.”
Lottie, who’d been leaning in and eavesdropping, nodded approvingly. “I take it back!” she called out in the direction of the phone’s mouthpiece. “Actually Paige Johannsen was the one who yelled screw you! I personally approve this union!”
Paige threw a punch at her arm, but Lottie ducked.
Caitlin made one last, desperate attempt to convince the crazy wolf to see reason. “I absolutely hate you and your pack for ruining my family’s life, you basically implied that we’re liars and thieves, and I will never stop loathing you for it.”
“You’ll come around.” The smug tone was back. “I am very charming. And you are my destiny.”
“So you expect me to just deliver myself to you?” she squawked, outraged.
“Oh, no, not at all.” She could practically hear him repressing his laughter. “That would not be a proper bridenapping.” And then he hung up.
* * *
Caitlin was wrapped in gloom as she walked up the flagstone path to her home. At least, it was her home for now. If she was bridenapped and became Alpha Queen, she’d lose her job, and her family would lose their home for sure.
The lovely old Queen Ann style house had been in their family for generations, but they’d been forced to take out a massive mortgage on it to pay for their legal fees. Not only had the pack seized their property, they were claiming that the Bellefont family owed them all of the proceeds from their business for the past hundred and five years, since they’d allegedly never owned that land in the first place.
As she hurried to the house, she saw her aunt, uncle, both of her cousins, and her cousin’s class-mate Troy, all standing on the front porch glaring at her. Her mother was sitting on the porch swing, with the same pleasant, slightly dazed smile that she always had these days.
Her aunt Maggie was holding up what appeared to be one of the dreaded wedding invitations. She waved it in Caitlin’s face as Caitlin walked up.
“Traiter,” Maggie said as she walked up the steps. “How could you?”
“Hey, does this mean I get your room?” her 13-year-old cousin Priscilla asked. “Then I’d have my own bathroom.”
Her cousin Hailey, who was 15, ran over and kicked her in the shins. Hard.
“Ow!” Caitlin yelled. “What is wrong with you people?”
“Serves you right,” Maggie sniffed, hands on her hips. “I’ve half a mind to do the same.”
“Will you give me a minute to explain?” Caitlin said, exasperated. “Did you see the part where it says he’s bridenapping me? I did not agree to this. I just spent this afternoon first trying to talk Kristofer out of it, and then internet searching to
find a legal way to get out of it. And Paige was searching too, and she had her parents look into it. And they couldn’t find anything.”
“Oops. My bad,” Hailey muttered. “You can kick me back if you want.”
“Oh, dear lord.” Maggie’s eyes opened wide. “What are you going to do? Can you run away? Would they put out a warrant for your arrest?”
“Worse. Everyone in town would be legally required to pay a year’s salary to the pack. Paige’s doing research on the law right now, and it’s airtight.” Although Paige also kept urging her to marry Kristofer because he was, as she put it, “Sex on a stick”.
“As if those bastards haven’t stolen enough,” her uncle Rich said angrily. “Why is he even doing this?”
“He claims I’m his fate, or something like that. Some word for destined true mate.”
“Yes, that’s what your great great uncle told your great great aunt. And they did have a very happy marriage, from what I’ve been told.” Maggie’s eyes briefly went all misty. Then she scowled again. “Of course, he wasn’t a thief.” She spit the words out like rotten meat.
Caitlin sank into the porch swing next to her mother, stifling a groan. “What are we going to do? Who is going to watch mom at night?” she asked.
“Who is going to watch mom at night?” her mom echoed. She reached over and patted Caitlin’s arm. “Pretty,” she added.
“You, too,” Caitlin sighed, slumping back in the seat.
Her mother’s worsening mental condition was the reason that Caitlin never went out these days. Her mother was a compulsive wanderer; if they didn’t watch her constantly, she’d be halfway to the next county, walking in the middle of the road, before they knew it.
Once upon a time, they’d been able to hire nurses to help watch over her. That was before Kristofer’s arrival. Now, Maggie watched over her during the day, and rushed off to work at her new waitressing job as soon as Caitlin got home. Caitlin watched her mother nights and weekends, and Maggie’s husband Rich worked every single day of the week as a car mechanic, leaving before the sun rose.
Doctors were baffled about her mother’s condition; she didn’t have Alzheimer’s, her brain scans all came back normal, and she was only fifty, but she behaved as if she had some odd, unknown kind of dementia. Maggie had no signs of it, and no-one else in their family had ever experienced anything like it.
“There has to be a way out of this,” Maggie insisted.
“I’ll come up with something,” Caitlin suggested, with a confidence that she didn’t feel. “I just hope that it’ll be before the bridenapping.”
“I should drop out of school next year,” Hailey said. “I can do it when I’m 16. Then I could get a full time job.”
“No!” Caitlin, Maggie and Ritch all cried out at the same time.
“Never,” Caitlin said fervently. “You are a 4.2 student and you were practically born with a cello in your hand. You will go to college.”
“There’s not really a lot of money in being a cellist. I wouldn’t be able to help the family out with that kind of career.” Hailey looked downcast, and Caitlin wanted to see Kristofer right then and there, so she could punch him in his incredibly handsome face. None of this would be happening if it weren’t for him.
“You concentrate on school. We’ll work things out,” Ritch said firmly.
Caitlin’s mother stood up abruptly and began pacing back on the porch, muttering incomprehensible words to herself. Caitlin hugged herself and looked away.
“Don’t worry, I’m the business expert here, and when I make my first million, I’m going to sue those werewolves’ asses off,” Priscilla said cheerfully. “They’ll have no ass left. They’ll be ass-less. They’ll look ridiculous.”
“Language,” Ritch said absent-mindedly, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it.
“Yeah, but that’s years from now.” Hailey shook her head.
“What if somebody hacked into their databases and planted something incriminating that really embarrassed the Alpha, and he had to flee the country in shame?” Troy asked. “I mean, if there was some kind of virus that did that, say. Like if it happened accidentally.”
Priscilla, who was alarmingly computer savvy, nodded approvingly. She and Troy could usually be found at all hours in her room – with the door open, per her parents orders – hunched over their laptops, probably figuring out how to hack the NSA.
“Huh. That would be a strangely specific virus,” Caitlin said, looking at him suspiciously. “You haven’t by any chance been adding hacking to your repertoire?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “I dabble.” Priscilla snickered behind her hand. Caitlin decided that she did not want to know.
She shook her head regretfully. “I appreciate the thought, but I want to get out of this honestly, not by cheating. Also I suspect that the werewolves would have excellent computer security systems.”
Troy coughed into his hand, and Caitlin thought she heard him say “They got nothing on me”, but she ignored it.
“So, does anyone have any suggestions that are not likely to result in a federal prison sentence?” she asked, not expecting much. “Hey, mom, where you going?”
“Aunt Louise! Come back!” Priscilla called out after her.
But Caitlin’s mother had already walked off the porch and was heading for the woods behind their house with a fast, determined stride.
“I’ll go for a walk for her,” Caitlin called out to them. “It might help clear my head.”
Walking in the woods also seemed to calm her mother down, although it did nothing to lessen her confusion. They had about ten acres of land around their house – all of that would be gone soon, too. The thought of losing their land, the forests she’d roamed in as a child, the trees she’d climbed and the grass she and her parents had lain in looking up at the clouds, made her feel ill.
They passed by the flower garden that her mother used to tend, behind the house. Her mother hadn’t touched it in years, and the formerly pristine, lovingly tended quarter-acre was a weed-choked jungle now. Caitlin saw it from the corner of her eye only, before looking away. It spoke too much of her mother’s psyche, once flourishing and beautiful, now dark and tangled.
Caitlin followed her mother through the pine grove, until they reached their favorite clearing, a grove of oak trees. A couple of the oak trees were sick with blight, and Caitlin steered her mother away from them, because they seemed to agitate her. If she saw them, she’d stand in front of them and flap her hands in dismay, and sometimes she made low keening noises.
Instead, they wandered over to the far end of the grove, and her mother knelt down and picked daisies, which she braided into a crown. They weren’t far from the house, but the forest was so thick here that they might as well have been a thousand miles away. There was no sight or sound of civilization in the grove. Coming here always gave Caitlin a sense of great peace and calm.
Or at least, usually it did. Today, tension was coiling tightly inside her gut. She couldn’t relax. She needed to go back home and keep researching the bridenapping issue.
Her mother held up the crown of daisies and set it on Caitlin’s head.
“That’s beautiful, mom!” she said with forced cheer. “Good job. Okay, let’s go back now. It’ll be dark soon.”
“It’ll be dark soon,” her mother echoed, letting Caitlin lead her back to the house.
They emerged from the forest and walked into the field behind their house – and Caitlin let out a gasp of horror.
Chapter 3
There were dozens of news vans lining the street in front of her house. There were dozens of photographers pressed up against the white picket fence at their property line.
As Caitlin led her mother to the front of her house, they went into a frenzy.
Flashbulbs popped. Cameras were trained on her as if she were a movie star walking the red carpet on Oscar night.
“Caitlin! Caitlin!” they cried out.
Holding tigh
tly to her mother’s hand, she ran up the steps with her. They dashed inside and slammed the door behind them. Maggie was gone; she’d probably headed out to work already. Rich, Priscilla, and Hailey were peeking out the lacy curtains.
“I can’t believe this! How did they hear about this, and why do they even care?” Caitlin wailed. Damn it, I hate being photographed, she thought. Ironic for a girl who worked as a retoucher for a photographer, but being photographed made her self-conscious.
“Slow news week,” Hailey guessed.
“Your wedding invitation is all over town. It’s all over Facefriend,” Priscilla said to her. “And every other social media site. You’re an internet sensation.” She perked up. “Hey, can I interview you? I’d get like a million hits on my blog, and I could put advertising on there. I’d make a fortune.”
“I’ll set up the blog to optimize it for you,” Troy said eagerly. “We need to get some SEO going. Let’s see, keywords should be bridenapping, werewolves, Alpha Queen…”
“Priscilla! Troy! Don’t you dare!” Hailey scolded them. “Don’t try to make money off our cousin’s misfortune.”
“We can’t let that monster get away with this,” Rich said angrily, yanking the curtain shut. He ran his hands through his thinning brown hair. “What if we write to our congressman?”
Caitlin shook her head wearily. “Wouldn’t help.”
Humankind was indebted to and dependent on werewolves, and that was why there were so many laws favoring them. Where would humankind be without regular donations of werewolf blood, collected from every pack? There would be no cure for cancer and diabetes and numerous other illnesses. It was impossible to manufacture a synthetic version; God knows all of the Big Pharma companies had tried.
That was why werewolves were granted massive tracts of land, and why they were permitted to make their own laws for their pack members, and operate like their own country within a country.
“Hey, I’m not saying you should marry that monster, but if you did, theoretically, would that mean that you would own half of everything that he does?” Hailey asked. “Like, our family’s land? Could we have it back?”
Bridenapped: The Alpha Chronicles Page 2