Alpha’s Hunger Box Set: Books 1-3

by Wilder, Carina

  He nodded. “I have eyes and ears everywhere.” With that, he shot me a knowing smile, and with a hot pulse of shame I wondered if he’d somehow seen me flash my breasts last night. “I even have eyes in Credence Parish. Even on this property.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me,” I said, “where is Tristan right now?”

  For a second Trick’s hands tensed into hard fists, the tendons in his wrists tightening like steel cables. “That I don’t know,” he said. “But even if I did, I couldn’t answer you. It would go against our code. I don’t usually meddle in Tristan’s affairs—present situation excepted—and he doesn’t meddle in ours. At least he’s not supposed to. I should probably tell you that he’s violating an agreement with our pack just by coming here. If we wanted to, we’d run him out of town on that fancy jet of his.”

  I swallowed hard, guilt tearing at my chest. “It’s not his fault. He’s only here because of me,” I said. “Because he wanted to show me where he grew up. It’s my fault.”

  “The guy lived here an awfully long time ago. This isn’t his domain, not anymore.” Trick’s voice had gone cold. For the second time the enormous man was making me shake with fear.

  “I’ll tell him that we need to leave,” I said. “I don’t want to be here anymore, to tell you the truth.”

  Trick shrugged. “Don’t bother. I’ll call it a favor. Maybe he can return it someday.” He rose to his feet and stared down at me, a slow smile spreading over his lips. Great, so the guy was amused by my discomfort. “I won’t hurt you,” he said, nodding to his companions, who still stood in the doorway. “Neither will they. The thing is, Tristan’s a good guy, which is why we’re bending the rules for him. I don’t wish him ill.”

  My heart began to calm down. So, like so many others of their kind, Trick respected my lover. Of course he did. I’d all but forgotten that Tristan was one of the most powerful shifters on earth. “I’ll be sure to tell him that you said so,” I promised. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

  “Thank you. Tell him that he should probably stay away from New Orleans, though. Things might get rough before too long, and he doesn’t want to land in the middle of it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Trick’s jaw locked as he looked at me, those fierce eyes of his brightening like my lover’s so often did. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. You’ve got enough going on. Just…keep him safe. He’s important. So are you.”

  I nodded slowly. “Thank you,” I said, my voice a wire-thin rasp. I was grateful that the wolf shifter had spared me any more bad news, but the fact was that nothing had been solved. I was still as miserable as I’d been a few minutes ago.

  Trick stood up and turned to walk towards the door, but he stopped before reaching it.

  “You can fix this, you know,” he said, turning his head so that I could see his striking profile.

  “Fix what?”

  “The problem you and Tristan have—what they call the curse of the Seven.”

  “How did you…?” I asked. But there was no point in inquiring how he knew; it was obvious that Trick had been serious when he’d said he had eyes and ears everywhere. “I was told that he can’t marry a mortal, or even be with one,” I said. “The Seven will punish him if he stays with me. That means I have no choice but to leave him.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Trick said, turning to look at me again. “He can’t be with a mortal.” With that, he bowed his head briefly, reverentially. The act seemed like a throwback to a time long ago, and suddenly I wondered if he, like Tristan, was ancient. “Give him my regards,” he said. “And look after yourself. You’ll find that danger follows you, Ariana. Keep an eye out for it.”

  “Wait!” I blurted out as he took another step towards the door. “You said I can fix this. Please—what do I need to do?”

  “That’s for you to figure out, Valkyrie,” he said, his tone all-knowing. “But I will tell you this—if he’s not allowed to be with a mortal…”

  “Yes?” I breathed, hope threatening to stir itself up inside my chest.

  “Then maybe you need to see to it that you never die.”

  A moment later, he was gone.

  Chapter 29

  January 10 1809

  New Orleans

  At times the pain of the change is almost too much to bear. My flesh burns with agony, the wounds healing slowly. But nothing is as horrible as this feeling, this constant, unrelenting lust for blood and flesh. I see another person and I want to tear his throat out. I smell a woman and I want to possess her.

  I’m no longer human.

  I’m an animal, a beast.

  Trapped inside the tortured flesh of a man.

  * * *

  When I’d parked the car outside the hotel I trudged up the stairs to our floor, still trying to get my mind around everything that had happened over the last few hours. So many questions had been answered. But there were still so many left that I wasn’t sure if I’d done more harm than good. Our already strained relationship was about to undergo its most brutal test yet.

  Inhaling a sharp breath, I slipped my key card into its place and pushed the door open.

  Tristan was standing in the suite’s living room, his back to me. His slim, muscular body was framed by the window like he’d morphed into the immortal subject of an oil painting. His face was pointed towards the street below, so he’d no doubt seen me arrive.

  “Where have you been?” he asked quietly, without turning around.

  “I could ask you the same.”

  “Like I told you this morning, I was trying to secure our future,” he said, pivoting to face me, his eyes all but glowing the penetrating blue that always reminded me that he was the most complicated man I’d ever met. “I was meeting with an old acquaintance.”

  “Our future…” I said, my voice desperate to crack under the weight of a thousand different emotions. “I’m not sure anymore that we have a future.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering, I held up the journal, showing it to him before setting it down on the narrow table next to the door.

  For a moment he just stared at it as though he was trying to figure out what to say in response. But I knew as well as he did that there were no words that would make things better. There was no point in denying what I’d seen, or in pretending that he wasn’t a man deeply scarred, deeply afraid of love. He was a man who had suffered the tortures of the damned, and there was nothing I could do to heal him.

  “So,” he said, “you went back to the house to look for the answers I never gave you.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I found some of them.” I crossed my arms, waiting to see if he’d offer me some kind of explanation. “A lot of the pages were torn out. Was that your doing?”

  He shook his head. “Not mine,” he said. “I haven’t seen that journal in over a hundred years.” He let out a chuckle that was cold enough to send a chill down my spine. “I’d almost forgotten it existed. If I had, I would have burned the whole house to the ground to get rid of it. Not to mention everything else that reminds me of those days.”

  I swallowed, bracing myself for the fight that must be coming. There was no way Tristan would just accept the fact that I’d gone snooping around his childhood home. He’d accuse me of not trusting him, of going behind his back. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I had the energy, or even the right, to argue.

  “Look, before you yell at me, I’m sorry if I was out of line,” I said. “I came here first, looking for you, but you were gone. I thought I’d go nuts if I didn’t get some answers.”

  “It’s fine,” he replied, his voice as exhausted sounding as my own. He didn’t seem angry, even. If anything, he sounded depleted, as if something had knocked the wind out of him. “Though I was hoping to find you here when I got back. I was hoping to talk about our plans moving forward.”

  “Moving forward?” I asked, stupefied. He didn’t seem to register what cha
os our future had become in the last few hours. “What about your past? What about the woman you loved, the life you wanted to live back then?”

  A look of pain crossed his face so quickly that I would have missed it if I’d so much as blinked. “You said it yourself last night. That was a long time ago, Ariana. It was another life. Revisiting it is like opening up a closet filled with ghosts whose sole purpose in this world is to torment me. Maybe you understand now why I can’t—won’t—talk about it. It’s painful in more ways than you can possibly imagine. Let it go.”

  “How can I let it go?” I asked, my voice quaking. “Are you so sure it’s all in the past? Because it seems to me that everything that happened then is still with you every single day. Which means it’s with me, too. It’s like a shadow that hangs over both our lives, Tristan.”

  “I’m well acquainted with the shadow.” His right hand curled into a fist, his lips setting into another hard frown. “Don’t you think I’d give anything to erase all of it? To make it go away? All I want in this entire fucking world is for you to be happy, and I know that’s impossible when I have so many scars, literal and otherwise.” He stared at me, his impossibly blue eyes rimmed with moisture. I’d never seen him look or sound so emotional, so desperate. “I would part with all my wealth, all my power, to be able to give you what you need. I would give up my life to ensure your joy, if that was what it took.”

  My chest ached at once with a delicious fullness and a profound, echoing emptiness. In that moment I loved Tristan more than I ever had before. To hear him express such a generous sentiment—to know how much he cared—it was all I’d ever really needed.

  For the first time, I felt loved. Truly loved.

  But I also knew it couldn’t last, and I supposed that he did, too.

  Tristan didn’t make a move towards me. Didn’t try to touch me, to lay a hand on my cheek as he so often did. Something—some invisible force—was holding him back. Maybe the thought of coming close was too painful.

  “I need to know what happened to you,” I said. “Please, tell me once and for all, so I can understand.”

  “Understand?” he laughed. “What is there to understand? Even if you only read part of the journal, you’ll know I was a wide-eyed idealistic idiot who thought he could make something of himself. Well, it turns out I was right. I made something of myself. I became rich beyond my wildest dreams. I built an empire of shifters, an empire of wealth.” Tristan combed an aggressive hand through his hair and breathed out an exasperated sigh. “The irony, of course, is that I’m the man I am today because of what they did to me. I’m successful because of everything they stole from my life. If you really want to hear about it, I’ll tell you.” He let out another chilling laugh. “Who knows? It might be good to get it off my chest.”

  I bit my lip, holding back the tears. My heart was breaking all over again for him, for the pain he’d endured. I felt cruel asking him to revisit it. But it seemed like the only way to get him to release the darkness that lurked inside him.

  “The entries stopped when you talked about the Marquis taking you away and tying you up,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

  Tristan grabbed the chair next to him, spun it around and sat down, his shoulders slumped. “It was the price I had to pay for what I’d done.”

  “With Elodie, you mean,” I said.

  He nodded. “With Elodie,” he repeated.

  “You were going to run away with her,” I said, my insides torn up at the thought of it. “You wanted to marry her.”

  He nodded and pulled his eyes to mine, pausing for a few seconds as though reading my expression. “I never loved her, you know, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said.

  “I didn’t ask you that,” I said. “I don’t want to hear…”

  But he interrupted before I could finish.

  “Not like I love you, Ariana. You have no idea how much I love you.”

  As he spoke, I reached a hand out for the console table to keep myself from falling to my knees.

  I love you.

  I’d never craved anything like I’d craved those words from him. I’d never fully realized the extent of my need until the moment he uttered them.

  But I couldn’t tell him that I loved him. Not now, not like this. Not while he was telling me about the woman he’d once planned to marry.

  “I assume that she left,” I said, struggling to maintain control over my voice. “You and she broke up, right?”

  “Broke up…” The color left his face as he stared at me, an expression close to pity taking over his features. He winced as he replied. “You told me that some pages were torn out,” he said. “I didn’t realize…I thought you’d seen it…I thought you knew…” He looked away as if it was too painful to make eye contact with me just then. “Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry, my beautiful Ariana. I’m so sorry that I have to tell you this.”

  “Tell me…what?” I asked, a whole new kind of terror setting into my bones. “What am I missing? Did you…” I choked. It was too much. Maybe they’d run away together after all. Maybe they’d…

  “Demarche wasn’t only angry because I planned to marry his daughter,” he said, his eyes locked on a landscape painting that hung on the wall. “Oh, that would have irritated him. He would have fired me, kicked me off the plantation. But that wasn’t what set him off.”

  “Then what? What was he so mad about that he’d punish you so severely? What happened?” I wanted to scream. To cry. To run at him and beat my fists against his chest until he told me.

  Tristan shut his eyes and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyelids, hiding his face as he said the words that I’d never wanted to hear.

  “Elodie was pregnant…with my child.”

  Chapter 30

  I crumpled to the floor, my heart throbbing brutally in my chest.

  “Pregnant…” I gasped.

  That Tristan had had a child with another woman was, without question, the last thing I’d expected to hear. “Oh God…”

  He was off the chair in an instant, on his knees, arms reaching for me. But I shoved him away, snarling in some incoherent language. It was all I could do not to unleash a primal scream that could shatter glass. “You’re a father!” I sobbed. “At least you were. Even if it happened eons ago, how could you not have told me that?”

  He shook his head. “No, no,” he said, his voice eerily calm and soft, “I wasn’t. I was never a father, my love.”

  Through burning tears I glared at him. Was he being cryptic as always? Was this some meagre attempt to settle me down before tearing out my heart one last time?

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, trying in vain to still my quivering voice.

  “Demarche sent Elodie away to France. He wanted to hide the shame of the pregnancy from New Orleans society. I never saw her again. I was never her husband, never a father to any child. None of it.”

  I hated myself for the sense of relief that swept over my heart in that moment. “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “They told me she died in childbirth,” he said. “They said the baby didn’t make it, either.”

  He reached out to me again but pulled his hand back. He probably knew that I wasn’t ready to be touched, not yet. So he sat down on the floor, wrapping his forearms around his knees. The pose was oddly innocent, like that of a frightened boy. “I was young and stupid, Ariana,” he murmured. “I did something monumentally foolish and I paid for it—so did she. I’m so sorry that the truth had to come out like this. I wish to God I could take it back—all of it—but I can’t. All I’ve wanted since the day I first set eyes on you was to forget the past and work at being the man that you deserve. I never wanted to hurt you.”

  I swallowed a sob and told myself that it was time to move past this. Time to accept, to forgive, to understand what he’d been through.

  Enough distance. Enough pain.

  When I held my hand out to him, he took it and squeezed, and for the first
time, I felt like the gulf between us was truly narrowing into something that we could both learn to endure.

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said, wiping my right cheek with the back of my hand. “I wish I could say I’m not shocked, devastated, even…but I know how hard that must have been for you, telling me the truth. You could have hidden it, probably forever. But you didn’t.” I looked into his amazing eyes, a sense of shame overtaking me for judging him so harshly. “You opened up to me, Tristan. That means everything.”

  He inhaled deep. “I wanted to tell you, of course. But it was so long ago. It didn’t seem relevant to our lives now. I suppose I’d pushed it out of my mind like I’ve done so many times, with so many memories.”

  “Tristan, there’s one more thing,” I said. Best to finish this now, then maybe we could let it go forever. “There’s something else I need to know. It’s about how you…how you were changed.”

  “Mmmm?”

  “What happened with Demarche and the Marquis?”

  “You mean…”

  I nodded. “The night when the journal ends. When the Marquis came for you.”

  Tristan scratched his fingertips through his beard and scowled, like the memory that was now surfacing in his mind was enough to stir up a deep-set rage. But he answered, apparently as determined as I was to put the past to rest. “The Marquis bound me to a tree. At first I thought we were alone, but then I saw the reflection of torches around us—many of them, coming from every direction. There were men all around me. I didn’t know where they’d come from; only that they were there to watch. It seemed like an eternity before I actually heard Demarche’s voice.”

  “He asked the Marquis for the whip,” I said. “I remember.”

  Tristan nodded. “Yes, and he got it. The Marquis never denied his boss anything.”

  I swallowed hard, recalling the feel of Tristan’s scars under my touch. “So Demarche was the one who…beat you?”

  My lover nodded. “I’ll never forget the agony of it. The bite of the whip was like fire on my flesh. I tried not to yell, to let them know my suffering, but before any time had passed it became too much to stand. I cried out, howled, screamed for my brother, for my God, for anyone who could help me. I couldn’t understand why I was being punished so cruelly, all because I’d wanted a better life. All because I’d dared to dream.”