Forced By the Alpha (Sparkle Hollow Wolves #7)

Chapter 21 - Sienna

I was starting to wonder if my dad was ever going to come back home. It had been a week since I returned to Sparkle Hollow, and I still hadn’t heard from him.

Being alone in my childhood home had been emotionally draining. Even though the choice to leave Franco’s pack had been my own, I still missed him terribly. The strength of my feelings surprised me and threw me off-guard, so I did my best to distract myself.

Unfortunately, most of the distractions took the form of memories from a happier time.

The house hadn’t been changed at all since I had lived there. The same family pictures hung on the walls, showcasing a smiling snapshot of life as it used to be. I lingered over photos of my mother’s face, remembering her comforting hugs and the way she had always smelled of sage and ginger.

Between bouts of sadness for the loss of Franco and nostalgia for my family, I combed through my father’s belongings to look for clues. He had never been one to keep a journal, but I hoped to find some indication that Franco’s story was true. I didn’t want my dad to be the bad guy, but I also needed to believe that Franco had been honest with me. It was always possible that his story was a ruse to keep me from wanting to go back home. If that were true, I feared my heart couldn’t take it.

My father’s computer password had been easy to crack—my mother’s birthday—but there were no files beyond family photographs and ledgers from his business dealings.

After ascertaining the absence of any information on Franco, I began a search of the books of magic in the library. Somewhere, I hoped to find a recording of the spell that had been used to curse the Forsaken Shadows wolves. If I could find one, I hoped I could create a counter-curse that would break it.

So far, I hadn’t had any luck. The closest I had come was when I uncovered a book of forbidden magic hidden on the bottom shelf, but it was written in Greek. Even after performing a spell of understanding, I hadn’t been able to untangle the words enough to gain any meaning from the dusty pages.

I had nearly given up hope as I scoured the shelves again, searching for anything I might have missed, when I heard the faint sound of footsteps downstairs.

I stopped what I was doing and padded across the worn carpet and down the stairs just in time to see my father closing the refrigerator door.

“Sienna!” he exclaimed, dropping the bottle of water he had been holding to the floor in surprise. “You scared me! I didn’t know you were here.”

“You would have, if you had bothered to look at your phone in the past week,” I replied, crossing my arms.

“A week? Can’t have been that long.” He ran a hand through his unkempt hair, and I realized how rough he looked.

“Where have you been?”

“Fishing trip,” he said as he picked the bottle back up. The motion wafted the air around him in my direction, and I got the distinct, sour smell of body odor and alcohol.

“Ha,” I laughed sarcastically. “You don’t fish. Out drinking by the river, more like.”

He didn’t answer, so I knew my guess had been correct.

“Are you sober now?” I asked.

“Course I am,” he replied with an offended tone.

“Good. We need to talk. But first, go clean yourself up,” I ordered. “I can’t stand to be in the same room as you when you smell like a dead raccoon.”

He grumbled at me, but shuffled up the stairs to shower. I was glad he was home so that we could talk, but even more glad of the short intermission that I was getting. I had spent a week waiting for him, but I hadn’t decided how I wanted to approach our conversation yet. What I needed more than anything was answers. It wasn’t clear whether I would get those by beating around the bush or asking straight out.

Ten minutes later, Tom reappeared, smelling like bar soap and linen.

“Can I get you some coffee?” he asked. “You still drink coffee, don’t you?”

I nodded, and he started a pot before sitting down at the kitchen table across from me. We sat in silence, listening to the coffee drip into the pot below until the machine shut off. He got up and poured two cups with a generous helping of creamer in each, placed one in front of me, and resumed his seat.

“What brings you back home?” he asked.

“You,” I began. “Or, more accurately, what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“After Mom died, you placed a curse on a group of rogue werewolves. A month ago, they kidnapped me and asked me to find a way to break the curse. I’d like an explanation.”

The color drained from his face as he listened to my calm words. Judging from his expression, there was no need for him to admit to what he had done.

“I should have known that curse would come back to haunt me,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry, daughter. It’s true—I cursed them—but I did give them a chance to leave first.”

“What do you mean?”

“When they encountered me on the road, they gave me the option to give them my belongings and leave with my life, so I offered them a similar choice: leave untouched, or leave cursed,” he said. “Their alpha laughed at my threat. He said I looked weak and that he wasn’t afraid of what I could do to them. After losing your mother, I felt weak, and being called out on that feeling was overwhelming. I never should have cursed them to begin with, but I was wracked with grief. It’s not an excuse, but I wanted to explain.”

“What curse did you use?” I asked.

“I was going to use a standard curse that would force them to transform on the full moon and remain human for the remainder of their lives, but something more powerful happened instead,” Tom continued. “Seeing all those young faces with their lives ahead of them… I wanted to punish them for what I had lost. Instead of containing their transformation to one night, the spell made their instincts unstable. It cursed them to feel the rage and lust for death that I felt at the moment I cast it.”

Hearing about how deeply affected my father had been by his grief made me pity him in a way that I hadn’t before. Until now, I had felt angry at his choice to lose himself in his loss instead of focusing on his family. I hadn’t realized just how impossible it would have been for him to set his own feelings aside to care for us.

But most of my horror was reserved for the young members of the pack who had their lives and futures ripped from them by my father. With a few exceptions, they would have been teenagers or in their early twenties when they were cursed. They had gone down the wrong path and intimidated the wrong person, but he had been old enough to know that there would be consequences for his actions.

“What you did was so wrong, I don’t even have the words for it,” I told him.

He hung his head in shame. I saw a tear glisten in his eyes, but the pity I had felt a moment ago was gone. Instead, I felt a determination to do what I had promised Franco.

“The curse must be broken,” I told him. “I tried to do it on my own and failed. The power was too strong for me to wield alone. I need to tap into your powers so that I can break the curse and set right what you did wrong.”

“It can’t be done,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“Curses like this are permanent. It was born from my grief, and only an equally compelling counter-emotion would be able to break it.”

“Then I’ll find one,” I said with determination.

He looked at me sadly and reached across the table toward me, but I avoided his hand.

“Sienna, you have to understand,” he said. “Magic always comes at a cost. If you try to break this one, it will kill you. The price for this removal is death.”

“That can’t be true!” I shouted. “You can help me. If we do it together, we’ll be strong enough to release the spell.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied.

His voice made it sound like his words were final, but there was no way I was going to give up that easily. Not after everything I had been through—everything my dad had put Franco and his pack through. This couldn’t be the end.

I opened my mouth to argue with him, but the doorbell rang unexpectedly.

“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.

He shook his head as he got up and walked toward the front door with me close behind him.

“Hi, my name is Killian,” the visitor said, introducing himself to my dad. I couldn’t see past my dad in the doorway, but something in his voice told me that there was a new problem. “I believe you know my mate, Leah Smith?”

“Alpha, it’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Tom. Who is this gentleman with you? He looks familiar.”

“We’ve met,” a familiar voice said quietly.

I shoved my father aside and looked past Killian into the icy blue eyes of the man I had been thinking about every moment for the past week.

“Franco,” I whispered. My heart soared. I had hoped to see him again so that I could break the curse, but I hadn’t imagined he would bring himself to the doorstep of the one man he had cause to hate more than anyone else. “Franco,” I said again.

“Hi, Sienna,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

He held out an open palm, showing my bag of crystals that had been left behind during my escape.

“I thought you might need this,” he said.