Reclaiming Home (Build-A-Pack #1)

Chapter One

Brodie

I sat on a nice leather couch in one of the playrooms of my favorite kink club in Seattle, with my best friend on my lap. His violently red curls cascaded over my shoulder with the way he’d flipped them to one side.

“You feelin’ good, sweetness?” I asked, petting his hip near the strap of his jock.

“Mhmm…,” Rian managed to reply. He was still not quite back from his flight, as he called subspace.

We had a two hour slot booked and had half an hour left, so we were in no rush. For two completely platonic friends, we meshed well in the kink ways, and sometimes, like tonight, we would scene together.

It mostly happened when neither of us could find anyone else and/or when we wanted something safe and comfortable. Kink wasn’t all about excitement for us, it was about comfort, too. A release without the sexual component was still a release. We’d stuck to non-sexual play after figuring out we didn’t really feel like that about each other years ago.

I felt energized instead of sleepy, like I often did when I saw my submissive fly. It wasn’t a given, of course, and most of the time it was hard work to get a sub there, but I tried my best and when it did happen, it was the best thing. On occasion, it got me to Domspace, too. That’s why I didn’t need to get off physically.

I wasn’t what someone might call a lifestyle Dom. I went long periods without finding a play partner, and had never had a live-in boyfriend who was also my submissive. I didn’t see that in my future, either. I was good with people when I had to be, but I was a solitary being by choice outside Rian and some friends I ran with on full moons.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Rian didn’t react, so I just squeezed him harder.

“Come in,” I called, knowing that nobody would interrupt if it wasn’t important.

One of the club’s submissives, Tino, peered in. “I’m so sorry, Sir, but you said to watch your phone?”

Instantly, I was on alert. “What happened?”

“Your sister has tried to call, twice.”

Rian perked up at that. “Check what she wants,” he murmured, gesturing for Tino vaguely.

Tino stepped inside and handed me my phone.

“Well done, boy,” I told him, half-distracted already.

“Thank you, Sir.” He quickly left the room.

I’d only asked Tino to keep an eye on my phone for any calls from my current boss or my sister while he’d been doing inventory in the back of the bar. With Rian right there with me, I didn’t have anyone else I would’ve interrupted a scene for.

Rian made to move off my lap, but I didn’t let him yet. I saw three missed calls from “Sister” now. Bella was six years older, and our relationship was difficult, but we were the only blood family we had left that we cared about. Well, there were two cousins, but we weren’t close.

I swiped to call her back. The ring tone had barely time to play twice before she answered.

“Brodie,” she said, and immediately I knew something was wrong from her tone.

“What’s going on, Sis?”

“I hope I’m not interrupting—”

“I’m at the club with Rian, but we were done.”

“Hi, Bella,” Rian singsonged tiredly.

“Oh, sorry, hi Rian. I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t kind of urgent. I guess?”

“You guess?” I kept from sighing, barely.

“Ben called. He thinks there’s something going on at Rusty’s.”

The way my stomach filled with lead was impressive. Rian heard everything Bella was saying and frowned, coming out of the remnants of his subspace a bit faster than I would’ve liked.

“Okay?” I asked, wondering where this was going. It could be anything, knowing Uncle Rusty and how he ran his excuse of a pack these days.

“Apparently, their mom finally left him like eight months ago. She’s gone, the boys don’t know where she is and good for her, but Ben says he and Max have been hearing rumors that there’s a girl at the pack house.”

Immediately, my skin crawled at her words, but even more her tone.

Barely managing to keep the growl out of my voice, I asked, “How old?”

I heard her swallow through the phone. “Young. Some rumors say she’s underage.”

“Why hasn’t the Sheriff checked it out?” Rian asked suddenly.

“There’s a new deputy sheriff who doesn’t get along with Rusty. Old man Hayes retired last year and the new guy is a bitten wolf, apparently. Apparently the actual sheriff doesn’t bother with Luxton if he can avoid it, so he’s not help, either.”

I hissed and Rian grimaced.

Uncle Rusty was the worst kind of speciest. He was a born wolf and lived with the belief that humans were a lower species, bitten wolves were only marginally better but kind of disgusting, and vampires were really not people at all.

“I also assume that if they have gone to check and she’s eighteen, there’s nothing they can do unless she tells them she’s being held against her will or something,” she concluded what I’d just thought.

I sighed. “What do you want me to do about it? It’s not exactly a short trip to Bumfuck, Pennsylvania from Seattle.”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You know how much Mom loved that house.”

I pulled my phone away from my ear and smacked it against my forehead. The fact that she pulled the mom-card was unfair, but I understood why she’d do it. Rian’s long fingers closed around my wrist and stopped me.

“And what if she is being abused? Held against her will? Brodie, I don’t….” It was her little sob that made me hate her a bit. She knew what she was asking and she knew I wouldn’t be able to say no.

The worst part was that I couldn’t even blame her for this reaction. Not after what had happened to her growing up in the pack house. Not after she had had to run away to save herself even if it drove a wedge between us for fifteen years.

“Okay. I’ll go look,” I finally murmured. “I need to clear it with my boss, but it should be fine.”

P ack politics were tricky. Our mother had been a born wolf who met a human man, fell in love, and was booted from her pack for it. Our grandpa who passed away before our time had been the Alpha back then, and he’d been as shitty about other species as Rusty, his son, was later down the line.

Because of how the genes distributed, mom had two kids who turned out one wolf and one human, as if the universe had decided to demonstrate the 50/50 chance in play when a human and a werewolf had children.

I was a wolf, Bella was human.

Our dad passed away when I was seven and Bella was thirteen. Because Mom had been a stay at home mom, we really needed help. That’s when we moved from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Mom said that the pack would help. That was what wolf packs were meant to be after all; big, protective families who took care of each other through thick and thin.

The reality was… not quite as nice. At least not in our pack.

I’d decided to fly to the nearest airport I could and then I rented a car to drive the rest of the way into the pack’s property nestled inside Allegheny National Forest. There was a town about twenty miles from the house, and the closest neighbors, at least when I still lived there, were five miles away.

As I drove through Luxton, I realized how little had changed. There were many more closed storefronts, but there were also some new shops. It almost seemed… quaint.

I snorted at the thought. This town had never been kind to me. Even if I didn’t share my uncle’s last name, everyone knew everyone and I was forever tainted by the stench of Rusty Douglas.

Before I got all the way through town, I parked for a while by the street and texted my cousins and Bella.

“I’m in town. Going to the house. Anything else anyone’s heard or that I should know?”

It took a minute for Bella to wish me luck, then Max piped up.

“Only that Dad has two betas left. They’re all strung out as fuck.”

“We should know.”

I frowned at Ben’s words. They were both addicts, they’d admitted as much. I couldn’t blame them, really. Not with how they’d grown up and how normalized using whatever took you away for a while had been.

“Okay. If you guys don’t hear from me within two hours, call the sheriff's office.”

They all sent a version of “stay safe,” but I knew this was something I needed to do alone.

Ben and Max were still technically part of Rusty’s pack, and that brought some werewolfy fuckery with it. They couldn’t ignore his command completely. He wouldn’t be able to tell them to hurt me, but he could tell them to not do anything at all.

That meant they were useless for me as backup, and so alone I would go.

My phone rang as I was a few miles outside of town.

“Hey, sweetness,” I told Rian.

“You driving? Hands free on?”

I chuckled. “Of course.”

“Good.” He always wanted everyone safe. “What’s the ETA?”

“Depending on a few things, I should know what’s going on within half an hour at the most.”

“Ugh, I hate waiting. I wish you would’ve let me go with you.”

“I know, Ri. But you also know why I couldn’t.”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

We breathed together for a while. We did that sometimes, just to feel connected to each other when one of us needed someone right there but it wasn’t physically possible.

“I hope this goes well,” I said finally after a couple of minutes. “But if it doesn’t, if something happens… well.”

“Bella will call me. I know.” Rian’s voice was sad and solemn at the same time. “But she won’t need to call me, because you will.”

I smiled slightly. I wished I could promise him that, but I wasn’t sure. You never could be with Rusty.

“I’ll call you. Love you, sweetness.”

“Love you too, Brodie.” He ended the call before I could say anything else.

We’d been friends for nearly a decade. On his scale, it wasn’t a long time, but he still said I was the best friend he’d ever had in his couple of hundred years. Rian was a vampire who had been turned right after the Great Famine in Ireland in the late 1850s. It felt nuts, that he was that old, but then again there were vampires that were much, much older.

Rian was unique. He had his sad, darker moments when life was a lot for him, but his personality was mostly kind of happy and upbeat in a way I couldn’t say I had ever been. We complemented each other, and I thanked whatever deity was listening every day that we had never been romantically attracted to each other, because we would’ve fucked this up already.

The closer I got to the pack house, the weirder it felt. I hadn’t been back in over ten years, so everything seemed the same while also incredibly different.

There were old fence posts on either side of the dirt road that led to the house miles away from it to mark where the property line was located. A banged up, weathered sign warning about private property barely hung from a tree next to the right side post.

I snorted. Everyone in town knew that this was the Douglas pack’s lands. Nobody would trespass. It was for potential strangers, and there weren’t many that ended up this deep in the woods when the best hiking routes and such were on the opposite side of town.

The only one trespassing today was me.

It surprised me that I wasn’t feeling nerves. As a wolf without a pack, I was weaker than wolves who were under an Alpha’s protection. Which, in this case, seemed ridiculous because my uncle wasn’t much of an Alpha. His betas would still be stronger than they would look, I was sure, just because they belonged to his pack.

Technically, Max and Ben were non-beta members of the pack. The old packs of yore had had more designations than the modern ones did. Every wolf would fall under the “Alpha, beta, or other” system, and their jobs within the pack were whatever the pack wanted them to be. Back in the day there had been omegas, but that was more of a rank than any actual task, and so omegas had become the non-betas eventually.

I wiped all of that out of my mind when I got to the spot of the winding driveway that rose up over a little hill before evening out again. Soon, there would be a bend, and then the big old house would rise from the woods like a movie prop that had been built there, because it seemed so unlikely for a house like it to be there, truly in the middle of nowhere.

As soon as I slowed down to see where I could park in the yard and lifted my gaze to the house, I gasped.

What the everloving fuck had happened here? The house looked like it hadn’t been fixed in the last thirty years, when I knew for a fact that once upon a time it had been well-maintained. Now, it had holes in the roof and there were boarded-up windows, too. The once lovely dark green paint was faded and chipped, and the gutters were hanging all wrong.

The barn doors were open, with a scrawny, unwashed man stumbled out of it, hastily closing them.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I murmured under my breath.

They really had turned the barn into a meth lab, hadn’t they?

I parked between two beat up pickups and got out of the car.

I was six foot four and 220 pounds of muscle. This guy was a strawman. He did a double-take when he took me in, then banged his fist against the door he’d closed and tried to puff up.

“What can I help you with?” he asked, strolling over.

Another guy looking like him came out of the barn. I could smell the chemicals on them, and I wondered how long it had taken for the two of them to stop smelling that. It couldn’t be easy for wolf senses.

“I’m here to see Rusty.” I gave them a bored expression. “He around?”

The front door of the house banged open and my uncle stepped out.

“What the hell? Is that little Brodie McRae?”

I pushed a small smile out and chuckled. “Uncle Rusty.”

He walked down the steps, and I could tell he had lost a lot of weight from his glory days. He had to be in his mid-fifties now but appeared like a seventy-year-old. I could see the gaps in his yellowed teeth and hid my disgust. He’d been a handsome, fit man in his youth.

We shook hands and I glanced around.

“Not much has changed here,” I stated as I let go of his hand.

“Nah, why change the good stuff,” he said as if any of our surroundings was good. A sudden gust of wind blew across the yard and he shivered in his T-shirt, even though wolves weren’t that susceptible to cold. “Come on in.” He looked at the betas, who were trying to do their job by being cautious of me. “You two can go back to work, it’s just my nephew. He grew up here.”

I wasn’t here for a fight, and his wolf could sense it. However, I would do whatever I needed to keep myself safe.

Following him up the creaky porch steps, I kept cataloging the signs of complete and utter disrepair the house had fallen into. It pissed me off more than the meth lab, because I had loved this house. It had been the best part of my teen years.

The inside wasn’t much better, but it was clear someone had tried to keep it clean.

“Come, let’s go sit in the kitchen,” Rusty said and led the way through the open doorway.

“Oh,” I said when I noticed the young woman by the stove.

She had long, dark hair and her scent didn’t have the woodsy notes a wolf’s would have. She was human.

As she turned her head to peer at me from underneath her hair, I could see she had a black eye that spread over her nose to her other eye as well. The thin dress she was wearing was stained, and her bare arms had bruises all over. My stomach turned.

“Hi,” I said to her, which made Rusty snort.

“She don’t talk. She ain’t got the brain.” He stood by the kitchen table and pulled a chair. “She’s got a few decent holes though, so at least she’s useful that way.”

The way she flinched at his words and the pure hatred in her eyes told me more than a thousand words.

"Isn't she a bit young?" I asked conversationally, my gaze falling on my uncle again.

“She’s nineteen. Old enough and, you know, not young enough at the same time, if you know what I mean, sonny.”

Something inside me snapped. I had him slammed into the wall before I knew what I was doing. “You piece of fucking shit!”

His amusement turned into panic when he realized how much bigger I was, how much stronger. Alphas didn’t need to be strong after all, they had betas for that.

“Is this about your whore of a sister?” he sputtered. Then his eyes rolled back, and I realized it was because I’d snapped his neck.

I let the body drop as my wolf puffed up inside. It absorbed the energy from the wolf within my uncle as life left him. The surge of the alpha power made me twitch, and I knew my eyes were flashing red. Well, shit.

I turned to the girl who had backed into the gap between the fridge and the wall.

“I won’t hurt you. Nobody will hurt you ever again,” I vowed, my voice rumblier than I liked. I sighed. “Give me ten minutes to deal with the betas, and I’ll come back and we’ll sort this out, okay?”

She stared at me with obvious fear, but nodded rapidly. “Okay,” she whispered.

“What’s your name?” I asked, and she seemed shocked that I wanted to know.

“Carys.”

“Okay, Carys. I promise things will get better.” With that, I left the kitchen and walked out the door.

The betas burst out of the barn, their wolves finally having clued in that something was amiss.

I let my eyes light up and snarled at them. “You are not part of this pack anymore. Your Alpha is dead. You have twenty minutes to gather whatever you want out of the house and the barn, take those trucks and go.”

Neither of them seemed sad or upset about Rusty. Both of them glanced back at the barn and then to me.

“Yes. Take all the stuff from there you want. It’ll be destroyed otherwise. Same with whatever is yours in the house.”

They spoke quietly and quickly, then one darted into the barn and the other slinked toward me.

“And don’t even look at Carys,” I ground out the words.

“Who?” the idiot asked, and I let out a sound that was more wolf than man.

He ducked past me and bolted inside.

As I followed more sedately, I dug out my phone and took a selfie with the red of my eyes showing. Then I texted it to my sister and cousins with the caption “oops?” Then I sent it to Rian with a “so I guess this happened.”

I’d never had the beta yellow eyes, let alone the Alpha red ones. Mine had always glowed the non-beta green, and while I felt when the color changed as it kind of narrowed my field of view a little, I’d never really thought about the color before. From now on, they’d be red, and I had trouble wrapping my head around the change, but I guessed I’d had the rest of my life to get used to it, not that it mattered much in the bigger picture. I had more things to worry about.

I put the phone back into my pocket and walked in. I could hear sounds of frantic packing from upstairs. I ignored it and glanced into the kitchen.

Rusty’s corpse was still on the floor, but Carys was gone. I went into the family room instead and grimaced at the nasty couches. Someone, likely Carys, had tried to cover them with blankets, but they couldn’t really be salvaged.

Everything smelled like cleaning products that were too strong to my nose, but they covered a lot of the disgusting smells underneath, so I’d take it. I was pretty sure the pack had lost part of their sense of smell to be able to deal with this, but I guessed drugs would do that to a wolf and Carys wouldn’t notice.

I slipped back into the hall and stood there, leaning to the kitchen doorway.

Carys came down the stairs first. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and clearly felt pissed off.

“They should be gone soon,” I told her, when she startled at a louder bang from behind her somewhere.

She nodded and went to stand in the family room doorway across from me. We stayed there awkwardly, while the former beta did his thing upstairs.

He ran down the stairs with two filled to the brim duffle bags, grabbed the keys to the trucks from the hook by the door. He took one last look back, sneering at Carys, then glared at me.

“Get the fuck off my property,” I told him and jerked my body toward him.

He burst through the door, and I walked out onto the porch to watch the proceedings.

He tossed the bags into one of the trucks and then he and the other idiot carried stuff out of the barn at full speed. They deemed themselves done within my time limit and tried to act tough as they climbed into the trucks and drove off.

I heard a long, relieved sigh from behind me and saw Carys standing by the window next to the door.

I went back inside and gave her my most compassionate expression. “Is there anyone I can call for you?”

She nodded seriously. “My brother.”

“Okay. Let me call the sheriff first. We need to deal with Rusty.”

Clearing her throat, she asked, “What do you need me to say?”

I smiled. “How about the truth?”

“No, I mean about you and him? Why you killed him?”

I hadn’t really thought about that. I shrugged. “Let’s say he was trying to lunge at you? It’s obvious that’s….” I gestured at her face.

She frowned. “Yeah. That’ll work.” She gestured at her body. “I’m pretty damn bruised all over.”

I glanced into the kitchen and wished I could kill the bastard again.

I took out my phone and handed it to her. “How about you call your brother? Rusty isn’t going anywhere.”