23. Kate
Twenty-three hours after Salem revealed my supposed real identity, I’m still shell-shocked.
I’m Anna Kate Hayes, not Kate Everhart.
Jagger’s younger sister.
Eli and Annalise’s daughter.
Kane’s fated mate.
It’s too good to be true… and tragic at the same time.
There’s no possible way for there to be any truth to her claim—except for the pregnancy part. I can see my wolf protecting our pup. I can feel them both inside me.
Unless…
Unless it’s a spell and the witch has her own agenda for me returning to the Bloodmoon pack. I can only be pregnant if I were of age to go into heat, putting me at least a year older than the twenty-year-old I believed I was.
Sure, when I woke on Kane’s couch, I was overwhelmed by the temperature of his house. Never once did I think I was in the midst of my first heat cycle.
Isn’t that something a woman would know or realize was happening to her body?
Then again, I’ve never wanted to think about that approaching time. It wasn’t something I wanted to face within my pack. Dick always decided which of his wolves would mate and with whom. He never allowed anyone the chance to find a partner of their choosing or their fated mate. When his female shifters reach fifteen, he pairs them with a male he selects.
He decided who Trez would be with when my brother was seventeen. We’ve never spoken of it, but I assumed Trez knew I’d never let that happen. At least not until he wanted it, and I knew he didn’t want a lifetime bond with someone he didn’t have feelings for. Like me with Kane, my brother has been in love with Jagger just as long as I have with Kane.
He may not admit it, but Trez likes Jag’s possessive side as much as it irks him.
I used to wonder why Dick never selected a mate for me. I figured it was because it wasn’t worth the fight he knew I’d put up. No one will ever force me to be with anyone not of my choosing.
I never submit to Dick Everhart without him physically breaking out into a sweat, working his alpha powers extra hard to be able to force me to comply. I won’t willingly submit to a man or anyone who doesn’t offer me equal respect. And genuine love.
Which is why I can’t believe, even for a second, that I am who Salem claims I am. If I were Kane’s mate, his wolf wouldn’t have allowed him to emotionally hurt me as deeply as he did. He broke my heart.
I don’t feel shit for you, he spit at me.
The force of that statement sucked the air from my lungs. I’ll be damned if I hand over my heart again to be trampled on, stabbed, or sliced into a million pieces.
But what if Salem’s warning that Dick needed me impregnated, and not by just any alpha wolf but by Kane specifically, was true? That Dick and Henrik had two separate plans for me.
One wanted me for himself and had planned to vanish with me.
The other wanted the wolf pup inside my womb as an offering to the devil himself.
Both wanted to cage me.
And one of them would have achieved their goal had Dick not ordered the murder of one of Salem’s witches for her ashes. According to Salem, he needed to make sure I believed my brother was dead and to send a message to her and the coven that resided in his territory.
Salem was his…Her magic belonged to him. Her purpose was for him just like the one before her.
Richard Everhart angered the wrong witch by killing Salem’s sister. When Henrik executed Ivy’s mother, it broke the hold the dark magic had on Salem, though, it hadn’t freed her, just cleared the fog from a part of Salem that she thought she’d lost long ago—her light side.
That didn’t suddenly make her a good witch again. No. Dark magic still thrives inside her, feeding on her feelings for a sister who is no longer part of this world, and Salem wants carnage and revenge.
Crossing said dark witch is what got Henrik captured early this morning before dawn.
Last night, after Salem removed the cloaking spell—a glamour she called it—she explained how Dick came into possession of a power he was never gifted with at birth. Then she fed Ivy and me.
I was starving after the poison wreaked havoc on my system, leaving me unconscious for days. The cold, leftover food Salem sat in front of me was bland, but I ate it like it was the best I’d ever had on my tongue and in my belly.
It wasn’t. Far from it.
When I finished eating, she revealed why Dick needed my baby so desperately. Ice-cold fear danced down my spine following her words. The contents in my stomach threatened to come up, but I managed to swallow the bile back down the best I could, my vocals silent, unsure how to react in her presence.
She is a dark witch, after all. And one that isn’t on my side. I didn’t know how far I could trust her or if I was being set up for a bigger fall. I knew I had to get out of the shackle she had me in and outside the bars she caged me inside. My only option was to return to Moonwake.
If it wasn’t a spell, if I am pregnant, then Kane deserves to know. That doesn’t mean I’ll stay in his pack. He probably won’t believe I’m his fated mate anyway, and I have no intention of claiming to be her.
Salem told me Trez was already in Moonwake but didn’t reveal how she knew that information. She did, however, tell me that Trez had overheard a conversation between herself and Dick about the two of us. That it had been done on purpose, and my brother played into their plan how they’d hoped.
Trez’s wolf had been near a cave at the bottom of Rivermoon Mountain. A cave that has always been off-limits to our pack, forbidden to be within half a mile of its entrance.
As pups, we used to be curious about what was inside, so we snuck in once, but it spooked my wolf, so we never went back. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the cave other than a bone-chilling feeling once inside.
Salem said she tugged on the rune on his back just a smidgen with her magic. That made Trez come to the mouth of the cave, but he didn’t go inside. With his supernatural hearing, he picked up on their hushed conversation about two kidnapped wolf pups from two decades ago.
The seed was successfully planted is what she didn’t have to tell me. I wanted to ask more: where’d we go when he disappeared, who took him, did anyone hurt him? But I wasn’t going to push my luck with a witch. She could turn me into whatever she wanted. I didn’t know her magical limit or if witches even had one.
So, I pulled my shoulders back and asked her what I needed to do for her to let me go.
A slow smile spread across her lips, the sparkle in her eyes wicked. She knew she had me where she wanted me, that I’d do anything to put as much distance between Dick and my pup as I could. Being in Port Angeles, I was too close to the border, only a ferry ride away from Canadian land. But in my mind, I wasn’t anywhere close to being far enough from Rivermoon Mountain to feel safe.
“You’ll escort my niece to Moonwake,” she announced yesterday. “Take her to the witch that has made herself part of your alpha’s pack. Ensure Ivy makes it safely into Storm’s care, and you’ll never see me again. Don’t…” She paused for a hairbreadth, just long enough to cause a shiver to shoot down my spine. “You’ll die a hundred deaths before your soul leaves this earth, mutt.”
A low growl slipped from my lips in warning, but I didn’t say anything back to her. In that moment, I knew better than to use words.
An hour afterward, I watched a team of Monster Hunters torture Henrik to the brink of death for sixteen hours. It got to the point that it was so brutal I almost felt sorry for him. That didn’t mean I did. It was the methods they used that rolled my stomach. At one point, my wolf lifted her head and urged me to run, to get away before they picked up our scent and came for us.
Before they finished Henrik off with a beheading, they kept him shackled in the silver-coated iron they’re known for. They injected him with potent amounts of wolfsbane every half hour. They shot him several times with silver bullets. They interrogated him, wanting to know where others like him were. There were three of them, and they each used a blade made of silver to slice through his skin.
Even with my supernatural hearing, I wasn’t close enough to hear more than Henrik’s shouts, his whines, and the begging he did in the end. After the Marked Crest beta was dead, they removed the shackles, stuffing them into what looked like a tool bag you’d find at a local hardware store. Then they ripped the old horse farm apart, starting with the house and then the barn I’d woken up inside.
By then, Salem, Ivy, and I were watching from the thick forest that surrounded the farm. Salem assured me that they wouldn’t find us. She told me when they first arrived, she’d been the one to tip them off. It was payback for Henrik killing her sister, for taking Ivy’s mother from her.
When they lit fire to the barn, we turned away and trekked down a narrow dirt path that Salem said would lead us to the white van I’d seen from the diner.
Salem brought us close to Seattle, where we’d need to sneak onto a freight train that would take us to Portland. Before Ivy and I got out, Salem produced my backpack. For whatever reason, she washed the dirty clothes I’d stuffed inside that I’d left on Kane’s bathroom floor. Surprisingly, the money I had in my pocket was inside the pack.
Salem left us at a truck stop after that. She had plans for Richard Everhart, which meant she had to get home. Part of me was fuming that he would perish at her hands or by her use of magic. I wanted to rip his throat out with my canines because, until now, I hadn’t fully realized that Dick may not be my father.
If what Salem told me is true, that he is the one that had the Moonwake pups kidnapped twenty years ago, then shouldn’t it be me that gets to kill the Marked Crest alpha, not her?
I understand her need for vengeance, but shouldn’t I also get retribution? Then again, maybe that’s a selfish thought.
Does it really matter who kills him as long as his life ends?
There’s another part of me that’s relieved. If she takes his life, then I won’t be putting my pup at risk to sate the dark voice inside me urging me to go north rather than south.
In the end, my wolf was the voice of reason, and in her way, telling me I had to make better, safer decisions for the baby growing inside me.
She was right.
So, I turned my back on the vehicle as it disappeared out of sight. Ivy and I went inside, we ate, and then we each showered, making use of the facilities offered to truckers and travelers.
“Let’s go,” I say to Ivy as she exits the shower room, clean and her wet hair hanging down her chest. “We have a freight train to stow away on.”
My hands go to my abdomen, pressing lightly against the exposed skin between my cargo pants and the black crop top I changed into. I lost my padded leather biker jacket and my racing bike when I was poisoned and kidnapped from the diner, so the fastest way I know how to get back to Moonwake is by stealing a ride in one of the cargo containers.
“I promise I’ll get you safely to your sister.”
With that, she nods, and when I drop my hands to my sides, Ivy slips her fingers through mine.