Eleven
On Thursday morning, Thanksgiving, because Ondine and Evan had stayed up past midnight and baked with her telling him what to do and him performing all the labor, they were late leaving the house together, to deliver two beautiful-looking pies to the celebration.
There was one apple and one pumpkin, along with more oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
Evan had called his aunt, explained that he wanted to contribute to the pack’s feast, and asked if that would be okay with her.
Narah had apparently broken down sobbing.
Cole was nervous about the challenge, which only made sense, but the truth was, he was the son of the alpha.
The chances of his uncle besting him were minute.
Alphas were instinctively suited to lead, but they were also bigger and stronger.
I was holding out hope that Abel would simply let the entire pack know what he’d done and then yield.
But that would have been too easy. As it was, when he won, Cole would announce to the pack precisely what had happened to his father.
As it got later in the day, I called Evan to ask if he and Ondine were going to stay on the pack land or return and walk back down with his brother and me.
When he didn’t answer the phone, Cole made a call to Abel, who claimed not to have seen Evan.
He checked with Narah while Cole stayed on the phone, but the answer was the same. No sign of Evan.
But that made no sense. It was a direct route from my back door to the pack land, and once you crossed into the large area in front of the main house, it was all cleared land that I had seen had been sectioned off for the challenge and lined with lights.
There were tables out there covered in runners, fall decor, and many space heaters, and it all looked very warm and inviting.
When Cole, Reggie, Helene, and I walked the same way to reach the pack land that Evan and Ondine would have, nothing at all looked out of the ordinary.
Emerging from the tree line, we were met by Abel and Justin.
“You’re early for the challenge,” Abel told him.
“No,” Cole bit off the word. “Where is Evan?”
Abel appeared stunned. “I have no idea where Evan is.”
Cole shook his head, and I could hear his breath hitching. “Give me my brother.”
“I swear to you,” Abel told him. “Have Merritt search if you don’t believe me. All of us know if Evan’s here, Merritt can find him.”
“Helene and I will help you,” Reggie offered.
We split up. I went to the main house and searched everywhere, then I sat in the basement, quietly, and used all my senses to find either Evan or Ondine.
There was no trace of either. What I did smell, upstairs, was blood.
When I broke down a locked bathroom door, Fletcher was in the tub, hog-tied, with a gag in his mouth, and he’d been severely beaten.
There was dried blood all over him, and there was a deep gash on his forehead.
Though I knew, as a shifter, he could heal the damage, it still had to have been painful to endure.
Once I untied him, I helped him downstairs and outside, back to Cole.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked Abel, and as Reggie was there, he took Fletcher from me, leading him over to the chairs where Helene was.
“I’m sorry, Cole. Some of this you’ve brought on yourself.”
I had no idea what that meant until I saw Tuss Haviland and several more men than he’d brought the first time, at least thirty, crossing the field.
What was even more concerning was that another man was with them, bigger, taller, and built like a tank, with no discernable neck I could see and musculature that only happened thanks to copious amounts of anabolic steroids, which were terrible for humans and worse for shifters.
Last came another man, older, crossing from the other side of the open area where many of the cabins were, almost strutting, carrying clothes with him draped over his right arm.
“The Haviland Pack is here?” I asked Abel. “Our understanding was that you had invited the Danton-Steelwater Pack to share in your Thanksgiving celebration.”
“We did,” Abel said as Justin and Narah joined him. “But when Cole challenged me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make good on my promise to Matthias, so I got in touch with him.”
“Matthias,” Cole said to the older man.
“Cole,” Matthias greeted him, throwing two coats down in front of us. One was Evan’s, the other Ondine’s, and they were both ripped to shreds and covered in blood.
“What did you do?”
Matthias, a big man, as Tuss’s father would have to be, studied Cole. “I need to make a confession to you.”
“Tell me where my brother––”
“No,” Matthias snarled at him. “First you listen.”
I moved forward and put my hand gently on Cole’s back. I could feel the fear and rage leaping off him and knew that staying calm was his best option. He knew it as well, but in the moment, the emotions were choking him. What was good was that the second I touched him, he took a breath.
“I need you to know that this all started because your father said no to me.”
Cole shook his head. “I have no idea what you––”
“I offered your father land in New York worth millions. I promised him a mansion, and money, so much money, if he would only give me what I needed.”
“And what was that?”
“I required then, as I do now, an infusion of pure lupine blood.”
No one said a word.
“I need a stallion to put with my broodmares,” Matthias explained. “I have the women. I just need them impregnated with seed to produce the wolves I require.”
It sounded so clinical, not at all the horror that it would be.
“And if that’s not what they want?”
“They belong to me. I don’t care what they want.”
“You have your son.” Cole barely got the words out, the disgust clear in his voice.
“No. My son can’t shift, and neither can I. That’s why they all carry knives and machetes—we have so few shifters in our ranks. My mother was half human, as was Tuss’s, a truth I found out only after she was sold to me by her father.”
When I glanced at Tuss, I saw the rage simmering in his eyes. As much as he may have hated us, he hated his father as well.
“By the time I went looking for a pure-blood female, the only one I knew had already mated with Abel and given him Justin. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t breed with Narah, even if we took her, because I’m not pure.”
“And my mother?”
“The same issue. And then she died giving birth to your brother, and I thought here, finally, was the answer.”
“What was that?” Cole rasped.
“You,” Matthias said simply.
“I don’t––”
“Anson could give you to me. I could have you impregnate all the females and give me the shifters I need to make our pack the most powerful.”
“But my father said no,” Cole whispered.
“Which was idiotic,” Matthias retorted angrily. “He was so short-sighted. He could have been rich, as well as his family and his pack. But he kept ranting about how he wouldn’t take away your choices any more than he would the females in my pack.”
Cole nodded. “That sounds like him.”
“He had Evan, he didn’t need you too. He had an embarrassment of riches and refused to share. It was insane.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to Abel, of course.”
It made sense.
That was what Justin had meant when he said that Anson had only cared about Cole and Evan. Why couldn’t Anson just barter away his firstborn son for the prosperity of the pack? Wasn’t that what a true alpha did? Think of the pack first?
“Abel always wanted to be alpha, and I could make his dreams come true and take away the only person who could ever challenge him at the same time.”
Anson and Cole both gone in an instant. Hearing it out loud was worse than I could have ever imagined. It had to be excruciating for Cole.
“Abel set the time and place so my men and I would ambush your father when you would be with him. It was so simple. We would kill him and take his son, and no one would ever know what happened to you.”
I shuddered, thinking of what they would have forced the loving, caring man I was crazy about to do.
“But Abel jumped the gun, grew a spine, and attacked his brother, the alpha.”
Cole remained silent, listening.
“When we reached the warehouse Abel had led your father to, he was hurt, yes, bleeding a bit, but Anson had disarmed his beta, and the blows weren’t fatal.”
“But the ones you gave him were.”
“That’s right.”
“Abel attacked my father, stabbed him in the back, but you and your men, you were the ones who killed him.”
“And staged a beauty of a car accident, yes.”
The truth revealed made sense of Abel saying the other night that he hadn’t killed his brother. Truthfully, he hadn’t, but it was semantics more than anything else. By his actions, Abel had placed Anson in harm’s way, weakened him, led him to slaughter.
Cole took a deep breath. “And what then?”
“Well, then you weren’t there. In his haste, Abel had forgotten all about you.
He’d forgotten what he promised. And later, when I came to collect you, he grew a conscience, or more likely, he realized that the Swann Pack needed pure lupine blood just as much as we did.
But then, as the years went by, I didn’t see either you or Justin fucking the pure-blood wolves in your pack, and all I did was grow more and more angry. ”
“Why make him pay tribute?”
“You know why.”
Cole nodded. “Because he owed you.”
“That’s right,” Matthias confirmed, then smiled, and right then, I saw the madness in his narrowed eyes. “I made him alpha and he gave me nothing. So for the rest of his life, I would receive money, every month, without fail.”
“And what else?”
“Blood. Innocent blood. Abel told us which of his young to take. He picked them and we murdered them, taking them away from your pack forever.”
Abel had sacrificed his wolves. Members of his pack that he had sworn to protect, and in some cases, the smallest, the youngest, the most vulnerable. The man was a horror, and the idea that I could let him or Matthias live was not to be borne. Already I could feel my power rising.