Chapter 8
THE FALLEN ALPHA
Jasper’s apartment is quiet when I step out of the elevator. The atmosphere is somber. The living room is empty, the wide, curving sofas untouched. Outside the Manhattan sky is fittingly overcast.
Across the room a figure emerges from the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. It’s Melissa. Her hair is tied back loosely, the bags under her eyes are mega dark, she’s wearing gray sweatpants and a cardigan that she holds closed around her.
“Hi Max.” Her voice is hoarse.
“Hi.” I wander closer, not wanting to speak too loudly and disturb the air. “How is he doing?”
She shrugs, pressing her lips together as if she could burst into tears at any moment, and takes a long inhale through her nose.
“He’s alive, thank the moon gods. But—we’ve had our best healers looking over him, and . . .” She can’t help the tears from falling. “They don’t know if he’s going to wake up.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Melissa shakes her head, trying to dispel her tears. “Jasper is with him. He hasn’t left his side.”
It’s been two days since the attack. I decided to give Jasper some space while Jericho was in the hospital, but last night, after they’d brought him home, Jasper reached out.
“I need you,” he said.
“I’ll come tomorrow.”
The moment Jericho fell was like a gut punch to the entire pack.
The moment he lost consciousness sent a ripple through our psyches.
And now with his life in the balance there’s a sort of mass unease, like we’re all one inch away from emotional collapse.
If I can do anything to help soothe even a little of Jasper’s distress, I will.
“How is Jodie?” I ask.
“Shaken up.” Melissa nods and blows her nose. “Sad. Scared. We all are.”
“It’s—it’s so awful.”
Melissa does her best to smile, then reaches out to hold my elbow. “You should go be with him,” she says. “He’s going to need you now.”
There’s a weight to her last sentence, some deeper ramification that’s not immediately clear.
“Is it okay if I go through?”
“Of course.”
My footsteps sound too loud, echoing as I slowly make my way toward the alpha’s room.
The door faces me from where it stands at the end of the hall, taller than the others, reaching up to the ceiling.
I can’t believe how close we came to losing our leader, how close Jasp came to losing his .
. . The thought is too terrible. So I shut it out.
I knock gently and open the door.
It’s dark inside, the navy curtains pulled almost all the way across the impressive east-facing windows, except for a slit in the middle where pale light streams in like the page of a book, half turned.
Jericho’s bed sits beneath a towering headboard, his sheets dark and muted.
His body, large and still beneath them. His eyes are closed.
Even from this distance I can see how swollen the skin is around his eyes and jaw, the scratches, the bruises, the teeth marks.
Jasper is sitting in a modern armchair, the back and arms a single curving feature. His head is bowed, his hair falling over his eyes. He looks up ever so slightly and the exhaustion on his face breaks me.
“Hey,” I say, kneeling beside the chair and taking his hands in mine. “Are you okay? How are you holding up?”
“I should have stopped them,” he says darkly, his voice weak, breaking like a teenager’s. “I should have known something was wrong. I should have—”
“No,” I say firmly, placing a hand on the side of his face to comfort him but also to make sure he’s looking in my eyes when I tell him, “this isn’t your fault. Don’t go down that track. It was them.”
Jasper’s face crumples in a way I’ve never seen. “What if he doesn’t make it? I can’t . . . not again.”
I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say. Instead, I simply pull Jasper into me and hold him as tightly as I can. We stay this way for a while, not saying anything, just being together, facing this horrible moment as a single unit, then suddenly there’s a knock at the door.
We turn as Salazar pokes his head through.
“Sir,” he says, addressing Jasper way more formally than I’m used to. “She’s here.”
Jasper pulls away and with great effort hoists himself up from his chair.
“Who’s here?” I ask. But Jasper doesn’t answer, he trudges to the door, following Salazar back through the hall and into the living room. I trail them, wondering whose arrival could have dragged Jasper’s focus away from his dad.
Back in the living room the sofas are no longer vacant.
Instead, a woman with permed gray hair, wearing an expensive-looking pantsuit in bottle green is sitting, wringing her wrinkled hands in her lap.
On either side of her are two of Jericho’s gamma wolves, soldiers in plain clothes, blue jeans, and black T-shirts.
How could a small, older woman need this much beefcake to accompany her?
Salazar waits a step behind Jasper as he approaches the woman.
“Mrs. Bridgers,” he says, and suddenly I realize who she is. I’ve seen her before, only she looks about ten years older than the last time I laid eyes on her. This is Walter Bridgers’s wife, Clayton’s mother. I’m suddenly glad for the heightened security presence. “Where is your husband?”
She shakes her head, her curls bouncing. “I don’t know. He left me almost a year ago. I have no idea of his current whereabouts.”
Jasper takes a tiny step forward, gritting his teeth and growling. “Don’t lie to me.”
I notice Salazar keeping an eye on Jasper’s proximity to Mrs. Bridgers, like he’s ready to step in should Jasper lose control and lash out.
“I’m not lying,” Mrs. Bridgers snaps, then recoils as if she’s made a mistake.
Clearly, she’s not used to being spoken to like a prisoner, especially by someone as young as Jasper—who she probably knew as a child, considering her son and him were besties until, well, recently.
But she also knows she doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
“Jasper, you have to understand, when Walter left he told me very little of what he was planning, except . . .” She trails off, perhaps scared to say more.
“Except what?” Jasper presses. “The wolves who invaded our territory, who infiltrated our packhouse, who attacked our people and left our alpha for dead told us they were sent by your husband. The same man who tried to have me killed just last year. As his mate you are the closest person to him. Speak or you will be prosecuted as a traitor.”
Mrs. Bridgers lifts her chin, injecting her tone with a rebellious sort of indignation.
“I am no traitor to this pack.” Only the tremble in her voice betrays her fear.
“I love this pack; I have served my pack and my alpha my whole life. Walter and I weren’t so close—at least, not of late.
For the last five or so years it was like we were living in different worlds.
He was in the city for the most part and I stayed at our house in the Hamptons.
I knew little of the goings-on in his life, especially when it came to his businesses.
Yes, I knew he had aspirations of rising to some greater power and yes, he wasn’t shy about his distaste for how your father ran things. ”
Jasper grinds his teeth so hard I can hear them squeaking.
“But I didn’t know he was planning all this,” she continues. “I would never have supported these actions. Never have turned against my own pack. My family have been Elite Pack wolves for centuries. This pack is my life. My husband may be a traitor, but I am not.”
Jasper pauses, placing a hand over his eyes, as if he’s trying to think.
“Jasper, darling, remember when you used to come to the house over summer break. I’d bake peanut butter cookies and you and Clayton would—”
Jasper starts up, letting his hand drop. “Don’t bring him into this.”
For a moment, Jasper and Mrs. Bridgers stare at each other, neither one seemingly willing to back down. Then suddenly, Mrs. Bridgers cracks. She starts sobbing, dabbing at her powdered cheeks with the back of her hand.
“Please, Jasper,” she says. “I’ve lost my son and my husband. I don’t want to lose my pack.”
“So you know nothing that can help us find your husband?” Jasper shoots back, stone-cold. “What good are you to your pack?”
Mrs. Bridgers’s tears stop abruptly, like she was in full control of them all along. Is she playing some sort of mind game or simply erratic?
Curiosity gets the better of me, so while Jasper continues to grill her, I decide to do a little recon of my own, reaching out with my mind and slipping into hers.
“There was one thing,” she says, tapping her fingers on her knee. “Walter did once share with me his plan for—how did he put it?—his plan to build a superior pack.”
“What did this plan entail?” Jasper asks.
“He always thought Jericho was too soft. He wanted to expand our territory, amass more power. But knowing he could never convince Jericho and his council to go along with such a plan, he started theorizing about what could happen if he gained his own supporters, if he were to recruit alphas from foreign packs and united them against the Elite Pack.”
“You knew this, and you said nothing?” Jasper growls.
She waves his accusation away like it’s a fly pestering her. “It was all theoretical. Chitchat over cocktails. I never imagined he’d actually go through with it.”
“He has,” I say, stepping forward. All eyes in the room turn to me, and I shrink a little, wondering if I should have said anything.
But I think the information I have is important enough to share.
“The wolves who attacked the packhouse weren’t rogues, they were pack wolves, only they each belonged to a different pack.
If they were working for Walter, like they said, then he must have managed to align a number of packs already. ”
“So he’s enacting this plan,” Jasper says, turning back to Mrs. Bridgers. “What else do you know about it?”
She takes a big breath, perhaps finally coming to some sort of resolution about exactly what her husband has been up to, right under her turned-up nose, for the last five years.
Then turning to the windows and cloud-filled sky, she says, “He called it the Axis Pack. In his fantasy it would be a stronghold of power, a place where wolves who shared his ideologies would thrive and where dissent would be stamped out.”
“And how many packs does he plan on uniting against us?”
Here she lowers her gaze, staring at her hands, barely uttering the words that escape her lips. “As many as he needs to destroy the Elite Pack.”
With the interrogation done, Jasper orders Mrs. Bridgers to hand over any and all materials she can find that could give any clue as to what Walter is planning.
The guards escort her out and back to her town house on the Upper East Side, where she is required to stay with a guard at every exit for the foreseeable future.
“If Walter is uniting packs against us, we have to act fast,” Jasper says, coming to me.
Salazar steps forward. “How can we know what she’s telling us is even accurate?”
“It is,” I say, warranting a suspicious look from Salazar and a pleading one from Jasper. “While she was talking, I connected with her.” Salazar rolls his eyes ever so slightly. “She was telling the truth.”
“You can read minds, but you can’t find my missing daughter,” Salazar says, a sentiment he’s echoed a few times since Olivia left.
I turn to him, intending to hold my ground. “She doesn’t want to be found.”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” Jasper says, cutting in. “If Walter is amassing power and trying to form this Axis Pack, we need to act right away.”
Salazar nods to Jasper deferentially. “What are your orders, sir?”
“My orders?” Jasper asks, taken aback. “What—what do you mean?”
“With your father incapacitated,” Salazar explains, “the succession of power is clear.”
“Meaning?” Jasper sounds terrified and confused.
I step to his side, slipping my hand into his.
“Meaning, you’re in command now, Jasp.”
His palm is instantly clammy, and his face turns white.