Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Marcus
“What?” I stare at my uncle, shaken.
He lets out a long breath. “Every alpha-born thinks he’s the only one fit to lead.” He steps over Kylan’s body, his claws still dripping with blood. “And yet here I am. I’ve held the seat that was meant for you, and held it well, for years.”
I can’t make the pieces fit. My eyes stay on the man who used to tuck me in as a boy.
His gaze slides to Jessa, and whatever I ever saw in his face is gone. “I don’t enjoy dragging humans into our business.” His mouth thins. “But you’ve been a splinter since the day you walked back in with that child of yours.”
Jessa glares at him over the gag.
“You ruined it the first time too.” He says it almost tiredly. “All Sloane had to do was keep him dosed, and she never even managed the second dose.” He tips his head at me. “One more, and his wolf would have gone quiet for good.”
The dart’s poison crawls through my arm, but the cold spreading in my chest has nothing to do with wolfsbane. “You gave Sloane the wolfsbane,” I say hoarsely, the betrayal twisting my gut. “Ten years ago. That was you.”
“Yes.” He looks unrepentant. “She wasn’t clever. A poor spy, in the end. But she’d have made a fine leash around your neck.”
“Why?” It’s all I can get out.
“Why?” My uncle’s expression tightens in anger. “Do you really have to ask me that? But then what would you, a bloodborn alpha, know? We are the ones overlooked. Your brother, for example, was so clever, he had the brains to figure out he was being poisoned. He just had to go looking for answers.”
Daniel knew?
My uncle—?
“For years I watched my brother groomed for a seat I wanted more than air.” He wipes a claw down his sleeve. “I was better than him at everything. Our father chose him anyway, on the strength of his blood.”
I feel bile rise in my throat. No. No, it can’t be.
“Your father swore he’d step aside when he was ready. Let me have it at last.” His calm flickers. “He handed it to you instead. And you could have handed it to me. I was built for it.” He looks at me. “You gave it to that useless boy.”
Daniel. My knees want to buckle, and the wolfsbane isn’t the reason.
“You poisoned my father,” I finally utter, a part of me desperately hoping he will deny it.
“I did.” He doesn’t blink. Whatever hope I’d still been holding on to dies.
“And Daniel. You loved Daniel!”
“I didn’t plan to touch Daniel. He was like a son to me.
” There’s a flicker of regret in his eyes now.
“I just wanted him sick enough that he would hand the position over to me, and he was willing to, but I guess he was just stringing me along. He’d gotten suspicious.
Behind my back, he found the wolfsbane. Where I grew it, how long I’d grown it.
He was going to bring it to you.” A small shrug.
“So I sent men. Mine and the hunters’ both, dressed up as rogues. ”
I think of the empty graves, my brother and my father gone from the ground for years, and the room tilts under me. “Where are they?” My voice shakes with rage now. “Their bodies. Where did you put them?!”
“Somewhere safe.” He almost smiles. “Family stays close, after all.”
“You armed the hunters,” I say, the words unsteady. “Our enemy.”
“They’re a tool.” He kicks Kylan’s body aside, careless. “I’ve grown wolfsbane since I was a boy, and I’ve sold it to every hunter faction worth the name.”
“They kill us. They killed children.”
“You’re thinking too small, Marcus.” He straightens his bloodied cuffs. “I keep the supply flowing, and every pack in three territories does as I say.” Pleasure settles into his eyes. “The shifters keep their numbers down, the hunters leave them alone. Good business.”
“You murdered your whole family for good business,” I spit out.
“I didn’t want to kill any of you,” my uncle hisses.
“But you kept getting in my way over and over again. You found the graves of those brats. You started investigating. I knew you’d find your way to me at some point.
Although I had hoped the wolfsbane I had been administering to you would have left you weak like your father and brother. But you were so stubborn.”
My jaw tightens. “You were giving me wolfsbane? How?!”
My uncle sneers. “Your fancy coffee beans that you get imported for your office. I bribed someone to crush some wolfsbane into it. It’s a special blend.
You’ve been taking it for years. All I had to do was slightly increase the dosage to get you really sick.
So the day you needed all your strength, you’d have none. ”
I get one knee under me. “A man like you can’t be alpha of this pack. I won’t allow it.”
He laughs softly, and it’s worse than any snarl. “And what will you do? You can barely kneel.”
I test my body. He’s right about the weakness, but my strength is somewhat returning.
I don’t understand why. Although there’s a good chance that when my father was given the wolfsbane he was older and I’m much younger.
It’s not affecting me in the way it did him.
I hide the fact. I’m going to need to take him by surprise.
But first I have to get my family out of here.
“This is between you and me,” I say. “Let Jessa and my daughter go.”
“I can’t.” He looks down at Mia, small and drugged on the floorboards.
“You still haven’t felt it. All this time, and you never once sensed it.
” He turns back to me, delighted. “Your daughter is alpha-born, Marcus. The wolfsbane dulled you so far down you couldn’t feel the alpha rising in your own daughter. I can’t let her live.”
The world drops away. Everything left standing in me wants to tear his throat out bare-handed. I force myself to stay still.
“So you see the trouble.” He extends his claws with a wet click.
“I can’t leave her breathing. Or her mother, who’ll only turn into a problem.
I’ll take Bella in, I suppose, though she’s a loose thread as well.
” He sighs, tired of the whole thing. “Cleaner if the line ends where it started. With me.”
Jessa works the rag out of her mouth and spits it to the floor. “You depraved piece of shit.” Her voice shakes with fury. “Don’t you dare touch my family.”
“You’re hardly in a position to bargain.” He crosses to her, one hand drawing back, claws bared for her throat.
I catch his wrist.
He turns, almost amused. “You can’t, boy. You’re fading.”
“I’m fading.” I force the words out through the poison. “But you forgot something critical when poisoning me all these years when you fed me wolfsbane.” My grip tightens, and I feel the bones begin to give. “It won’t work so quickly on me.”
The smugness goes out of him.
“Does it make sense now?” I crush down, and something in his wrist snaps. “Do you understand?”
He tears loose and comes at me with everything, desperate now.
We go down swinging, human and clumsy, teeth and fists in the dark of the cottage.
Then he breaks into fur and fang, and I let mine come with it.
My wolf hauls itself up through the poison, slower than it should, and we meet in the middle of the room in a snarl of bodies.
He drives me back across the room. The wolfsbane still has its claws in me, and my strength answers a half-beat late every time, so his teeth find me before mine find him.
Only the alpha in me keeps me upright at all, clawing the poison back inch by inch.
He opens my shoulder to the bone. I tear a strip out of his flank in answer.
We carve each other apart, the floorboards going slick under us, and every second I bleed a little more of the fight away.
Decades of grievance drive every strike he lands, and he lands too many.
I’m losing, and I feel exactly how fast.
Wood splinters behind me, sharp and close. I glance toward it, and he takes the opening. His weight slams me down, his claws punch into my belly, and he drags them sideways through muscle. The pain whites everything out. For a heartbeat I’m sure he’s opened me for good.
Then a chair comes down across his back, swung two-handed. Jessa, free of her ropes, her wrists raw and running red. He rears around at her, and that half-second is all I need. I lunge and close my jaws on his throat. Hot copper floods my mouth, and I don’t let go.
He goes down under me, blood coming fast. The doors burst inward.
Adrian is first through them, gray-faced and barely upright, and he goes straight to Jessa, scooping Mia off the floor and pressing my daughter into her mother’s arms. A dozen more pour in behind him. Someone breathes, “Alpha Marcus.”
My uncle isn’t finished. Even with his throat torn open, he thrashes under me, swiping for my eyes.
I don’t let it be quick. My claws go into him a dozen times, and every time they sink home, I see another of the dead over his face, my father gray on his sickbed, Daniel staged on his own floor.
I give Nathaniel the slow end he gave them.
Some ruined part of me is screaming the whole time because I trusted these hands with everything once.
Adrian moves to turn Jessa’s face away. She won’t let him, keeping her eyes on mine steadily, telling me without a word that she isn’t going anywhere, not even now.
I drag myself back to a man on the last of my strength, and in death, my uncle’s body shifts back under me, broken and still.
Swaying, painted red from throat to knee, I stand over it.
Twenty shifters fill the room, and one steps forward with his head bowed.
I don’t look at him. My eyes go to Jessa.
Her breath hitches. “Marcus,” she whispers. “Your pants.”
I laugh, half wild. Then the floor comes up, and I go down with it.
“Marcus!” She’s on her knees over me before I hit the ground.