Chapter 1 #2
Dad. So they're his. Brothers. The one in the doorway has a few years on the other—you can tell because the young one glances at him before he decides how much fun he's allowed to have.
Two alphas built the same and standing nothing alike—the young one taking up every inch he can reach, the older one not bothering to.
The cold silver one is their father, and my mother…
conned him to falling in love with her and never once told him I was alive.
Why would she? She wishes I was never born.
I watch the understanding land in the older one and go to ice.
I know that math even from the wrong side of it—the moment a man adds up everything he was told and sees that none of it held, that the warmth was a performance and the wife was a role and the whole soft second life she promised was a set built to be struck.
If she lied about a son, she lied about all of it.
I know my mother… She must have stolen from this man and skipped town.
I see him realize all of it. The alpha energy in him swells with the anger until the pressure on my chest is so much I can barely breathe.
Then all three of them are looking at me, and I know that quiet. Something's being decided.
The hand comes off my throat when I push at it—the young one lets it go, watching his father, waiting to be told. I get my feet under me and tug my shirt straight with hands that won't hold still.
"Where is she?" the father says.
"I don't know."
"Try again."
"I don't know." My voice cracks on it, and I hate that, because a cracking voice sounds like a lie. "I haven’t seen her, I haven’t been here. I got home an hour ago."
"An hour ago." The young one says it like it's the funniest thing he's heard all week. "That's convenient timing, isn't it."
"When did you last speak to her?" the calm brother asks, his eyes needling me.
I have to think about it, and thinking is hard with my heartrate going the way it is. "Uh, like a month? She said—" I stop.
“She said what." The father barks, and it isn't a question.
"That she'd met someone." The alpha father's face doesn't move.
"That his name was Vincent. That he was an alpha and he had money.
" I watch it hit the man in the coat like I've handed him back something he'd lost. Vincent.
So that's the fairytale, standing in my mother's living room with the door broken behind him. Every word lands wrong but it’s the truth. I’m not going to lie right now while the three of them could snap my neck.
"That's all. She said to stay out of sight and that you didn't need to know about me. "
Something happens behind the father's eyes. It's fast, and it's terrible, and then it's gone.
"You knew there was a wedding coming," he says, "and you stayed hidden."
"I didn't stay anywhere. I’ve been a little tied up with my own stuff." My voice is going thin but I don’t dare mention anything about the hospital–these three probably already see me as a weakling. "I didn't know it happened. I didn't know she moved in or anything about a house or a safe—"
"Nobody said anything about a safe." The calm one, quiet, watching me.
The floor goes out from under that. "You said she emptied—someone said—" I don't know who said what.
I don't know what I heard and what I filled in. But I know my mother and her nasty tricks. Emptying out a house of it’s goods and a safe seems like her style.
"Please. I'm not—I don't have anything. Look at me.
Look at this place. If she had money, do you think I'd be here? "
"Kid's got a point," the young one says, bored.
"Or he's good," his father says. "She was good too."
That shuts the room up.
He looks at me for a long moment then, and I make myself very still under it, the way I always do.
"She kept you alive for twenty years," he says slowly. "She hid you from me for nine months. Whatever else you are, you're the one thing she took the trouble to hang on to."
I don't understand what that means until it becomes painfully obvious that he’s not letting me off the hook.
"You're coming with us," he says. "And then she's going to find out we have you."
"She won't come." It's out before I can stop it, flat and fast and true. "You don't understand. She won't come."
"For her son?" The young one snorts. "She'll come."
I look at the floor. There's no version of no she won't that I can say out loud to three absolutely pissed alphas, so I don't say it. They don’t believe me and right now isn’t the time to make them more angry.
"And when she does," the father says, already turning for the door, buttoning his coat, his voice gone flat and finished, worse than the shouting—a man reading out a prison sentence, "she brings back every cent and every piece of what she took, and she stands to face exactly what she's done. " He nods, once. "Bring him."
"Wait—" I don't even know what I'm asking for.
Understanding isn't the thing that saves you; I learned that before I could read.
The thing that saves you is not making it worse.
So I don't fight the hand hauling me toward the broken door.
I twist in it, just enough, just to reach—"My bag. Please, I need my bag—"
And maybe it's the please. Maybe it's how small it comes out.
The dragging stops for half a second, and in that half second I get my fingers around the strap of the plastic bag I set down by the couch ten peaceful minutes and a whole lifetime ago.
I pull it against my chest and fold my arms over it so nobody can see what's inside.
All the medicine I need is in there, and the first rule of my whole life is that nobody finds out what's wrong with me.
Somewhere behind the gray, the calm one—the one who said she's not here, the one who's been watching me this whole time with an attention that feels like a hand laid flat on the back of my neck—doesn’t say a word.
But I can feel him looking. Still looking.
Like there's a sum in this room that isn't adding up, and he's the only one who's noticed, and he hasn't decided yet what to do about it.
I file it away without meaning to. The small useless coal of it.
Can he sense what I am?
Then the young one hauls me out through the door that doesn't even lock anymore, into the bright sun, and I do the only thing I have ever known how to do in the hands of someone bigger and angrier than me.
I go quiet. I go still. I hold my bag, and I let them take me. Cold ahead of me. Clean somewhere behind. Hot around my arm.