Chapter 12
Millie
I nearly stroked out over his bluntly delivered words. This man knew exactly who I was. Also, that statement made me instantly aware that I’d come face to face with my stalker. The very man who’d threatened to assault me after killing my mate!
A dizzying combo of fear and panic bubbled to the surface of my chest and the blood in my veins seemed to pump double-time with fear-
laced adrenaline.
“Get out of here right now!” I finally managed to force out of my suddenly parched and scratchy throat.
“Sure,” the dark eyed man agreed in a low, rumbly tone, “as soon as you leave with me.”
His gaze dropped down to my androgynous outfit like I was wearing a bikini and not a plain white tee and basic black straight-legged pants like everyone else.
“If you try anything, I’ll scream,” I whisper-warned him, eyeing all the people milling around the coffee shop.
The man snorted. “And say what? A shifter asked you to leave with him and return back home to your pack in Alaska? I don’t think so, Millie. You aren’t that naive. You know what people will say if you claim something like that.”
He discretely made a twirling motion with his hand beside his ear to insinuate they’d think I was crazy.
Of course, he was right. Nobody would believe me if I said shit like that out loud. Still, I wasn’t going anywhere with this unhinged ware. Not now. Not ever.
“I don’t need to say that, I can just tell everyone that you’re threatening me and call the police to have them deal with you,” I challenged.
“You could, but I’d be long gone by the time they ever got here. Besides, you haven’t heard everything I have to say yet. Don’t you want to know about your family, Millie? About your mother? About why she left your no-good thieving father and headed back to her family in Alaska?”
I was curious. There was no denying it. Every nerve in my body was shouting as much. But the fact that this stranger had just called my father a “no-good thief” also made me want to slap that smug look clean off his cruel face.
“Don’t talk about my father like that!” I nearly growled, baring my teeth as I leaned halfway across the counter to make my point.
My sudden anger seemed to amuse the ware. “I see you’ve inherited your mother’s fierceness. I like that, omega. You’re going to need that strength when you’re my mate. It’s hard work leading a pack. But under my tutelage, you’ll pick it up quickly enough.”
I didn’t even realize I was doing it until the sound arose in my throat. A low grumble that could only be described as a warning growl to anyone who experienced it.
“I’ll never be your mate!” I spat back, taking care not to raise my voice so that Jessica or the customers would overhear me. “I already have the only mate I’ll ever want or need.”
This time, the ware on the other side of the counter growled at my statement.
“Don’t push me, omega! I can barely contain my wolf as it is.
That fool already has enough to answer for.
Ethan Conner stole what was mine. You were promised to me before you were even born.
You should have been filled with my knot, not his.
I’m going to peel the flesh from his bones and piss on his corpse for what he’s done. ”
Well, that certainly seemed rational. Fucking hell, this man was a true deviant of the highest level!
“Ethan or not,” I spat back, “I would never belong to you, asshole! I don’t know what kind of sick place you live in, but it’s the twenty-first century, not the dark ages. Women aren’t property. They make their own decisions and choices. Nobody, man or ware, tells me what to think or do!”
The shifter’s rage was so intense, he was practically vibrating with it now.
“You’ve been raised amongst humans, omega,” he choked out, his tone several octaves deeper than before.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. But I’m going to teach you all about our ways, mate.
I’m going to teach you every night with this,” he grabbed his crotch below the counter and I sneered back at him with revulsion.
“Now, are you going to come with me, or do I have to kill that pathetic pack of orphans keeping you from me to convince you that this is your fate?”
“Don’t you dare threaten my family! They have nothing to do with this!” I shouldn’t have allowed him to see how terrified the prospect of losing my family made me. It gave him a power he would only wield for evil.
“I think I’ll start with the young one,” he thoughtfully began, eating up the look of fear in my eyes as he considered his options. “He seems so innocent. So trusting. I bet he won’t even see it coming, which is probably for the best.”
“Stop it!”
“Then I’ll move on to the two toy-boy soldiers. I can’t wait to make those losers squeal with pain.”
“I said, stop it!” I demanded, but the venom had been drained out of my words and now I just sounded scared.
“And after I’ve worked my way through each one of those orphans masquerading as a pack, I’m going to take my time with Conner. I’ve fantasized about all the ways I can make him hurt. You can’t imagine the different ways I can make him suffer, omega. I can be creative when I want to be.”
Furious tears sprang to my eyes and bile in my throat. “If you hurt a single one of them, I’ll kill you!”
The ware smiled darkly. “No, you won’t. You’ll be a good omega and do what you’re told. You’ll take my knot and bite like you were always meant to. After our first child is born, you won’t even remember old-what’s-his-face rotting in an unmarked grave in some distant state.”
Reaching into his pocket, the man extracted a small piece of paper with numbers and a name scrawled on it. “I expect a phone call within twenty-four hours or else I’m going to start following through on what we talked about here today.”
Sliding the paper across the counter, the ware tossed down a twenty beside it and exited the coffee shop. Through the pooled moisture in my eyes, I read the name “Osyrius” and a number scrawled in black ink.
“Who is this son-of-a-bitch?” Ethan demanded, as he looked down at the piece of paper Osyrius had handed me this afternoon while I was at work.
“I’m not sure yet,” Flint returned. “But it’s not going to take long to figure out. One of my ware connections told me he has a file on somebody by that name and will send it right over with pictures so we can determine if it’s him.”
“How about you, Stark? Have you ever come across him in your business dealings?” Ethan pressed, breathing so hard I could see his chest rising and falling from across the room.
Stark shook his head. “No. But with a name like that, it shouldn’t be hard to track him.”
“I’m sorry, Millie. I should have been there. I should have taken care of the man myself,” Gavin apologized from his place beside the fire. Until now, he’d been cradling his head in his hands, devastated over what had happened on “his watch”.
Placing my hand on Gavin’s slumped shoulders, I took a seat beside him. For the hundredth time since he’d returned from the comic shop, I reassured him this incident wasn’t his fault.
“I told you to leave, remember? Nobody knew what my stalker looked like. There’s no way you would have been able to stop Osyrius from coming into that coffee shop today, even if you’d been stationed directly at the front door.
None of you could have,” I added, glancing around the room at all the downturned faces.
“Even if you smelled him coming, the coffee shop is open to the public. You would have no authority to keep him from entering it.”
The front door swung open then and Logan strolled inside. Right away, he picked up on the dark mood in the air.
“What did I miss?” He asked as he poured himself a whiskey from the decanter resting on the coffee table.
Colt succinctly explained while Ethan stalked back and forth in front of the hearth on which I was perched beside Gavin.
Logan didn’t convey any emotions as he listened without interruption. His silence caused Ethan to pause his pacing and study his brother hard.
“You’ve lived in Alaska longer than any of us,” he noted. “Have you heard of someone called Osyrius from the Tupilaq pack?”
Logan didn’t answer right away. Instead, he savored the mouthful of liquor he’d been sipping before slowly swallowing it down. “I can’t say I have. At least, not that I remember.”
There was something about his response that didn’t sound entirely honest. Kind of like he was being evasive about something, though I couldn’t tell what.
“My friend just sent over that file,” Flint interrupted, as his phone began to ding multiple times in a row. His eyebrows rose as he opened it and scanned through the contents. “Ethan, you’re going to want to see this.”
Handing over his phone, my mate began to scroll through the electronic file. His face tightened as he worked his way through it in total silence.
Not able to take the suspense any longer, I demanded, “What is it?” Part of me didn’t want to know, but a bigger part of me needed to.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan said by way of denial, tossing the phone back at Flint after he’d sent the file to his own device. “This piece of shit isn’t going to live long enough to be a problem.”
Getting to my feet, I stalked over to Flint and put out my hand. “Let me see the documents. I have a right to know who’s been stalking me, Flint!”
Ethan could threaten Flint with his eyes all he wanted. He couldn’t stop me from finding out what I had every right to know. It was my life on the line, after all. I shouldn’t be kept in the dark about who I was dealing with.
Flint shrugged. “She’s the only one who can identify the man, Ethan. None of us have ever met or seen him before.”
A pained expression of shame washed over Gavin’s face again. I wanted to comfort him, but nothing I said was going to help right now. The wound was still too fresh. We’d talk about it again later, when he could truly hear what I had to say.
In truth, I was glad the youngest man in our pack wasn’t there when Osyrius had entered the coffee shop.
My stalker was an absolute brute. Far larger than Gavin and ten times as aggressive.
After all the threats he’d made in regard to killing my family, I wasn’t exactly eager to give him a chance to carry them out.
I might have been scared for myself, but Osyrius had left me terrified for my pack.
I didn’t know the man from a hole in the wall, but I could tell the ware was capable of great cruelty and savage acts of violence.
The eyes never lie, and his were crazy as hell.
Flint unlocked his screen, pulled up a picture of Osyrius, and flipped it toward me. “Is this the guy that you talked to this afternoon, Millie?”
The minute my eyes landed on the image, my body reacted like he was directly in front of me. My muscles tightened, the hairs on my arms pricked into a standing position, and my mouth grew instantly dry.
“That’s him,” I affirmed, once I’d gathered my wits about me.
I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the man’s face and those disturbing eyes.
It wasn’t their color, per se. A kind of golden brown with flecks of darker shades streaked throughout.
It was how much of the whites were showing as he looked at me, like he didn’t dare blink in case he missed the smallest movement.
Like he was always in hunting mode, and I was his intended prey.
“That’s him,” I choked out again, feeling like the walls were closing in all around me.
Ethan rushed to my side and helped me to the couch.
I felt cold all over as I remembered the threats the arrogant asshole had made.
He wanted to kill my mate, my whole pack.
I might never have shifted before, but despite that, this was still my family.
Losing them was the worst fate I could imagine.
“Don’t worry, Princess. You never have to see him again,” Ethan soothed, arranging me onto his lap and holding me close as he activated that magnificent rumbling purr of his that always managed to calm my nerves and recenter my focus.
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” I spoke, looping my arms around his neck and snuggling closer. “It’s you, Ethan. You and your brothers. Osyrius said he was going to kill every single one of you if I didn’t go back to Alaska with him!”
Flint snorted. “I’d love to see him try!”
“Flint,” Ethan chastised, rubbing soft circles on my back as he kissed my neck, “now’s not the time for bravado.”
The sound of the flames crackling away in the fireplace dominated the room for several heartbeats. Then, the phone in my pocket rang and snagged all of our attention.
It took me a second to realize it was mine, being it was the burner phone Flint had only just given me. I hadn’t received any calls on it yet and hadn’t ever heard the ring tone before. Even more surprising, somebody who wasn’t in this room had my number.
Reaching into my back pocket, I extracted my cell and stared at a set of unfamiliar numbers. All I knew was that they weren’t from a local area code, which I found even more damning than anything.
Eyes blazing, Ethan said, “Answer it, but put it on speaker phone so we can all hear what’s being said.”
Nodding, I clicked on the call and there was nothing but air until a feminine voice replied, “Can I please speak to Millie?”
“This is she,” I returned, taken off guard because I’d thought for sure it would be Osyrius calling me to remind me about his twenty-four-hour deadline.
“Millie,” the caller hesitantly spoke, “it’s Jenny.” The woman paused and cleared their throat. “Your mother.”
My stomach dropped out and my vision blurred. “Mom?”