I’d been surprised to see Brix climb out of the battered ,old truck behind Elder White. His presence caught me off guard and from the look on Elder White’s wrinkled brown face, that had been his intention. The man who had dictated every facet of my life for ten years had waited until we reached the desert clearing before allowing me to set eyes on Brix. This felt like a set up. The Elders were going to use my friend to try to strong arm me into being obedient. Did he know? Was he complicit in this?
Brix approached me with his hands in the air, but it was unnecessary. I stumbled backward as he moved fully into the clearing with me.
“Hey there.”
“Brix? Wha—what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to convince you to come home.”
I shook my head, still in disbelief that he stood before me. His presence was jarring. “This is my home now.”
“No. Don’t say that. You haven’t been here that long. I know it’s something new, but your home is back in Houston. With us. Your family.”
Once upon a time, that was exactly how I saw him and the others he’d named. Recent events made me see things differently. I scoffed. “Family? My only family is barred from seeing me and has been since I was a teenager. Don’t talk to me about family, Brix, because you just sound stupid.”
He groaned. “Come on, Janine, don’t be stubborn! You know what I mean. The family we created. Me, you, Cody, Sasha. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“It didn’t count for anything when I was told I had to mate you. My family didn’t have my back then, didn’t come to my defense when I protested.”
“I didn’t think there was anything to protest. They weren’t asking anything too awful of you.”
“They weren’t asking me anything! They were forcing the both of us! I wasn’t the only one affected by their decision! That’s what never made sense to me about the entire situation. I was the only one upset.”
As he stared at me unblinkingly, his jaw was tense. “Unlike you, I didn’t find the idea of being bonded to you for life so repulsive. The moment the Elders informed me of their decision, I actually looked forward to it.”
My mouth snapped shut in surprise. I hadn’t known that. Brix had never shown any romantic interest in me outside of trying to flirt as teenagers when I first arrived at the Elders’ home. I pushed out a harsh breath.
“Brix.”
He shook his head the moment I said his name. “You don’t need to say anything. It is what it is, and I had to learn the hard way that I was alone in my feelings. But none of that matters right now. All of this confusion and fear is unnecessary. If you would just come back to Houston and become my mate, they’ll drop this whole thing.”
I stared at him in disbelief. How could he be so naive? “Brix, you have to know that they’ll never drop this. If I left with you all right now, I’d be paying for this for the rest of my miserable life.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that, Janine. We can end this right now if you would just come back with us.”
I rolled my eyes, tired of him repeating that phrase as if that made it true. “You know damn well that isn’t happening.”
His smooth jaw clenched. “The Elders have already said that we aren’t leaving here without you unless you no longer breathe. What do you think that means, Janine? Just come with us; I’m begging you!”
I stared at him, unsurprised that the Elders had been plotting on my life. Something told me that blood would be shed on this day. “Why do you think they came for me?”
He didn’t even hesitate, immediately spouting the nonsense the Elders had parroted to us over the years. “Because they care for you! I care for you! We were a family!”
“We had other family that left,” I said with a shrug. “Kids that lived with us at the Big House who would run away in the middle of the night. Whole families that would abandon their houses while we all slept. Why didn’t the Elders ever go looking for them? Did they not care about any of those other members of our pack?”
For a moment, he said nothing and I thought maybe I had gotten through to him, but then I could see his face harden as his fists clenched at his side. The sight of it made me sad.
“They weren’t important. Your assistance would bring about a new era for our pack.”
I shook my head in disappointment. Unfortunately, my old friend could not be saved. I had no idea what kind of poison they’d dripped in his ears about me once I left, but it was clear that he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “You need to leave, Brix. And never come back.”
This time he cringed, and I wondered if it was real or fabricated. “We were friends once.”
I nodded. “We were. Back when we were both ignorant and gullible. Now, I know better and won’t let the Elders continue to run my life. You need to wake up, Brix! They’ve been lying to us about everything!”
“Is this it, then? You refuse to come back home?”
“Open your eyes! They’ve been feeding you bullshit about becoming an Alpha, but that’s a lie. You can’t mate someone to become an Alpha; you have to be born that way. They are using you, Brix. Please listen to me! They are just using you to try and control me. I’m an Alpha. They lied to us both!”
I was unable to harbor my emotions, and tears sprang from my eyes as I begged what was once my only friend to believe me. His eyes widened briefly as I screamed at him, but there was no use in wasting my breath. The moment I saw him shake his head as if to knock my truths from his ears, I realized that the man I knew and loved like he was my brother was unquestionably lost from me. I raised my face to the sky and screamed out my frustrations as my wolf burst forth from me and charged for him. If my only options were to go with the Elders or die, then I would fight until Brix wrenched every breath from my body.
Brix’s change was instant, and we collided in the middle of the desert, a tangle of teeth and claws. I fought for everything I gained since leaving, and he fought to strip it all away from me. He was bigger than me, outweighing me by at least twenty pounds, but my speed made up for my size. He swiped at me, claws dragging across my back while I tried to reach his flank. I cried out at the pain and lost my footing, sliding through the dirt while Brix continued to attack me. After suffering several injurious bites to my loin and hip, I managed to circle him twice and jump on his back, aiming my muzzle at his neck.
Latching on, I swung down, slicing through his pelt to get to the flesh of his throat in a clean arc until I was below him and he was howling for pain. When he fell to the ground and didn’t immediately get back up, it was obvious that I had the clear victory. As I stood over him, seconds away from ending everything, the look in his eyes stopped me. Despite what my wolf wanted, I knew that if I killed Brix, I’d never be able to live with myself.
Distantly, I could hear Elder White screaming for me to finish the job, but I tuned him out and did something that I would never have done had I been thinking clearly and not under a cloud of pain. I turned my back on Brix and limped away from him, heading toward my Jeep. As soon as I reached Lenny, I braved the excruciating pain to shift back. I could see Elder White’s furious gaze clearly from fifty feet away, and though I had to grit my teeth to do so, I smiled at him.
“I’ll leave the senseless killings to you, but know this; if you step foot in Madow again, I will finish what I started today, starting with you and ending with everyone you bring with you.” I didn’t have to yell; I knew he could hear me just fine as could everyone else in attendance. The fear I saw in his eyes was payment enough for the shit he’d put me through—not only today but since I was sixteen years old. I spat on the ground, and the wad of mucus was thick and bright red. “Take your alpha and leave this place.”
I had no intentions of staying to see if they followed my directive. I turned to Lenny, whose face was ashen and pinched tight with worry.
“Lenny, take me home.”
♥♥♥♥
I watched until the tail lights from Lenny’s car disappeared in the darkness before turning back to the scene in front of me. Two men had rushed forward to help the fallen man who’d fought Janine, but the older wolf who’d watched over the battle with a look of glee in his watery eyes halted the assistance.
“Leave him!” he spat with a dismissive wave of his gnarled hand.
He must be the Elder White that Janine had referenced. Elder or not, I had no respect for a wolf who wielded manipulation as his weapon. I walked toward him, sensing Adrian and Jarred at my back. I saw his eyes run over me curiously before he flicked them over my shoulder in a dismissive act. It was a move meant to be disrespectful of my rank as alpha, but I’d smelled the bitter scent of fear rise off of him when Janine rose from the fight and warned him from returning; his disrespect didn’t bother me. I stopped five feet away from him.
“You’ll do right to heed her warning.”
His thin lip curled. “How can you let a woman come onto your land and bark orders like a recalcitrant puppy? Pathetic!”
I chuckled. “Well, it’s not my land; it belongs to Bani Dowd—a woman. And I was raised to have respect for all alphas, whether they were mine or not.”
His eyes became so wide, I thought they would pop out of his skull, but his lack of denial for my claim was every bit a confirmation of what I already suspected. He—and the others like him in that cult they called a pack—knew exactly what Janine was when they decided to take her from her mother and “raise” her.
“As I said, you’ll do well to heed the alpha’s warning. There is just one thing, however. You need to deliver the alpha’s mother, unharmed.”
A flash of light returned to Elder White’s eyes—surely he thought my demand gave him leverage.
“Jeanetta Winston is quite fine where she’s at.”
I shoved my hands deep into my pockets to keep from looping them around his throat. From the moment Adrian brought word that this scum had arrived in Madow, my wolf had been thirsty for blood, and the only thing keeping him inside my skin was the image of Lenny driving Janine away from the fight. Elder White had no idea how close he was to bleeding out onto the dust bowl he stood on.
“You will deliver the alpha’s mother in no more than two days’ time, or you will find me on your doorstep, and I promise you that I am not as merciful as Janine.” I grinned, letting my fangs slide down over my bottom lip.
He straightened his spine, standing to his full height over my five-feet-ten inches, but the still present stench of fear wafting off of him made the move comical. “I don’t know how you wild wolves do things out here in the middle of nowhere, but in the city, we have laws. You can’t just waltz into a pack with guns blazing and think you’re going to be able to walk back out.”
His haughty tone amused me, and I tugged on my beard, pretending to be in thought. “I wonder just how interested the council you refer to would be to hear how you had an alpha in your pack and attempted to mate them off instead of letting them rule.”
His watery eyes shot daggers at me, and if looks could kill, I’d be nothing but a flash of soot under a pair of boots. I was no more fazed by the hatred in his eyes than I was by the sight of the mostly unharmed—save for the gashes around his throat—wolf being helped into the back of a vehicle. All that mattered to me was making sure he understood what I was saying.
“Forty-eight hours.” I backed away a few feet before giving him my back and walking toward my truck. Before climbing inside, I turned to Adrian.
“Make sure every one of them leaves Madow tonight. Have someone follow them to the interstate just to be sure.” He nodded and clapped me on the back before going to relay the message to Jarred.
I jumped in my truck and sped off in the direction of town. I reached Janine’s apartment in twenty minutes, but after knocking on her door repeatedly without an answer, I remembered that I had moved her to the ranch house the day before. As I jogged back to my truck, I whipped out my phone and dialed her number, but it rang until it went to voicemail. My next call was to my sister who answered on the fifth ring.
“Lenny, I’m trying to call Janine but—”
“We’re at the house,” was all she said before the line went dead.
♥♥♥♥
I stood outside the door to my house for a minute, just trying to calm myself down. From my vantage point of the fight, it didn’t seem like much happened before Janine had the other wolf at the throat. I had no idea how severe Janine’s injuries were, but I assumed they must have been awful if she wasn’t answering her phone. When I finally walked in, the first floor was silent. There were no signs of life anywhere, which was unusual for this time of night. It was just after seven, which was around the time we usually ate dinner together as a pack. The stark difference was a reminder of how crazy the last few hours had been.
When I hit the landing at the top of the stairs, Lenny exited my bedroom and joined me in the hallway.
“What’s going on?” I didn’t even try to mask the concern in my voice.
My sister sighed and ran a shaky hand over the top of her head, pulling some of her braids away from her face. This ordeal had to have been hard for her to watch as well, not only because of how much she cared about Janine but because of the bond they had developed in the past six weeks. Without giving her a moment to speak, I pulled her into a tight hug and sent waves of love and appreciation through the strings of our bond. As the pack omega, emoting was her thing, but titles and roles aside, as her alpha, I knew when to give the members of my pack what they needed. Right now, Lenny needed something positive in the aftermath of the first bloodbath she’d ever been witness to. When she pulled back, there was a smile that hadn’t been there before.
“Thank you for that. You just don’t know how much I needed it.”
I grabbed the back of her neck and touched my forehead to hers. “I think I did know.”
She grinned at me. “Oh yeah, that’s right, alpha.”
I chuckled lightly at her teasing and stepped back. “Janine? Is she okay?”
Lenny sighed once more and nodded. “She will be. Just give her time.” Then she patted my arm and walked off to her own bedroom, shutting the door behind her softly.
I entered my room and—upon finding the bed empty—went into the bathroom where I found Janine in what looked like a crime scene. She sat slouched down inside the tub with bloodstained water up to her chin. Her eyes were wide open and she stared blankly at a spot in the water. Moving swiftly, I squatted next to the opposite end of the tub and simultaneously switched on the faucet and reached into the opaque water to twist open the drain.
When all of the soiled water was gone, I was glad to see that many of the deep gashes on her thighs and calves had already begun to heal, but I could tell by her shallow breathing that she was still in pain. I closed the drain and dried off my arm on a towel before jogging down the stairs and going into the kitchen. In less than a minute, I was able to locate the dried casatia I was looking for and hurried back up the steps to drop them in the freshly drawn water. The moment they hit the liquid, their leaves began to rehydrate and secrete their essence. After a moment, Janine’s shoulders relaxed from their tense state and I knew the herbs were working to relieve her pain.
Once the water hit her chin, I shut off the faucet and sat down, pressing my back against the wall as I watched her. She hadn’t moved from her position when I’d first entered the room, and Lenny’s sole instruction was front and center in my mind. Just give her time. I would give her all the time she needed. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes.
“Are they gone?”
I jerked my head forward and looked over at Janine. Her bourbon-brown orbs were on me.
“They’re leaving now. Adrian is making sure of it.”
She dropped her gaze to the water that had turned green from the casatia. “They won’t be back.”
I inclined my head. If they knew what was good for them, someone needed to make their way back to deliver her mother, but she didn’t need to know about that right now.
“You sure about that?”
“They live by a code, however screwed up it might be. Because I won the battle, there is nothing left for them here. I’m dead to them now. Not as dead as they would prefer but dead enough.” Thin rivulets of tears trailed down her cheeks and disappeared into the water. “I’m finally free.”
Scrambling to the side of the tub, I reached out and brushed away those tears. The way she leaned into my touch caused my wolf to preen. “No more looking over your shoulder or avoiding your phone. You can do whatever you want and go wherever you’d like.”
When she looked up at me, I saw everything we never said aloud shining back at me, and I wanted to howl to the moon about the good thing I’ve found.
“Right here with you is the only place I want to be.”