“What do you mean, you asked him here?” Ari slammed her palm down on the huge metal desk in her father’s study. It dented a little.
Well, too bad. He’d gone and invited her former bloody alpha to the estate, without asking her first. It wasn’t like she wore an eyepatch for fun; she was deliberately hiding her were nature from the vampires in Skarva. It’s what had painted such a large target on her back as a child, after all, so why would her father risk exposing her secret?
The Duke of Ashes, otherwise known as Parker Ash, didn’t even frown, just slowly shook his head at her. He was seated behind the desk, his posture ramrod straight, the white plaster walls soaring behind him up to a high, vaulted ceiling. He was always so measured, it made her blood boil.
He was tall, at over six foot five, and all sharp lines, with ash-blond hair that he kept short – that meant daily trims for a vampire. She supposed he was good-looking, since most vampires were, but she thought he was about as interesting as a stick.
Wait, that wasn’t a fair comparison to the stick.
Her father’s even voice broached the temporary silence. “I honestly fail to see what the problem is. I didn’t think I required your permission to invite people to my house.” Such cold precision in those words.
“You do when it’s him!”
“Am I to understand you have some problem with him personally?”
And didn’t that just shut her up.
He didn’t bloody know? How could he not know?
Ari opened her mouth to speak, but then snapped it shut. He didn’t know. She wanted to place the blame on her father’s wide shoulders, but that wasn’t actually fair. She’d never told him, now she thought about it, about the pack that had slaughtered her family. Sure, he knew it had happened, but neither she nor Xave had been keen on rehashing their past, so they hadn’t given names, or a location.
They hadn’t wanted to lose the only parent they had left – because even though Ari didn’t like her father much, she’d known that he would have gone out and hunted down the pack responsible for his other son’s death. Vampires were like that, especially older ones like Parker: children were precious. And Parker hadn’t been aware he’d even had children, not until Xave and Ari had shown up on his doorstep. He might not have believed their claim, if not for the fact Ari was the spitting image of his long-dead sister, and Xave had had enough of his father in him that it made the question moot.
So Parker hadn’t doubted that they were his children, born of a short-term fling with a were. He hadn’t known about them – if he had, he would have come for them, Ari didn’t doubt that. Children were rare and prized to long-lived vampires, even freak offspring like her. Maybe that was why Mama had never said anything to him. She hadn’t wanted to fight for them.
Ari sighed and sat down. Normally she didn’t bother with chairs; she didn’t spend a lot of time in the office, mostly because she was too angry to listen to him. Glancing down at her hands, she frowned. Sprinkles of sandy-colored hair rippled across the skin, disappearing almost as quickly as they appeared.
Then, with a calm she didn’t feel, she met her father’s stare directly. His deep violet eyes were the same hue as her single purple iris. “Sebastian Talien was the alpha of my former pack.”
The Duke of Ashes exploded from his seat. The chair fell to the floor, and his heavy desk screeched a few inches toward her. “What?”
So, he really didn’t know.
“He was away when the attack happened.” Ari didn’t know why she said that. “But he was the alpha at the time.”
Her father took a few deep breaths, reclaiming his renowned calm, then turned and righted his seat. “I see.”
“I found him here, last night. He was sniffing around. Father, it is a bad idea to have him here.” Her chin jutted out. “Xave said so.”
Her father shut his eyes at Xave’s name, regret visible across his features. Talking about Xave was the only time she ever saw true emotion from him – aside from his out-of-character outburst before. But then, he had a lot of guilt about his son, didn’t he?
“While I don’t approve of Sebastian sneaking through the estate – and I will talk to him about that – you need help. And he has a certain reputation, regardless of what Xavier may or may not have said.”
“I need help?” Ari glared at him.
The duke looked down at her clenched hands, at the fur appearing and reappearing there.
“You can’t control the shift. You need to learn how. It makes you vulnerable.”
How fatherly.
Unfortunately, the bastard was correct.
“What’s this about ‘a certain reputation’, then?” she asked. “That he slaughters innocent children?”
Her father sat down, flicking his coattails behind him as he did so. “Quite the opposite.”
“The opposite of a child-slaughterer?” One blonde eyebrow shot skyward.
“That is what I said. It was very difficult to track him down, but he seems to have spent the last fifty years helping at-risk children. He’s rumored to have slaughtered an entire pack once, for harming one.”
Chills zapped down her spine.
“He killed a pack?”
Those normally emotionless eyes bored into her. “The most I could find out about the incident was that he killed the lot of them, after a child was hurt. And that it was several decades ago.”
Could that have been her pack?
No.
Don’t be an idiot. He probably started the rumor so that people wouldn’t hate him on sight. Although, would they have?
Not when there were rules about albino children. Stupid, horrible, disgusting rules.