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بيت / Werewolf / Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left / Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

مؤلف: Shelley
“Dad. I have a child. His name is Asher. He’s five.”

“Come back. Now. I’m sending people.” My father’s voice, coming back through a link that had been dead six years, was shaking. Not the cold Alpha King voice I knew.

I’d meant to leave the next morning. But Asher was half-asleep when he murmured, “Daddy, you promised…”

His fifth birthday was in two days. Last month Kael had promised that as soon as the Marking business was settled, he’d take Asher to watch the pack training match. Asher had pinned three drawings of that match to the wall by his bed.

I looked at his sleeping face and decided to wait three more days.

The next morning Helena sent her housekeeper. We were summoned to the main estate. Asher thought his father was finally keeping his promise. He pulled on his little suit and went out with Kael.

In the car Asher asked, “Mommy. Where do my grandfather and grandmother live?”

“Up north. Far from here.”

“Then why don’t we go see them?”

Kael’s eyes flicked to me in the rearview mirror. “Your mom’s used to being on her own. There’s probably no one waiting for her up north.”

He said it the way you state a fact.

I didn’t correct him.

He had always been like this. He thought I couldn’t leave. He thought I would always wait. He thought loving him meant I would put up with everything.

He wasn’t wrong about loving him. Six years, I had.

But I had my own pride.

What I couldn’t put up with was watching Asher grow up here and spend his whole life calling his own father “uncle.”

The Silverfang delegation was already inside the main estate when we arrived. Vivienne’s father had come in person. Kael stood beside Vivienne with his hand on her waist.

Helena announced it in front of everyone.

“Vivienne is pregnant. Her child with Kael will be the next heir of Ironridge. The bond between our two packs will be sealed permanently through this child. The Marking ceremony will be held very soon.”

The Silverfang side clapped. Kael turned to the elders of both packs. “This child is the future of Ironridge.”

His own son was standing right next to him. He didn’t even look this way.

Asher tugged at my sleeve. He tipped his face up and asked quietly, “Mommy. What about me?”

His voice was small but the whole room went quiet.

Vivienne’s father frowned. He turned to Helena. “Whose child is that?”

Helena cut in before anyone else could. “An orphan we took in. A Rogue child. Poor little thing. Sera here is the nanny we hired to look after him.”

Asher froze. He looked up at me.

“I’m not an orphan,” he said quietly. “I have Dad and Mom.”

Helena’s snort buried his sentence. The Silverfang table started looking us over. The way you look over staff. One of the older men next to Vivienne’s father said, half-laughing, “Does the Ironridge pack adopt just any rogue wolf?”

Kael’s face changed for a fraction of a second. He opened his mouth.

Vivienne picked that exact moment to slip her arm through his and lean up to his ear. “Not in front of my father. Please.”

Kael said nothing.

Asher didn’t cry. He didn’t ask again. He started, very quietly, undoing the third button of the small suit he’d refused to take off all morning.

His eyes flickered darker for a second. That was the wolf cub pushing up, and then pushing back down. On this pack’s ground, in front of this room, he could not let himself cry.

I crouched down and folded his cold little hand into mine.

“Sweetheart. Come with mommy. There’s no place for us here.”

I stood up. I looked at the room. My voice was even.

“My son is not an orphan. He has a mother. His father is dead.”

The hall went still for three seconds. Helena’s face was darker than my words.

I took Asher’s hand and started walking. Vivienne’s voice came from behind me. She moved around in front of me and slowly raised a finger, manicured nude, and tapped the silver chain at my collarbone.

“Sera. That pendant has been passed down to the Luna of the Thorne family for generations. The Marking ceremony is coming up. Time for it to go home.”

That pendant. Kael had put it on me himself, the winter Asher was born, and told me the Luna of the Thorne house was the woman who wore that chain.

So that was why we’d been summoned. To strip the son of his place and the mother of her chain. Both jobs in one afternoon.

I stopped and looked at Kael.

Kael dropped his eyes to his own shoes. He spoke in a voice I had never heard him use with me, small and almost coaxing.

“Vivienne’s right. The pendant should go to the Luna.”

The lipstick mark on his collar was much clearer in the chandelier light than it had been in our bedroom that morning.

I reached up, took the chain off, and set it down on the center of the long table. Right where Vivienne wouldn’t even need to stretch.

I led Asher out of the main estate. He held my hand the whole way. He didn’t let go once.
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  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 9

    I walked past Kael. Asher walked toward him slowly from the other end of the hall.He told me later what happened.Kael saw him, and his eyes lit up. This was his son. A year unseen, and half a head taller.Asher stopped in front of Kael and looked at him steadily. Kael reached for his head. Asher moved his head out of reach.Asher took something out of an inside pocket and pressed it into Kael’s palm. A rusted thumbtack with a small blue dot painted on the metal cap.Kael didn’t understand.“It’s the thumbtack I used to pin my drawings up with,” Asher said. “Mommy tore the drawings down. The thumbtacks were still there. I had grandfather’s people pull them off the wall, one by one, and mail them to me. Forty-seven of them.”He paused.“I was going to ask if you remembered the drawings. But thinking about it, you probably never noticed them at all.”Kael’s fist closed on the thumbtack. The point cut into his palm. He opened his mouth. He couldn’t get one word out.Asher took a step bac

  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 8

    A year had passed. A whole year.My father picked an autumn morning. In the central hall of Northcrest, in front of every pack under northern jurisdiction, he passed the seat of Alpha King to me. Old northern protocol meant every pack under the jurisdiction had to send a representative. Ironridge, a pack under northern jurisdiction, was on the list.Kael had no way out of it.I wore the silver ceremonial gown of the Northcrest line of succession. Asher wore a small grey suit. He had grown half a head in a year. He walked up to me and put my left hand in his.The ceremony began. Asher and I walked the long red carpet up to the high platform together.Every pack representative rose.I knew Kael had seen us, because of the way the silence behind one of the rear rows of the procession deepened.I looked up.He stood at the front of the Ironridge delegation. He was much thinner than a year ago, his eye sockets sunken, and a day’s worth of stubble on his jaw. The Ironridge Alpha’s ceremonial

  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 7

    The Northcrest escort picked us up and took every route that bypassed Ironridge patrol points. The whole way I braced for my father’s anger. He had opposed Kael for six years. He had not seen me in six years.When we pulled up to the estate gates he didn’t say anything. He crouched down and opened his arms to Asher. Asher startled and hid behind my legs. My father stayed crouched on the step. Almost a minute.My mother was the one who finally moved. She fished half a butter cookie out of her coat pocket and held it out to Asher. He looked at it. He looked at me. I nodded. He put his small hand into hers. My mother’s tears came down at once. She said, “She’s too thin.”She meant me, not the child.My father stood and pulled me in without a word. The familiar cedar-and-old-library smell on his collar. Six years and he was still wearing the same cologne. He brushed the back of my neck. “Kael. We’ll talk about him later.”A group of pack children Asher’s age was on the lawn. They saw him a

  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 6

    Kael stayed in our apartment for two days. He didn’t go out.On the third day, before dawn, the doorbell rang. He flew to it. Vivienne was at the door, a takeout bag in her hand, worried he hadn’t eaten.Around her neck was my pendant. The Thorne family heirloom Luna chain. The one she had taken off my neck in front of the whole pack.The same cloying woody perfume on her, even thicker than yesterday.He thought of the text she had sent from his phone to Asher. “I have a surprise for him.” He thought of Asher’s white face at the doorway of the rehearsal hall.He yanked the chain off her neck. The metal snapped and tore a thin red line into her throat.“What are you—”He didn’t let her finish. He pinned her to the doorframe with one hand on her throat.Vivienne thrashed and screamed.“Kael, have you lost it?”“I’m carrying your child!”“I’m your rightful Mate.”Kael let out a short, cold laugh. He let her go and stepped back. He watched her slide down the doorframe to the floor.“I neve

  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 5

    By daylight Kael was still on the floor at Asher’s door. He was digging into the gap of the couch cushions with his fingers. He pulled out one long dark brown hair. It was mine. He closed his fist around it.He slept on the couch.He woke to someone laying a blanket over him. Eyes still closed, he caught the wrist and said my name.“Sera.”He opened his eyes. It was Vivienne.Her hair was loose. The thing she was wearing was the cream cashmere cardigan Kael had spent three hours picking out for me last anniversary. He recognized it on sight.In the dim living room, the outline of her hair almost looked like mine for half a second. Then the cloying woody perfume, the one I would never wear, cut through the illusion.He threw her hand off. He stared at the cardigan. His voice was cold enough to shake.“Take her clothes off.”“Kael, I was worried about you—”“I said. Take it off.”Vivienne bit her lip and slid the cardigan off her shoulders, slowly. Halfway out the door she turned back. “

  • Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left   Chapter 4

    Marcus told me later what was happening on Kael’s side at the exact same moment. He was still at the main estate handling the rehearsal follow-up. He froze for two seconds when the call cut, then redialed. The line was dead. He redialed again, and the line was dead again.He swept a stack of family documents off the conference table and ran for his car. Vivienne called his name behind him. The door was already closed.The highway. Wipers on the fastest setting and still no road through the rain.In his head it was a different rain. Six years ago. The first time he came to that small training field at the Northcrest border. My father had been furious. He’d locked Kael in a temporary border outpost for two days. The third day was a storm. I’d put a small backpack on, scaled the wall, and shown up at the outpost door.I had said: “You’re not letting me leave Northcrest. Then I’ll leave on my own.”I had been talking to Kael. I had also been talking to my father.Kael hadn’t said a word th

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