Chapter 5 – The Whelp

(Rene)

I told my men one hour.

I told myself I'd wait it out at the hotel like an Alpha with a shred of self-control.

Instead I'm leaning on the door of a trailer that smells like mildew, cheap soap, and her, and self-control can go to hell.

Her scent is everywhere out here.

Worn into the doorframe, the cracked step, the dead plant by the welcome mat she clearly never watered.

Five years of my mate living a life I knew nothing about, eleven feet from a propane tank, and my wolf is pacing the inside of my skull cataloging all of it like evidence.

Ours lives here. Ours has been cold. Ours has been hungry.

Ours did this to herself.

He doesn't accept that.

He never has.

He’s too focused on the instinct to claim and protect. It blinds him to the deception.

It’s a good thing he’s not the one in control.

The Miata turns into the gravel and stops too fast when she sees me.

She’s afraid.

Good.

She gets out slow, keys still in her fist like she's thinking about using them as a weapon.

Which is fucking ridiculous. I don’t know how she’s survived out here on her own.

Her throat's gone the color of a storm.

My marks.

Four of them, and the thin red line under her jaw where I lost my grip on my claws when she said the word son.

The satisfaction that gives me is not something I plan to examine.

"You're early," she says.

"I changed my mind about waiting."

"Rene-"

"Pack."

I push off the door.

"You've got twenty minutes."

She doesn't move.

She's staring at me the way you stare at a cyclone coming at you across a field, wondering if you have any chance at outrunning it.

Then a screen door bangs somewhere to my left, and everything in me goes still.

"MOM!"

A blur comes rushing toward us.

Small.

Fast.

A four-year-old in a dinosaur shirt two sizes too big, flushed with fever, running flat-out on legs that shouldn't have the juice for it, and not toward his mother.

Toward the car.

"Is that a real one?"

He skids to a stop in the gravel, gawking up at the SUV like it's a spaceship.

"Is it yours? It's so black."

Then he turns and finds me, and I wait for it.

The flinch.

The wail.

The thing children do when they get close to what I am and their bodies tell them to run even though their brains don’t understand why.

It doesn't come.

He tips his head all the way back to take me in, and grins, looking delighted, like I'm the best thing that's happened to him all week.

Obviously not very smart.

Whoever planted this seed in Angelique’s belly was clearly dim-witted.

"Whoa. You're really big."

The scent reaches me a half-second behind the boy.

Wolf.

Young, unformed, but all werewolf.

Not a half-blood like I expected.

For a split second I wonder whether he could be mine.

Another sniff puts that ridiculous notion to rest.

Some fucking wolf got a pup out of my mate.

Somebody who isn't me.

The fury that comes up is so clean and so total it whites out the edges of my vision.

She let some other male do this.

While my mother was sifting ash.

While I was breaking my own hand on a tree.

She was somewhere warm with somebody's cock inside her, making this.

I look down at the proof of it, this small grinning traitor's get, and feel a wave of disgust.

"What's your name?" he demands.

And my wolf, my furious, betrayed, five-years-starved wolf, does something I have no word for.

He doesn't snarl.

He doesn't recoil from the evidence of her unfaithfulness.

He goes quiet.

Curious.

He tips his head the same way the pup just did.

I shove him down so hard it hurts.

"Zack."

Angelique's voice is filled with the kind of fear that make people do stupid things.

She's crossed the gravel and got her hands on his shoulders, drawing him back into her body.

She's looking at me over the top of his head like a woman watching a wolf decide whether her child is food.

"Baby, don't... come here. Leave the man alone."

"But he's huge," Zack says, betrayed, like she's denying him a museum.

"I know."

"Are we going in the black car?"

She doesn't answer him.

She can't.

Her mouth's gone to a flat white line and her eyes haven't left mine.

The bond runs her terror straight into my chest, undiluted, and I feel the dark thing in me lean toward it like a plant toward a window.

"Yeah," I tell the boy, "You're going in the black car."

Zack throws both fists in the air like he's won something.

His mother looks at me like I've taken something instead.

I should be enjoying that.

I am. Mostly.

But I'm still looking at the kid bouncing on his little legs in the gravel, fearless in front of an Alpha three times his size.

Definitely slow.

I turn for the SUV, unwilling to keep looking at him.

"Twenty minutes," I say flatly, getting into the driver’s seat and closing the door firmly behind me.