Matthias hated himself. He hated everything surrounding this situation. He looked at Raine, and the guilt rose like bile in his throat, thick and choking, until he could barely breathe around it. He wrenched his gaze away from her, his jaw clenching hard enough to crack bone, his hands curling into fists at his sides. He couldn’t afford to unravel here, not in front of her, not in front of anyone. The pack was still watching, waiting for their alpha to get a grip. When the last of the earth had been thrown and the funeral rites ended, the crowd began to scatter, their murmurs soft and reverent as they drifted away in small clusters. But Matthias remained where he was standing, rooted to the spot, staring down at the freshly covered grave, his breath dragging rough and uneven from his lungs. He didn’t even hear Raine approach. But he felt her, unsurprisingly. She came to stand behind him, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, soft and steady agains
His son’s grave was too shallow. Matthias stood at the edge of it, staring down at the dark, gaping wound carved into the earth, and all he could think about was how small it looked. How wrong it felt. Silas had never been small. Even as a boy, he had carried himself with the weight of someone twice his size, always loud, brash, burning bright enough to scorch everything around him. A natural born alpha, he would have been the perfect leader. And now there was nothing left of him but the brittle bones and torn flesh wrapped in funeral cloth, waiting to be swallowed by the dirt. Still and quiet, just has his mother had been before she’d been given back to the earth. Matthias’s hands curled into fists at his sides, his nails digging deep enough to break skin. Around him, the pack gathered in heavy silence, a sea of bowed heads and tight, grief-stricken faces. The air was thick with the scent of smoke and damp earth, the forest pressing close, watching with cold, indifferent eyes.
“This is stupid,” Selene hissed from she was sprawled on Killian’s office couch, lazily thumbing through one of the magazines he’d left on the coffee table next to her. She was looking sideways at him with a lazy eyed expression, and something about it pissed Killian off. He growled low in his throat, turning the full force of his gaze on her. “And what exactly is it that you find stupid about this entire situation?” “This ridiculous beef you have with Ronan now, just because he took back a member of his pack. One you weren’t even meant to have kidnapped in the first place. It’s incredibly stupid.” She ended the statement with a final clap of her magazine. “That pack member is mine.” He hissed, “That was the basis of our trade with Hansel, he give me Raine and I’d give his father the witch. But he has gone behind my back, and now I will forsake both him and his plans.” Selene scoffed, very obviously done with the bullshit. “Oh please, this righteous act is getting on my nerves.
Ronan had scrubbed until his hands were red. Until the skin burned and split, nails jagged from scraping against porcelain, wrists trembling under the weight of the act he couldn't wash away. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the blood remained. He could still feel it there, slick, sticky, crawling beneath his skin like it had seeped into his bones. Silas’s blood. His brother, who he had murdered in cold blood. He could still hear the loud broken wail his father had made when he first saw Silas’s body. His first son. Ronan’s brother. He closed his eyes and he could still hear the wet sound as his hand had gone through his chest, the choked off sound of surprise as Silas had looked up and realized what had been done to him. Ronan gripped the edge of the sink, knuckles white, breath dragging in slow and ragged, but it did nothing to steady him. He stared down at the swirl of pink-tinged water slipping down the drain, spiraling endlessly. It looked too much like his brother’s life
Gasps erupted around them, wolves cried out in shock and horror, but Raine heard none of it. She only saw Matthias how his face had drained of all color, his body shaking with a fury that made the walls feel like they were closing in. Raine’s knees buckled beneath her as the world spun violently, she stumbled back to lean against the wall so she could take pressure off her throbbing leg. It hardly even mattered in the face of everything because Silas was dead. And somewhere, deep in her gut, Raine knew…Ronan was lying. No one else moved. Silas’s body lay still on the floor, pale and lifeless, a pool of crimson slowly spreading beneath him. His skin already looked cold, the last remnants of life long gone. He looked so different now, a far cry from the man she knew, the man shed seen hale and hearty just a few days ago. Now he was gone, a body unmoving on the cold, hard tile. Matthias still hadn’t spoken a word. He hadn’t even moved since Ronan laid the body down. Raine’s heart
She could tell something was wrong the minute she opened her eyes. At first, when she woke next to Matthias’s naked form, she’d been so confused and temporarily disoriented, then the events of the night before had come filtering back, memories of the man moving above her, teeth and tongue erasing all evidence of what had been done to her, and making her forget about anyone else’s touch. In that brief moment, Raine has forgotten all about her unhealthily body, her wolf’s absence and the new life growing inside of her. A life she knew was hers and Matthias, sure of it in a way she’d never been of anything before. She knew this child was Matthias’s, she just didn’t know what it meant for their relationship now. He was her mate’s father. If anyone in the pack were to find out that not only had she been cheating on her mate with his own father, she also had the galls to go ahead and get pregnant for him, both of them would be doomed. As alpha, Matthias might not have had much to lose, b