Chapter 5

“Daaad! It’s not like that!” Marian pressed, stomping her foot like a child as she held her father’s hands in both of hers.

Corien smiled at his only surviving child.

“After you left, I tried to talk to you many times. But you cut me off eight months ago. You cut me off, Marian…Do you still hate me?” he asked quietly, almost apprehensively.

“No, Dad, I never did...” she replied gently.

“But you went away –” he pressed.

“I went away because Dorien rejected me,” she pushed back, not meeting her father’s eyes.

“We just lost a battle, Minnie –” he stated softly, searching her face.

“But I knew him before that! I knew him for YEARS before that! I thought we were–” she threw back at her father, her words running out of her mouth.

“We just lost. His father –” Alpha Corien continued, unperturbed, remaining calm and steady before the force that was his daughter.

“ADOPTED father!” she spat, the bile rising in her stomach.

By the goddess, how I hate that man! She screamed in her mind, and Dinka snarled, barring her fangs.

Corien resumed speaking, gently, coxing his daughter, “His father would not have allowed you anywhere close to him –” he stated, his wolf purring, making the raised fur on Dinka’s back slowly fall and smoothen out.

“’Cos YOU are enough, right?!” Marian snapped. Her voice was sharper than she had intended, but it showed her real feelings.

Feelings she refused to give voice to.

Feelings her father knew were there, knew because she was his child and therefore he could feel her emotions and thoughts far easier than any others could.

And…their blood bond was rich, richer than any other ordinary werewolf family’s.

Even when she had cut the link with him when she fled earlier that year, he had been able to repair it by himself, without her acceptance or consent.

He was special. He had been raised different from most wolves and had gifts that were…unique; but no one spoke openly about this.

He had fixed the link even with the distance between them. Fixed it, and fixed her, as best as he could, as best as she would allow.

She was his pup after all, and though she did not have his powers, she had some sliver of it, deep down, and was therefore able to resist him to a small degree.

She plopped down on the grass, folding her legs in the lotus position.

He sat across from her, gazing at his angry pup.

“I’m not a pup, Dad! I’m twenty on New Year’s Day!” she shot at him, glancing sideways at him and then turning away, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

Corien had not spoken out. He had thought it in his mind and she had felt it. The link between them was now stronger than it had ever been.

Her father smiled sadly, saying nothing. He was coaxing her, calming her in the mind space. It was what he always did when she pouted.

Once her hot anger had simmered to a low smolder, he spoke with his own voice, “Okay. Tell me. What happened?” he asked, his voice steady.

She sighed and gazed up at her father. She told him everything, her voice low, as she didn’t want anyone to overhear their conversation.

How had he lost to an ordinary Alpha? She mused as she spoke to him; even though she knew the answer.

Alpha Dax!

That bastard! Marian’s mind drifted to him again, even as she was talking to her father.

She recalled the loss she and her father experienced almost four years ago to this date.

==========

Marian saw her father covered in blood, holding her mother’s limp body. His eyes were wide, his face pale. He was in his human form.

An internal pack war was being fought and at the end of that devastating battle, her father was on his knees, holding his dead mate.

Marian had been less than six feet away, staring at her mother lying in her father’s arms as he rocked her, his tan, ripped body smeared with the evidence of the vicious fight that was coming to an end after four long hours of battle.

She clawed at the ground, causing blood to flow from her already bleeding hand. She wanted to go to her mother’s side, but her wounded body would not move.

The wolf that had launched this attack, this mutiny on her family, to take over from her father, a man she called ‘uncle’ all her life, up to just yesterday, Dax Garrant, stalked behind her father.

Dax, in wolf form, held his front left wolf claw under her father’s throat as he rocked his dead wife, whose hand was holding onto her equally dead son, Marian’s younger brother, twelve years old at the time.

“Yield!” Uncle, Traitor Dax had growled in his human voice as his men drew closer to the mourning Alpha, Marian’s father.

“Yield, Corien!” Dax snarled, sliding closer to her father.

When Alpha Corien did not respond, Dax leaned in and whispered something to him in the mind space. No one heard what he said, but Marian did, through the bond she shared with her father.

Through her father’s shattered consciousness, Dax’s words had bled into her head. Only her, no one else.

She was Corien’s blood relative, and they shared a familial bond, and…she was the only one alive.

She was not meant to hear it. Those words were not for her ears.

Marian gasped, and her ‘uncle’s’ eyes snapped to her. His wolf’s hackles rising.

He sensed that she had heard him, and he narrowed his eyes at her, his wolf growling as he stared at her with black eyes.

His wolf snarled. Dax growled loudly, his gaze on Marian.

As if coming from a far distance, they both heard her father whisper defeatedly, “I yield.”

Her father bowed his head and she felt the connection to him snap.

Marian wanted to call out to him, to say something, anything, for him to hold on to her, but she couldn’t. She was injured and was barely able to keep herself from lying flat on the ground.

Her stomach was ripped, and her left shoulder was torn.

She glared at her so-called uncle and spat in their mind space, “Disgraceful –”

But he did not let her finish. He rushed at her, poised to rip her head off like he had done to many wolves during the fight, but her father had moved faster than anyone could have thought possible in his broken state.

He placed the extended claw of his right hand under Dax’s throat as he stood naked behind Dax’s wolf, Bentax.

“Do it. Do it and see if your daughter will live to see the sun, rise beyond the horizon this day.” Dax’s wolf, Bentax growled at her father, his black eyes on Marian.

“Do it, Corien! Let me kill her. I want to kill her. Dax is holding me back. Your claws can only wound me, not stop me. DO IT!” Bentax growled baring his sharp wolf teeth.