Page 101 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

Sloane isn’t looking at me at all. She’s staring past me at Mia, one hand clamped over her face, blood pouring between her fingers. “How is this possible?” she breathes. “You’re human. You’re supposed to be human.”

Mia growls at her. My daughter is circling on all fours across her own kitchen floor, shoulders low, glass crunching under her palms.

“Bella, stay here.” I set her down against the cabinet. “Don’t move.”

I go to my daughter. “Mia.”

She turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are gold, lit from somewhere inside, and her teeth have come through her lower lip. She lets me get both hands on her shoulders. Her claws prick through my sleeves into my skin, but I don’t take my hands off her.

“Mia, calm down.”

This thing looking back at me, she’s still my daughter.

She growls.

“Mia Vasquez.” I pitch it high and hard enough to strip paint. “You will calm down this instant, or so help me, you’ll be in more trouble than you’ve ever been in.”

She stops. The gold drains out of her eyes between one blink and the next. Her hands close, ordinary hands, shaking, and she looks up at me with her mouth open, then sags forward into my arms.

Behind us, Sloane climbs to her feet. I already have the knife off the floor.

“One more step, and I’ll carve your heart out of your chest, you crazy bitch.” My daughter is behind me, Bella has a fist on my calf, and my hand is steady. “Don’t underestimate me. I don’t care if I go to jail. Get out of my house.”

Sloane retreats a pace. She’s still staring at Mia, and her jaw hangs slack. “This isn’t possible,” she says to nobody at all. “It isn’t possible.”

Then she’s gone, out through the glass door and across the lawn into the trees.

My knees buckle.

I go down on the tiles among the glass and the blood, hauling both girls into my lap. My own heart drums so loudly in my ears that I can’t hear anything past it. Mia’s face is buried in my neck. Bella has two fistfuls of my shirt. There’s a cut over my eye, my ribs won’t let me breathe deep, and my arm is running red into my daughter’s hair.

Footsteps come through the front of the house at a run. Cole rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops dead, taking in the wreckage and the three of us on the floor.

“What the hell happened here?”

I pull the girls in tighter and lift my head.

“Get Marcus,” I whisper hoarsely. “Call Marcus.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Marcus

I run through the woods, my mind racing, four legs pumping against the forest ground.

The graves. My brother.

I push forward, anger and bewilderment moving through me. It’s not possible. Adrian must be wrong.

I reach the edge of my territory and see Adrian standing in front of four gravestones. He hands me a pair of pants as I shift back into human form, his expression grim. I don’t even look at the garment as I tug it on, my eyes focused on the piled dirt.

The graves are empty. At least the two that he just dug up are. My father and Daniel’s.

“Who?” I snarl. “Who was it? Where are they?”

“I don’t know, Marcus.” Adrian sounds strained. “I thought I was mistaken when I dug up a portion of the grave. And then I had to dig up the whole thing. I checked Daniel’s first and your father’s.”

“Hannah?” I look toward my sister-in-law’s grave, my face pale, and Adrian shakes his head.