Page 109 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

He doesn’t answer. So I get my arms up around his neck and pull him toward me. He just rests his chin on my shoulder. Grief pours into me. It’s underneath everything, black and enormous, with rage laid over the top of it in a thin sheet. The man holding me is calm on the surface. Cold? I had once thought this man was cold? He burns like a furnace on the inside.

“I’m sorry for putting you near her.” His voice is rough at the edge. “I didn’t know, Ariela, that she was dangerous. I trusted her.”

“I know. I’m sorry you lost your friend.” I spread my hand between his shoulder blades. “What about Silas? What happened to Silas?”

He goes quiet long enough that I lift my head. “Silas and his uncle are both dead. While Silas and Isabella were planning to deal with you and Luca, Samuel was rallying the pack elders against me. The entire pack has gone through a bloody restructuring.”

That’s when I smell it on him. The blood isn’t fresh, though it’s gone into the weave of his shirt, under his nails, along the cuffs. There’s a great deal of it. I wait for the horror I ought to feel, and it doesn’t arrive. What comes through the bond instead is a bone-deep tiredness, the sort that sits on somebody who hasn’t put his head down in days.

“Are you okay?”

“You’re awake. My son is awake. I’m fine.”

He isn’t fine, though he probably believes he is.

“I’m sorry.” I lean my head against his forehead. “I trusted Isabella. I should have listened to my instincts.”

“No. Isabella was very clever.” He takes my chin between his finger and thumb so I can’t look at the blanket. “She knew you wouldn’t trust her outright, so she built your trust little by little, just enough that she could get you away without you knowing.”

“I tried to call you to tell you that I was going with her.”

“There were jammers in her car. You couldn’t have reached me no matter how much you tried. She was very well prepared.”

A knock lands on the door. “Come in,” I call, then wince because my voice sounds like scratchy paper.

Damien comes in with a folder under one arm, and he looks worse than Callum does. His shirt is buttoned wrong at the collar. There’s a gray cast to him that goes all the way down.

“I’m sorry about Isabella, Damien.”

His eyes go bright, then he turns his head toward the window and keeps it there. “Yeah. So am I.” He clears his throat twice. “Are you doing better?”

“Yes.”

He nods at me and says nothing else. The effort that’s taking him is painful to sit through. “He clearly wants to say something to you,” I tell Callum. “Just go on and talk to him. It’s fine.”

“You’re my mate now. There’s nothing he can’t say to me in front of you.”

Damien’s head comes around. Whatever he sees on Callum’s face settles it for him. “Very well.” He puts the folder on the end of the bed. “Corinne sent these over this morning. Clinic records from six years ago, everything she could get out of her brother’s rooms.”

Every muscle in me locks up. “Corinne? She’s still alive?”

“Corinne is the new head of the family,” Callum tells me. “Of course, she’ll have to mate with somebody to carry on the family line, but she was as much a victim as you were.”

He goes on, and it turns out that wiping the Thorne family off the map is off the table because a third of the pack’s territory sits under their name, along with most of its political weight.

“I don’t care about any of that, but I do care about how you are doing.”

“I’m fine.” He looks away. “I thought I was being clever and cautious, but I didn’t realize that even the people closest to me could easily betray me.”

“He’s right.” Damien picks at the corner of the folder without lifting his eyes. “We both trusted Isabella too much. We both knew that as a child she wore the prospective title of luna with such pride that when she lost it and acted all graceful, none of us realized she felt it so deeply.”

“She hid it well, but if she had come to me even once, I would have helped her in some way or another.” Callum’s hand tightens on mine. “I would have given her one of the highest titles in the pack, anything to make sure she was not humiliated. But she chose to do this instead.”

Damien flips the folder open at a marker he’s already put in it. “I recovered documents from Isabella’s study. For someone so clever, she sure did keep detailed records.” His mouth twists. “It seems Elena had figured out that Isabella was trying to cause her infertility. And when she got pregnant, Isabella tried to find ways to get rid of it. But when Elena confronted her, Isabella decided to go to the root of the problem and got rid of her.”

Beside me, Callum has gone so still that he might be carved from stone. Nothing comes through the bond except a long, low pressure, so I put my hand in his.

“There’s more.” Damien turns two pages over. “We found out what happened to Maya, why she ran. It seems Isabella revealed what we were to her under the guise of friendship. She also convinced Maya that Callum would take the child and kill her.”