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I tried to keep my breathing even and slow, though my instinct was to gasp for air. I had barely enough room to breathe, I just needed to stay calm. In the meantime, I forced my pounding head to think through what I’d just learned.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. I’d imagined that Troy was just born violent and cruel, or that he’d become that way due to his own actions. But now I understood that he was driven by pain, betrayal, and angst. All of his worst qualities were connected to his father, and after living under Gregor’s leadership as both a human and a woman, I was surprised that the Alpha had treated his own male heir so poorly.
“If Night was your father’s favorite, why did he let you lead that raid on the Wargs’ compound? Why did he let you attack Wargs who were on patrol or hunting for no reason?”
“Now you’re asking the real questions.” He let go of my throat, allowing me to fall back against the wall. “To show me that those attacks wouldn’t crush Night the way they crushed me. Night knew about me that entire time, but he never once reached out. I tried to speak to him, you know, on the day my wolves and I infiltrated the Wargs’ compound. I went to speak to him myself. I found him while he was out patrolling. Before my men did anything, I wanted to bridge that gap. I thought, maybe he’s been busy. Maybe that’s why he never reached out to me. Maybe Father led us both astray and we got off on the wrong foot. I tried to get him to listen to me, but he attacked me the moment he saw me. He didn’t let me get a word in. I said, ‘Let’s talk, let’s bury the hatchet’, but he rejected me. Just like Dad. Just like you.”
Troy’s eyes were soft, even sad as he spoke, but his gaze hardened again as he continued, “I tried to warn him what would happen if he went on like that. He ignored me. He hurt me. He tried to kill me. So, that night, I let my men do what they wanted.”
He looked at me like everything was supposed to make sense to me now that he’d spoken his piece, like I would understand him now. “Don’t you get it, Bryn? All of this would have been prevented if he had just spoken to me man to man. All of this was Night’s fault.”
My lips pulled away from my teeth. I thought about Tavi, and how broken and vulnerable she had been the night I found out about Troy’s raid. I thought about the way anger darkened Night’s eyes when he remembered that night.
“No, you psycho,” I said. “You expected him to welcome you just because you went to see him? You expected him to just accept your olive branch if you threatened his pack? You tormented the Wargs! You hurt his friends and his family!”
“I wasn’t attacking him when I went to find him,” he said, as if that were an argument. “If he had listened to me, maybe I wouldn’t have let my men go as hard as they did.”
His dark eyes showed no remorse. He reached for me then, and I flinched, expecting him to grab my neck again. Instead, he placed his hand on my chest, between my collarbones. I shuddered at his touch.
“It hardly matters now that I have you, Bryn. Night is going to pay for leaving me alone to deal with our father. And he’s going to regret trying to show up to take the Kings from me.” He let his hands trail further down, over my breasts and stomach.
“Stop!” I jerked around, wanting him as far away from me as possible. “Fucking get off me!” But when I felt the press of his wolf claws in my naval, I stopped, lest my movement force those nails to puncture my skin.
His answering smirk revealed the sharpened points of his teeth. “I’m going to take everything from him. His mother was first, and now his mate.” Slowly, he removed his hand and stood up, backing into the darkness the same way he’d come.
I trembled now that he was gone. I was alone, but I still felt the phantom sensations of Troy’s hands on me, feeling me up in the darkness. I understood now that things between Troy and Night were very, very personal—especially on Troy’s end. He had tormented the Wargs and killed indiscriminately, but he still viewed himself as a pup who had been wronged because his older brother wasn’t there for him.
Tavi had told me that it was typical for rival Alphas to play dirty to get what they wanted, but what Troy was doing was so, so wrong. He felt he was entitled to vengeance, entitled to his brother’s life, and that meant that there were no rules, no morals, no mercy. This could only end violently and bloodily. I only hoped that Night could find us before the distance between us weakened him too much.
5
NIGHT
I stood in the conference room in the mess hall. I had hoped that I would already have Bryn and Tavi back by now, but three days had passed since they were taken and we had no leads. On top of that, my body felt sluggish, unresponsive, heavy. My wolf and I felt more like strangers as the days passed, a sensation that was so wrong, so alien. It felt like I was disconnected from my own soul, and it hurt worse every day.
It made me wonder if this was at all how Bryn felt interacting with her wolf now, feeling a stranger acting independently in your own body. If so, my heart ached for her even more.
I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since that night, and the only thing keeping me from losing control entirely was my determination to get my girls back.
But here in the conference room, I tried to enjoy a moment of peace. There would be a meeting here soon, but for now, I was alone. I walked to the wall and looked up at the framed pictures. Most of them were taken by Mom in the days after I killed Peter to become Alpha. They were images of Dom and me as teens, heading the construction of new cabins. Planks of wood, buckets of cement and paint, and felled trees were the backdrop for many of the images.
I remembered the story of each one so clearly. If I closed my eyes, I felt the blazing sun on my back, the rush of a cool beer after a day’s hard work, and the taste of Mom’s cooking as she and other wolves worked together to hunt and feed our pack. Things had been so hard, and the work seemed never-ending. Yet, we Wargs had persevered, and we had survived. We hadn’t received any help from other packs—Gregor had made sure of that—but we’d done well without it. We thrived.
I had spent so much of my life invested in the health and prosperity of my pack, my wolves, and my people. Now Troy stood a good chance of taking it all away from me. I’d wanted to take control of the Kings all my life, but now that things had ended up like this, I found myself questioning every decision I’d made to try and make that happen. Wanting a better life for my pack was one thing, but it was another for me to selfishly tie my own desires to the welfare of my pack.
I clenched my hands tight, my stomach churning. Maybe I was no better than my father.
I turned to the door when I heard footsteps approach. Dom popped his head in. “Hey, I’ve got a surprise.”
“What is it?”
He opened the door wider, revealing Kai, Redford, Vince, and…my eyebrows raised when an old friend walked in. Evan Brandy, a wolf I’d grown up with and someone I considered to be a very close friend. He looked the same as when I had last seen him: chocolate brown hair, casual grin, and an old, jagged scar running vertically down his left cheek. I remembered the day he’d gotten that scar. It had been when we were eleven and an adult thought he could bully us around. My mother ended up giving Evan stiches because his parents had already died.
Evan wasn’t in the pictures that hung on the wall. I’d sent him to infiltrate the Kings pack shortly after I became Alpha. Evan served as a fighter for the Kings, which put him in a prime position to learn the goings-on of the pack as well as strategy for what the Kings had planned. My trust in Evan ran as deep as my trust in Dom, so he was the only wolf I could have put in this position.
The last time Evan and I had been in the same room together was last December. That was back when Gregor was still alive and my hope of taking control of the Kings pack was still a distant dream.
It felt like years had gone by since then.
