Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left Chapter 04
Marcus told me later what was happening on Kael’s side at the exact same moment. He was still at the main estate handling the rehearsal follow-up. He froze for two seconds when the call cut, then redialed. The line was dead. He redialed again, and the line was dead again.
He swept a stack of family documents off the conference table and ran for his car. Vivienne called his name behind him. The door was already closed.
The highway. Wipers on the fastest setting and still no road through the rain.
In his head it was a different rain. Six years ago. The first time he came to that small training field at the Northcrest border. My father had been furious. He’d locked Kael in a temporary border outpost for two days. The third day was a storm. I’d put a small backpack on, scaled the wall, and shown up at the outpost door.
I had said: “You’re not letting me leave Northcrest. Then I’ll leave on my own.”
I had been talking to Kael. I had also been talking to my father.
Kael hadn’t said a word that day. He’d put me in his car and driven off.
Asher was born that winter.
He gripped the steering wheel. He talked himself down.
She wouldn’t actually leave. She had never said in all those years that she would leave. A Rogue mother with no formal pack registry and a small kid in tow had nowhere to go. He just had to go home and smooth it over.
He pressed harder on the gas.
He pulled up to our building. He looked up. The bedroom and living room lights were on. He paused five seconds on the steps. He decided to lead with anger. He’d make sure I learned that “I’m taking the kid and leaving” was not a threat I could use. Next time would be a real problem.
He swiped in. Elevator to the 12th floor. He pushed the apartment door open.
The lights were on. The TV was on. A glass of water on the coffee table was still steaming. The apartment was quiet, the way it was quiet when the owner had stepped down to buy milk.
The tension on his face slipped. He almost laughed at himself for panicking.
He went to the bedroom.
The closet was open.
All my clothes. Gone. The vanity. Empty. The perfume tray. Empty.
He turned to Asher’s room. The wall of children’s drawings was bare. Asher had been pinning up his pictures since he was two, one at a time: daddy holding him, the three of them by the lake, the pack warriors on the training field. Every one of them was torn down. Push pins all over the wall. The worn-out grey wolf plush from Asher’s third birthday, the one Kael had given him, was gone.
Kael slid down the doorframe of Asher’s room and sat there.
He started going through Asher’s drawers. He didn’t know what he was looking for. At the bottom of one were three folded papers.
He opened them. Three drawings of the training match. Three seats. The middle one had a little tuft of hair sticking up.
He stared at that tuft of hair. He remembered Asher at three. Every time the kid came out of the bath he’d point at that tuft and laugh and pat at it and not be able to flatten it and laugh harder.
That was the clearest memory he had of his son.
He didn’t know what Asher liked now at five. What he was afraid of. Whether he still called for his father at bedtime.
He spread the three drawings out on the bed. He sat on the edge of the bed with the handful of torn paper still in his fist.
He sat for a long time without moving.
After a while his hand started to shake. The wolf coming up under the skin. He hadn’t lost control in years.
He pressed his forehead to the three drawings and closed his eyes and pushed it back down.
He remembered the day six years ago at the Northcrest border, when the trouble broke out. He’d found me in the crowd, pulled me behind him, stood in front of me. In that second he’d thought, I’m going to Mark her.
He’d kept thinking there was time. So he kept telling me to wait.
He stared at the three drawings.
He remembered the first time Asher called him daddy. The kid was two, had just learned to walk, came staggering across the floor and grabbed his leg and looked up and called him daddy.
The wolf had moved in his chest in that moment, not under his control. It was blood recognition, the earliest and most certain thing an Alpha has: knowing his own blood, before any thought.
He’d pushed it down. He’d told himself it was protectiveness of a cub. Just that.
He’d pushed it down for five years.
He folded the three drawings together, put them in his pocket, stood up, walked to the window.
He took out his phone. He looked at my name. He didn’t dial.
The number was off.