Alpha’s Strength(77)

“I think… that is to say… I’m wondering if Beaux is my true mate.”

“What?” She stared at Lake. Could that be? She’d known something was happening but she hadn’t seen that coming.

“Can you tell me how you knew that you were mated to my brother?”

“Well…” A loud boom sounded upstairs, and they both stared up at the ceiling. What had caused that?

The door to the basement swung open. John charged down the steps two at a time. A grin exploded across his face when he saw them, and Betsy let out the breath she held. He wouldn’t be smiling if her Cyrus lay dying somewhere.

She rushed toward John and then up the stairs behind him. Lake followed in her wake, but Betsy had only one thought, and it was all about finding her love. She sniffed the air when she reached the upstairs and didn’t scent Cyrus inside the house.

“This way.” John opened the front door, and for the first time since he’d come into the basement, she felt a moment of trepidation. Her hands were unsteady, and she shoved them in her pockets.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes.” John laughed. “Look.”

A wolf paced around a group of humans. It wasn’t Cyrus. She’d know his brown and gray coat anywhere. It was the darker black fur of Beaux. Cyrus stood behind the group. Eight men knelt on the ground, their heads bowed. One of them was Nathan’s father.

“Hello, princess. Sorry that took so long, but these humans had to be dealt with using very little fuss. That took some arranging.”

She cleared her throat. “It’s not like I had any appointments I had to miss today. My schedule is rather open.”

“Well then,” Cyrus grinned. “That’s good.”

“Monsters.” Nathan’s father bled from a wound on the top of his head. Blood covered the side of his face as it flowed downward.

Beaux laughed. “Now now, Joe no one hurt you until you took a shot at us. Then you left us no choice.”

John snickered. “We may have made ourselves easy targets to encourage that stupidity.”

“I see.” And suddenly she did. The wolves had given the humans enough rope to hang themselves with. Now there would be no question in how they should be dealt with.

“Joe, I think we talked about what you’re going to do now, remember? If you don’t want to see us go after your family and friends with the vengeance of a pissed-off animal, you’re going to do what we said.”

“Betsy, I’d like to apologize for any wrongs we ever did to you.”

She blinked, not sure if she’d heard him correctly. “What?”

“Say it again.” Cyrus tugged on the back of the other man’s head, yanking his hair.

Joe yelped, and several of the pack let out joyful howls. “I’m sorry for anything we ever did to you. All of it. From moment one when we decided to keep you.”

This was her chance to get some answers. Her heart rate kicked up, and it took a half a minute before she could speak again. “Why did you decide to keep me and send my sister off?”

It might seem a simple question considering the large problems they had to deal with. But it had pressed on her mind since she’d met Lilliana. What had happened?

“We meant to keep both of you. Twin werewolf girls who didn’t show any signs of shifting? It was a real coup. But one of our group got chicken-shit and decided to take off with the two of you, rescue you. He nearly got out of town with both of you. Big battle. Shots. We got you out of the car, but the asshole still managed to hightail it with the other baby. I can assure you that we searched. Never found the baby demon.”

She kicked him, hard, in the ribs. He gasped, and Cyrus laughed. It took Betsy a moment to realize what she’d done. In all her life, she’d never resorted to violence so casually. This time, though, she’d not even given a second thought before she’d kicked.

She met Cyrus’ gaze, and she saw amusement radiating in his blue depths. “I guess I really am a wolf now.”

“Oh, you are.” Cyrus smiled. “Do you have any other questions for this little man or shall we haul him off now and let Beaux’s people do what they will?”

“Why take us at all? What did you do with the other babies?”

Joe shook his head. “We waited to see that you all really were werewolves. Babies start to show their shifting around age one. They howl. Growl. Start to act more like animals than human babies. You never did that, so we didn’t do to you what we did to the others. Some of us foolishly thought you could be saved.”

Cyrus spoke before she could. “What did you do with the ones who weren’t latents? How many of them did you have hold of over the years? Where did you get them?”