Taken By The Alpha(10)
Teresa sighed. “Perhaps not as much as he used to.” She turned and walked away.
As much as he used to? They’d only been married three years. Katrina hadn’t noticed anything wrong between him and her mother, but then, she was starting to wonder if there was a lot going on that she hadn’t noticed.
She wondered what would happen to Teresa if her stepfather won. Surely Teresa must have been aware of that possibility. The Mordhaus pack would take over the Killingworth pack, and then Teresa would almost certainly have to pack up and leave the area entirely.
She turned to walk back to towards the picnic table– and slammed into Lula, who was, for some reason, walking through the common area holding a hot bowl of soup. The soup spilled down the front of Lula’s shirt, and Lula screamed in pain and instantly shifted to wolf form.
Katrina followed suit, dropping down to all fours and growling, as the hair stood up on her back. The female was considerably bigger than her, but as the saying went, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
The next thing she knew, Maddox was in between them in wolf form, snarling at the other woman. The woman immediately let out a whimper, fell to the ground, and rolled on to her back to show submission.
Maddox shifted back to human form, and she and the woman did too. Now all three of them stood there naked. Katrina had to admit, the woman had quite the impressive rack. There were red blotches on her skin where the soup had burned her.
“She attacked me!” The woman wailed. “She dumped scalding hot soup on me and burned me on purpose! I have the right to defend myself! I issue a challenge.”
“Bring it!” Katrina snapped.
Maddox let out a snarl and both of them fell silent. Katrina could have kept arguing, but she didn’t want to challenge his authority in front of everyone and put him in a bad spot.
Wait, why not? She wondered.
“I saw what happened, Lula,” Maddox said. “You walked right up to her and bumped in to her on purpose. There will be no challenge. Understand?”
She hung her head sullenly and nodded.
“She doesn’t belong here. She’s not one of us,” she muttered, her voice angry and rebellious.
“You don’t get to make that decision. Pack up and move to one of the cabins in the far north section, and if you come near her again, you’ll be moving off the property. Do I make myself clear?”
Her lips parted and she stared searchingly at Maddox, with an expression of yearning that somehow raised Katrina’s hackles. Katrina felt fur rippling down her neck and back, the way it would when she fought in wolf form. She didn’t want any other females looking at Maddox like that. Her wolf howled inside her, wanting to be freed, wanting to stake it’s claim.
My wolf is a dumb animal, Katrina reminded herself. She had no claim on him, nor did she want one.
After a long moment, Lula turned and walked away without answering Maddox.
Chapter Seven
Everything was falling perfectly into place. Of course, it always did for him.
“You hear that, father?” Roman asked, his lip twisting in contempt. “I win again. I always win.”
His father stared back at him with glassy eyes. Literally glassy eyes, because after Roman had him killed, he’d had him stuffed by a taxidermist.
He kept him in a secret room that he visited often. Every time he dominated someone, every time he humiliated someone, he came to remind his father how wrong he’d been about him.
Roman kicked the big stuffed wolf, and as he did he felt a sharp twinge in his side and grimaced; a wolf had used a silver knife on him in an assassination attempt a few weeks earlier, and the wound still hadn’t healed properly. It might never heal all the way; he’d brought in a healer to try their magic, and the healer had failed. He’d arranged for the healer’s fatal accident immediately afterwards, of course; he couldn’t risk the secret getting out.
“You think this makes me weak? Do you?” he yelled at the wolf. “What the hell do you know? If you’re so smart, why am I standing here and you’re a giant Beanie Baby? Answer me that! No answer? I thought so!”
His injury wasn’t even putting the slightest crimp in his plans.
He’d just manipulated Roman into meeting him in the Death Arena – and ensured that Roman would lose.
He’d also kidnapped Tristan’s family, and ordered Tristan to bring him a member of the Killingworth pack if he wanted to see them alive. He’d known Tristan would fail – and now Killingworth could walk right in and take over. There were no other Alphas in Tristan’s pack.
Tristan had been on the verge of challenging him, and with the injury, Roman would have lost – but he’d outsmarted his opponent and forced him to commit suicide by wolf.
Roman lashed out at his father’s stuffed corpse again, kicking him in the face. “How’s it feel to be on the other end?” he jeered.
Patrick Coffman had been more than old school in his parenting methods - he’d been vicious. As far back as Roman’s memory reached, Patrick had used brutality and humiliation in an attempt to mold Roman into what he’d considered the perfect Alpha.
Two of Roman’s brothers and one of his sisters hadn’t survived their upbringing. Only Roman had made it through – and the older he got, the more savage Patrick’s punishments had been. Roman’s mother had been too terrified of her husband to intervene.
Roman didn’t begrudge the beatings, the impossible challenges, the constant pain, hunger and fear that had marked his childhood. He planned to use those methods himself, as soon as he started having Alpha sons.
What infuriated him was the public humiliation. Even when he succeeded in the tasks his father set for him, his father insulted him, held him up in front of the pack and called him a girl, kicked him hard enough to break bones and dared him to utter a single whimper, spit on his face…
The intercom system on his desk chirped. Somewhere on the compound, his lovely, near-perfect bride was trying to get in touch with him.
Roman leaned down and spit on his father’s head. “I’ll be seeing you,” he growled, and turned and left the room.
His lovely Janet wanted him. Killing her husband and marrying her had been an enormous achievement for him, the next step in his ambitious plans. He’d had his eye on the Mordhaus pack lands for a long time. He wanted their lumber business, their construction business, he wanted everything they had – including the beautiful, elegant, Janet, who gave him that entrance to the high society world that he’d always craved.
She looked perfect on his arm, was as dedicated as he was to bettering her position in the world, and was nearly perfect in every way. She only had one tiny flaw. No matter; he’d found the solution to that problem too.
In the meantime – she probably wanted to talk to him about the charity ball they’d be hosting. They’d managed to get three members of the Council of Elders to attend. He’d be keeping careful track of who chose not to attend. He always remembered his allies, but it was his enemies that he kept in a special mental memory vault, that he opened every night and re-visited and help up for examination.
* * *
It was 3 a.m., and someone was outside her window, getting closer. Katrina lay perfectly still in bed. She’d always been a light sleeper, and especially so tonight, with so many problems running through her mind.
She heard a rattling, and then bars opened from the outside and then the window slid open. Then a bag was tossed through, landing on the floor with a thud.
She tensed – bomb? Thrown in by Lula? After a few seconds, when nothing exploded, she sat up in bed and walked lightly over to see what mysterious gift she’d just received.
She smelled noscentium. Noscentium was an herb which disguised individual smells and masked an individual’s identity, but it came with its own distinctive aroma. Somebody didn’t want her to know who they were.
The bag had been drenched in Noscentium – and contained a spray bottle of Noscentium as well. There was a tranq gun, and a cell phone – a cheap disposable one.
Someone was trying to help her escape.
She doubted that any of the Killingworth pack would risk this kind of move. Her money was on Teresa. She probably hoped that helping Katrina escape would win her favor. It could also be any of the other pack members who’d come over.
She picked up the tranq gun, which was specially designed to hold four darts. She bent over and sniffed at them. She was a little concerned about using a tranq gun when she hadn’t personally loaded the dart’s syringes, or at least gotten the syringes from a source that she knew and trusted.
Dear lord, did she smell cyanide in them? Well, that made it useless. Irritated, she set the gun down.
She did not actually want to kill anyone. She could suck it up for a month if she had to; everything would be resolved one way or another then.
She’d just have to hope that she could make it out without running into anybody.
She quickly shed the pajamas that the Killingworth pack had provided for her, and sprayed herself from head to toe with Noscentium. That would increase her chances of getting past the sentries that Killingworth would have on patrol. Noscentium grew in the wild, so if they smelled it, it wasn’t likely to aruse their suspicions.