4
1240 Words
Darius
I waited until my sister fell asleep.
That was the hardest part. Sitting on the edge of her old bed in the mansion, watching her curl up small under the blanket the way she used to when we were kids, holding my rage on a leash while I stroked her hair and told her she was safe. She kept apologizing. That was what killed me. She kept saying sorry, like she was the one who had done something wrong.
The moment her breathing evened out, I stood, closed her door softly, and walked downstairs.
Zephyr was waiting by the front door with his arms crossed. He hadn't left. I knew he wouldn't.
"She's asleep," I said.
"Good." He pushed off the wall. "Silvercrest Lane?"
"Silvercrest Lane."
We didn't take a car. We ran, wolves just beneath our skin, through the dark streets of my territory, and every step of the way I thought about the last two years. Kellan at my dinner table. Kellan shaking my hand. Kellan calling me brother while my sister paid for the roof over his head and starved herself trying to be enough for him.
I am the Alpha of the Ashwood Pack. Four hundred wolves sleep safely because of the order I keep. I have spent my whole life learning control.
Tonight, control and I were going to have a disagreement.
The lights were on at the house my sister bought. I didn't knock. The door tore off its hinges and landed somewhere in the living room, and by the time the echo faded, I was standing in the hallway and Kellan was stumbling out of the bedroom, shirtless, eyes wide.
"Alpha." His voice cracked on the word. He grabbed for composure and dragged it on like a coat. "Alpha Darius. What... is something wrong?"
Behind me, I heard Zephyr step over the ruined door. Kellan's eyes flicked to him, and I watched the blood leave his face. Good. He understood the math. There was no version of tonight where he was fast enough or strong enough, and now he knew it.
"Is something wrong," I repeated slowly. "You tell me, Kellan. My sister came home tonight unable to breathe from crying. So you tell me if something is wrong."
He blinked, and then he did the worst possible thing.
He lied.
"Wren? Is she okay?" Concern spread across his face, smooth and practiced, and I realized I was looking at two years of performances I had believed. "I don't know what she told you, Alpha, but there must be a misunderstanding. I've been home all evening, training schedules, I swear it, whatever she thinks she saw..."
"She heard you." My voice dropped. "Through the bedroom door. Every word."
"Alpha, I would never..."
I punched him.
I felt his jaw give under my knuckles, and then he was airborne. He crossed the living room my sister furnished, took out the lamp she chose, and hit the far wall hard enough to c***k the plaster. He slid down it and lay there, wheezing, blood running from his mouth onto the carpet she paid for.
It helped. Not enough. Nothing was going to be enough tonight.
A scream came from the bedroom. Zephyr moved past me without a word, and a moment later he came back gripping Selene by the arm, wrapped in a bedsheet, shaking. He deposited her in the middle of the room like something he'd found blocking a drain and stepped back to the wall.
Lights were coming on all down the street. Wolves gathering on lawns, drawn by the sound of their Alpha's rage. I let them come. I wanted witnesses.
"Get up," I told Kellan.
He got up slowly, holding his jaw, and I watched something shift in his eyes. The mask was cracked from the punch, and what crawled out from behind it was ugly. He looked at Selene. He looked at the neighbors crowding the doorway. He did the math again, this time on his reputation, and he found it already dead.
So he stopped pretending.
"Fine." He spat blood onto the carpet and laughed, low and bitter. "Fine. You want the truth in front of everyone? Here it is. I never loved her."
The room went silent.
"Not for one day. Not for one hour." He straightened up, shameless, arrogant even now with his blood on the wall. "Look at me, Alpha. And look at her. You really thought a man like me wanted that? I wanted the Ashwood name. The head table. The doors that open when your last name opens them. Your sister was the price of admission, and believe me, I earned every bit of it pretending that girl was..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
Zephyr had moved. I hadn't seen him cross the room, and I was watching. One second he was against the wall, the next his hand was around Kellan's throat, pinning him to the cracked plaster, feet dangling. And his face, the whole time, stayed perfectly calm. That was the thing about Zephyr that scared even me sometimes.
"Choose the next words carefully," Zephyr said quietly. "They may need to last you."
"Zephyr." I said his name once. Slow. His jaw flexed. Then he opened his hand and let Kellan drop in a heap, and stepped back to my side, and the room breathed again.
I crouched in front of the man my sister had loved.
"Kellan Vayne." I let my Alpha voice out, and it filled the house, the street, the bones of everyone listening. "For deceiving a member of the Alpha family. For exploitation of a pack member. For dishonoring the mate bond. I strip you of your rank as warrior and your candidacy for Elite. I revoke your place at every table you schemed your way into."
"You can't..." he croaked.
"And I banish you from the Ashwood Pack." The words landed like a gavel. "You have until sunrise to cross my border. Everything in this house stays. It was never yours. If you are found on my territory after dawn, you will be treated as a rogue." I leaned in close. "And Kellan. Pray you are never treated as anything worse. Because the only reason you are still breathing is that my sister fell asleep before she could watch."
Selene sobbed something about not knowing, about being tricked too. I didn't look at her. "You'll answer to the pack council tomorrow," I said, and left her to the shame of the crowd.
Kellan gathered himself off the floor. And I'll give the snake this much. Broken jaw, broken rank, broken future, and he still found his feet. He limped to the doorway, past the neighbors who stepped back from him like he was diseased, and then he stopped.
He turned.
The hatred in his eyes was the first honest thing I had ever seen on his face. It burned past me, past Zephyr, up the hill toward the mansion where my sister slept.
"Tell Wren something for me," he said, dragging the back of his hand across his bloody mouth. "Tell her to enjoy this. Because I promise her, on everything I have left, she is going to regret ruining my future. No matter how long it takes."
Then he walked into the dark.
Beside me, low and certain, Zephyr said, "He's dead. He just doesn't know the date yet."
For once, I didn't correct him.
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