Page 5 of The Alpha's Forced Bride

The room was awfully quiet, too quiet for my liking, and I almost wanted to blurt something out to make everyone stop being so darn quiet. I gripped the edge of my seat, feeling like a balloon that had been inflated past its breaking point. I had yet to pop, but I knew it would happen soon enough.

This was going to be such a bleak December evening, especially with the sun already setting. I glanced at the clock. Half past four. It feels more like eight.

Regina rested a hand on my shoulder, inviting my gaze. I had almost forgotten that she was sitting to the left of me. Beside her was my father, who was sitting near Isaiah, Fred, and Jermaine. Both Troy and Blake were sitting directly across from us at the fancy conference table. While Troy looked curious, Blake looked like crap. Actually, he looked worse than crap. He looked like crap and dirt, and had a baby together named Garbage. I held on tightly to Regina trying to absorb some comfort from her—neither of our alphas had bothered to follow up on Blake’s concerning announcement.

Dad cleared his throat. The whole room shifted around in their chairs with relief. Finally, someone was about to speak up. But instead of my old man piping up, it was my best friend.

“Sir, what does that mean?”

Blake hung his head. Disappointment seemed to swim around in his usually stern eyes. Our poor alpha was clearly struggling, and it was a show of great strength and support for Troy to touch his shoulder tenderly with an expression that radiated with understanding.

They were fantastic leaders because they displayed integrity and honesty. They were transparent with us and didn’t try to cover things up. I was honored to be part of their pack—I was more than honored, honestly. I was actually very proud.

As confusing as Blake’s statement was, I knew a proper explanation would come once Blake had wrestled with his demons.

Blake cleared his throat. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Jermaine chimed in, and we all agreed with hums and nods.

Blake gave us an appreciative smile. “I don’t mean there’s something wrong with either of us—” He gestured to Troy. “More that we’re unsure of what to do next.”

“When did you stop hearing names?” I asked.

Troy looked at me with his kind eyes. “About a month ago.”

I pursed my lips. “That explains my lack of mate.”

Dad leaned forward to peer around Regina with a fatherly expression. “Kiki, that’s rude.”

“Dad, cut it out.”

Regina calmly twined her fingers with my dad’s and did the same for me. “Kiara is just eager to be paired up, Eric.”

“GG, we’ve talked about this.”

She squeezed my hand. “Sorry. Right. You can speak for yourself.”

“Yes, I can.” I folded my arms over my chest. “I wish you and your mate would stop treating me like a child.”

Dad fumed, “I wish you would stop acting like a child.”

Troy coughed once. It was a distinct sound that gently commanded silence. At once, I stopped bickering with my father and focused on my alphas. Right now, there were more important things to discuss—like the fact that our alphas couldn’t announce anymore mates.

Once Troy had our attention, everyone fell silent. He raised his eyebrows with a fierce command that I recognized from his early alpha days with our combined pack arrangement.

“Listen,” he said, “We're at our wit's end here trying to figure out how to do this properly because we can't hear mate pairing names anymore. That’s the unfortunate truth. We're going to have to come up with a different idea for what to do.”

Jermaine lifted a folder heavy with papers that had been printed about an hour before the meeting. I remembered when he did that; I heard it from down the hallway, the persistent whine and strange buzzing that came from that particular printer that Blake seemed so fond of keeping. This was funny enough on its own without the added detail of his extreme wealth.

I didn't understand why he didn't just replace it with a newer model. We were sitting inside a huge mansion, and he had enough money to buy out the pack ten times over. Surely, he could afford a new printers—maybe even a whole office of them. But that printer had once belonged to his mother, and I thought he might have kept it out of sentiment. Us wolves were such sentimental creatures, after all.

The folder made a loud thwack noise as it dropped on the table. Nobody seemed surprised by the amount of time and attention that Jermaine must have put into the report. But Isaiah, Troy’s cousin, appeared disheartened as he had been particularly proud of the small folder that he cradled in his lap.

On Jermaine’s giant folder was a rudimentary label with the name of our pack, Grimpaw, in large black letters. He opened the folder and pulled out the first page, revealing a series of reports from the area about missing persons, vandalism, and random wolf attacks. Sheesh, he was really into graphs, wasn’t he?

It wasn't like me to be so judgmental of the people in my pack. I just had become fed up with the constant meetings, the issues of mate pairings, and all of the other stressful things happening. Instead of experiencing any kind of love and romance in my life, I had an overbearing father breathing down my neck, a best friend trying to soothe my father, and the strangest little family imaginable.

I was just about ready to pack my bags and move to another pack entirely. Of course, I would never actually do that kind of thing. I didn't want to leave my best friend behind, I didn't want to ditch my alphas, and I certainly didn’t want to abandon my father. But sometimes, a girl could only take so much.

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