Page 60 of The Alpha King's Curse: Part Two

“If you go outside and lose control of your emotions, they kill you on the spot. You barely held yourself together last time,” he stated gently. “So please, let me do this. Let me make sure you learn everything you need to keep yourself safe because I can’t lose... I can’t lose the baby.”

He’d almost slipped up. Even if his actions said otherwise, he would never be vulnerable to Layla again.

But her annoyance turned to pain just before he gave up the fight and his eyes closed.

Chapter 32

Layla held the silver chain with both hands and then looked up at Jackson. Jax, as Dylan kept calling him. It felt weird on her tongue because calling him by that name suggested they were closer than they were.

“Nothing? No tingles?” Jax asked.

“Nothing.”

Jax’s body relaxed as if he had been expecting the worst.

“This is one of the ways the Hunters like to torture us,” he explained as he took the chain from her with his bare hands.

She frowned at his words as she watched him place the chain back in the box he had brought up to the bedroom after her breakfast.

“How?”

“Silver poisons us. They use it as a test when they suspect someone is a werewolf,” Jackson answered. “It’s debilitating. It burns and goes into our systems. If we’re exposed to it for too long, it poisons our whole system, and our organs shut down. It’s a terrible way to die.”

Jackson said it casually, as if he were explaining how to bake a cake. She had to keep reminding herself that this was real; this was the life Jax had been born into. And her child would be born into it.

“You seem perfectly fine to me,” she stated.

“I’m different.”

“So our child...?”

“Will be the same as me. He’ll be safe.”

“It's a girl,” she mumbled.

“Girls don’t grow that big that quickly. It's a boy, and he’s already displaying my perfect genes.”

She rolled her eyes and watched him pick something else from the box and bring it to the bed. A little bottle with a red label on it.

“I’m not going to try this one yet, just in case,” Jackson said. “It’s wolfsbane—another poison. In big doses, it can kill us, too. A small amount would make us violently ill for a long time, and we never get ill.”

“But you got that infection. You got really sick.”

Jackson met her gaze briefly before he looked down at the bottle again.

“That was dark magic,” he said.

His voice was low as he turned away, so she was sure she didn’t hear him correctly.

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that? It sounded like you said it was dark magic.”

Jackson sighed and came back to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Yes. The world is bigger than you imagine. You’ll have to protect yourself from everything, and that includes witches.”

What the...?

She’d just got her head around werewolves, but now he was saying there was more out there?

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