Page 70 of Rejected By the Alpha King

She prowled around the edge of the room and glanced at me warily. “You’re hard to read,” she said finally as she stopped at the bed.

“All you need to know, going forward, is that everything I do is to protect you.” Pulling the sheet back, I gestured for her to climb in. “I need you.”

She hesitated. “And when you don’t need me anymore?”

“Our original deal still stands. You can leave.” She acted like she had a choice. Our one ace up the sleeve was that whoever was attacking the witches didn’t know that she was a null.

Form her vision, she had to know that was probably no longer true. She was safest with me.

“You haven’t been the most trustworthy. I don’t know anything about you. I don’t even know how you became an alpha.” Slipping in the sheets, she turned her back to me.

The silence grew between us. “Parker didn’t tell you?” I said finally.

“I never asked. It didn’t seem important at the time.”

Staring at the ceiling, I grimaced. “Parker was supposed to teach you about pack dynamics and our history. What the hell did he do all those years?”

“Kept me alive.”

The simple statement squeezed my heart, and I closed my eyes. Parker had kept her safe.

From others. From herself. The toll it must have taken on him. He died, and barely two months later, one of mine had tried to rape her.

He’d done a damn fine job of protecting her, and here I was, berating him for not doing his duty.

“My family has been alpha of this pack for six generations. I have some early memories of my grandfather before my father killed him. Then he raised my brother and I to do the same.”

“You have a brother?”

She wouldn’t have blinked an eye at the fact that my father had killed his father. Every wolf in high status was open to challenges, and many of those came from families. If the losing wolf didn’t yield, and many times they didn’t, the challenge ended in death.

I couldn’t exactly accuse her of having no sense of what family was supposed to mean after what my family did.

“Not anymore.” Thinking of my brother made me cold, so I turned and gathered her in my arms. She stiffened but didn’t pull away.

I continued. “I think there was a time when we were good leaders, but my father was all about power. He took it forcefully rather than let it be handed to him, and he took it before he was ready. He held on to it with an iron fist. He had ten years of rule before my brother challenged him. Connor was eighteen. By then, the pack had suffered. My father wasn’t a brutal man, but he was so focused on growing a powerful army that he forgot that the pack was more than military. The money dwindled. Other packs were too afraid to trade and do business with us. The pack suffered.

“No one blinked an eye when Connor challenged my father and killed him. I think they were hoping that a younger man could be guided and the pack would thrive. They were right, but Connor wasn’t that man. On my eighteenth birthday, I followed in Connor’s footsteps, only I didn’t have to poison him beforehand to win. I was the more dominant wolf.”

I’d begged him to yield. He was the last of my family, and I hadn’t wanted to kill him. I didn’t regret it. There had been no other way. Connor had taken my father’s lust for violence and turned it inward. The other packs had taken notice of our weak alpha. We were about to be invaded.

I did what I had to do.

Starkly, I realized that Anna felt the same. I’d been protected by pack rules, and she’d been punished. I wasn’t even haunted by the blood on my hands. Not anymore.

“Sounds like your family wasn’t a picnic either,” she said, coming to the same conclusions. “But you earned respect. At least, until I came along.”

“I sacrificed my family to save this pack.”

“Is that a warning?” Anna tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t let her.

“Not a warning,” I said tiredly as I yawned. “I told you that I would protect you. Now get some sleep. The next week is going to be difficult.”

“My whole life has been difficult.”

I didn’t sleep until I felt the even rhythms of her breath, and I finally let myself drift off.

And I dreamt of a hollow laughter and blood.

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