Page 74 of Broken Wolf

I ended up going into the far back bedroom that I mostly just used for storage and curling up into a ball in the corner. There weren’t really any memories there or—it was fairly neutral.

I needed some neutral.

Sometime into my watching my silent tears land on my arms, I felt my tiger join me. He didn’t say a word, just moved behind me and hugged me tightly.

I wasn’t sure how long we sat there but long enough that my butt fell asleep from the awkward position. “You’re paying for my door.”

“Yeah, I know,” he whispered, kissing my hair. “You’ve got to eat to process that feed. Please?”

“I didn’t deserve this,” I rasped, finally saying what I’d been feeling. “Smelling her on him. Him ditching out on me. I gave him everything he said he wanted and he…” I broke down really crying, turning and clutching to him. I hated to cry to one of them about another of them, but that was my life.

And anytime some part of it broke like this, all I wanted was my old life back. And then I fell into a guilt spiral. The boys weren’t in my old life. The men I loved.

My son. Topher wasn’t in my old life.

But this was all too much, and I felt too lost in it all.

The last thing I needed was my phone ringing with Apollo’s number. I cried harder and shook my head. I couldn’t be the bad guy of all of this.

I just couldn’t. Not this time.

Not when Carter had put down the boundaries of what he’d needed. Not when I’d given him leeway when he’d been having issues. Not when I’d let him handle just about everything how he wanted and trusted him.

He’d been the one to push we not rush things and then wanted dates. He was the one to get jealous and make demands about wanting that spot next to me later. He was the one who had started calling me his darling and acting like we were more.

And all I’d said in return was no wolves.

Luckily, Sander was in my kitchen fussing over food when Axel coaxed me out there. I handed him my phone because Apollo was already calling me again and that was it. I couldn’t handle the call or any of this.

He nodded that he had it and took my phone. “Apollo, look, I know you’re upset and yeah, Carter probably called you, but he fucked up. He fucked up bad, and Sera’s not okay to talk. I can tell you what I know, but we all missed it—Helmer filled us in, but from what I can tell, Carter got scared of his feelings for Sera and tried to put some space between them.

“Instead, he started bonding with a trainee who wanted to use him to get at Sera, and he was—I don’t know if an alien invaded his body or what, but it wasn’t even smart from a security standpoint. But he completely sided with the woman over Sera and ignored Sera’s comments about him smelling like wolf, going over the one line that she put in place.”

“She doesn’t need to hear this either,” Eva hissed at him while he was talking in the hallway. “She’s crying more instead of calming. Go. She has to get back to work soon and—everything is on hold.”

If only life would ever be so kind to me.

Fuck all the damn ducks.

20

I was—unfortunately—right, and the next meeting David told us about was going to be on Wednesday. We learned that from the website, and there wasn’t another one scheduled.

So it was then or then.

We would make it work or just swoop in and round people up since we had enough to do that. Now that we had the name of the doctor, I wanted him and his office first. He would be easy to break and get us names and more, but we were going to do it quietly as if he was in trouble for not paying his taxes.

He was taking money under the table to do bad things so yeah, the IRS was pretty good at sniffing that out. It made the most sense.

But before that and my work, apparently I was needed as Alpha. Nothing shocked me more than finding out several of the women of the pack were in the lobby of the FBI office to talk to me Monday morning.

And what I heard made my blood boil. Not just at the men who had been involved, but the women who had told them to let it go and not make a big deal of it. The fact they told their daughters or younger members of the pack to just accept bad behavior disgusted me.

So I was a sarcastic shit in my seething rage kind of way.

I worked on what I needed to in between what was coming in and reviewing other things. I sent the women on a few errands for me and told them what I was plotting, glad when they were on board to help since I was seriously busy.

But in the end, it needed to come from me as Alpha.

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