Page 2 of Reclaiming Home

“Okay?” I asked, wondering where this was going. It could be anything, knowing Uncle Rusty and how he ran his excuse of a pack these days.

“Apparently, their mom finally left him like eight months ago. She’s gone, the boys don’t know where she is and good for her, but Ben says he and Max have been hearing rumors that there’s a girl at the pack house.”

Immediately, my skin crawled at her words, but even more her tone.

Barely managing to keep the growl out of my voice, I asked, “How old?”

I heard her swallow through the phone. “Young. Some rumors say she’s underage.”

“Why hasn’t the Sheriff checked it out?” Rian asked suddenly.

“There’s a new deputy sheriff who doesn’t get along with Rusty. Old man Hayes retired last year and the new guy is a bitten wolf, apparently. Apparently the actual sheriff doesn’t bother with Luxton if he can avoid it, so he’s not help, either.”

I hissed and Rian grimaced.

Uncle Rusty was the worst kind of speciest. He was a born wolf and lived with the belief that humans were a lower species, bitten wolves were only marginally better but kind of disgusting, and vampires were really not people at all.

“I also assume that if theyhavegone to check and she’s eighteen, there’s nothing they can do unless she tells them she’s being held against her will or something,” she concluded what I’d just thought.

I sighed. “What do you want me to do about it? It’s not exactly a short trip to Bumfuck, Pennsylvania from Seattle.”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You know how much Mom loved that house.”

I pulled my phone away from my ear and smacked it against my forehead. The fact that she pulled the mom-card was unfair, but I understood why she’d do it. Rian’s long fingers closed around my wrist and stopped me.

“And what if she is being abused? Held against her will? Brodie, I don’t….” It was her little sob that made me hate her a bit. She knew what she was asking and she knew I wouldn’t be able to say no.

The worst part was that I couldn’t even blame her for this reaction. Not after what had happened to her growing up in the pack house. Not after she had had to run away to save herself even if it drove a wedge between us for fifteen years.

“Okay. I’ll go look,” I finally murmured. “I need to clear it with my boss, but it should be fine.”

Pack politics were tricky. Our mother had been a born wolf who met a human man, fell in love, and was booted from her pack for it. Our grandpa who passed away before our time had been the Alpha back then, and he’d been as shitty about other species as Rusty, his son, was later down the line.

Because of how the genes distributed, mom had two kids who turned out one wolf and one human, as if the universe had decided to demonstrate the 50/50 chance in play when a human and a werewolf had children.

I was a wolf, Bella was human.

Our dad passed away when I was seven and Bella was thirteen. Because Mom had been a stay at home mom, we really needed help. That’s when we moved from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Mom said that the pack would help. That was what wolf packs were meant to be after all; big, protective families who took care of each other through thick and thin.

The reality was… not quite as nice. At least not in our pack.

I’d decided to fly to the nearest airport I could and then I rented a car to drive the rest of the way into the pack’s property nestled inside Allegheny National Forest. There was a town about twenty miles from the house, and the closest neighbors, at least when I still lived there, were five miles away.

As I drove through Luxton, I realized how little had changed. There were many more closed storefronts, but there were also some new shops. It almost seemed… quaint.

I snorted at the thought. This town had never been kind to me. Even if I didn’t share my uncle’s last name, everyone knew everyone and I was forever tainted by the stench of Rusty Douglas.

Before I got all the way through town, I parked for a while by the street and texted my cousins and Bella.

“I’m in town. Going to the house. Anything else anyone’s heard or that I should know?”

It took a minute for Bella to wish me luck, then Max piped up.

“Only that Dad has two betas left. They’re all strung out as fuck.”

“We should know.”

I frowned at Ben’s words. They were both addicts, they’d admitted as much. I couldn’t blame them, really. Not with how they’d grown up and how normalized using whatever took you away for a while had been.

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