Page 5 of Reclaiming Home

I let the body drop as my wolf puffed up inside. It absorbed the energy from the wolf within my uncle as life left him. The surgeof the alpha power made me twitch, and I knew my eyes were flashing red.Well, shit.

I turned to the girl who had backed into the gap between the fridge and the wall.

“I won’t hurt you. Nobody will hurt you ever again,” I vowed, my voice rumblier than I liked. I sighed. “Give me ten minutes to deal with the betas, and I’ll come back and we’ll sort this out, okay?”

She stared at me with obvious fear, but nodded rapidly. “Okay,” she whispered.

“What’s your name?” I asked, and she seemed shocked that I wanted to know.

“Carys.”

“Okay, Carys. I promise things will get better.” With that, I left the kitchen and walked out the door.

The betas burst out of the barn, their wolves finally having clued in that something was amiss.

I let my eyes light up and snarled at them. “You are not part of this pack anymore. Your Alpha is dead. You have twenty minutes to gather whatever you want out of the house and the barn, take those trucks and go.”

Neither of them seemed sad or upset about Rusty. Both of them glanced back at the barn and then to me.

“Yes. Take all the stuff from there you want. It’ll be destroyed otherwise. Same with whatever is yours in the house.”

They spoke quietly and quickly, then one darted into the barn and the other slinked toward me.

“And don’t even look at Carys,” I ground out the words.

“Who?” the idiot asked, and I let out a sound that was more wolf than man.

He ducked past me and bolted inside.

As I followed more sedately, I dug out my phone and took a selfie with the red of my eyes showing. Then I texted it to mysister and cousins with the caption “oops?” Then I sent it to Rian with a “so I guess this happened.”

I’d never had the beta yellow eyes, let alone the Alpha red ones. Mine had always glowed the non-beta green, and while I felt when the color changed as it kind of narrowed my field of view a little, I’d never really thought about the color before. From now on, they’d be red, and I had trouble wrapping my head around the change, but I guessed I’d had the rest of my life to get used to it, not that it mattered much in the bigger picture. I had more things to worry about.

I put the phone back into my pocket and walked in. I could hear sounds of frantic packing from upstairs. I ignored it and glanced into the kitchen.

Rusty’s corpse was still on the floor, but Carys was gone. I went into the family room instead and grimaced at the nasty couches. Someone, likely Carys, had tried to cover them with blankets, but they couldn’t really be salvaged.

Everything smelled like cleaning products that were too strong to my nose, but they covered a lot of the disgusting smells underneath, so I’d take it. I was pretty sure the pack had lost part of their sense of smell to be able to deal with this, but I guessed drugs would do that to a wolf and Carys wouldn’t notice.

I slipped back into the hall and stood there, leaning to the kitchen doorway.

Carys came down the stairs first. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and clearly felt pissed off.

“They should be gone soon,” I told her, when she startled at a louder bang from behind her somewhere.

She nodded and went to stand in the family room doorway across from me. We stayed there awkwardly, while the former beta did his thing upstairs.

He ran down the stairs with two filled to the brim duffle bags, grabbed the keys to the trucks from the hook by the door. He took one last look back, sneering at Carys, then glared at me.

“Get the fuck off my property,” I told him and jerked my body toward him.

He burst through the door, and I walked out onto the porch to watch the proceedings.

He tossed the bags into one of the trucks and then he and the other idiot carried stuff out of the barn at full speed. They deemed themselves done within my time limit and tried to act tough as they climbed into the trucks and drove off.

I heard a long, relieved sigh from behind me and saw Carys standing by the window next to the door.

I went back inside and gave her my most compassionate expression. “Is there anyone I can call for you?”

---