Page 11 of Reclaiming Home

Ah. Brodie hadn’t been the Alpha this morning, but was one now. It all made sense suddenly.

“I’ve seen them, your cousins, through the window,” Carys said quietly. “They haven’t been in the house while I’ve been there, but….”

“They couldn’t do much because of the whole Alpha command thing,” Brodie explained in a softer, apologetic tone. “But they did call Bella when they heard other people mention there was someone young here.”

I cleared my throat. “How long have you been here, exactly?” I asked, not sure if I wanted the answer.

“About seven months? That’s when….” She grimaced and looked down, then lifted her gaze to stare at me with an expression filled with defiance and fear, as if she was trying to keep up a front but wasn’t sure how I was doing to take it. “When my latest pimp sold me to Rusty for some meth.”

I felt nauseous and struggled to keep my mug from wobbling in my suddenly shaky hands.

“I’m glad I killed him,” Brodie rumbled, his eyes shining red for a brief moment.

“Me too.” I put the mug on the crappy, unsteady coffee table.

Carys snorted. “Me fucking three.”

Chapter Three

Brodie

As the siblings sat on the floor, crying their eyes out and clutching each other, I went upstairs to continue cataloging the damage the house had.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected when it came to Carys’ big brother, but an angel with black hair wasn’t it. He was easily the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

When I’d opened the door and he’d stood there, my wolf had gone crazy inside me. At first I thought it was because this was a stranger on a new Alpha’s territory, a stranger coming into its den. Except, it wasn’t that.

The way the wolf acted was like a playful puppy. It also wanted to get as close to Kye as possible. It took me a few minutes to realize what was happening: a mate bond.

It freaked me out. Of course it did. By the time I got to the other end of the long hallway upstairs, I felt like a caged wolf. Meanwhile, the wolf within wanted to go back to the humans, back to the mate.

I let out a choked up sound. One of frustration and disbelief. I couldn’t understand what was going on. Why would the universe do this to me now?

In Seattle, I’d had an easy life. I had been content, even happy on occasion. I didn’t need a pack for that, or a partner. I had a great job working for a contractor wherever he needed me—I was a mix of carpenter, plumber, and electrician by trade—and on the weekends I played hard at my favorite clubs or, if I didn’t feel the craving, stayed at home and binged shows and movies.

I hadn’t tried dating in years, because the men that wanted to date a working class Dom rarely felt right for me. I guess now I knew why. Some part of me must’ve known I had someone out there just for me.

Except, now I couldn’t even begin to entertain the thought of beginning something new with Kye. Or anyone, really. I needed to figure out the pack. The house and the lands. I needed to move my life here for everyone’s sake. Where the two humans currently sitting on the floor downstairs fit, I didn’t know.

I concentrated on the house as much as I could. All the bedrooms were upstairs. The main one had an attached bathroom, and those two were in decent condition. The six other bedrooms and two baths though… not so much.

I opened the door to the room that had been mine and Bella’s once and grimaced at the mess. Not only was there water damage all over, but there was a clear hole in the ceiling that hadn’t really been patched. Who knew how long that must’ve been there.

The window was boarded up, too. The wallpaper was peeling, and the floor was… I didn’t even want to think about it, really. There was so damn much to do here. By here, I meant the whole house.

Bella had been right. Mom would’ve hated to see the house like this.

I checked the other rooms again. I’d done that before, with Sheriff Holden Drumm who had wanted to check the whole place out. He was a deputy, really, but everyone called him the Sheriff because he was the senior deputy at the town’s station. The actual Sheriff, Gerrell, ruled from his throne in the biggest city in the county, which, to be fair, wasn’t that big, either.

Being a bitten wolf, Drumm had more understanding than most humans, at least. He’d been bitten about twenty years ago, and looked to be in his forties where he was, in reality, in his sixties. Werewolves aged differently from humans. Born wolves like me often appeared younger than we were, but we still aged. Our life expectancy was around two hundred and fifty years.

Being bitten, like Sheriff Drumm, would make one age very slowly from the point where they received the bite.

Meanwhile, vampires like Rian were forever the same age they’d been when turned. In his case, he’d always look to be in his early twenties. There weren’t any natural causes that would kill a vampire. They died due to violence, or, more often, by their own hand because being alive for centuries upon centuries got rough, mentally. The oldest vampire I’d ever met had been an owner of a bookstore in Portland. She told me she’d been alive for over nine hundred years.

Rian had explained that more often than not, the really old vampires became kind of numb to life. It was like depression, the older you got. He was still doing well, and I felt confident that my best friend would be around for at least until the end of my lifetime.

While Holden hadn’t told me why he’d been bitten, he’d mentioned that it had been a life or death situation during a regular old workday somewhere in the south.

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