Page 3 of Reclaiming Home

“Okay. If you guys don’t hear from me within two hours, call the sheriff's office.”

They all sent a version of “stay safe,” but I knew this was something I needed to do alone.

Ben and Max were still technically part of Rusty’s pack, and that brought some werewolfy fuckery with it. They couldn’t ignore his command completely. He wouldn’t be able to tell them to hurt me, but he could tell them to not do anything at all.

That meant they were useless for me as backup, and so alone I would go.

My phone rang as I was a few miles outside of town.

“Hey, sweetness,” I told Rian.

“You driving? Hands free on?”

I chuckled. “Of course.”

“Good.” He always wanted everyone safe. “What’s the ETA?”

“Depending on a few things, I should know what’s going on within half an hour at the most.”

“Ugh, I hate waiting. I wish you would’ve let me go with you.”

“I know, Ri. But you also know why I couldn’t.”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

We breathed together for a while. We did that sometimes, just to feel connected to each other when one of us needed someone right there but it wasn’t physically possible.

“I hope this goes well,” I said finally after a couple of minutes. “But if it doesn’t, if something happens… well.”

“Bella will call me. I know.” Rian’s voice was sad and solemn at the same time. “But she won’t need to call me, because you will.”

I smiled slightly. I wished I could promise him that, but I wasn’t sure. You never could be with Rusty.

“I’ll call you. Love you, sweetness.”

“Love you too, Brodie.” He ended the call before I could say anything else.

We’d been friends for nearly a decade. On his scale, it wasn’t a long time, but he still said I was the best friend he’d ever had in his couple of hundred years. Rian was a vampire who had been turned right after the Great Famine in Ireland in the late 1850s. It felt nuts, that he was that old, but then again there were vampires that were much, much older.

Rian was unique. He had his sad, darker moments when life was a lot for him, but his personality was mostly kind of happy and upbeat in a way I couldn’t say I had ever been. We complemented each other, and I thanked whatever deity was listening every day that we had never been romantically attracted to each other, because we would’ve fucked this up already.

The closer I got to the pack house, the weirder it felt. I hadn’t been back in over ten years, so everything seemed the same while also incredibly different.

There were old fence posts on either side of the dirt road that led to the house miles away from it to mark where the property line was located. A banged up, weathered sign warning about private property barely hung from a tree next to the right side post.

I snorted. Everyone in town knew that this was the Douglas pack’s lands. Nobody would trespass. It was for potential strangers, and there weren’t many that ended up this deep in the woods when the best hiking routes and such were on the opposite side of town.

The only one trespassing today was me.

It surprised me that I wasn’t feeling nerves. As a wolf without a pack, I was weaker than wolves who were under an Alpha’s protection. Which, in this case, seemed ridiculous because my uncle wasn’t much of an Alpha. His betas would still be stronger than they would look, I was sure, just because they belonged to his pack.

Technically, Max and Ben were non-beta members of the pack. The old packs of yore had had more designations than the modern ones did. Every wolf would fall under the “Alpha, beta, or other” system, and their jobs within the pack were whatever the pack wanted them to be. Back in the day there had been omegas, but that was more of a rank than any actual task, and so omegas had become the non-betas eventually.

I wiped all of that out of my mind when I got to the spot of the winding driveway that rose up over a little hill before evening out again. Soon, there would be a bend, and then the big old house would rise from the woods like a movie prop that had been built there, because it seemed so unlikely for a house like it to be there, truly in the middle of nowhere.

As soon as I slowed down to see where I could park in the yard and lifted my gaze to the house, I gasped.

What the everloving fuck had happened here? The house looked like it hadn’t been fixed in the last thirty years, when I knew for a fact that once upon a time it had been well-maintained. Now, it had holes in the roof and there were boarded-up windows, too. The once lovely dark green paint was faded and chipped, and the gutters were hanging all wrong.

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