Page 82 of A Wolf's Heart

“Eight,” she countered.

“One.” He wasn’t giving any wiggle room.

“Four,” Rainor chimed in.

“Done.” She smiled. “Good luck trying to find me.” She stepped out of her pants, and I was panting. Her body was a glorious mess of curves, and I wanted to bury myself into all of them. Would I ever be able to look at her naked body without getting horny as fuck? I sure hoped not.

Lila opened the back door and Max stood up. She told him to stay before she transitioned and took off into the woods. We weren’t worried about her running into anyone, since there was a team looking after her territory. The idiots had gotten too close to her house this morning, and she’d nearly discovered them.

“What’s happening?” Rainor asked Kage.

“If she does end up conceiving, we are going to have to up her security. I want everything around her to be monitored. That child will need protection.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We did a DNA check on Lila, and we found out who her pack is,” Rainor said, filling me in.

Sneaky bastards, though I expected nothing less from them. “And?” I asked.

We both looked at Kage. “I’ve been searching my father’s journals.” Ah, that explained why he’d been on the tablet so much today. “Scarab Pack isn’t just an EGP, they were originals.”

I frowned. “Wait, what does that mean?”

Rainor slowly shook his head. “All the original packs were wiped out, long ago, before Lila’s time.”

“It’s why she can resist your persuasion, and I’m assuming it’s why she can send the beast back. It’s why she naturally fits into an alpha role and how she was able to control the pack after meeting them only once. It’s in her blood. If anyone ever finds out her true bloodline, her heart is the first they will go after.”

“Because she is powerful,” I said. I mean, our hearts were at risk as well, but the way Kage said it about Lila seemed different. I hadn’t learned about original packs; this was news to me.

“She is undiluted,” Rainor said. “Her power isn’t only strong, it is pure, and she has no idea.”

“Then, we tell her,” I said. “Explain to her why she is coming with us tonight and will always have one of us with her from now on.” Why were we sitting here talking about this?

Kage’s lips thinned out.

“What?” I snapped, knowing there was something else.

“Her pack. They didn’t abandon her. They were eliminated.” I dropped my hands to my hips, shaking my head and turning away from him. I already knew where this bullshit was going. “My father…”

I laughed. “Motherfucker just can’t stop screwing us over,” I mumbled.

“Everything he did was for—”

“The good of the fucking pack!” I cut Kage off, spinning around and yelling at him. “I get it, I do. I fucking get it. But all those packs we’ve wiped from this world, and now, look at the situation we are in. Tell me that’s not karma.”

He said nothing. I looked at Rainor, who just quietly shook his head.

“Yeah, we reap what we sow.” This will fucking crush her…and I will lose her. I will lose the only person in my entire world I have ever, really, truly…loved. Kage was right—she couldn’t know, and every single thing about this situation was wrong.

“It gets worse,” Kage said.

“How could it get any worse?” Rainor whispered.

“No one can know Lila exists. It wasn’t just our pack that acted on the originals. Cridhe was following an order.”

“By who?” Rainor growled. It wasn’t commonplace for Cridhe to follow orders they themselves didn’t create.

“The council. They didn’t go into detail about what it was, but the Scarab pack… Lila’s pack… held a generational gift so strong, it threatened the existence of the shifter species as a whole.” Kage glanced at each of us. “A gift that is handed down with a mark. A birthmark…”

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