Page 67 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

“That won’t happen,” I say as the guard pulls my arm, a sign to leave. I’m almost grateful for the interruption so I can break eye contact with a man who knows too much about me.

“Why not?” Gregor steps forward as if to stop my guards.

I aim a mirthless smile at him, but I don’t respond.

My dreams—or nightmares—have always been the same few seconds. I’m in a basement. Sometimes, I’m surrounded by a field of sunflowers. Very occasionally, there are stairs. That’s it. The few puzzles I have don’t add up to much of a picture, but that picture feels important, and I wish I knew why.

21

AREN

Istand on the decking, staring down at the railing.

Our home sits on a slope, so it has two large stilts at the front for support. Each one is the size of a large tree trunk since the first Kasens who settled here decades ago worked hard to build a home that would last for generations.

They started with the single-story bunkhouse before moving onto this log house with views of a bubbling creek and the towering pine trees that dominate the horizon.

It isn’t just home. It’s the most beautiful sight in the world.

An image of the feral pops into my mind.

Her rich chestnut brown hair. Sun-kissed unblemished skin. The faint dusting of freckles over her pert nose. The most incredible pale blue and hazel flecked eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.

I keep hoping, wishing for reasons to touch her. My wolf wants to mark her and I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind because she is not mine. She is just a feral I need to kill, and I don’t see how I can do it when the thing I want to do most isn’t to kill her. It’s to hold her again. To sniff her hair.

To have her in my bed.

I throw my head back and howl, releasing my frustration into the sky.

A feral killed the people I love most in the world. I’ve hunted enough of them over the years to see—first and second-hand—the damage, heartbreak, and heartache they can wreak on those unfortunate enough to encounter one.

They don’t just rip lives apart; they rip apart families. Like mine. There’s no way I can ever go back to being the same Aren Kasen I was before.

I have to remember what’s important, and it isn’t the feral.

Shaking my head, I refocus on what brought me to the decking.

Because our home was built on a slope, the two stilts at the front of the home are about nine feet tall. To ensure no pup could hurt themselves by falling through the large spaces between the wood railings, we closed the gaps between each.

But I didn’t come here to appreciate the engineering of our home.

I came here to confirm something that I knew was a lie the moment I heard it.

The feral didn’t fall.

Even if Marisa had accidentally dropped the chain, which, after what happened the last time a feral got loose here, I can’t imagine her dropping that chain for a second. It would have to fall over the railing first.

Marisa would need to have literally thrown the chain to ensure the feral went over instead of crashing onto the hip height railing.

The feral didn’t fall.

This was no accident.

She was pushed. Or dragged.

“Aren…”

I lift my hand in a plea for silence as Finan’s voice drifts over my left shoulder.

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