Page 141 of The Wolf King's Mate

“You never buy cake?”

“Nah. All of us try to avoid buying food.”

“Why?” There was curiosity in my voice. “Is it a health thing? I know you don’t like to eat there, but the food in the dining hall is pretty good.”

“No.”

I blinked.

He clarified, “It’s not a health thing. Or a high-maintenance thing.” He lowered his gaze to the stand mixer and watched intently.

Right.

So there was a reason for it. He just didn’t want to tell me.

That was fine. Really, he didn’t have to. It was obviously his business.

I wasn’t going to push him for more information. If he wanted to share, he would.

His grip tightened on my thigh.

A few minutes passed as he added ingredients without asking me to turn off the mixer.

I didn’t say anything.

If he wanted us to have a relationship, he was going to have to trust me with things. He’d already basically forced me to trust him.

He turned the mixer off when the batter was done, and stared at it for a long moment.

“That was supposed to be my job,” I said, giving him an out. We could keep our relationship surface-level. That was perfectly doable. It wasn’t what he said he wanted, and it wasn’t what I really wanted either, but we could do it.

“Our dad wasn’t only cruel to our mother,” he finally said. “When we started getting bigger than him as preteens, he knew he wouldn’t be able to control us much longer. We outnumbered him, and I had more dominance than him. He wanted to keep us weak, so he drugged us. Poisoned us. Through the pack’s food. The cooks and servers did it for him, and they didn’t tell us.”

“We were unfocused for years. Sucked ass in school. Could barely think straight. When a tutor finally asked for a list of what we were eating, wondering if there was some kind of severe allergy, I got the menu from the head cook. He could barely meet my eyes. Something was obviously up,” he continued.

My chest squeezed.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

“I wasn’t tactful. Could barely think straight because of the drugs. I hit him with all the dominance I had. He pissed himself, but told me about the poison. Showed me where it was. What it was.”

I put my hand on his, on my thigh.

“I killed him and everyone else who had been involved that day. I could understand my dad poisoning me. I wouldn’t have even been surprised. But they were the closest thing we had to family, and my brothers weren’t Alphas. They couldn’t have challengedhim. He hurt them anyway. I tracked him down after I was done with the servers. Challenged him. Killed him. Took over the pack that day.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “It was weeks before we had fully recovered, even with our werewolf healing. We felt like new people. I regretted killing the cooks and servers. Still do. I’ve tried to be better, now.”

“They pretended to be your family while poisoning you, Enzo,” I said quietly. “Maybe they’d been forced, and it wasn’t entirely right, but you were a kid who had been betrayed horribly. And you weren’t in your right mind, either. You did what seemed like the right thing at the time.”

“I got angry.”

“You had a right to be angry. Theypoisonedyou.”

He let out a harsh breath. “The three of us started cooking every meal after that. Shared an apartment. Did our own thing while we tried to heal and figure out how to lead a pack. It was messy, but we eventually settled in.”

“You still prefer to cook your own food, though. All of you?”

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