Page 8 of Cruel Alpha

“Alyssa?” His voice encroached on the memory, jerking me back into the present. Caleb and Leo were both looking at me, concerned, and I wanted nothing more than to be away from both of them.

“What?” I bit out, and Caleb flinched. Good.

“Leo asked why the Arbor Pack was after you,” he said slowly, as if talking to a child or a very elderly person. For a moment, I wondered whether I ought to tell the truth—Argent was one of the more tolerant Packs when it came to magic, but there’d been a reason I was an outcast on Lapine. I didn’t want that for my daughter, but nor did I want to hide her nature: I was proud of her.

“Emmy did magic in front of one of them. It was an accident,” I admitted, and Leo’s eyebrows rose.

“Yep, that’ll do it,” he said.

“You can say that again,” I muttered.

Caleb said nothing, only leaned forward in his seat, elbows resting on his knees. He looked so much older than when I’d last seen him, though it was barely three years.

“You should get some sleep,” he said eventually. “We’ll head back to Lapine tomorrow, and we can go from there.”

I blinked, surprised.

“I’m not going back to Lapine,” I told him. I’d been through enough without returning to a Pack who’d always hated me, with two kids whose father wouldn’t claim them.

“Yes, you are,” Caleb said.

“I’m staying here,” I insisted.

“No, you aren’t.”

“I’m sure Leo—”

“Leo is staying out of this,” said Leo, holding up his hands. Caleb didn’t even acknowledge him, still staring me down from across the room.

“Leo can’t give you the kind of protection I can,” he said. “This isn’t your Pack, and they won’t stand up for you.” It was true: Argent wasn’t my Pack, and its people wouldn’t rally around me. But no one on Lapine had ever stood up for me either, Pack or no. “Anywhere you go—anywhere but Lapine—won’t hesitate to hand you and your children over to Arbor the second you’re found. Are you really willing to risk that? Risk them?”

Fuck him for saying that. Fuck him for using them against me. Fuck him for being right. I hung my head, inhaling Jack’s familiar baby smell.

“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “We’re going back to Lapine.”

Chapter 4 - Caleb

I’d half expected the morning to begin with another fight. Surely, Alyssa had spent the night thinking up new reasons to object to my protection. To my surprise, she had nothing to say in the morning; when I returned from running the perimeter shortly after sunrise—Leo said it was unnecessary, but I was willing to risk offending him—she was busy shepherding breakfast into her children’s mouths. Most of it seemed to be going all over Leo’s table and floor, but he clearly didn’t mind.

I’d never known how Leo made it all look so easy: for all of Argent’s wealth and his happy-go-lucky demeanor, I knew things hadn’t been easy for him. The previous Argent Alpha might have been his father, but his mother wasn’t Alpha female, just some poor woman working in the laundry who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d grown up watching his older half-brother lord it over the Pack, knowing that he’d be a selfish, brutal leader when the time finally came. He’d challenged his brother when his father died; at only nineteen, he’d left the Heir bleeding and broken to claim his right as Alpha.

On my worst days, I wondered if I’d reminded Leo of his brother when I first set foot on Argent, the second stop on my Heir’s Tour. I’d been arrogant and selfish and far too concerned with appearing strong. He’d helped me a lot while I’d stayed here and in the years since.

I hovered in the doorway, pulling on the pants that Leo had left out for me, watching the scene. It was weird to think that, for all we’d grown up together and had known each other all our lives, I’d never seen Alyssa like this before. There was something so vulnerable about bare feet sticking out of the bottoms of her sweatpants, her oversized sleep tee swamping her body, and her hair piled in a haphazard bun on top of her head; several strands of wispy hair had escaped, brushing her forehead and her neck, tender as a lover’s caress.

A growl grew in my chest as Leo leaned over into her space.

“More coffee?” he asked, reaching for the empty mug in front of her.

“Please,” she said with a smile. She’d never smiled at me like that: easy and open and grateful. I tamped down the aggression I could feel rising inside me. Leo wasn’t a threat, he was my friend, he was just being polite. It wasn’t Leo’s fault I’d messed up so spectacularly that my mate no longer had anything but contempt for me.

Sure enough, her face fell as I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table a respectful distance away. Her posture became stiff, guarded, and I hated my younger self more fiercely than I ever had before. He’d had no idea what a gift fate had given him, so concerned with status and appearances and appeasing his father. I’d have that arrogant, conceited little pup on his back now, my teeth in his throat. He’d driven our mate into the arms of someone else: someone who’d knotted her and knocked her up and abandoned her on a witch-hating island. My fists clenched beneath the table, and Leo quirked an eyebrow at me. Clearly, I wasn’t keeping a lid on my emotions the way I thought I was.

“All clear?” Leo asked, the note of teasing clear in his voice.

I nodded, grunting in the affirmative.

“What a shock,” he said. “You want some bacon?”

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