Page 70 of Elven Throne

It must have been awful.

She didn’t know much at all about shifters, true, but she did know their pack was everything.

Maxwell was the exception. But he always had been, hadn’t he?

“What happened?” she asked, unable to stop herself a second time from prompting him for more.

With a heavy sigh, he kicked at the underbrush with the toe of his boot, making noise with his steps for the first time since they’d entered the woods. Then he dipped his head back to gaze at the canopy above them. “Simply put, I was wrong.”

Rebecca gaped at him. “That’s hardly something to warrant being turned out.”

He swung his head back down to shoot her a sideways look and growled. “I wasverywrong. The details of it do not matter nearly as much as their consequences. My Alpha gave an order with which I disagreed. I believed obeying that order was wrong because it did not match my own moral code at the time.

“So I defied it. I thought I was doing the right thing, but grave mistakes are not lessened by the intentions behind them.”

He paused again, swallowing thickly, and briefly closed his eyes. “More than a mistake. Shifters lost their lives because of it. In the end, it turned out I was wrong and had been all along. Not only in defying my Alpha but in my failure to understand the full scope of what he’d ordered and why.

“I learned exactly why a leader is rarely obligated to fully explain the reasoning behind their decisions. It was a mistake I will never be able to correct or make up for, with my pack or any other.

“But if I can, wherever possible, I will strive to make up for it in other ways until the day I die. With other people…”

Damn.

That certainly explained why Shade’s Head of Security was such a stickler for the rules. Breaking them just once had cost him everything.

“Your Alpha,” Rebecca began, unsure exactly how to phrase it. “Is he still…”

“Alpha now?” he finished for her. “Yes. It is still Jim.”

“The man who answered the farmhouse door?”

“The very same. I imagine he will remain Alpha for quite some time to come. He is a stern man, not unfair but strict where it matters. I imagine there are some who think he was too harsh when meting out my punishment. But he had to be. To set the right example. Not just for the Sparta pack but for all of them. And I can say, had he not been Alpha at the time, I likely would not have fought him so fiercely the way I did.”

“Bad blood between you two?” Rebecca asked.

Maxwell snorted. “Not at the time. Not before I forced his hand. Family has a tendency to make us push harder than we otherwise might dare.”

“Family?” she blurted.

“He’s my uncle.”

She didn’t know why it surprised her so much. She’d instantly noticed the resemblance between them the moment Jim had opened the farmhouse door to find them on his front porch.

Probably because she’d expected everyone else’s relationship with their own family to be vastly different from hers. Some utopian thing where blood ties and affectionate bonds were stronger than duty.

Apparently, the callous nature of Rebecca’s familial ties wasn’t as rare or as uncommon as she’d assumed.

Maxwell’s own uncle had decided to make an example of him, to shun him from not just one pack but every pack for breaking whatever constituted a shifter Chain of Command.

The way Maxwell had explained it, the fact that they were blood only seemed to have made the punishment that much more severe.

She cocked her head, frowning. “And Annie is…”

“My aunt,” he replied, shooting her another quick flicker of a smile. “They raised me. The closest thing I had to parents. Once, I believe, they really did think of me as a son.”

Rebecca had known from a very young age what it was like to have parents who treated her no more kindly than they treated any other valuable soldier. Who likely had been so much harder on her because they were herparents, though?

Not once had Bundros and Sha’alvali treated her as their own child after discovering the Bloodshadow Heir’s remarkable abilities had manifested in her. They’d all but sent her off to be raised by Theodil instead.

---