Page 19 of Brutal Alpha Bully

“Yes.”

“Are they your family?” Nora asks, tilting her head. “They smelled like you.”

Her words are a punch to the gut. It used to be that I was proud to carry the Sorel scent. Now it feels like a heavy mantle around my shoulders. Like a mark of shame.

Again, I glance at Seraphina. She hasn’t told me a thing, hasn’t answered any of my questions. So why should I be candid with her daughter?

Though I tell myself to say nothing, I confirm, “Yes. My brothers.”

For the next hour, Nora continues to talk to me, asking questions that I tell myself I won’t answer, only to find myself giving in. She asks about when my wolf grew, and if I did anything to help it get bigger. If I trained with my brothers, and what that was like. How I managed to increase my alpha control to the point where even my brothers—other alphas—seemed to want to listen to me, to follow the natural order of things.

“It’s always been like that,” I answer. It’s the truth—I have always had slightly more weight to my voice than the others. It’s why many in town always thought I would take over as thealpha supreme. It’s why Declan is so threatened that I’m back in Silverville.

Nora is in the middle of asking another question when Seraphina wakes up again, using one shaking hand to try to push herself to a sitting position.

“Nora,” she whispers, her voice hoarse like she’s been screaming for hours, “don’t—”

She coughs, cutting herself off, but her hand flutters in my direction, and her meaning comes across.

Nora hands her a glass of water, whispering, “Sorry, Mom.”

Seraphina is alive. Nora seems capable of taking care of her, and Seraphina clearly doesn’t want me around.

I stand and leave, coming down the steps into the living room just in time to hear a knock at the door. My brain catches up to the moment—to the time—and I realize the guys are all going to be showing up.

When I open the door, Lachlan Cambias struts into the room, wearing a fine leather jacket and smelling of expensive, foreign cologne. He’s the kind of man who wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a magazine, far more polished and perfect than I could ever be.

The last time I saw him, he was clean-shaven, but now he sports a beard along his jaw that makes him look older. His outline is thicker than it was before.

How long will it be before I stop being astounded at the ways Silverville has continued marching through time without me? My high school friends, somehow aging up from teenagers and into men, just like I did?

“Alright,” Lachlan says, turning and flashing his perfectly white teeth at me. “Are you going to get this party started or what?”

Chapter 10 - Seraphina

Slowly, over the next few days, my strength comes back to me. Though I tell Nora not to talk to Xeran again, I get the sense that she wants to. That she might talk to him while she’s out, fetching me a glass of water or making more soup.

One day, she arrives with a book I’ve never seen before, but I don’t ask about it. Mostly because I don’t want to know where it came from, and whether or not Xeran gave it to her.

Sometimes, when I sleep, my dreams morph into nightmares. Replays of that day in high school when everything went wrong.

“Sera!”I hear Aurela’s shrill voice piercing through the air as she tries to find me. Valerie’s scream of fury. Maeve somewhere, her sobs quiet and heart-shattering.

It’s too dark to see anything but a faint crackle, the spark of light around the fifth member of our group, engulfed by flame.

When I startle awake, it’s to Nora already petting my arm, trying to calm me down, just like I used to do for her when she was a little girl. Occasionally, I hear other voices in the house, muffled and male. It sends a thrill of anxiety through me, even as I know Xeran would never do anything to hurt us, and wouldn’t let anyone in the house to hurt us.

He would just keep us here against our will.

On the fourth day after our encounter in the woods, I’m back on my feet, shuffling down the hallway to stretch out my aching, stiff legs. I stand at the top of the stairs, staring down into the house, wondering if Xeran is here. It’s quiet, and Nora is napping in our room, so I slowly creep down the stairs myself,holding tightly to the railing when my knees threaten to give way to the weight of my body.

The living room is dusty, only a single chair cleared of the grime. The dust floats through the air—likely a combination of regular house dust and daemonic ash creeping in through the cracks of the house over the years. The windows are streaked with gray, like someone tried to wipe them off quickly, realized it was harder than they thought, and left them worse than they were before.

Without ever having come here in high school, I can still look around the living room with its high ceilings, leather furniture, and massive stone fireplace and know what this place could look like. I feel the potential here, along with the weight of the past, as I imagine the Sorels lounging in the living room.

Maybe Xeran sat on this rug once, reading in front of the fire.

“Should I tell Xeran you’re skulking around in his living room?”

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