Page 10 of Cruel Alpha Beast
I chew on the inside of my cheek. They’re still doing potlucks, huh?
“You promised a veggie platter,” Sawyer continues.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Greg tells him.
Greg turns before I do, still holding onto Shea tightly. He reaches down and grabs the suitcases we brought with us, leaning against the wall outside the meeting room.
I catch Sawyer’s steely eyes watching me—that same lingering, longing look he always used to give me. The one he claimed meant nothing. The one he said was because I was such a freak show.
The one I always hoped meant he felt something for me deep down inside.
I’m much smarter now, though. My heart doesn’t skip a beat as the alpha’s eyes trace my body this time. Instead, my blood runs cold. I turn over my shoulder and follow Greg.
But not before I catch Sawyer nodding his head toward me.
Chapter 4 - Sawyer
It’s been over an hour since I’ve laid eyes on Lacey, and yet I can’t stop thinking about her. The way her eyes shone in the ceiling’s light, the dangerous curves of her body, the look of confidence on her face. She’s changed since I last saw her. I can only imagine what she’s been through since she left me by the lake’s edge so many years ago.
Heaving a deep sigh, I try to shake the woman out of my head, if only for a moment. As alpha, I have to make sure that this potluck goes well tonight. Jasper, Ellis, Greg, and I schemed for several days, trying to figure out how to restore some community values and some level of morale back into our communities.
This dinner was the best thing we could come up with.
The mess hall is full of people from all three towns in the valley. The vast majority are shifters, while a scant few are open-minded humans who aren’t afraid to live amongst wolves. All are welcome here, my father told me. But if that were true, then why were we all so awful to Lacey?
There she is in my head again. I can’t get her out. I’ve gone so many years without seeing her, but now, every time I close my eyes, there she is, haunting me.
As more of my people come inside the mess hall, bearing food, the hungrier I feel. Spices and herbs rise from their slow-cooker pots and glass dishes to mingle over my head. I’m starving, but my father told me long ago that I should be the last to eat when I become alpha. Making sure my people are fed is the most important thing to me, above all else.
I try to distract myself by setting up extra tables and bringing out chairs, but neither the delicious food nor the beautiful woman from my past drifts too far from my mind.
The doors to the mess hall open, and I’m suddenly drawn to look toward them. My mouth waters as I watch Lacey step through, bearing a large veggie tray, just as Greg promised. The man himself, my lifelong best friend, stands behind her, carrying that little girl on his shoulders. She giggles loudly, grasping onto his mop of hair to stay steady, even though we all know Greg would never let her fall.
All this time, I had no idea he was an uncle. I always thought we were the type of friends who told each other everything, but he kept this a secret from me for so long. I can’t even be mad about it, though, because the smile returning to his face is a welcome one. I haven’t seen him this happy in a long time.
Lacey glances up at her daughter, smiling herself, in a way I genuinely don’t think I ever saw. Looking back, she was never happy living in this valley, and I can’t blame her. But if everyone saw just how gorgeous she is with that gleam in her eye or the dimples on her cheeks, maybe people would have been a lot kinder to her.
The little girl says something to her mother that I can’t hear. Lacey looks up at her and replies in what I can only imagine is a warm, loving tone. This moves me more than I thought it would. Maybe it’s because Lacey and Greg lost their mother and father when they were young, and so she’s making up for all she’s lost.
But what I’m finding even more confusing is, just who is the girl’s father?
Immediately, I’m brought back to the night I took her to the lake’s edge, where she called me out for staring at her. I was the cruelest I’ve ever been to her. I called her names. I pushed her away. But even my best defenses couldn’t stop me from pulling her back, feeling her lips against mine, sinking into her warmth like I had wanted to do for so long.
We mated.
I was her first, but perhaps not only. She had gotten the wrong idea and assumed that this meant we were going to be together for the long haul. I’ve always felt she was in love with me, and based on how she ran away crying, never to be seen again until literally hours ago, I was right.
I tossed her away like trash. Made her think that I could never and would never love her. I was an asshole—cocky and immature.
But what I couldn’t admit to her that night by the lake was that I had feelings for her too.
They started when we were young, and Lacey used to follow Greg and me around. I was mean to her, like little boys are to the girls they have crushes on. I didn’t know how to express my feelings, nor did I want to learn how, and so, I was awful to her. Eventually, it all came out that she was unable to turn into a wolf, despite coming from a long, ancient line of shifters. There was no coming back from that. Her fate as a pariah was sealed.
Everyone, even the adults in our community, looked down upon her. She was different. Weird. And once her parents had died, she only had Greg to support her.
I could have been there for her all along. But instead, I worried about what others thought of me, so I masked my feelings for her by upping my cruelty. Still, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her at all.
My thoughts are interrupted by the visual of a waving hand in the distance. I turn slightly toward the right and see my father, with his hand in the air, a giant tank of water under his other arm. He smiles proudly at me, just as he always does, deepening the wrinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes. His graying hair is tied at the back of his head in a messy knot, but he looks almost the same as when I was younger.
