Page 4 of Leave Me
Channing has instructions to send this letter to you when I’m gone. Know that I’m proud of you and hope you will return home to take your rightful place running the King Pack, the Club, and Motorvated. I’m leaving everything to you and Channing, but I can’t make you take it. You were always smarter than me, so I know you’ll make the best choice not just for you, but also for your sister.
My deepest regret and love belong to you, my boy.
Goodbye,
Alpha King
Chapter two
Riley Jones
“You unpacked yet, Ri?” Mom’s question echoed down the short hallway to where I was starfished on the same double mattress I’d had since I was in kindergarten. Thankfully, the boy band posters I had as a teen had been replaced by framed pictures from my travels.
A warm breeze blew the white lace curtains over my head, and I sat up to close the window before the afternoon heat crept in. We only had an old swamp cooler, and the weather was heating up.
“Mostly,” I called back. I knew she’d hear me, because her little cottage was only four rooms with a bathroom attached in the nineties.
My mom owned the bungalow in the hills west of Blue Lake, California, where I’d been born and raised. She didn’t have the income to live lakeside, like some of the wealthy clients she cleaned for, but I liked our little place. Which is why I helped her pay it off, so she didn’t have to work so hard.
At twenty-seven, with a college degree and a successful career, I probably should have bought my own place, but it felt unnecessary. I was home for only a few weeks at a time before a new assignment came my way. I could have taken a job with a newspaper stateside, but I’d felt unmoored since graduating from high school, and the globetrotter lifestyle suited me fine.
While I traveled the world researching for stories and writing whatever struck my fancy, I always had a place to come home to. Even if I had no privacy.
Mom’s steps signaled her approach, so I hopped up to look busy, pulling my only suit out of my travel case. Most of my clothes fit in one drawer, but sometimes I needed to dress formally when meeting foreign leaders. A black suit was versatile, but also annoying to get dry-cleaned on location.
“I should iron that for you,” Mom told me, leaning on the doorframe and crossing her arms over her apron-clad chest.
“No rush, I don’t have any jobs booked right now.” Though I never knew when one would pop up and pull me to the other side of the globe, I was contemplating my next career move. “Plus, I know how to iron my suit. You don’t have to.”
“Hush. Let me mother you before you stop letting me,” Mom admonished, taking my suit off the hook and laying it over her arm. “Besides, you might want it for all the events this week.”
Chuckling, I scratched at the patchy blond beard I grew on my last assignment. I needed to shave it off before anyone saw me. ThoughI thought it helped give me a mature look, I knew some of the guys would give me hell. “Don’t think the Lake High Reunion will be so fancy.”
“Maybe not, but the funeral is tomorrow,” Mom said, turning to leave my room like she hadn’t dropped a bombshell.
“Funeral?” I asked, following Mom into the next room with the kitchen and dining table, where her ironing board lived in a wall.
Her parents were gone, and I wasn’t close to many people who were old enough to die of natural causes. I’d never even met my father, but I knew Mom wouldn’t be talking about him, since she never did.
“Who for?”
“Well, you know I still clean the King Pack house, even though I added the inn on the lake?” Mom started, dropping her board down and pulling the iron from the cabinet before walking to the sink to fill the reservoir. “And Alpha King hasn’t been so bad the past year or so.”
Mom had a thing for making stories take longer to add context and suspense, which might have influenced my writing, but I needed answers.
“That drunk still in charge of the pack?” I asked about the current alpha, David King, whom I couldn’t stand to be around. Maybe the former alpha—his father, Merle—had passed. “Is it Merle?”
“Technically, no,” she answered with absolutely no clarity before plugging the iron in to heat.
“Mom,” I drew the word out, and she rolled her eyes. “Who died?”
“Old man King is still alive and well,” she clarified before screwing her face up as if trying not to cry, “but Alpha King passed away last week, so he isn’t the alpha anymore. And neither is Merle. I think Finley Clark stepped in as his second.”
Shock coursed through me, an icy chill down my spine as my head went fuzzy with memories, blurring out the rest of what she said about the motorcycle club and pack politics. I was barely pack adjacent, as a third-generation wolf who couldn’t shift and had never presented, but I didn’t care.
By all accounts, the alpha had been an amazing father and alpha before the death of his wife, and Fowler remembered those times. I knew David King as a hateful drunk who ran my best friend out of town for being himself, and I had wished for the man to drop dead countless times. I knew his son was conflicted, though.
Fowler was his chosen name, and though we talked often when he first ran away to San Francisco, we’d lost touch over the years. I went to college on a scholarship in Los Angeles, and he was going through his transition. He didn’t want to see anyone from his past while he changed his body, which I understood to an extent, though it hurt. Then, I was traveling all over the world.
