Page 124 of The Pack Next Door
I was the big dog in the car park, ready to protect them all from being touched by this shit.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snarled.
“Gideon…?” Had my mother’s voice always sounded like nails dragged down a chalk board? My head whipped around to see her rushing over, clutching her handbag close to her chest. “Darling boy.”
Tears filled her eyes as she stumbled over the gravel ground in her haste to get to me. She reached out to grip my arm and I jerked back before she could touch me, knowing somehow just how it would sting.
“Son.” Max tromped over, the keys to the car swinging from his finger. Thankfully he was sober, mostly. Greg was slumped, eyes closed, on the back seat. “This has all gone on for long enough. I know it's exciting that you’ve found your mate?—”
“That woman.” My mother’s face transformed. Tears evaporated in the face of her ire. She scowled at the church, and I was shocked when it didn’t immediately turn into a ball of flames. “She’s not your mate. Gideon?—”
Another attempt to touch me. A bid for attention, that’s what the beta relationship experts called it, and I made clear what I thought about that.
“Do not touch me.”
The wolf snarled that, no longer able to be held down. He’d made clear to me over and over how wrong the family dynamic was, but I’d forced him into silence. I wanted his power, his skills of observation, to be used in whatever way my family saw fit. Well, no more. Black fur sprouted all along my arms, my hands going to claws.
“Oh…” Mum’s hand went to her mouth and she let out a shuddering breath. “Oh, did you see that? Ned?—”
“I know.” He shouldered forward, stepping between me and my mother. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”
“Or what?”
It was then he realised the mistake he’d made. What made him value me more than my brothers was the height, the strength, he didn’t possess. Forced to crane his neck to stare into my eyes as I stepped up and met his challenge, he saw then the mistake he’d made.
“You did your best to train me to be the biggest, scariest prick in any situation,” I said and with a blink, I remembered every savage lesson he visited upon me. “Because you thought one day, you’d be able to use that to your advantage.”
“Gideon, mate—” Max started to say.
“Shut the fuck up.” My focus shifted back to Ned, and that sloppy smile, I knew it all too well. There was something dangerous about all of my fathers, but none more than Ned. A recklessness that Mads had inherited, but without an ounce of decency to moderate it. “Now, this is this is going to go. None of you are going to ruin today for Briar.”
I couldn’t do this for myself, but for my mate? I’d choose her every damn day, and that would be put to the test today.
“Get the fuck back in your car and turn it around, driving anywhere other than the city, because that’s my territory now, and I will not tolerate any of you within it.”
“Everything alright, Gideon?”
Brent looked me and my parents over warily. Instincts honed on the force made clear that a situation was unfolding.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I said with an appreciative nod. And I could. That came as a shock to realise. All of their training made me perfect for a role they never intended for me to fulfil. “Now, go?—”
“Where?” Max’s desperate tone was a revelation. “You think we wouldn’t be here if we had any other choice?”
“We’re your family, boy,” Ned snapped. “You’d be nothing without us.”
“I’d rather be nothing.” That hollowness inside me, it made sense now. They’d created it, scooping out every part of my personality they saw as weak or irrelevant. Five things you can see, I told myself. Four things you can hear. But I didn’t need to deploy those coping skills, misusing them to stuff everything I felt down. “Because I’m not your dog anymore. I gave you the keys to a home in the town you said you wanted to live in. Any debt between us has been settled.”
“Except that vicious little queen wouldn’t let us keep it.” It was then I saw behind the mask my mother wore. Something very ugly rose, showing her true face to the world. “Took far too much pride, kicking us out of ‘his’ town.”
If you’d asked me this morning if I could laugh at the idea of seeing my parents again, I’d have thought you were mad, but that’s just what I did. It all played out in my head. Omega Hart declaring my parents verboten, no doubt because they’d overstepped, starting fomenting dissent. Unwilling to just let sleeping dogs lie, they’d have sealed their own fate and come whining to me to fix it.
“So go back to Glen Hallow,” I said.
“That’s not happening either.”
Max had the grace to look embarrassed by that.
“Had words with the ruling pack before we left to see the alpha trials, I did.” Ned swayed a little on his feet. “Words you can’t come back from.”
