Page 49 of Wolf Unleashed
“School was poisoning your mind, making you believe shifters are like us.”
“They are like us!” she said, moving so fast toward him that Murphy stepped in front of her dad. She stopped short, battling the dizziness that returned from the sudden motion. “They just want to live in peace, raise their families, and be left alone.”
He patted her shoulder. “You are still young and innocent in the ways of the world and what it takes to survive.”
She clenched her hands, forcing the anger back. She needed to be smart, think smart. Yelling at him wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
“Why am I here?” she said, as if all the anger had left her. This conversation and revelations had drained her. “What do you want from me,Father?” she dragged out his title, a title he never liked her using. He wanted to be calledDad. There were a lot of names she wanted to call him, butfatherwasn’t on the list.
“We need to take care of that beast inside of you.”
“Despite what you think you did to me, I would know if I was a shifter. I don’thavea wolf,” she said defiantly, raising her chin. “Basic biology, Dad. Humans don’t give birth to shifters. That much I know.”
“Your mother was shifter.”
Alyssa never thought she’d hear her father admit that, and it confirmed what Maddox had found. As a kid, she had suspected her mother was shifter ever since she’d found those pictures, but she had never confronted her dad about the possibility. She’d been too scared. Of him, and of having a wolf inside of her.
Until she’d met her shifters. The wolf inside of her had started to surface, which had confused and terrified her at first. Then she got to know her shifters and their wolves. They’d given her the courage and strength to face what had frightened her for so long.
“I see you’re not surprised,” Woodrow said.
She knew right then he wasn’t going to let her go. He wasn’t done trying tofixher.
“I found the pictures,” she confessed. “You caged her and then you killed her.”
The hard edges around his eyes tightened as his eyes narrowed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure I do. She committed the ultimate betrayal to a man like you. She hid the fact that she was a shifter from you and when you found out, you were horrified, maybe even humiliated, among your anti-shifter buddies. So you killed her.”
Alyssa pushed off from the bed, ignoring her bond with Maddox and his heightened worry. She could swear she felt him pushing her to back down, to not tempt the crazy man standing in front of her. Except he wasn’t crazy. Woodrow Monroe was a very sane man with an intense hatred of shifters.
“You took my mother from me and now you plan to take even more from me.”
“She can’t be reasoned with, Murphy,” her father said, shaking his head as he talked around her as if she were an animal in a cage. “I fear I’m already too late. It may be more than mere brainwashing. If the beast inside of her has affected her brain, there may be little we can do. She wasn’t like this at the DSA training center. Graves said she was calm, smart, collected, showing no signs of even having a wolf. Until she got involved with those three shifters.”
“Perhaps the blood-bond unleashed her wolf,” Murphy suggested.
Her father’s eyes grew wide. “Of course! I should have thought of that!”
“You’re personally vested in the outcome, Mr. Monroe. Staying objective is difficult in these situations,” Murphy said, sounding as calculating as a scientist about to dissect a rat, or in this case, a wolf.
“Very true,” Woodrow said as he opened the door.
“Wait!” Alyssa called, but both men ignored her.
“The bond complicates matters, but I believe we can destroy it. Then we can proceed as planned.”
“You can’t destroy my blood-bond. I won’t let you!”
“None of the methods have been proven, except the one. It’s a good thing we already deployed your team,” he said as he grasped Murphy’s shoulder in a fatherly manner.
Her father wasn’t going to listen to her. The second she raised her voice, he had blamed it on her wolf. Alyssa lowered her voice and crossed her legs on the edge of the bed. She neatly folded her hands over her knees, making a show of presenting herself as a lady.
“Dad,” she said calmly, the way he always told her to act, as far from being a shifter as a woman could be.. “Please talk to me. Explain what’s going on.”
“Oh, you’re back again,” he said with a genuine smile.
She tried to keep the shock off her face, but knowing what he planned to do to her scared the shit out of her.
