Page 73 of Rejected By My Stepbrother Alpha
I couldn’t even be angry at him for that comment. Why the hell hadn’t I thought to lock the door?
“Did you attack her in your wolf form a little less than a week ago?” Asher questioned, nodding at me.
Riggs blinked, and a confused look came across his face. “No, I didn’t.”
I shared a loaded look with Asher. It seemed like he was telling the truth. He could be lying, but he had admitted everything else so far. What was the point of lying now? Who had tried to attack me if it hadn’t been Riggs, hired by this mysterious woman?
“Who was the woman who hired you?” I demanded.
“She never told me her name,” Riggs said. “I only saw her once at the bar where I met her. The rest of our communication has been through payphones and notes she leaves for me with instructions. She’s very secretive.”
“Well, what does she look like?” I said impatiently.
Riggs' eyes traveled down my body and then back up. His stare made a shiver of disgust go up my spine.
“The woman looks like an older version of you,” he said.
Holy shit.
My stomach dropped, and in an instant everything clicked.
The woman looked like an older version of me…everyone had always said that I was the spitting image of…
My mother.
A picture popped into my head of my mother in a smoky dive bar, her icy blue eyes scanning the place with disgust. I imagined the sound her high heels made on the dirty wooden floor as she walked across the room to Riggs on his sixth or seventh beer. She would have smoothed her outfit down before she sat next to him and asked him for his help to ruin my life.
But why?
With my heart in my throat, I grabbed Asher’s hand and pulled him into the corner of the room, away from Riggs.
“Don’t worry about me! I’m perfectly comfortable tied to this chair,” he called from behind us.
Asher and I ignored him.
“It has to be my mother behind this,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.” A frustrated sigh escaped his lips. “How did I not see this before? When your mom discovered that I convinced my dad to leave her out of the will, she vowed to seek revenge on me. She was pissed at the reading of my father’s will. She made a whole scene.”
“I remember her anger,” I said, recalling my mom blasting classical music when I came home that day. “She had slapped me and told me that I would regret not trying to convince you to marry me.”
Asher’s eyes darkened with anger.
“She hit you?” he growled.
I waved my hand impatiently. “That was seven years ago.”
“Right,” he said, but his hands were still clenched into tight fists.
“What did my mother do after I left Sun Fire? Did she leave the city right away like you requested? Or did she make another scene?” I asked.
“She left that night, disappearing without a trace,” he said.
“I don’t understand why my mother waited seven years to get her revenge on us,” I murmured. “What has taken her so long?”
I paused and bit my lip. Then, my eyes prickled with tears. Just the mention of my mom made all of my past trauma withher rise to the surface. The overwhelming emotions pressed in on me until I felt crushed under their enormous weight.
Asher noticed my distress, and he took my hand, gently squeezing it.
