Page 53 of The Alpha: Part One
I shake my head. “She’s fine. He wouldn’t be alive if she wasn’t.”
We make it to the main road before Michael screams from the passenger seat, scaring the shit out of me and causing me to nearly drive off the road.
I glance over at him. He looks how I feel. Disgusted. Sick. Disappointed. Scared.
“Do we believe it?”
Michael leans his head back against the headrest. “It doesn’t matter what we believe. Everyone else believes it, and Minos won’t sign off on the registration if he believes it.”
“But dowebelieve it? It doesn’t make sense, does it? His reactions–”
“Don’t mean shit if he did it.” Michael interrupts. “Yeah, he might be messed up, but he hasn’t offered a single explanation about why he’s so messed up. I wanted to give him time to talk to us about it when he was ready, but maybe he was never going to tell us.”
Probably not. He’s been around us enough to know that we’d never let him near Desie if we thought he was capable of something like that. And now that we do know we’ll keep him as far from her as we can.
“What’s fucked up is that Seth isn’t our biggest problem.”
“Fuck,” Michael grits. “He isn’t, is he? The council. They could take Desie even though we claimed her because we just lost our goddamn third. Fuck!”
“Exactly.”
We’re quiet for a while, thinking, stressing. I turn off the main road into our neighborhood but instead of rushing to the house, I pull over on the shoulder. We can’t go back to the house without a plan to handle this disaster.
“We’ll make him leave,” Michael says quietly. “Desie’s going to take it hard, but then we’ll make a plan with her to leave. We need to leave here for at least a while, maybe a few months.”
“Okay,” I agree. “Are we telling her what he did?”
“We have to, Ben. She’d find out anyway.”
We pull into the driveway and the front door opens as we’re getting out of the car. Seth comes out, grim, holding his phone to his ear and his duffle in the other. We stop on the walk and the three of us just stare at each other while Seth listens to whoever is on the other end of the call. We don’t say anything to him, and he doesn’t say anything to us. He knows that we know. It’s all over his face.
“I’ll leave the truck parked at the house and leave the keys on the table when I lock up. There is an explanation, but I understand you don’t want to hear it. I apologize for not being upfront, but I didn’t think I’d need to explain it… I understand…Yes…Alright.” He ends the call and puts the phone in his pocket, but he still doesn’t offer any explanation to Michael and me.
He opens his mouth, then closes it and shakes his head. He looks over his shoulder back at the house and then turns back toward us. He looks at each of us in turn then takes a breath and walks away. He gets in the truck and drives down the street and that’s that.
Desie comes running out to us crying. “What’s wrong?” she sniffs. “I don’t understand.”
“Come on,” I put my arm around her waist and guide her back to the door. “We’ll talk about it when we get back inside.”
“Why? I don’t understand. He got a phone call, I’m guessing from Alpha Minos, and he just left. He said he was sorry and left. Then you came home and didn’t stop him, like you wanted him to go. What did he do that was so bad?”
“I got it,” I tell Michael. I’ll explain it. “Flores came to Mateo with a file from the East Coast Council. The file states that Seth did some awful things to a girl when he was younger. He didn’t tell us because he knew we wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“What did he do? What were the circumstances? Is that why he has the problems he has?”
I drag my hands down my face. I didn’t want to tell her what he actually did. I didn’t want to say it out loud to her.
“Just tell her,” Michael says.
“He raped her. It’s documented. The details aren’t clear, but it happened. It wasn’t exactly covered up, but the details are classified. We don’t know her name or what happened to her afterwards, just that it happened. And that he didn’t bother to mention it to us. He also didn’t bother telling us that he was involved when the COT unit killed his pack.”
I watch her reaction play across her face. Every emotion is there to see, and I feel them all pouring through her bond.
“That doesn’t make sense, Ben. There has to be more to it.”
“It doesn’t matter if there is,” Michael sighs. “He should have told us. I’m sick that we let him touch you. The Eastern Institute even put him on a list to bar him and his pack from taking any omega.”
The flow of her emotions abruptly stalls and hardens. “Ilet him touchme, Michael. And, like you said, he should have said something. I’m not sure how to feel about the rest of it, I need time to work through it.
