Page 45 of My Fugitive Wolf
Grace's voice turned sour, "The alpha should have acted sooner. When he did, he played by the rules of a fair fight and beat down Josiah so hard that Josiah barely limped away. Unfortunately, the damage was already done. For reasons I'll never understand, most of the betas and omegas listened to Josiah instead of the alpha. They got off on his hate and his fake power or felt sorry for him because of how badly he'd been beaten. Whatever the reason, they left the pack to follow him to whatever rock he crawled under.”
Samara could feel her stomach tighten, knowing what was coming, because there was no other way for Grace’s story to end. It made her sick, but she could only imagine what it did to Kellen and Grace.
"Building a strong pack takes time and patience,” Grace continued, her voice quieter now, “so Riverstone still didn't have enough omegas to fight when Josiah and his followers came back two years later, this time with silver bullets and knives. It was an ambush, crafted to rip Riverstone to pieces. Even so, Josiah lost many of his followers to the alpha's fury, but not enough. All the male betas and omegas who survived were tortured with silver. The alpha was forced to watch, before he too was tortured and murdered. Josiah got drunk and laughed the entire time."
Everyone stayed quiet. Even Stephen had stopped writing.
"Josiah's not even a true alpha," Grace continued, after a deep breath. "He just kept saying he was until everyone believed him.”
Kellen closed the book and Samara reached out to grab his hand. He needed this connection, regardless of where their relationship ended up. She needed him to know that she cared about him. He squeezed her hand and gave her a grateful smile.
"I don't remember any of this," he said. "Why don't I remember this other alpha?"
"I'm glad you don't remember," Grace said. "You were only five and it's not something I would have wanted you to remember. Soon after, Josiah decided to start training you to fight with the omegas, and later as an assassin. It was the safest place for you. Josiah loved to force me to watch as he molded and twisted you into something that he knew I would hate. It was the only reason why he let you live, so he could keep hurting me." She took a long, deep breath. "So now that you know, let's move on."
Move on to where? Grace was hiding something. Kellen couldn't see it or didn't want to see it, but Samara did. The way she kept her eyes down, looking at the receipts she held in her lap as she talked. Kellen couldn't remember what happened because watching Josiah execute someone in cold blood, never mind his pack's alpha, had to have traumatized him to the point where his wolf shadow erased the memory—if wolf shadows were even capable of that. She also assumed that the omegas who held him hostage had to have abused him in some horrible way, increasing his pain before Josiah ordered them to train him.
A vague thought crossed her already exhausted mind. If wolf shadows could erase memories, had her wolf shadow erased hers? Was that why she couldn't remember as much as she should about her captivity? Had the wolf shadow prevented her from having nightmares?
"There's more stuff in my box that I need to look at." Samara reluctantly let go of Kellen's hand and returned to her side of the sleeper sofa and the box. Everyone else did the same. An hour later, toward the bottom of her box, she found a photograph in a hinged frame, either a daguerreotype or tintype. She wasn't enough of an expert to know the difference. With care, she opened the hinged frame and immediately slammed it shut again. The snap of the hinges closing caught everyone's attention again.
"Josiah and my grandfather knew each other." She passed the frame to Kellen who looked inside. “The one on the left is definitely my grandfather, but long before he became grandfather. And Josiah is standing right next to him.”
Samara closed the box, done with digging for clues. Josiah knew her grandfather at some point and now he wanted her. Did he have something to do with her grandfather's death? Did he want her because her grandfather owed him something? Money? Interest on a loan from a century and a half ago would have turned into quite a tidy sum. Had her grandfather run away from his responsibilities and lived his life in secret to not have to fight his friend?
Her grandfather hadn't made friends easily. In all the time she stayed with him while her parents worked, she'd only met two or three people who she might have considered his friends. They were folks he would sit with on a deck chair in the mouth of his garage, drinking beer on clear-weather days.
Kellen passed along the picture to Leo. "My box has spells."
"Like magic spells?" Samara asked. "Magic really exists? I mean you can read an incantation and make things appear or disappear?"
"If you believe in wolf shifters, why would magic be so unbelievable?" Kellen started to separate papers onto his lap and the coffee table in front of him. "Each clip has the original document laminated and a translation from various ancient dialects. Some are Anglo-Saxon, I think, but others I'm less sure about. The translations are clearly spells."
“You understand Anglo-Saxon?” By this point she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Kellen shrugged. “Libraries started popping up all over the place after World War II. By that point we could read and write just like most folks.”
"May I see them?" Grace asked, holding her hand. It took Samara a second to move past her shock that the brothers hadn’t learned to read and write before they became assassins. Then she craned her neck to better see the spell, just as Stephen and Leo did the same from the opposite side. "That's my grandfather's handwriting. Either he gave Josiah these papers or Josiah stole them."
"What sort of spells are they?" Leo asked, too far away to see anything.
Grace turned the papers around so she could read them, but didn’t try to pick them up off the table. "It looks like they're spells about different types of shifters from different cultures, but if Josiah was already a shifter and wolf shifters are either born with wolf shadows or they are created when bitten, I don't know why he would need any of.... Oh, wait."
"What is it?" Kellen asked.
Looking grim, Grace touched one of the spells. "There's one here about how to prevent a person from shifting, effectively locking them into their human form and trapping them there. That would explain why Samara’s father never shifted."
"But what about me?" she asked instead of spitting nails. "If my grandfather effectively locked me in my human form, how was I able to shift when I was in the cage?"
"You said that you woke up at one point with bites all over your body." Kellen was looking at her again, but she still couldn't bring herself to face him, especially when they were speaking about her captivity. "I could see Josiah trying the brute force method to break the spell. If he bit you enough times, or if he had all of the other Riverstone wolves bite you, that might have been enough to break the spell and awaken your wolf shadow."
Kellen had said that if Josiah wanted to rape her, he would have kept her awake so she would be forced to experience it. This was just as bad. The bagel in her stomach churned and Samara ran to the bathroom before she embarrassed herself. Her last thought before slamming closed the bathroom door was how could Kellen possibly love her after this?
Chapter
Eighteen
Her mind fractured. Hot and cold flashes engulfed her. Stars appeared at the edges of her sight. Even after, as she rinsed out her mouth, she couldn't stop heaving. Only after she splashed water on her face did she notice that the blue tinge had completely disappeared from her lips and fingertips.
