Page 34 of Sigma
“You ever dig in to find out more? Find out what happened there after?”
Jared’s eyes narrow. “Left and kept moving. Why? What did you see?”
“If you haven’t dug, we need to. I saw that night, only the aftermath. Saw the abuse from your alpha and his betas. You were young?”
“Yeah.”
“How young?” I ask. “What kind of abuse?”
“Got the shit kicked out of me often when I was a kid,” Jared says.
Grey continues. “You’ve buried shit, shit I can’t dig out on my own. But I think there are more answers there than what me and Ronnie can decode. Nothing from your wolf. All you. I should sense both you and your animal, but I don’t sense your animal at all.”
“I haven’t set foot within three hundred miles of the place since then. I buried them and left.”
“In all your years of doing private eye work, you never crossed paths with anyone from your old pack?”
“Thankfully, no.”
“Can you share many memories of what happened just before you left?”
“My pack wasn’t a great place to be. Not like Silver Hills, though. The abuse came at me specifically. And my mother and sister after Dad died.”
“Linc said your father was a private eye. Was he alpha?”
“Beta. Alpha’s younger brother. Could’ve challenged the alpha and likely won; he was strong. Died when I was a kid. Couple years before I… before I… first shifted.” Jared lets that hang.
“Your uncle treat you bad before he died too?”
Jared scoffs. “You could say that. He had no kids, no mate. After Dad died, he took us in. Treated Mom and my sister as housekeepers. Treated my mother like she was his whore. I think he saw me hitting maturity as a threat to his position, to the shit he was getting away with, so he was sure to do whatever he could to put fear into me before I matured.”
“How old were you when you first shifted?”
“Thirteen.”
“That’s early.”
“Yup.”
It is. Most alphas, other than our council alphas, don’t shift until sixteen or seventeen.
“And you were connected to your wolf then?” Grey asks him.
“No. The first time I shifted was when I killed my family.”
Damn.
“And where was that?” Grey asks.
There’s a beat where it looks like Jared is considering whether he wants to answer the question.
“Utah,” he finally says. “Not far from the Colorado and Wyoming borders. Closer to Colorado.”
“All that abuse,” Grey says. “I think it fucked up your wolf.”
He shrugs. “A lot of shifter kids deal with that. Don’t know any of them that have a wolf like the one I’ve got.”
“You’ve dug into that? Looked for similar cases?”
