Page 106 of The Weakest Wolf

“When did your parents realize it was a mistake?”

“The first hour.” Her voice turns flat and her eyes return to a point just over my shoulder. “The alpha killed Dad right in front of us. When Mom tried to take me away, they blocked the door and told her no.”

No wonder she’d called them animals. That’s all the Stone pack had ever been. “You don’t have to tell me all this, Sierra.”

Her eyes return to mine. “There’s so much about them I know I’ve forgotten because the memories stay in my head and over time they just… die. I know they do.”

She’s right. I had Dom to keep my memories of Melody alive, but Sierra has had no one.

“What happened next?” I ask her.

“The alpha had his enforcers take us to a cabin. They told us that’s where we’d be living from now on, and that Mom would mate with one of the men. We were Stones now. That’s what they said, but I was fourteen—old enough to know that I would never be one of them—not after what they’d done to Dad.”

Aware I’m all but pinning Sierra to the bed, I shift us so we’re lying side by side. “I can’t imagine your mom would’ve been happy about that.”

She shakes her head. “No, no, she was furious. She was a beta, and she wouldn’t have stopped fighting. Not unless…” her voice trails off.

“Not unless?”

“The alpha couldn’t convince her to stop arguing, so he turned to threats instead. When that didn’t work, he forced her out.”

“What about you?”

Sierra lowers her gaze to my chest. “They told her they would kill me, that if she didn’t leave, then I would be the one who paid for it.”

“So she left?”

“Did you bring the necklace from the truck?”

I reach over to the bedside table and retrieve the necklace she’d tucked in the glove compartment before she’d fallen asleep.

In silence, I watch as she opens the heart-shaped locket and hands it to me. On one side is a man with a square jaw and familiar silver-gray eyes that could only be Sierra’s father. On the other half is a beautiful woman with long dark hair, and blue eyes holding a grinning toddler in her arms. Sierra and her mom, Lira Bree.

“She gave me this and told me that one day we’d find each other, that she’d survive, and that all I needed to do was hold on long enough for that to happen.” She smiles, even as tears slide down her cheeks. “She was more worried about what would happen to me than herself.”

Her heart. That’s what’s she’s trusting me with. The thing that means more to her than anything.

I close the locket and return it to Sierra.

“But something happened?”

“It was a year later, and I was waiting for my first shift so I’d have the best chance of getting away. The alpha told me that Mom was dead, that she’d been killed by hunters nearby.” She sniffs. “I didn’t believe him at first, but he said she’d never gone far. I knew it, I think even before he told me. I knew I was never going to see her again.”

I wrap my arms around her and pull her close. “I’m guessing it wasn’t hunters that killed her.”

Her hair tickles my cheek when she shakes her head. “Bowen admitted that she came back, probably to get me away, but they killed her.”

“So you stayed to get revenge.”

She lifts her head. I’ve never wished for the ability to go back in time and save her parents as much as I do when I take in the anguish filling her eyes. “They sent her out there to die, the alpha and his enforcers. And when she didn’t, they killed her. They had to die. All of them.”

I want to ask about how she managed it, about her relationship with her wolf, but now isn’t the time. “So you killed them.”

“I decided I wouldn’t wait for my first shift so I could run away. I’d wait so I could kill them all. It took a long time.” She shakes her head. “Learning my wolf was submissive made things harder, but suddenly it was just Leo and Bowen, and then—”

My smile is bitter. “A selfish alpha turns up, exposes you, and ruins all your plans when you’re so close to achieving it.”

“Something like that.”

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