Page 8 of The Alpha's Betrayed Mate

“Paying my respects to the dead,” she rasped. How strange, to hear again a voice he’d long since consigned to memory. He’d never quite been able to bring himself to imagine her dead—when he slipped and let himself think of her at all, he imagined her in some distant place, with a new pack, a new life. He should have known that she was more stubborn than that. Her answer did not please the pack—he could hear them muttering amongst themselves, and he knew that their respect for him was the only thing holding them back from attacking Venna.

“How did you escape captivity?” Raske stepped up beside him, a torch held in his own hand, his silver eyes burning with thinly disguised fury. “How did you find this place? How dare you defy the explicit instruction of the Alpha? Why—”

“Enough,” Belmont said sharply. “I’ll handle this. Raske, please continue with the ceremony. I will ensure the exile is dealt with.”

He moved forward before the lorekeeper could object, aware of his pack’s eyes on him as he seized Venna by the upper arm—one of the few places on her body that wasn’t bandaged, from what he could see, though the skin beneath his palm was still ridged with scar tissue. She cried out in pain as he pulled her to her feet, and he narrowly stopped himself from flinching. Murmuring among themselves as Raske called to them, the pack withdrew, and Belmont led the limping Venna through the trees as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

“Stop,” she snarled, breathing hard. “Blast you, I’ll bleed out.” She was steadying herself against a tree, panting as she adjusted a bloodied bandage around her midsection. Belmont gritted his teeth.

“The last I heard from the lorekeeper, you weren’t even conscious,” he pointed out, trying to keep his voice low. “Now you’re well enough to traverse the island alone? Is there no end to your deception?”

“Let’s be careful around the subject of deception, shall we, Alpha?” Venna snapped back, her face drawn with pain as she yanked the bandage fiercely tight around her midsection. “There. You can finish hauling me back to prison now.”

But instead, he found himself opening the door to his cottage and pulling her inside. This part of the settlement was eerily quiet at the moment, with his pack still preferring to stay in the community center together, and the rest of Kurivon’s residents some distance away. They’d be alone here for some time, and unlikely to be overheard, even in the event of raised voices. And from the vivid resentment seething in Venna’s wild eyes, he had a feeling raised voices were very likely.

“Sit down before you fall down,” he said abruptly, jerking his head towards one of the chairs at the dining room table. “I’m going to give you one chance to explain yourself.”

“Explain myself? To you?”

“Why did you deceive Syrra about the extent of your injuries?”

Venna narrowed her eyes at him. “I didn’t,” she said finally, drawing back her lips to reveal teeth that were shining wetly with blood. “She may have underestimated my resilience, but that’s hardly my fault. They were myfamily, Belmont. It was monstrous of you to bar me from the funeral.”

He could already feel his temper boiling, threatening to break through. What was it about Venna that turned his rock-solid defenses into something as thin and inconsequential as paper? For as long as he’d known her, she’d always known how to get under his skin. Even when they were kids. He remembered the way Raske would roll his eyes at their quarreling… then reassure him that it was good to have a friend who’d help you practice your composure. It had been eight years since she’d tested him, and it showed.

“Well?” she demanded now, leaning forward and slamming one fist on the table. “Isn’t this an interrogation?”

“Why didn’t you leave?” he snapped. “You were exiled.”

“I did leave,” she said coldly. “Nobody in the pack has seen hide nor hair of me for eight years, isn’t that right? Those were the terms, and I obeyed them.”

“We thought you were dead.”

“That’s not my problem,” she rejoined immediately, her face betraying nothing but anger. “You didn’t condemn me to death,Alpha.” The sneering way she pronounced his title made him want to rip the word out of her mouth. “You chose exile, which is worse. The coward’s solution.”

“You’ll be lucky to get as mild a sentence again,” he growled, resisting the urge to slam his own fists down on the table the way she had. He had to prove he was better than her, stronger than her. “The pack will want worse than exile for what you’ve done.” Venna looked at him levelly across the table, daring him to continue. He tried—and failed—to wait her out. “Breaking the terms of your exile. Following the pack on their journey—”

“You have no idea what I’ve done or why I’ve done it,” Venna said coldly, cutting across him with a disrespect that burned him more than anyone else had ever managed. “So stop pretending.”

“That’s exactly what I am attempting to ascertain,” he said through gritted teeth. “What you’ve done and why you’ve done it are, in fact, the very questions you’re refusing to answer—”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she snapped. “Aren’t Alphas meant to be clever? Look at me. I’ve been living in the woods around the village back on Halforst for the last eight years. Nobody’s seen me, partly because I’m smart, and partly because you don’t post enough patrols, because you’ve gotten complacent about the demon presence in the area. And yes, I followed the pack to Council HQ, and it’s a good thing I did, because even more of them would have been dead if I hadn’t been there. If Raske wants me dead for that,fine.”

“Eight years,” he repeated, frowning across the table at her. “Why?”

She stared back, and he was surprised to see the anger in her eyes give way to hurt—at that, of all questions. “You’re really asking me that?” she said softly. “Me? Look, I know I got some of it wrong, but I thought…” She took a breath, and he saw her steel herself. “I swore an oath to protect the pack from demons, Belmont. Or did you think your all-powerful word as Alpha canceled that out? Not a chance.”

“I thought—” He suddenly felt adrift in the conversation, as though what he thought had been solid floor had been suddenly yanked out from underneath him. “After what happened, that day, I thought you’d abandoned your oath.”

“What happened that day.” She gave a mirthless little laugh. “You still can’t say it aloud, huh? You mean the day Korvi was killed.” Belmont closed his eyes for a moment, not wanting to let her see the expression on his face. But when he opened them, her gaze was on the table, her jaw tight. “Really? You thought I’d given up being a demon hunter? Me, who was never any damn good at anything else?”

“I was as surprised as anyone.” He was trying not to think about it, trying not to let the memories resurface, but he was losing the battle. The day he’d been appointed as Alpha, the official handing over of the mantle of responsibility he’d been preparing for ever since he was a child. How quickly the celebrations among the pack had turned to horror when they realized the pack’s youngest member was missing, that the last time the toddler had been seen he’d been on his way into the woods with his older sister. He’d always loved to watch her throw knives, her speed, her deadly accuracy. And what safer place could there be for a child than under the watchful eye of the pack’s most promising young demon hunter?

The pack had combed the woods for the boy, searching with increasing panic when they realized that the tell-tale signs of demon presence were in the air. And in the end it had been Marroc who’d found the child—the child, and the demon that had been hunting him. At least, that was what they’d had to assume. All that had been left, when the rest of the pack finally came upon the terrible scene, had been the remains. Marroc’s fatal wounds were still hissing and bubbling with the tell-tale ichor that oozed from demonic claws. And beside him, even more terrible, was the body of the toddler he’d died trying to protect. When the boy’s sister had at last returned to the pack and they’d confronted her with the tragedy that her carelessness had caused, she hadn’t spoken a single word in her own defense.

And so Belmont, in his first act as Alpha, had banished Venna from the pack for good.

“I never went back on my oath,” she whispered now. The years might have made her face almost unrecognizable, but those eyes burned through him the same way they had that day as he’d exiled her from the pack. “I never wavered. Not once.”

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