Page 26 of Scapegoat

“Jesus fucking Christ, Abigail,” Greg said, stumbling into the room. “This? This is not what we talked about.”

“Shut your bloody mouth,” Mum snapped.

“The girl, she’s the boys’—”

“Enough!”

Because that was the thing about Mum. She was strong enough to overrule many people in the pack. Her dominance was such that, perhaps if she’d been born a boy, she might have been in the running to become one of the alphas of the pack.

But she wasn’t.

However, her command was enough to shut everyone up, including me, until there was no other sound in the room but her rapid pants.

“Anna, take the bedclothes and rub them against your skin. The wet parts, not the dry ones. Everywhere, darling. We have to mask your natural scent.”

The wolf didn’t understand words, but she understood threats just fine. She lunged and lunged against my internal walls, taking my understanding of what my mother planned and howled her challenge.

But she was stifled by me.

I just stared at the two of them, watching my sister gag and whimper as the bloodied slick was smeared over her skin, my mother working to help her, when she noticed my stare. My mother met mine head on and I knew then that there was no lack of comprehension in her eyes.

She knew what she was doing to me and she was going to do it anyway.

I was her daughter; the boys were my fated mates. There would be no other men in the whole world I would love, cherish or need like them and my mum was working quickly and efficiently to implement a plan she’d been holding close to her chest for some time.

Because she knew.

Anna wasn’t ever going to be the omega. I was. My sister wasn’t their mate. I was. And even though Mum knew that this would break my heart, she showed me again how little she cared for me, and how much she worshipped my sister.

And something inside me died right then.

The world went still, quiet, and cold, as Anna did everything that my mother asked and then dropped my sheets to the floor.

“But won’t they know?” Anna said. “Once they get past Kaia’s scent and smell mine, after I have my first shower.”

“It’ll be too late then.” Mum stared at me smugly, as if I was the bad guy here and she the plucky underdog. “You’ll be marked as their mate and there’ll be nothing that can be done about it.”

Greg, Anna and Mum left not long after that, Mum instructing him to lock the doors behind him, keeping me from bursting out and circumventing their plan. I just watched them, completely numb, so divorced from my body I couldn’t feel a thing. But as the car pulled out of the driveway, taking them to the forest and the alpha challenge, something cracked. The wolf had tried and tried to get free, but something had stopped her.

So she obliterated everything in her way.

One minute I was a catatonic girl and the next I was a huge wolf, standing on the bed, my lips pulled back from my fangs. I shoved the door open, ran downstairs, then paced, paced around the rooms, not able to find a way out. She ransacked my mind, trying to find a way to open the door, remove the barriers, but nothing I showed her made any difference.

But she was done being held back, and no man-made cage would hold her ever again.

Her back legs coiled in the boys’ lounge room, her eyes on the big picture window, right before she ran forward.

Windows smashed and my heart went with it, tumbling to pieces on the grass as we strode forward. There were cuts, bruised flesh, but we just ran on, knowing instinctively where to go. They were in a car, forced to follow roads, follow the rules, to get where they needed to go, but me? I was a wolf. I streaked down the road, then through someone’s yard, over a fence as one of the boys’ neighbours shouted, then sailed over the next and the next, until I got to the outside of town. Then through paddocks, past skittish sheep and cows, over barbed wire fences until I came here.

I’d stepped into the forest that day, after slipping away from my mother, but that feeling of rebellion paled into insignificance to what I felt now. The wolf didn’t care about baulking at my mother’s heavy-handed authority.

She wanted to rip my mother’s throat out.

Chapter 16

Jayden

Earlier that morning

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