Page 96 of Scapegoat

My head rang and the phone in my pocket seemed to follow the same pulsing beat. There was a bloody wolf shifter in the kitchen and neither of them seemed to notice.

“So when did you get Fluffy?” I asked Melva, cutting off a bite-sized piece of cake with my spoon, while her eyes followed my every movement.

“What?” The woman looked slightly dazed. Someone out at the front counter tapped on the bell to get her attention. “Oh, she’s just a stray. She turned up here a while ago. Now, have some cake.”

“Melva did make it specially for you,” Jamie prompted.

My nose worked as I sucked in scents. I got chocolate and sugar and some kind of liquor and… I brought the bit of cake to my nose and sniffed. Underneath all of that sickly sweetness there was something else. The wolf jumped to its feet, growling slightly, its eyes turning silver.

Dominance is always a hard thing to explain to humans. Sometimes it’s like that vibe you get from someone, making you think that they are not to be messed with. Sometimes it’s a kind of quiet strength. At its most brutal, it can enable an alpha to overrule and take control of members of the pack, all of the members theoretically, with just one shout. It’s both an appearance of confidence and the ability to force someone to submit to your will.

And the wolf was trying that shit on now.

“Melva, how long ago did you get this dog?” I asked. But my voice sounded weird, echoey and distorted as my phone buzzed, the bell rang and my heartbeat pulsed in my ears.

“Fluffy?” She turned towards the dog reluctantly. “Oh, about two years ago.”

“I’ve never seen her before.”

Making any comment right now made my guts twist and my eyes throb.

“She comes and goes as she pleases,” Melva said in an offhand way. “I hadn’t seen her for a while and then a few weeks ago she just turned up again.”

A couple of weeks. It had been several weeks since we’d made the announcement, revealed the truth to the town. Several weeks since we’d left our families’ bullshit behind and started looking to our own future. A couple of weeks since—

“This isn’t the way I raised you.” Mum’s growl was all too familiar, sending a shiver down my spine, and where Fluffy had been sitting a moment ago, she now stood, tall, strong, naked. “The woman spent a considerable amount of time making that treat, and for someone like you. The least you can do is eat.”

Her smile was as sharp as a knife blade, her silver eyes blazing as she stared me down.

“Eat the damn cake, Kaia.”

And just like that, all of my illusions that I’d moved on from my mother’s control were stripped away. A thin thread of blood trickled out of her nose as she made me, through the sheer force of her will, put the spoon to my mouth.

Chapter 55

Atlas

“Something’s wrong,” Xavier said, striding back and forth across the kitchen as he tried and tried to ring our mate.

“We can’t keep ringing her.” Jay frowned, though I could smell the stink of fear on him. “She told us we’re being overly protective.”

“That…” Mum pointed her finger at the piece of cotton sheet now sitting on the kitchen table. “Your grandmother gave that to me when I was first mated to your fathers. I never liked the pattern. Too floral, too fussy.” She poked at the scrap. “I always put them on the spare room bed.”

The one that my parents had forced Kai to sleep in the night I’d claimed her. I’d hung around the doorway, pacing back and forth until Greg had forced me to go to bed.

“Keys,” I said, holding out my hand to my dad.

“What? Where are you—?”

But I just clicked my fingers, staring him down until he handed them over.

“Where are you going?” Mum asked, following me down the hall. “What’s going on?”

“The calls…” Xavier was hot on my heels but he stopped just then, turning to face our mother. “When did they start?”

“What calls?” Dad asked Mum.

“We’ve had a few prank calls…” But then she went pale. “You don’t think…”

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