Page 98 of Scapegoat

“Get to the hospital,” Xavier said, “and take Melva with you. The truck stop needs to be closed down and—”

“You’re gonna ride to the rescue.” Jamie tried to smile, but the wound on her face made her wince. “I wanna say I’d join you, but I’m no match for that bitch. She’s fast as a cat and her claws just tore into me.” Her eyes widened as she pleaded for us to intercede. “She drugged Kai. She’d made Melva pump some shit into the cake I got Melva to make for her. It was the only thing that stopped Abigail from tearing my fucking head off: The fact that she was dragging along her unconscious daughter as well.”

Why, that’s what I needed to know. I didn’t wait for the others. I went charging out of the swinging doors at the back of the kitchen and then put my nose to the ground, trailing my mate’s scent. It was richer, riper, making clear exactly why we should have disregarded Kai’s valid protests, because… I snuffled at the gravel on the road that led to a nearby pine plantation and then took off. Kai was going into heat and we were nowhere near her to help her through it.

Chapter 56

The first thing I did was throw up. The sound of disgust that followed was all too familiar, but I couldn’t see properly. Then, as I blinked, blinked, blinked, she came into view. Hazy at first, just a tall dark blob, but it was her words that identified her.

“Look at the mess you’ve made!” A hand grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, the feeling of all of my hair being pulled. “You’ll need to clean that up.”

The command in her voice had me moving, but it was too soon. My arms were bound behind my back and whatever had been in that cake, it had me swaying, then falling straight for the floor.

“Whoa, whoa, there you go.”

His voice was softer, gentler, familiar as he caught me.

“Greg?”

“It’s all right, love,” he replied.

He was trying to lay me back down on something, but Mum wasn’t having that. I heard her footsteps across the floor and then bang! She slapped me so damn hard my head spun. Pain, so much fucking pain, clouded my senses, drowning out everything else. The wolf shifted inside me, moving, moving, wanting out, but then she snapped.

“You will not shift without my permission!” Suddenly I was right back in childhood. There was no rebelling against her order. She hadn’t had to be this heavy handed before because she’d raised me to be afraid of her. When I’d been a kid, Mum’s power had seemed unassailable, absolute, but now it appeared that it really was. She grabbed my hair again and then dragged my face up to meet hers. “Clean. Up. Your. Mess.”

A fresh trickle of blood ran from her nose, the twin for mine. I licked away my blood as I fought to focus on her.

“N—”

I got one syllable out before she raised her hand again, all the anger she’d been sitting on for the last few years powering that blow. But before she could smack me again, Greg jumped in. He looked a lot wilder than he had when he’d been with Jenny. His cheeks were hollowed, his chin now sported a scraggly beard and his hair was long and ratty looking. But his eyes went wide as he seemed to realise just what he’d done.

“You dare—” Mum raged.

“If you wanted to kill Kaia, you would have poisoned that cake, not drugged it,” he stammered out and that stopped Mum. “She’d be dead and so would all of the witnesses.”

Shit, Jamie and Melva. I had to find out what the master plan was.

“Anna,” Mum said, and when her focus shifted, I saw my sister sitting there with a look of disgust on her face.

“I’m not cleaning it up!” she snapped. “That’s Kaia’s job.”

I smiled then, despite how my head throbbed and my gut swirled, readying to vomit some more, because, no matter how I’d grown and changed, apparently my mother and sister were just the same.

No, make that worse.

Anna stared at me with a sullen scowl on her face.

“Show Greg where the mop and bucket are,” Mum ordered.

When they disappeared to do as they were told, I looked around. This was a cottage of sorts, though one in a far worse state than mine on the farm. The stained-glass windows were cracked, and plaster had flaked away in places on the stone walls. There were holes in the floor and in the roof, letting the wind in. I shivered as Mum came closer.

“Do you want to be set free?” Looks like someone was switching from bad bitch to mad bitch. Mum pushed her finger under my chin, forcing me to meet her gaze. Just like when she was in wolf form, her eyes burned into mine like phosphorescent flames, but somehow she just didn’t seem to notice the blood trickling from her nose. “We don’t have to engage in this kind of ugliness.”

“Pretty sure you crossed that line when you mind-raped Melva.” My voice was little other than a ragged rasp, but she jerked back anyway. “So what the fuck do you want?”

“Reject your mates.”

“What…?”

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