Page 5 of Her Reborn Mate

“Dad…I mean, Maurice, he came in at dawn, holding your lifeless body, telling us a completely bullshit story about your death. No one bought it, but what could we do? You were dead, completely unbreathing, unmoving. There was a funeral at daybreak, followed by a burial in the early hours of the morning,” Vincent said, wiping his eyes. “And there’s no sign of Alexis anywhere.”

“Before anything else, you must swear to secrecy that you are not to tell a single soul that I am alive. Do you swear?” I whispered.

“I do not know what you’re planning, nor do I completely fathom how you’re still alive, but I swear. On my life and the life of my mother, may God rest her soul, I’m not telling anyone,” Vincent said. He held me and stared at me in disbelief for a complete minute before saying, “I wonder if….”

“I am wondering the same thing,” I said.

“You know, whatever experimentations that Edward fellow did upon you, they must have built some sort of long-term tolerance. Or maybe the potion that I gave you had some effects that we were unaware of back then,” he whispered.

“Or perhaps, just perhaps, the Wolf’s Bane was not as powerful as Blair had intended,” I said.

“You must tell me what happened. I…there’s no sign of Lexie anywhere. Do you know what happened to her?” Vincent asked.

“How would I know, Vince? Not more than an hour ago, I regained consciousness and clawed out of my grave.”

‘Right. Sorry. It’s just, it’s never happened to me before, having someone close to me come back from the dead.”

“I’ll remind myself not to make a habit of resurrecting myself now and then,” I said, trying to smile but finding it impossible to do so. Now that Vincent had told me that there was no sign of Alexis anywhere, my heart tremored at the possibilities. Was she safe at all?

Before we could talk about anything else, there was a loud knock on the front door.

“Vince! What did I tell you about locking the door? I hear noises. Who the hell are you talking to at this time of the night?”

That voice made my blood boil. My first impulse was to go to the front door, drag Maurice inside, and beat the living hell out of him, and right before I killed him, I’d find out what he had done to Alexis.

But my depleted level of energy and the resolution I had come to earlier about me keeping my resurrection secret stayed me from acting too rashly.

“You gotta get out of here, Will,” Vincent whispered frantically as the knocking on the front door became more forceful. “He can’t ever know.”

Vincent pushed me out the backdoor just as Maurice brute-forced his way through the front door. I crouched behind the wall and tucked myself right under the window where I could hear what was happening inside.

“Didn’t I tell you to stop moping around? What’s all this? Have you taken up talking to yourself? Like I needed to add yet another fucking concern in my life?”

“Don’t worry, dad. I haven’t gone psycho or anything. I was just saying a prayer for the fallen,” Vincent said.

I heard Maurice scoff loudly.

“So it’s even worse than I thought. You’ve gone religious. And what’s that shitty smell?”

“He became my best friend, dad. I get that the concept’s hard for you to understand, but he was like a brother to me. I was by his grave, trying to make sense of it all. I’m tired of burying people I love. First mom, then him.”

“Now is not the time to become sentimental. Whatever happened to Will was a travesty, I am sure, but we must look to the future instead of sulking about the past. You can be the alpha of this pack one day. You will soon know what it means to make hard choices,” Maurice said.

Vincent sneered derisively, then said, “He was twice the man you are. Don’t think me and the rest of the pack don’t have our suspicions about how you came walking through the commune with his corpse in your arms. Lexis’s missing too, which makes it all even more doubtful.”

“I would flay you alive were you not my son for this insolence,” Maurice said.

Not wanting to take any more of Maurice’s vitriol, I crouched back and disappeared into the trees. The backdoor opened just as I had hidden myself, and out stepped Maurice with two of his men. They scoured the surroundings, looking for someone, something, but when they were unable to find anything damning, they went back inside.

The night was not so silent and dark anymore. Ever since Maurice’s arrival, his men—men that I had not seen before, no doubt under his and Blair’s joint payroll—had started combing through the commune in an attempt to tie any loose ends. How ironic was it for Maurice that his biggest potential undoing was his own son?

I could trust Vincent with my life, but to be near him right now was extremely risky. Besides, there was someone whom I needed more than anyone else. Even though I could not morph myself into my wolf form, I discovered that I could still use my bond with Alexis.

It was faint, distant, and hurting. Wherever she was, she was in pain. I could sense the heartbreak, the sorrow, and the wounds that she was trying to recover from. I wondered momentarily if she had tried to tap into her bond with me, but then it occurred to me why would she? She had seen me die. There was no cause for her to use her bond anymore.

But of all the scattered and fragmented information that my bond was giving me, two things were clear. She was not in Fiddler’s Green anymore, and she was in mortal danger.

While still tucked away behind the tree line, I tore off my coat’s sleeve and wrapped it around my face. Stealth was my only ally now.

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