Page 70 of Her Reborn Mate

Had I done it? Did it happen?

Was the antenna disabled for good?

I couldn’t wait around to find out. I had to head to where the rest of the pack was assembled at the docks and add my bomb to the pile and make sure that they’d be carried out into the sea.

As I’d just gotten out of the generator cage, something happened that I was not anticipating.

All the lights of the town square went off. I didn’t know if this was my doing or something pre-planned to declare the results of the election. Just as the darkness became uniform throughout the square, the crowd erupted into screams and laughter.

How was I supposed to make my way through a crowd to the docks in pitch-black darkness?

Chapter 30: Will

There was no point standing so far away from Fred. If he had intended to shoot me, he would have shot me from that far away. Back when he was young, he was pretty handy with a firearm, and I didn’t think that aging would take away his muscle memory of aiming and pulling the trigger at a target.

But this didn’t seem to be what Fred wanted to do. He wanted an audience. He needed me to listen. Fred had planned everything down to a tee. He had anticipated that I would turn up. I had to give him credit where credit was due. As sick and perverted as he was in the head, he was a mastermind when it came to committing to his schemes. It had only dawned on me now when he had revealed that he had been the architect of my misery, all the while, how malevolently brilliant my brother was.

“You cannot stall me forever. This night, like all nights, must end, and before it does, I intend to see everything you hold dear razed to the ground,” Fred said, fiddling with the button but not pressing it.

“I held you dear once,” I said.

“And I remain true to my statement. Before your very eyes, you see your beloved brother turn into a monster you never thought he could be. You were always such a pragmatist, thinking that there would be some way you could redeem me. There is no point in redeeming me, Will. I was already redeemed back in Germany when you rooted me out with the rest of the pack and brought me to this shithole. In a way, all that terrible stuff that happened to you, you are to blame for it,” Fred said.

“I will not deny it,” I said. “I made mistakes. I have never been the perfect Alpha. I was thrust into leadership at a very young age. Making mistakes is the domain of all men who are put in charge of something. But that doesn’t mean that I am a villain. Everything that I did, I did for the better of the pack. For you.”

“Spare me the melodrama. You did things because you wanted to. Admit it and relieve yourself of the lie you’ve been telling all of us all this time. You had always wanted to come to America, even before the war. The land of opportunity, you called it. You just saw an opportunity and took it, never minding once how the rest of the pack must have felt. There were others in the pack who voiced discontent against your decisions, but only I was the one who was capable enough to do something about it. I thought that by taking you out of the equation, I would get control of the pack and help them go back to Germany or, at the very least, allow them to build the lives they wanted in this new place,” Fred said. “But they always saw you as a hero after you disappeared. A legend who saved the pack. They forgot that they were discontented to begin with. Only I remembered that.”

“You sought my doom. How long did you plan that for?” I knew the only way to stop him from pressing that button was to engage him in this conversation long enough for Alexis and the rest of the pack to do something. I also understood that I couldn’t stall him forever. But I was playing into his egocentric desire to show off, to reveal his master plan, and to have an audience. He had been waiting for this for a long time, and in his heart, he needed me to know why he had done it. It was the only reason he hadn’t pressed the button and was still talking to me. Fred was vain.

“When you first landed us in this miserable pit of horrors that you so loved, I made it my job to find out about all the people who lived here so that I could get started implementing a strategy that would eliminate you from our lives. You had already done so much damage, removing us from our hometown, forcing us to build a new commune from the ground up, and robbing us of our ancestral wealth. If we had stayed in Germany, stayed put after the war, that country would have been ours to rule. We would have regained our lands, and we would have been millionaires. But that was nothing compared to your principles, was it? You couldn’t risk staying there for a little while longer. How utterly pathetic was that? Imagine, if you will if we had stayed there once the war was over. Do you know what would have happened?” Fred asked.

I could see that he had grown tired of sitting on his chair, a lifetime of feigning lameness hadn’t taken away the impulse to get out of his wheelchair and move around a little bit. Now that his jig was up, he got out of the chair without hesitation and walked around. He took a packet of cigarettes out from his pocket and lit one.

“I can tell you what would have happened. We would have died when the Allies rushed Germany and took away control from the Nazis. When everyone was thrown into prison after the Second World War, we would have rotted in some jail while the new government figured out what they’d do to the country. You never knew this, but they reallocated all land back to the masses. We wouldn’t have gotten back our ancestral land. Never. They distributed it to the people equally to reduce post-war poverty,” I said. I knew this to be true, having read accounts of what happened to Germany after the war.

“If we had stayed put, they would have never taken our lands from us. There were hundreds of us. We would have laid claim to our property. But you didn’t want to wait. You wanted a fresh start for the pack,” Fred said. “I loathed that.”

“So you sicced Edward on me?”

“Edward and I were each other’s solutions to longstanding problems that we were both facing. I wanted you out, and he wanted to research werewolves, what with him being a crazy occultist. We made a deal. I would give him a werewolf, and in return, he would leave the rest of us alone.”

“And how did that deal work out for you?”

“Oh, we prospered for those seventy years. I gained control of the town by investing myself in its politics. I planted my son as the mayor. There were other avenues of business to explore, which I did as well. Knowing what I knew about the sea, ships, and the merchant navy, I propositioned the vampires to work with me so they could smuggle their goods through the sea instead of whatever primitive way they were resorting to back then. I brokered peace between two species that had always been at each other’s throats for as far back as any of us can remember,” Fred said. I could see that he was feeling proud of himself, the way his chest was popping out, and his eyes were glinting. He saw himself as the hero of this tale, even after all that he had done.

“You never brokered peace. The vampires encroached on the town and made life miserable for every single person living there. They ruled through fear. The wolves were compromised by your actions,” I said. Even though there was little hope for him, I had to make him see how things were instead of how he was assuming them to be. “You were no hero for these people either. You had their Alpha kidnapped, you went behind their backs to deal with the vampires, and you used corruption to plant your son as the mayor.”

“I was there for them. That’s what mattered. Where were you?” Fred scoffed, then burst into maniacal laughter.

“You knew where I was. I suspect you knew that I was alive all that time. Maybe you and Edward Beckett were friends by then, and he showed you what he had been doing to me,” I said, grasping for straws. I didn’t know if this part was true, but if it were, Fred would bite and give me a few more minutes before pushing the button.

“Ah, I knew Edward. He and I became quite close after some time. He would request things from me, and I’d provide him. I was, after all, operating a smuggling ring in the town, wasn’t I? He’d give me updates on what he was doing to you. His experiments…I knew what they were. I begged him not to let you live. I implored him to kill you, and I’d provide him with a newer wolf to experiment upon, but he had grown attached to you all the way until his death,” Fred said.

“Is that all? Are you done? Don’t you want to push that button and blow the town to hell?” I asked, trying to stall him some more.

“Now, now, patience is a virtue.”

“You do realize that I’m going to take you to trial for all of this in front of the tribunal.”

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