Kidnapped in Sister’s Place and Emotionally Numbed: The Tragic Twin Cuts All Ties Chapter 11
Kaelis told me exactly how it went down at the Northglen pack house.
Alpha Calder had slapped a new list of mate candidates down in front of Kaelis.
“The Rothmeres cut Liora loose. I’ve set up a meeting with Shadowmoon’s daughter this weekend.”
Kaelis didn’t look up.
“I’m not going,” he’d told his father. “I’m not mating with anyone else.”
“Then you’re no son of mine.”
“Good.”
When Kaelis walked out of that office, there had been a fresh handprint across his right cheek.
And he was smiling.
“How’d it go?” I asked when he finally slid into the booth across from me.
“Perfectly.” Kaelis dropped into the chair. “The old man officially kicked me out of Northglen.”
“My inheritance, the pack holdings, the Alpha title: all gone. I’m nobody now.”
“Then you’re free to move.” I raised my glass of water. “Congratulations.”
Kaelis’s mother had found out that Calder Holdings was funneling wolfsbane to rogues, using Northglen’s
shipping routes to hide the trail.
She’d been preparing to take the evidence to the Pack Council. Then she died in what was ruled an accident.
Alpha Calder and a circle of Northglen elders had buried it.
Kaelis had known since he was old enough to piece it together. He’d spent his whole life waiting for this.
Twenty years of gathering evidence. All to bring his father down.
“What plan? I’m just a lovesick kid who threw away his fortune for a girl.”
He rubbed his swollen cheek and tilted his head with a grin.
A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
“Wait, did you just laugh? Are you laughing at me?”
“No. You’re imagining things.” I lifted my glass to cover the smile I couldn’t quite kill.
“You absolutely did! Wow, how cold of you.”
“Hold on, doesn’t laughing count as an emotion? Hm?”
“Go away.”
“Anyway, to us.” Kaelis smiled. “Think there’s any chance you’re my fated mate?”
His eyes held mine, and there was nothing casual about them.
I didn’t answer right away.
With my wolf asleep, I had no way to tell.
“Impossible.”
The word came out sure. But something flickered in my chest: faint, unfamiliar, warm.
Somewhere deep inside me, in the place where my wolf had gone silent, I thought I heard something stir.
A scratch.
Barely there.
