Her Wolf

Chapter Five

Tristan stood in the council chambers and listened to Michael’s plans to capture and ultimately eliminate their father. It was good to be back with his twenty-eight pack mates.

He would always be closest with his brothers, but he’d known the others his whole life and cared about each of them. He knew he should care about the decisions they made but he couldn’t focus on anything other than Ashlee’s gorgeous body. More than anyone else in the room he had reason to want his father destroyed. But he couldn’t help but think that, in a truly perverse way, he owed his patriarch a great debt.

If he hadn’t been trapped in his wolf form and placed in the zoo, he would never have found his mate.

Not that he intended to stay out of the mission to eliminate his father—he just wasn’t all that interested in planning and plotting at the moment. He sighed and looked at his watch again for the fifth time in five minutes. Ashlee was with the Aunts, who were trying to teach her how to harness her inner energy, something Tristan couldn’t help her with. The pack might be male-dominated in its hierarchy, but the females could do amazing things their Y-chromosome counterparts couldn’t even imagine.

“I don’t think I want a mate if she’ll make me stare off into space, heartsick like a fifteen-year-old kid.” Theo’s remark snapped Tristan back into the present. Twenty-eight pairs of annoyed eyes bored into him.

Tristan hoped his voice sounded apologetic, but he doubted it. “I’m sorry, did I miss something?”

Michael snorted. “You mean other than the last six months?’

Tristan rolled his eyes. “Other than that, yes.”

“I asked you what you thought about the assault plan.”

“I think whatever plan my Alpha comes up with is the right one for our pack.”

“That’s just the thing, Trip. As the only member of this pack with a mate, we feel that perhaps it is a sign from the fates that you should take over as Alpha. I’ve never officially been made our leader and maybe that’s because it’s always supposed to have belonged to you.”

Tristan gawked at Michael. “You’ll do anything to deny you’re our Alpha, won’t you?”

Michael opened his mouth and Tristan knew he was about to argue his point.

Internally, Tristan braced for the encounter, expecting the argument to affect him badly.

It had always made him a little ill to argue with his father. Their wolf sides hated any confrontation with the Alpha. But when Michael spoke, the sick feeling Tristan had anticipated never arose.

“I’m your big brother, Tristan. I’ll always be that. But let’s face it; I got this job by default because I was born first. I don’t have the skills to lead. I didn’t even have a clue how to find you when you went missing. It took Rex to track you down.”

Next to Michael Azriel laughed. “Wanna be Alpha, Rex?”

“Nope. I’m not the Alpha.” Rex crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Tristan.

In fact all of the eyes in the room were on him. Why the hell was everyone staring at him?

He cleared his throat. “Michael, when Dad did what he did, the job fell to you. You are the oldest. Our natural born leader.”

Michael shook his head. “Dad wasn’t the first born, Tristan.” Michael’s eyes bored into Tristan’s. He’d never seen his brother struggle for words like this before. “He was the third son.”

“And look how fabulous that turned out. Maybe it should have been the first born instead of our clinically insane father.”

Tristan heard grumbles behind him, but he didn’t turn around to see what they muttered about.

“You’re not Dad—and when you were gone…we were lost.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Now they were just starting to piss him off. If Michael had a point, he needed to get to it.

“I’m not the Alpha. I know it. My wolf knows it. Everyone here knows it.”

“You’re just nervous because you don’t want to be like Dad. You were born to do it.”

Gabriel laughed, a cold hard sound, and stepped next to Michael. “What other reason should Michael be Alpha, Tristan, other than his birth order? Do you really think he’s Alpha? Look inside of you, what do you see?” Gabriel dropped his eyes after he made that speech in a gesture of submission. Tristan whirled around and stared at his fellow pack-mates. Not one of them would meet his eyes. He had no idea what was going on but he was going to put an end to it now.

He opened his mouth to speak, to tell them they were all nuts and that anyone who didn’t support Michael was as good as treasonous, but any attempt to argue was forgotten as a grey and black wolf plowed into the group. Although no one would dare to complain, Cullen’s arrival made the already tense situation worse. The white light that always accompanied the shift surrounded Cullen for a moment before his body stretched into his formidable human form. Tristan watched as Cullen strode to the back of the room and put on a pair of sweat pants and a tee shirt that were always stored there.

Cullen Murphy, the oldest living wolf-shifter in their pack, stood just under six feet tall: smaller than the Royals, but what he lacked in height he made up for in strength and power. Tristan always thought Cullen resembled a bulldozer. He could knock into any potential enemy, hard, and in one swift movement, be done with them.

When Tristan had been a child, Cullen had been so terrifying Tristan had behaved at every pack meeting just so Cullen wouldn’t turn his haunted gaze on him. Cullen had been his father’s closest advisor. There were many in the pack that mistrusted him, and felt he still worked for their former Alpha. But Tristan didn’t share that view. Although Cullen looked thirty years old like the rest of the unmated pack, his eyes were ancient.

He’d been as betrayed as the rest of them.

“Much as I love these little discussions where the Royal Six argue like small children over the Alpha position, we have bigger problems.” Cullen’s gravel-filled voice was a trigger for Tristan. Just one second of listening to it and Tristan wasn’t a man with nearly a century under his belt, but a terrified kid of five who had snuck out to watch the pack perform death rites on a member whose wife had passed on. Tristan closed his eyes for a moment in respect to the memory.

Michael stood silently for a moment in front of Cullen. “And what would the more important matters be? Perhaps you’d like to be Alpha? Too bad your blood doesn’t hold the requisite magic to live endlessly after finding your mate, or we’d all be thrilled to pass the job on to you.”

Cullen raised one eyebrow—which, Tristan realized, was akin to other people rolling their eyes. “Please don’t mistake my interest in this pack’s survival with a desire to take over your position, my interim-Alpha.” Tristan tried not to smile. It was hard to dress down Michael but Cullen did it every time he showed up.

Tristan watched Michael storm to the window and look outside. He spoke without turning around. “Get on with it, Cullen. Your arrival back from Mexico can only mean you bring news of our father.” Tristan took a deep breath. If Cullen did bring news of their father, it would mean the time had come to go and destroy Kendrick, the royal six’s sire. As their father’s former second-in-command, Cullen had taken on the quest to find and destroy him as a personal vendetta. The job was what kept Cullen alive. It was rumored he had lived four hundred years now without a mate. Most shifters chose to perform the ritual suicide after less time, feeling hopeless without a mate.

But not Cullen. He’d lived as their Alpha’s second, a bogeyman for the pack’s children, and now as a potential assassin, for longer than Tristan could imagine. If Cullen was at all interested in telling stories, Tristan was sure they could learn a great deal from him, but Cullen was never willing to share or instruct. He was more likely to terrorize and destroy.

“There’s movement inside the facility. He seems to be bringing people in. Several of his flunkies left about a month ago and haven’t returned. I think it would behoove us to find out what they want.” Cullen crossed his hands over his chest while he stared at Michael’s back.

“Was it three men? The blond man with the snake tattoo and two others?” Tristan asked to break up the silence that had taken over the room.

Cullen nodded. “Yes. How did you know that, Prince Tristan?” Inwardly, Tristan flinched at the title. His father had insisted on nonsense like rank and order but he and his brothers had never held to it.

“They attacked me and my mate two days ago after she rescued me from the zoo I was being held in.”

Cullen stared at him. “I think I’ve missed quite a bit.”

Tristan thought it was perhaps the first time he’d ever seen Cullen befuddled before.

He tried not to laugh.

Michael turned from the window. “We’ve been trying to contact you for some time.

You need to start carrying a cell phone.”

“As I am watching the facility as a wolf, there isn’t really a place to carry a cell phone.”

Michael made a noise that was something between a growl and a laugh. “Surely you must go somewhere to sleep for the night, some place where you shower. You can leave the cell phone there and check your messages so at least I can tell you when my brother has been kidnapped and we fear him dead, or when he’s returned with his mate in tow.

Surely Tristan is important enough to warrant that much respect from you.”

Cullen nodded and Tristan snorted, which earned him a glare from Michael. Tristan had never seen Cullen acquiesce to anything before.

“How did you get away from the three attackers, Prince Tristan?”

Tristan itched to correct him about the prince title but he’d long ago ceased trying.

“Rex, Victoria, and I killed them outside the zoo where I’d been held.”

“Victoria is your mate?” Cullen shouted and Tristan blinked in surprise.

“Ah…no, although I don’t know why that would surprise you so greatly. Her eldest daughter Ashlee is my mate.”

“Victoria has a daughter? The young woman who drove me to distraction with her hysterical actions, is mated and mother of your mate?”

It had never occurred to Tristan that any of the antics he and the others had pulled as young pack members had affected Cullen at all. They’d seemed below his notice.

“Victoria has two daughters and she is mated to a plastic surgeon in New Jersey who knows all about us. However, until two days ago her eldest daughter did not know anything about her heritage, and her younger one still does not.”

Cullen looked around the room. “Do you think you found your mate because the danger has finally passed, so Mary Jo’s spell is finally voided?”

“Either that or I really was just in the right place at the right moment.” Tristan didn’t know. Metaphysical questions had never been his area of interest. When it came to pack dynamics, he preferred to be his brother’s advisor, a dominant warrior, and now Ashlee’s mate. Although right now he could kill his brothers for their indecision. The pack needed strength and security. He would never be able to fulfill his role as advisor if Michael never fully took on his Alpha position. Hell, if he wasn’t so completely unfit for the position—hadn’t his father told him so a million times?—he’d take it on himself. Outside of the pack, he painted and sold his artwork. As far as Tristan was concerned, the mystics could take care of the pack’s magical needs without his involvement.

Something about his last thoughts bothered Tristan. His father had told him more times than he could count that he would make a lousy Alpha. Why had he done that?

Tristan’s skin started to crawl.

“Where is your mate now?”

“What?” Tristan’s attention was thrown back to the present. Figuring out why his father had been so adamant he’d never be Alpha would have to wait until later.

Cullen lowered his eyes. Why was everyone doing that? “Where is your mate now, Prince Tristan?”

“Last time I saw her, the Aunts were driving her crazy. I think she’s trying to digest a lifetime of study and knowledge before lunch.”

Theo cut into their discussion reminding Tristan he was in a room with twenty-eight other people besides Cullen and himself. “You never mentioned a sister.”

“Victoria isn’t going to give her to us until she is at least Ashlee’s age, and not until she’s had the chance to finish school. The girls were both raised as humans. Ashlee is taking this all pretty well, but Victoria isn’t ready to limit the sister’s options just for our convenience.”

Theo laughed, hard and loud. “Does she understand we have been living here in agony for thirty years with no women? Not any?”

Across the room, Michael grimaced. “We did have the Aunts.”

As if on cue, the chamber door burst open and Tristan’s two aunts entered, followed by Ashlee. The very sight of her took his breath away. All other spectacles and sounds in the room faded and he realized how Ashlee’s mother could have lived off-island for as long as she did. Tristan could live anywhere, do anything, and be anyone that Ashlee needed. She smiled at him and he grinned back.

She was a precious gift he didn’t deserve but one he was going to keep anyway.

Others had suffered much more than he; the bloodshed that had followed the spell the witch placed on the island had been devastating for Tristan. He’d lost his mother to a violent death perpetrated by his father. Even though he’d been seventy years old and well past the point of childhood, he’d lost his innocence.

Now he really understood the full magnitude of what had happened that day.

Members of his pack had awoken from what felt like a drunken sleep to find they had murdered their mates. Tristan could actually feel the anguish they had felt that day because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he ever harmed even a hair on Ashlee’s head, the pain he would suffer would go beyond all physical agony he had ever endured.

Something on his face must have given away his thoughts, because Ashlee’s eyes narrowed and she looked at him with concern. She thought something was wrong with him. He blinked and tried to cheer up. He was lucky. He could look forward to being with Ashlee for the rest of his life, an existence that finally had a determinable end-date.

Relief surged through Ashlee’s body when she saw Tristan’s mood brighten. If her presence brought on that amount of darkness to his features, she would stay away from him. Except she found that ever since she’d jumped his bones in his bedroom earlier, she couldn’t seem to stop craving him. If he was a drug, she was addicted.

Tristan’s aunts, Clarinda and Adeline, had spent the entire morning teaching her about pack dynamics and trying to get her to ‘feel the mystic within.’ Ashlee learned the pack rules rather easily; some of it felt intuitive, as if she already knew it, and the rest she absorbed without any problems. But awakening her magic was another matter. If Ashlee was any judge, she didn’t have any magic to awaken. But the Aunts were persistent. They told her a young woman who could become a wolf all on her own by just stepping foot onto Westervelt must be filled to the brink with untapped abilities. They had been very patient with her, which Ashlee appreciated.

If Clarinda’s style of dress was eccentric and eclectic at best, Adeline looked like she’d walked out of a New York City fashion show. Her hair, dyed black—Ashlee could see her grey roots—was slicked back with mousse and cut close to her head. The sleeveless, mustard yellow shift dress she wore showed off her shapely arms that had to take a tremendous amount of work to maintain. Red pumps and black silk stockings finished off the outfit; not colors Ashlee would have put with mustard yellow, but it worked for the older woman.

When they decided it was time for Ashlee to meet the rest of the pack, they’d dragged her across the Institute to the meeting chambers, where she now stood feeling like the new kid in school who the teacher made stand up and speak to the class. Tristan walked over to her and put his arm around her waist. She knew she should want to be more independent and not labeled as ‘his woman,’ but she liked it. Her wolf, who had gotten more and more vocal as the day went on, liked it too. Tristan had said eventually she and the wolf would become one unit, and Ashlee could see how that would work better than this constant discussion between the two of them about the proper ways to behave.

Tristan smiled at the group. “This is Ashlee. She rescued me from the zoo in New Jersey. She is my mate, and as most of you know, she changed into a wolf by herself without any outside help.”

Ashlee felt her cheeks heat. “The last bit was entirely not my own doing. Believe me, I would rather have not gone through that alone.” Laughs met her remark and she was relieved to see almost everyone in the room looked at her with a friendly demeanor. Theo still appeared somewhat hostile, but maybe that was just the way he looked most of the time. A man she didn’t know stood in the circle next to Michael, looking at her with a demeanor of distance the others didn’t share.

“We were just discussing the plans to go after my father. Cullen—” Michael indicated the man next to him who’d given her the distant appraisal, “—was just telling us our father’s headquarters has been active and on the move.”

“He has a headquarters?” Ashlee was confused. Why hadn’t they eliminated him by now if they knew where he was?

Michael nodded. “He and some of his less-than-reputable medical partners run a mental health facility in Mexico where they perform unnecessary medical procedures on the criminally insane. Tristan just told us you met three of his former patients outside of the zoo before you came here.”

A vision of Snake-man plunged into her mind. His sick smile, the half of his face designed to look like a serpent. Ashlee hadn’t thought of him since they’d left him dead in the parking lot. Just the thought of his face chilled her to the bone. Tristan’s father had experimented on him, had made him that way, and now they wanted Tristan.

No one was safe on this island, not by a long shot.

Suddenly, Ashlee needed to know all the details of Tristan’s imprisonment. “Tristan, how did you get caught in the first place?”

“Rex and I drove into Portland to get some supplies that we needed.”

“Tristan wanted watercolors and I ran out of Yuengling Lager.“ Rex cut off Tristan’s story.

“Don’t lie,” Tristan spat. “You wanted more than beer, Rex. He loves music and can spend endless hours in that used CD store on Fore Street. After waiting an hour and a half, I finally had enough of his musings about Nirvana and Garbage so I told him I would go to the art supply store myself and meet in front of Gritty McDuff’s pub down the block. I waited outside the pub for twenty minutes before I was jumped. I assumed they had Rex so I fought back instead of losing them, which is the protocol in cities or around large crowds of people. I thought I could rescue him. But they struck me with this spell. It felt like worms crawled all over my body, and I shifted against my will. We must have made a commotion, because people came pouring out of the pub. Dad’s men ran off.

Then I ran because I wasn’t going to be any good for Rex stuck as a wolf. I don’t know where I actually went but when I woke up I was in the back of an animal control car on my way to New Jersey.”

Ashlee blanched at the way Tristan told the story, his voice devoid of any emotion.

She realized that at some point during that drive, Tristan must have become convinced Rex betrayed him to his father. It wasn’t polite, but she was going to ask him about it.

“After the fight in the parking lot, you acted like Rex had betrayed you. Why?”

“The longer I stayed in that cage, the more I became convinced he must have told them where I was. He was the only one who knew I was in Portland that day and where I would be.”

Rex shook his head. “It wasn’t me. I was late; I’m always late. I missed you by fifteen minutes. I caught your scent, I knew you had shifted. I could smell it. I knew you would never have done that in the middle of Portland if you’d had a choice. I followed your scent for miles before I lost you. So I called Michael and we decided I would go hide out at Dad’s facility and see if you showed up there. When those three goons left last week, I followed them and ended up in New Jersey.” Rex was silent for a second but the look on his face, the way his eyebrows slanted down, led Ashlee to believe he wasn’t done talking, “I knew you would think I betrayed you, but I hoped you knew better.”

Cullen, the distant one, stared at Rex. “I never smelled you at the facility.”

“I smelled you; and if I could, I knew Dad could too. I stayed the hell away, I didn’t want him recognizing me.”

“But why couldn’t I pick up your scent?”

“You’re not the only one with tricks, old man.” Rex’s tone was jovial but his eyes had gone wolf. Ashlee swallowed, remembering how he’d done that on the boat too. Rex must let his wolf loose more often than the others. Cullen made a growling noise in his throat.

“All right.” Michael interrupted their display. “You’re both big men. For the moment, I’m in charge here and I say enough. Ashlee’s going to take Trip and run out of here faster than any of us can imagine if we don’t all start to behave like civilized people.”

Ashlee opened her mouth to object, but then closed it as her wolf growled at her.

Alpha.

Ashlee wasn’t sure what that meant, but she had a feeling it was her wolf’s way of telling her not to argue with the boss.

“Trip, you’re no good to me like this, all gooey and doe-eyed. I want my warrior back. So take your mate and get the ritual done so we can have you back. Tonight we run as a pack. I want Ashlee integrated now. Then tomorrow we meet and figure out a game plan for dealing with Dad and the witch. Cullen, I expect you to stay and run with the pack. No disappearing right now.” Michael nodded to everyone and left the room.

“Why doesn’t he just become the full-fledged Alpha?” Ashlee whispered to Tristan.

Tristan looked at the floor. “Because he’s afraid, as we all are, that we’re too much like Dad. That the power of the Alpha, after the ceremony, is so intense he’ll go mad with it like Dad did and betray everyone we love.”

“Your father did that to you on purpose. He kept the six of you weak so you’d never be a real threat to him. I didn’t realize that’s what he was doing at the time—I didn’t realize a lot of things about our former leader—but that’s what he did. But your mother made you strong. Just look for her power.” Cullen’s voice from right behind her startled Ashlee so much she jumped. Tristan put his hand on her shoulder to steady her as Cullen turned on his heel and left the room.

“He’s a bit much, isn’t he?” Ashlee watched Cullen stalk from their sight.

“He can be, yes. He’s the bogeyman to the wolf children. Don’t misbehave at pack meetings, listen to your Alpha, don’t betray our secrets, or Cullen will come and get you.

He actually came and got me once when I’d disobeyed. Needless to say I never disobeyed again.”

“What did he do to you?” Ashlee asked, as images of dark dungeons and beatings filled her head.

“He made me do manual labor for a month. This place shone like a new penny when I was done scrubbing it.”

So Cullen was tough but not brutal. Ashlee could respect that.

“One more thing, Tristan. What is the mating ritual we need to get done so you can stop being doe-eyed?”

“Michael just ordered us to go have sex.”

That’s what she’d thought. If her cheeks were as red as she thought they were, she was the color of a tomato.