“Mena!” Roel shouted. “Open the door, please.”
Mena glared at the door, and then she turned her head to look at Slade. “Who from my pack came to Las Vegas with Phoenix?”
Slade shook his head. “I’m not good with names—”
“Roel, Heath, Heather, Brad, Peanut and Tracy,” Sinna said. “Oh! And Lea, but she was a little out of it the whole time.”
Mena was having trouble breathing. It was possible these two perfect strangers had done research to know about the personal things, but she doubted anyone would know that Alex had named his wolf Peanut. Only her pack and Phoenix knew about that. By the way Tracy and Roel didn’t seem to want these two around her, it was pretty clear what the truth was. Tracy had even called Slade by name and told him not to do this.
“I’m picking the lock and coming in on the count of three, Slade. This isn’t going to end well for you, buddy. One…” Roel started, “… Two—”
“Do you want Mena to shove your nuts up your ass?” Heath said. “Mena, please, open the door.”
Slade placed the card in Mena’s hand. “My cell number is on the other side if you want to know anything else. Ace realized we were keeping something from him almost immediately, and he gave us a direct order to talk. He wasn’t as upset as we thought he would be, but he didn’t think you should know about any of it. I doubt you would have ever found out if that invitation hadn’t come in the mail. We forgot all about the Shift coming up, and I never knew that Ace filled out the mating form and sent it in when the two of you were together, and afterward, he didn’t remember doing it. If there were any way to spare you everything you are about to go through, I would do that for you, Andra. You mean that much to me and to us as a pride. There just isn’t a way to change this. A mating is for life. There’s no divorce with our kind.”
She flinched at the word. “Divorce? I thought you said the bond was broken?”
Slade swore. “I keep forgetting that you haven’t been a shifter very long.”
“A bond can obviously be broken, but a mating is permanent,” Sinna said. “It’s like a marriage license, but our kind doesn’t believe in divorce, as the humans refer to it.”
“Wouldn’t I have had to sign something?” Mena said, aghast. “A marriage isn’t one-sided!”
Sinna shook her head. “Normally, the two who are mating will fill out the form together. The only reason I can think of why Ace would have done something like that without your permission was so that our pride and your pack could be together. They won’t put two groups together in the same territory like that unless the Alphas are mated. The bond only allowed the two of you to be apart for eight hours before you passed out. Another four hours after passing out and one of you would have died. So, he didn’t have a choice. We need him and your pack needs you.”
“Are they talking about marriage in there?” Brad said.
“Mena is going to kill us,” Heather said. “This is all Phoenix’s fault.”
So, everything is true, Mena thought. I’ve got a lying boyfriend, a pack who betrayed me and I am married to a total stranger. My life in a nutshell.
“I will call you if I have any questions. If he doesn’t know you came here to tell me all this, you don’t have to tell him. Maybe I can get a hold of someone at the Council, or whatever it is, and see about getting this marriage thing annulled or something. I’ll let them know the bond has been broken and we have no memory of each other.”
Slade and Sinna exchanged a glance, and then Slade nodded. “Okay. We’d like to take our leave now, but I really don’t want to have to hurt any of your pack members on the way out. Will you—”
Mena nodded. “Of course.” She went to the door, unlocked and opened it to see Brad, Heather, Tracy, Heath, Roel and Jess all jump back in surprise, as if their ears hadn’t been pressed against the wood and eavesdropping on her conversation with Slade and Sinna. Mena put her hands on her waist. “Two things: One, nobody is to touch or say anything to Slade or Sinna as they leave. That’s a direct order. Do all of you understand?” They all nodded in unison.
“What’s two?” Brad said.
Mena’s eyebrows popped up. “Two is, you are all in very big trouble.”
Chapter 59
Tuesday, February 24th 2015 9:10 a.m. PST
Las Vegas, Nevada
Ace
My eyeballs felt like someone had scrubbed them with sandpaper. At one point during the night, I had actually begged for sleep, prayed that Andra’s sweet torture would drag me into a dream, but it never came.
Slade’s words rang in my head over and over, like a damn broken record, and I couldn’t shut my mind off enough to fall into unconsciousness. He was right, but I didn’t see how anything he had to say would fix anything that was broken in my life.
I guess the first thing I needed to do was apologize to him for acting like a dick over the last couple of weeks. Maybe that would give me enough peace for an afternoon nap. God knew I needed it, but I figured this was a form of punishment my soul was inflicting on me, sort of like the dreams were doing. I just wanted to forget about her.
Thinking that made me grab my phone, so that I could look at her face again, brand her image on my memory, contradicting my thoughts and actions to the fullest.
The icon for the gallery on my phone caught my attention, and I clicked on it. The first picture I saw was the one she—or I assumed it had been her, since Slade had informed me I had been blind for half of her stay—posted to the wallpaper on my phone. The second, third and fourth were pictures of me playing with Chaos.
Glancing to the foot of my bed where my dog was laying, it was clear the moping and whining he had been doing so much of lately was a result of depression, of a broken heart.
“You miss her,” I said, and Chaos raised his head to look at me, and then he just laid his chin back on his paws and whined. There were wet tracks below the corner of his eyes, darkening the tan fur there a few shades. I swallowed before I spoke again, because I knew it would hurt me to say her name. “Andra,” I croaked out, and Chaos’ head snapped up and looked toward the door. He whined again when the door stayed closed. Fuck. The dog was in worse shape than I was. That wasn’t difficult to believe, considering the dog actually remembered her. And so did all of my pride. I had avoided all of them, too afraid that someone would speak her name and send me into a spiral that could go nowhere but down. I didn’t want any of them to see me weak and broken, but I hadn’t thought about what they were going through. Each and every one of them had expressed fond memories of her on the first day that I had woken up from the bond reversal. They had loved her, and they were all hurting. Slade was right. I had only been thinking about myself.
“Come here, boy.” Slowly, Chaos got to his feet and walked to me with his head down. When he reached me, he collapsed by my side and I wrapped an arm around his torso and stroked his fur. “We’ll go for a run later. Maybe that will give us the distraction we need. What do you say?” Chaos’ response was to lick my chin.
On a heavy sigh, I looked back at my phone and clicked out of the gallery. Needing to send Slade a text to request a meet up, I hit the text app and studied the line of names. I had been avoiding everyone lately, so I hadn’t sent or received many texts since before all this shit had gone down, nor had I bothered to check out the ones that had been sent and received from before.
I skipped over already checked texts from Sinna and Karma, and one that hadn’t been checked from Slade, and then my eyes stopped on an odd name: Roel. My thumb hovered over the name, and then I pressed it to the name.
You are a dead man! ~Roel
Help us kill these fuckers and get her back and the challenge is yours. ~Ace
My pleasure. ~Roel
Heather knows where we keep the weapons. Load up. ~Ace
Shit! I had been challenged? Who was this Roel guy? Had Slade mentioned him before? And then it dawned on me. Andra’s Beta. The guy was Andra’s Beta. Of course he would want to
murder me after his Alpha got abducted whilst in my care. I still couldn’t place who Heather was, but obviously she knew where the weapon room was in my house.
I clicked out of the text and looked at the next line. It wasn’t a name, only a number, and the text hadn’t been checked yet. Curiosity got the best of me.
The first thing I noticed as I clicked into the message thread was that there was a picture of Chaos and me at the top. The text read:
Pretty sure I’m in love, Ian. The guy is nice, too. LOL JK It’s the guy I’m in love with, but the dog is a nice bonus. Can’t wait for you to meet them. I taught him ASL in, like, five minutes… the guy, not the dog. You’ll love them both, though. I have so much to tell you, big brother. See you in a few weeks. ~Mena
Before reading the return text from her brother, I dropped the phone on my chest and stared up at the ceiling. She’d sounded so happy in the message. Had I made her happy? Had she made me happy? According to the pictures and what everyone in my pride had said, the answer to both of those questions was a big, fat yes. I sure wasn’t feeling the cheery feels now. The text to her brother only made me feel worse, because that was one more thing that I couldn’t remember.
Picking the phone back up, I read her brother’s reply:
I am elated to hear that you are finally happy, Mena. You never fooled me. I knew you only married Marc to get me out of trouble. I pray I can somehow repay you for what you did and the life you wasted with that asshole. I love you, little sister. Don’t ever doubt it. I’ll be working in a third world country over the next six months. I will email you when I can. ~Ian
For some reason, his reply triggered a memory of a dream I’d had recently. What was weird was that I hadn’t been in the dream with Andra at all. It seemed like it was one of her memories. Was I unlocking something through my subconscious? I didn’t know, but I did know that I was excited to get back to sleep and see her. I was turning into a total pussy over this girl, but it felt right.
My heart fluttered when I read the name under the text to and from her brother. Love of my Life. Oh, shit. I hadn’t realized we would have shared any texts, since Slade had informed me that we had been attached at the hip from the time we bonded, but this meant that I had her number. How the hell was I going to keep from texting her or calling her now? She knew nothing about all of this.
Deciding that I more than likely would text her if I clicked on Love of my Life, I scrolled back to the top where Slade’s unread text was and clicked on that.
It was just a link, with no description of what it might be. And the date and time of when he’d sent it told me that he’d already known I wouldn’t have any memory of it when I looked at it. I frowned, and then pressed the pad of my thumb to the HTTP.
Tuesday, February 24th 2015 11:21 a.m. CST
Montgomery, Alabama
Mena
Mena had a lot to think about before talking to any of her pack about what Slade and Sinna told her, and she didn’t want to do it when she was mad. And she was… mad.
It was apparent to her that Roel and the rest of her pack that had been in the house when Slade and Sinna left, expected her to blow up on them. She’d wanted to, but instead, she’d made them all leave so that she could think.
Phoenix had been blowing up her phone with calls and texts from the moment Roel walked out of the house, so she had a pretty good idea where he’d gotten his info from. She hadn’t bothered answering any of them, and it was daylight, so there was no chance that he would show up any time soon. She didn’t want to talk to him. Actually, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to talk to him again.
So many lies. Too many. However did he keep up with them all? She found herself wondering how it was possible to kill a vampire. Were stakes a myth? Sunlight she knew. Would fire kill him? Maybe she could just bite him and give her pack a direct order not to give him any of their blood to heal him.
The pinging of her phone ripped her out of her thoughts, and she glanced down at the device in her hand to see that Phoenix had sent her another text.
“Fucking hell,” she muttered. She was done. Pressing the button on the side and holding it in, the phone powered off.
Mena walked down the hall, through the living room and stopped in front of the boxes in the foyer. She scanned the black words that were written on each one, until she saw the one she was looking for. Study: electronics.
It was three boxes down, so she moved the others to another stack and pulled the flaps open. Grabbing the laptop and the power cord from inside, she rushed back to the Study and sat behind Marc’s desk, plugging everything up and powering the thing on.
After everything booted up, it prompted her to put in a password. Really? The secrets that man had. Secrets and lies. That was all she’d been handed the majority of her life. Letting her forehead fall to her palm, she stared at the cursor and tried to think what Marc would have set his password as.
Shifter. Denied.
Werewolf. Denied.
Alpha. Denied.
Pack. Denied.
Mena. Accepted.
Her eyebrows popped up, and then she smiled. Maybe he wasn’t such a douche after all.
Thankful that she hadn’t cancelled the internet yet, she connected and clicked the Chrome icon. Five seconds later, she was typing in the link on the back of the business card Slade had given her.
When the still image of the man from her dreams popped up on the laptop’s screen, Mena cupped her hands around her nose and mouth and just stared at him. Trey Thatcher was Ace. His long hair was gone, but his face was the same as it had been in her dreams. His beard was gone, but he had a little scruff. And those eyes… they were exactly the same.
“Oh, God,” she said, and all of a sudden she didn’t feel like there was enough oxygen in the room.
It couldn’t be. This had to be a dream. The ones she’d had lately had seemed so real to her, so it was possible she had never woken up in Phoenix’s bed this morning and agreed to go on a date with him tonight. She prayed that was the case, because this couldn’t really be happening right now.
Her hand shook as she moved her finger over the touch pad to the sideways triangle below Trey’s face.
With her heart pounding against her ribcage, she heard Trey’s—or rather, Ace’s—voice come through the speaker of the laptop. Mena inhaled sharply.
“Andra…” He rubbed his hands over his face and leaned back against the cushions of a leather couch, his chest bare. A nipple ring glinted from the light above him, and she shifted in her seat. The tattoos… the tattoos on his body were the same as they had been in her dream. Dear God. She noticed there was a bandage on his neck, and one on his left shoulder, and then she remembered Slade saying that he’d been shot twice while looking for her. “God, this is hard. I failed you, baby.”
She hit pause. His voice… it was just as she remembered it in his songs. She never would have imagined he’d be directing his words—that beautiful voice—toward her. And she didn’t feel like he had failed her. No. She felt like he had saved her. She clicked on the triangle again.
“You’re going to make it through this, because you’re stronger than me. You’re so much stronger than I am, Andra. You are going to be an amazing Alpha to our pack and pride. They love you and look up to you so much. You give them hope for a better future, something neither I, nor any other Alpha, could do. You have a vision, and I was lucky to be a part of it. I have no regrets.” He sighed. “God, I love you more than anything, woman. You made me a better Alpha… a better man. And I will die happy, knowing that I will be one of your happy memories. We both know you didn’t have many.”
Mena paused the video again and leaned back in the chair, wondering why she was watching this. Ace didn’t remember her any more than she remembered him. If Slade told her the truth and they really had bonded and cared for one another, that was gone. They were total strangers now.
Even through her doubts, she couldn’t stop herself from starting the video aga
in.
“I hate this,” he said. “I hate that I have to tell you this through a fucking video message. I should have told you everything at the very beginning of all this, but I was afraid that you would hate me. I don’t think I could live with myself if you ever did. I’m sorry about what Justice did to Phoenix’s people. I would go back and change what I did sixty-four years ago if I could, if it meant that he would never try to hurt you or anyone you cared about.”
Ace leaned forward and put his head in his hands. After a moment, he rubbed his face and looked up. There was so much pain in those eyes that it caused her heart to ache for him. Her palms dampened, and she curled her fingers in to keep from reaching out to touch the laptop’s screen.
“When I discovered that Emily was his mate, and that I had been fooled to believe that she had loved me, I wanted revenge. He’d killed my family and everyone I loved, so I didn’t have anything left to lose after he took her, too.” Ace huffed. “When he forced me to run, I went in search of other shifters, wanting more than anything at that point for someone to turn me. I knew I couldn’t beat him with me only being human. Months went by without me finding even a real wolf, much less one that shifted. And then I found Slade. He was a lion shifter, and he told me how cruel his Alpha was to their pride. So, I made him a deal. I promised that I would challenge and defeat his leader if he would change me. It was a small price to pay for getting something I so desperately wanted. He agreed, and I did what I said I would do. I challenged and defeated the lion leader.” Ace’s eyes shifted to look above the recording device. “We still good?”
“Yeah,” Slade’s voice said. “It’s recording. Keep going.”
Ace sighed, and then his eyes locked back on Mena’s, as if he could really see her. This was so surreal. “I see now that it was the wrong thing to do, but I had a point to prove. I wasn’t going to hurt Emily. I just wanted to show Julian that he hadn’t beaten me. Slade went with me and we waited for the right time. I didn’t know anything about the bond back then or the way it affected the people who were under it, and I honestly didn’t realize they had been bonded until after I bonded with you.
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