by CJ Cooke
I was nervous about the kids getting back from school. How we hadn’t realised Coby came to us with only a small bag of clothes and nothing else was beyond me. I just assumed one of the others had gotten his things from the cabin. I couldn’t afford to be this distracted. We had too many enemies on the horizon, and I needed to be present.
I could feel the anxiety drawing my power to the surface and I took a deep calming breath to push it back down.
After tonight we would at least be aware of one of our problems, and hopefully, Sean would be able to help us figure out a solution. Although, even when we’d dealt with it, we still had two massive issues I couldn’t even fathom.
I was pulled out of my thoughts as the front door was thrown open, and Jacob and Coby ran inside laughing, before skidding to a stop when they saw us all stood waiting for them. Jacob shuffled across to Abby’s side, and we all watched him do it, choosing not to say anything for fear of a repeat of this morning.
“You guys ready to check out your rooms?” Calli asked brightly.
The stampede upstairs that followed sounded like we had thirty kids in the house rather than three—and Tanner because he was hot on their heels.
The rest of us followed at a normal pace, and as they started up the stairs, I pulled Calli back into my arms. She leaned back against my chest, her head tipping back onto my shoulder.
“Stay with me tonight,” I whispered against her neck, running my teeth along her skin and enjoying the shiver that raked through her body in response.
I trailed my hands from her hips up the front of her stomach. I wanted her more than I wanted to breathe right now. It felt like an age since I’d feasted on her sweet pussy, and my wolf was growling in arousal at the feel of our mate.
“Hmmm, that depends,” Calli answered slyly. “What do I get if I do?”
She shifted slightly on her feet, making her ass grind back on to my already hard cock. The minx knew precisely what she was doing. The thing was, I’d give her tonight what I’d give her every second of the day if she’d let me—absolutely everything.
“Tell me what you want, mate, and I’ll give it to you.” My hands ran down her front to the waistband of her jeans. Just as my fingers dipped inside, a masculine cough from the top of the stairs drew our attention.
“Sorry,” Aidan blushed. “We just thought you might want to be there for when we show Coby.”
Calli laughed at the deep blush on Aidan’s face and pulled out of my arms, setting off up the stairs. I caught Aidan’s smirk as I adjusted my hard cock, so it was slightly less obvious and trailed after her. Her beautiful ass swaying up the steps just ahead of me was doing nothing for the predicament I currently found myself in. I only had myself to blame, though.
As we walked past Aidan, he slapped me on the shoulder, and we headed to the kids’ bedrooms.
“Calli!” Jacob happily shouted as we walked through the door of Abby’s new room. Abby was showing the boys her new toys, and they were ooing and ahhing in the appropriate places.
My eyes caught Coby, and I watched him as he interacted with the two of them. Since the night he’d met Jacob and Abby, they’d all been inseparable, and I wondered if he was feeling the same bond with Abby that Jacob was. They were both protective of her.
I needed to make time to sit down and talk with him tonight when the others weren’t around. I didn’t want him to feel like he was being pushed aside by the new kids in the pack. The guilt of the whole situation with his room was riding me strong, and I knew I’d failed him when he first came to us. I wasn’t about to let that happen again.
“Coby,” I called out, and he turned to look at me with a happy smile on his face. “We’ve got a surprise for you too, bud.”
He looked confused at first, and when I waved him out of the room to the closed door of his new room, he still didn’t seem to understand what was going on. He seemed almost reluctant now the attention was on him. Abby was bouncing happily away by his side, excited to show him what we’d done. She had, after all, helped us to choose some of the furniture for his room.
“Go inside,” Calli said, giving him a soft push to open the door.
Coby cautiously reached out to turn the door handle and slowly pushed the door open. He didn’t move from his spot as the door swung open in front of him, revealing the room inside. His eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t say a thing as he stood and stared at what it held.
“If you don’t like it, we can change it,” Calli said nervously.
“Is this for me?” he asked, sounding unsure of himself.
Abby was the one to break the mood as she skipped inside. “Do you like it?” she asked him, turning her big green eyes to him. I didn’t know how anyone would be able to say no to that look.
“I don’t understand,” Coby finally said, taking a step inside to peer at the room a bit closer.
Abby grabbed his hand and pulled him across to the unit at the bottom of the bed, which held the TV and console.
“We got you a twitch,” she told him earnestly.
Coby grinned, and both he and Jacob dropped to the floor to check out the ‘twitch’ while Abby started to tell them about our shopping trip. It was calming to watch them together. All of the nervousness and fears they had, seemed to be wholly forgotten, whether it was when they had to deal with adults that made them come to the front, or if it were the comfort of the bond they were forming between themselves, we’d probably never know.
An alarm started to go off, and Calli pulled out her phone and silenced it before looking up with a grin, “Cookies are ready,” she announced, and the kid stampede began again.
“Coby, can I have a quick word first?” I asked him before he charged out the door.
Jacob froze in the doorway, but Calli ushered him out with the promise of two cookies, and Coby hovered near the doorway nervously, waiting to hear what I was going to say.
I sat down on the edge of his new bed, patting the edge beside me. I could tell he was anxious, and it broke my heart. I didn’t want him to feel this way about me. I wanted him to be able to come to me with anything. Part of me felt bad that I didn’t recognise Coby as my own pup like I did Jacob and Abby. But that didn’t mean I loved him any less than the others. He was the pack’s pup, and he would always be just as important to me.
I let a small amount of my alpha power leak into the room, trying to ease Coby into feeling more comfortable, and he slowly made his way over to sit beside me on the bed. He almost looked like he was waiting for me to tell him to leave, and I had no idea why he would be so afraid of me. All of the pack had done nothing but shower Coby with love since he was born.
When he was finally settled, I spoke.
“Coby, when Aidan went to your house to pack up the rest of your things, he said your room was empty,” I told him.
He just nodded slightly, eyes fixed on the ground like he didn’t want to meet my eye.
“What happened to all your toys, bud?” I asked him, dreading to hear the answer.
Coby just shrugged, and I wrapped an arm around him and pulled him against my side.
“Can you tell me what it was like living with your mom and dad?”
He just shook his head and buried his face into my shirt. I could almost throw up. Aidan had told me what the inside of Coby’s room looked like. The walls were bare. There was just a metal bed frame with a thin mattress and a tatty old blanket on it. The worst part, the part that made my wolf want to hunt Wallace down and kill him even more than I already did, was the lock Aidan had found on the outside of the door.
How this could be going on in the pack without me knowing was beyond me. All of the time we’d spent with Coby and his family, there was never any indication that anything had been going on. I never saw any bruises on him. He was always a bit quiet, but he never seemed scared of his parents. But now as I thought about it, I rarely went inside Wallace’s home. Whenever any of us went to see them at the house, we always ended up with a beer o
ut on the porch.
“Coby, did your parents ever hurt you?”
He froze at my side, his body going stiff, and I could feel the shiver of panic starting to build up. I thought back over the past few days. Coby getting changed in the bathroom, having a shower in the other bathroom while we put Abby in the bath.
“Coby, would you let me look at your back?”
He started frantically shaking his head against my side, clinging to me with a fierceness I hadn’t felt from him before. As much as I wanted to see, I wasn’t going to push him. I wouldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. Coby was going to learn that even though he was young, he still had choices, and no one was going to take that away from him.
I dropped down to my knees in front of him, the shame of having completely failed him pressing down on me.
“I'm your alpha Coby, and it's my job to make sure you're safe. I’ve failed you, and the shame of that will forever haunt me. I’m not going to press you to talk about it, but I hope that one day, you will trust me, or one of the other adults enough to tell us. No one is ever going to hurt you here. No one has the right to do that, and they never did, not even your parents.”
Coby launched himself off the bed and into my arms. Huge sobs shook his little body. I wrapped my arms around him to hold him, but as I did, he whimpered in pain, and I quickly loosened my grip.
“You need to let me look, bud,” I told him softly.
It had been four days since Coby had come to live at the packhouse. He was still a young shifter. He hadn’t come into his wolf yet, or most of the perks that came with it. His healing would only be slightly faster than a human at his age.
Coby just shook his head again, and I honestly didn’t know what to do. Someone needed to see what was going on, but I didn’t want to force him. He needed to be able to make these decisions, and we needed to respect them, but he was clearly injured, and we needed to do something about that.
“If you don’t want me to, that’s okay, bud. But someone needs to make sure that it’s healing properly. Coby, you’re hurting,” my voice broke as the words came out, and my wolf was howling in grief. Suddenly, it was Coby comforting me. The strength of this little boy astounded me.
“Calli,” he whispered.
“Are you okay waiting here while I go and get her?”
He nodded and sat down on the floor, still not meeting my eyes. I needed River on this. I could tell Coby was feeling ashamed, but I didn’t know how to convey to him that he had absolutely no need to be.
I’d just started to get up when Coby’s panicked voice reached me.
“Don’t… don’t tell Abby and Jacob,” he ended in a whisper.
Kneeling back down in front of him, I gently put my hand on his shoulder, and for the first time since we started talking, he looked up and peered into my eyes.
“You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, Coby. None of this is your fault,” I told him, hoping that he could hear the sincerity in my voice. Hoping that even just a tiny part of him would believe me.
“I’m bad,” he said, dropping his eyes again in shame.
“No, buddy, you’re not. Not even a little bit. You’re an amazing kid, Coby.”
My wolf was riding me hard to do something, I needed to get Calli in here, but I didn’t want to leave Coby alone now. I could’ve slapped myself when I realised I could just send her a text message. Pulling out my phone, I did just that, and then turned back to Coby.
“You want to see what games we got for the twitch?”
He huffed out a laugh, swiping the tears from his face and gave me a nod.
I crawled across to the unit at the bottom of his bed that Calli had picked out for him. Coby’s eyes widened in shock when I pulled out the drawer and he saw all the games inside—Tanner and I might have gotten a bit over excited in the video game section.
“Erm yeah, never take Tanner shopping for toys and stuff.” I muttered awkwardly, pushing the blame squarely on Tanner—he wouldn’t mind.
9
Calli
My phone vibrated inside my pocket, and I pulled it out in confusion. I never got messages because no one really had my number. Reading the contents of Grey’s message, though, nearly made me throw up. “Can you come upstairs with the first aid kit? One of the others can grab it for you. Coby doesn’t want everyone to know.”
I caught River’s eye across the table, and he frowned when he saw the look on my face. I was pretty sure it screamed “oh shit” at him.
“Does anyone want a drink?” I asked, forcing the cheerfulness into my voice as I stood from my seat. I nodded towards the kitchen, and River casually got out of his chair to join me.
“Juice please?” Jacob shouted, as I knew he would. The kid was as addicted as I was to tea.
“You want some too, cherry bomb?” Tanner nudged Abby, and she nodded.
River followed me into the kitchen, and as soon as we were out of sight, I passed my phone across to him, my hands shaking as I did.
River’s eyebrows shot up in surprise as he read Grey’s message, and then his frown turned angry. I could see him shaking where he stood and when he raised his eyes from the phone, they flashed with his wolf pressing close to the surface.
“I know,” I told him, running my hand down his chest in support. “But Coby needs us now, and being angry isn’t going to fix anything. We needed to help him first. Then we will hunt Wallace down and kill him.”
River nodded, steeling his expression as he walked away from me, presumably to get the first aid kit.
A child who could hide that he was in pain was one who’d learnt how to do it. This was going to break Grey. I didn’t think he would be able to deal with the fact that something like this had happened in the pack without his knowledge. How had Wallace been able to keep them all fooled for so long?
Quickly making the kids’ drinks, I dropped them off at the table and then went to meet River at the bottom of the stairs. Tanner eyed me warily as I walked out of the room. I knew he would want to help with this, but if Coby didn’t want everyone to know just yet, we needed to respect his wishes.
River passed the kit across to me, and I felt my hands shake as I took it from him, remembering the last time I’d seen it.
“I feel like I should be coming up with you,” he told me, staring sadly up the stairs.
“I know.” Because I did, I knew exactly how he felt. “I’ll see if he’ll let you bring him something up to eat when I’ve had a look at him.”
As I walked up the stairs, I felt a pit of dread forming in my stomach at the thought of what I was going to find. I felt so impotent right now, not having enough magic to heal his injuries. I should be able to take this away for him. But I’d used so much when we got back from the witches holding site; it had barely built back to a flicker inside of me.
Knocking gently on Coby’s bedroom door, I walked in to find Grey and Coby sitting on the floor looking through the pile of switch games, which was essentially every age-appropriate one we could find.
As soon as he saw me, Coby’s head dropped, and shame just radiated from him. Sometimes, the physical abuse wasn’t the worst thing. The injuries healed, and the scars faded. It’s what it leaves on the inside that lingers—the emotional trauma. The loss of confidence combined with the feeling of guilt and shame that eats away at someone. That was the worst thing about abusers. They always made their victims feel like the guilty party. It was how they managed to get away with what they did for so long.
I set the first aid kit down on the ground behind me and sat down next to Coby. “Jacob has always wanted to play this one,” I told him, pointing out Super Mario Maker.
Coby looked up at me, and the tears in his eyes ripped away at the very essence of me. His bottom lip wobbled, and then it was like all the walls he’d built around himself just shattered. I pulled him across my lap as he sobbed out his pain. His grief at a childhood stolen by parents who were supposed to love and protect him.
All of the cautionary words my mother had told me about taking from my own life force were cast aside—they didn’t matter. All that mattered was this little boy sitting in my lap who needed someone to help him. Closing my eyes, I looked down into the well inside me. It had been tapped into far too many times recently, and it wasn’t quite as full as it should be. That alone should’ve been enough to turn me away, but it wasn’t. I didn’t even care. All I cared about right now was Coby.
My hands heated as my magic eagerly rushed forward to help. There was no need to try and coax it out of that well. It was almost like it was aware of what was happening, and it wanted to help. I felt my very essence reach out and link with Coby, moving through his small body as it lit up all the places where he hurt—the cuts, the bruises, the scars.
Coby sighed in relief, sagging against me as the magic started to work, healing the outside—even if I couldn’t do anything about the inside. That kind of hurt ran so very deep through him. Almost like my magic heard me, it turned inwards and guided me to the flicker of something inside Coby. Something small struggling inside of him. As my magic wrapped around it, it surged just that little bit brighter, and I realised this was his wolf. The beginnings of his dual soul fighting to grow inside him. Something about it didn’t seem right. It didn’t feel whole. I’d never been near any shifter children apart from Jacob, and Jacob was different, like me.
That slight shimmer inside Coby looked back at me, and I could feel it asking for help. Telling me, this wasn’t right; this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. My magic reached out to comfort it, and just as they touched, it was like something clicked inside of me.
