Alpha Pack 3 - Black Moon (28 page)

mouth.

“Excuse me.”

She ran for the bathroom, hit her knees, and heaved. As she did, her father’s incredulous voice

floated in the air. Made her pulse pound with panic and regret.

“Sooo . . . when the hell were the two of you going to tell me that my baby girl is pregnant?”

Twelve

Pregnant?

What the fuck?

Kalen made like a statue, stared dumbly at the undoubtedly badass General Jarrod Grant and

searched for an appropriate reaction. Unfortunately, his brain short-circuited and he gaped at the general with his mouth hanging open and his heart doing a weird stuttering thing in his chest. Maybe he was

going to have a heart attack.

“What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” Grant demanded. “She’s been rubbing her stomach since I

got here, she didn’t take a single sip of her coffee, and now she’s throwing up her guts. And the kicker is, she’s not really sick—in fact, I’ve never seen her more radiant. How long has this been going on?”

“I—I don’t know.” He thought back, trying to remember.

“Wake up, son. Seems like you’ve been so busy with your Unseelie problem that you’ve been blind

to what’s most important.”

Kalen blinked at the man. “You must be mistaken. She wouldn’t keep something like that from me.”

Would she?

“Actually, Dad, I was waiting for the right time to talk to him,” Mac said, her voice tight with stress and irritation. “So thanks for bulldozing right over me.”

“Shit! I’m sorry, baby girl,” he said contritely.

Kalen felt like his head was going to explode. He rubbed his temples, staring at his mate. “You’re

pregnant.”

“Yes.” Her blue eyes were clouded with worry. “I was going to tell you. There just hasn’t been a

good time.”

Some thread of knowledge was trying to come to the forefront, but he hadn’t grasped it yet. He was

still too busy assimilating the facts to think about how excited he was over the news. “How long have

you known?”

Her face paled and she licked her lips. “A few days.”

A few days. Okay. He processed that and the unwanted information slowly dawned. She wouldn’t

have—but yeah. She fucking had. A hot flare of anger ignited inside him and built rapidly toward

something very, very ugly.

“You knew,” he said in a deceptively low voice that quickly ramped up in volume. “You sent me

out to battle with the pendant around my neck. The pendant that should have been protecting not only

you but our child.”

The general frowned. “What pendant?”

“The one she’s wearing that protects against evil. I gave it to her, but she took it off when we went

into battle against some Sluagh and begged me to wear it.”

“Mac,” her father began, “what were you thinking?”

“I can explain!” Her eyes filled with tears as she fingered the disk in question. “It seemed safe for

me and the baby here, and I didn’t want anything to happen to you!”

But Kalen’s rage was far from averted. “You chose to protect me over
our baby
?
How the fuck
could you?
” he roared. He hadn’t even realized he’d taken a giant step toward her until Grant was between them, a palm on his chest, holding him back.

“Okay, let’s all calm down.”

“I’m sorry!” she cried. The tears broke free and rolled down her cheeks. But Kalen wasn’t swayed.

Malik pounced on the situation.
Didn’t I warn you, my boy? Do you believe now that I’m the only

one you can trust to tell you the truth?

“You endangered our child, Mackenzie,” he said hoarsely, grabbing his head in both hands. The pain

of her betrayal was so great, it threatened to send his anger over the edge. “I don’t know if that’s

something I can forgive.”

There’s something else she knows that you do not,
Malik said, his voice sly and pleased.
Ask her.

“What else are you keeping from me?”

Sobbing openly now, she shook her head in confusion. “What? Nothing!”

She lies. Come to me and I’ll forgive your betrayal. I’ll reveal the answer to the question you

asked me not so long ago. The answer she refuses to give to you.

“You’re lying,” he hissed at her.

“Wait a damned minute,” Grant began, his face reddening in anger. “My girl wouldn’t lie to you.

Maybe she made a mistake. But she only did that because she cares about you.”

A mistake that could have caused you to lose your child.

“I can’t—I have to get out of here before I say or do something I’ll regret.”

Spinning on his heel, he pushed out the door and summoned the rest of his clothing onto his body

with a wave of his hand. His mate cried out his name, but he kept going. Faster and faster until he was running, nearly barreling into Ryon as he rounded the corner at the end of the corridor.

“Hey, dude, where’s the fire?”

He kept going. But the facts chased him anyway, dogging his steps. His mate had endangered their

baby. Sure, the wards over the compound meant that the child was probably safe.
Probably.
But nothing was ever one hundred percent. She’d gambled with a defenseless child’s life.

That’s right. She refused to protect your child. Just like your mother refused to protect you.

His anger and shock were much too hard to contain. His shift happened almost without conscious

thought and his panther was set free. Streaking through the compound toward the rec room, he was

hardly aware of the surprised shouts. A teammate calling after him, asking what was wrong. If he

could’ve laughed, he would’ve.

What was right?

He bolted through the rec room, leaping and easily clearing A.J. and Kira, who were sprawled on the

carpet watching television. He ran straight for the outside door—and right through the glass, which

shattered on impact. Alarms blared. Somebody would have to fix that. He didn’t give a fuck.

There was no pain from any possible injury. Only pain inside that had no outlet.

He ran through the forest for a long while, moving in the direction of Malik’s cabin. The place that

was nothing more than an illusion, filled with wickedness. So wrong. But he needed to know what the

damned Unseelie was talking about. Was his mate really keeping something else from him, or was it a

trick? If she was, he might not be able to forgive her.

But didn’t everyone deserve another shot? What if nobody had been willing to give him a chance

when he arrived in Cody? What if Nick and the Pack had turned him out? They could have at any point

in the last few weeks, when it had become obvious Kalen came with a battleship full of trouble. If they had, where would he be now?

Right where he was currently headed. Of that much he was suddenly sure. Malik would have simply

lured him in sooner. In an epiphany, it struck him that Malik was, almost without a single doubt, the one responsible for bringing Kalen to the Shoshone in the first place. Until now, he’d always chalked it up to fate that he’d ended up here.

Now he knew better.

The rustic cabin came into view and he slowed, trotting into the yard. The front door opened before

he even reached the porch, Malik standing there in his guise as Kerrigan, looking as handsome and

urbane as ever.

“You could have teleported,” the Unseelie observed with impatience. “I don’t appreciate being kept

waiting.”

Letting his magic flow, he shifted back into human form. “Tough shit. I’m here now, aren’t I?”

A flash of anger sparked in his fathomless eyes, but then Malik’s lips turned up in amusement.

“Come inside, whelp. The last time you were here you asked me a question. I have the answer.”

Kalen followed him into the house. Nothing had changed—but something was about to. The air was

heavy with the weight of a secret that might soon crush him with the telling. Any secret Malik was

excited to impart could only mean bad things for anyone around him.

“What is this answer going to cost me? You want blood?”

“I already have that,” he answered cryptically. “And so do you.”

Kalen suppressed a shiver. “Are you going to dance around this all night? I don’t even remember the

question I asked.”

Malik walked to the wet bar and removed two tumblers from the glass shelf. Into each he poured

two generous fingers of the fine Cognac he’d served before, his stance all too casual. But Kalen had no trouble reading the growing anticipation in the Unseelie’s expression. His posture. He turned, a feverish light in his eyes as he brought Kalen the drink, handed it to him.

“You asked me, why you? Why, of all the powerful beings in the world, did I choose
you
?”

“I remember now.” Kalen took a fortifying sip of the liquor, let it warm his insides as it went down.

“I assumed it had to do with what Grandma told me. That I was born under a black moon, which makes

me vulnerable to dark forces.”

“That is true, what she told you,” he allowed.

“But there’s more.”

“Of course. Isn’t there always?” Malik swirled the amber liquid, took a drink. Then he closed the

distance between them, standing casually a mere couple of feet away. Too close. “You are one with the

darkness because it’s in your blood, Kalen. It’s a part of you that causes you intense pain to deny, and yet you fight it so.” He seemed genuinely saddened by this.

“I feel it,” he admitted. “All the time.”

“There is no point in your fighting it any longer.” The other male gazed into his eyes. Kalen couldn’t look away if he tried. “You were born to be the greatest Sorcerer, the most powerful Fae in the

universe. I want you to learn all that you can so that one day, when my time in the universe is done, I may pass the torch. You will rule as I have. You’re the only one who can carry on my work.”

Kalen shook his head. “That’s crazy. I’m nothing like you.”

“Remember what I said about blood. You were born under a black moon, which means your sire

was a creature of power and darkness. This is what your grandmother kept from you,” the Unseelie said

earnestly. “Don’t you understand?”

His brows furrowed. “Not really. You’re saying that my father was, what? A ‘creature of darkness,’

as you put it? Dave was Unseelie or something?”

“May the gods damn David Ray Black for the spineless human worm he was!” Malik thundered,

hurling his glass of Cognac across the room, where it shattered into a zillion shards. The Unseelie’s fangs lengthened and his human glamour began to slip. Claws emerged at his fingertips, and his ebony wings

erupted from his back as he raged.

“That worthless slug could never sire such a force as you! That is why he hated you so fucking

much! That’s why he beat you and your mother daily! Why he tossed you out of his home that night, so

afraid of you that he almost pissed himself when he realized you were coming into your magic! Don’t

you get it, boy?”

Kalen swallowed the sickness rising in his throat with the liquor. “He wasn’t my father? Then who

is?” he rasped.

Oh, God, no. If there’s any hope for me at all, please—

“You are mine!
My
son! You have always been mine!”

Kalen’s glass hit the carpet. He stared at Malik in sheer horror.

Malik’s palms cupped his face, sharp claws digging into his scalp. His dark gaze captured Kalen,

refused to let him go. “I am your father, my boy. Your mother was once royalty, a much younger cousin

to the Seelie queen who birthed Sariel. I talked my way into your mother’s bed in the Seelie court,

fucked her right under your grandmother’s nose.” He chuckled, low and dangerous.

“Then I waited for her to realize I had bestowed a child upon her. She would hand over my son at

his birth, and I would take away the evidence of her shame with none the wiser. That was my offer to

her.”