Page 100 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

I look at her for a second. Then I take a plate off the drainer and smash it on the tiles at her feet. She jumps back a full step.

“If we’re breaking dishes, I’ve got two hands as well.” I brush my palms together. “I don’t like the dishes in this house anyway. Maybe if we break all of them, Marcus will let me choose new ones.”

“Have you lost your mind?” she snarls at me, bewildered.

“I will if you don’t get out of my house.” I give her a pleasant smile.

“This is not your house.”

“Take that up with Marcus.” I waggle my brows at her. “He’ll side with me, since he’s the one begging me not to leave.”

Her upper lip curls back off her teeth. “You shameless little slut.”

“Well, since we’re name-calling…” I inspect my fingernails. “He’s very good in bed.”

She comes at me.

I get the pan up and swing it into the side of her head. The blow rings off the ceiling, and she staggers into the counter, hair coming loose from its pins, blood at her temple.

She doesn’t drop. Through the loose hair she looks up at me, and she snarls. My smile fades.

It’s the hair, and the angle of her jaw with her head down like that. I know her. She’s the woman from the sidewalk outside that bar in Ashford, ten years ago, holding a barely upright man by the arm.

Then she’s on me before I can breathe. I hurl the pan at her, then the fruit stand, and she takes both without slowing. Her fist lands in my ribs. My forearm comes up in front of my face, and her nails rake it open.

“Are you insane?” I gasp, scrambling around the island. “Are you actually trying to kill me?”

“You’d be better off dead.” She follows me around it at a walk. “I only came to frighten you off. Now I think you and that brat of yours would look lovely under ten feet of dirt.”

Anger slams through me with all the force of a freight train. The knife block sits at my hip. She’s coming at me again, and I know she’s here to end this. I have a knife out and buried in her shoulder to the handle, my whole body behind it.

Sloane looks down at it, and my breathing is ragged. “Shit. Oh shit. We have to call an ambulance!”

I actually stabbed her.

Then before I can move, she takes hold of the handle and pulls it out of herself, dropping it on the floor between us.

“This little thing?” Blood sheets down her white sleeve, and she’s smiling at me. “I told you. We evolved.”

She lunges, her hand coming up. Her mouth opens, and her teeth are wrong. They’re lengthening while I watch, the eye teeth curving down into points. My back hits the cabinets, and I have nowhere left to go. My heart is pounding. What the hell is going on? What is she?

Something small hits her from the side and takes her clean off her feet. Sloane sprawls into the broken glass, and my daughter goes down on top of her.

“Mia!” I’m on the floor, scrambling backward. “Mia, no!”

She doesn’t answer me because she isn’t speaking at all. My daughter is crouched over Sloane with her back to me, and the sound coming out of her is a terrifying one.

Sloane shoves herself back against the cabinets and stares up at her. Her mouth falls open. “You’re one of us.” Her voice has gone thin. “You’re a hybrid.”

“What?” I whisper. “What does that mean?”

My daughter springs. Her hand comes up, and I see them this time, coming out of her fingertips, black and curved. She opens Sloane’s cheek from eye to jaw, and Sloane screams.

Feet hammer down the stairs, and Bella arrives at a dead run with a baseball bat up over one shoulder. “Get out of our house!” She swings it into Sloane’s arm with everything she has. “Get out. Get out. I already called Uncle Marcus, so get out!”

Sloane’s arm flies out and catches her across the chest. Bella leaves the floor, and I get under her before her head can meet the tile, taking the impact through my elbow with both arms locked around her.

“I will kill you.” My voice scrapes out of me. “If you touch my children, I will kill you.”