Page 103 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“You dug up my family.” I bury both fists in his coat and drive him off his feet, straight back into a headstone. The stone cracks against his spine, the breath goes out of him in a grunt, and he laughs at me through it.

“Where are they?!” I snarl into his face. “Where did you put them?”

He grins at me with blood in his teeth. His hand moves at his hip.

I see the blade too late. It comes up short and quick, dragging across my ribs, a shallow line, nothing a cut that size has any right to be. Then it hits.

Fire pours out of the wound and into me, faster than anything should move through a body. My legs go loose under my own weight. I stagger off him and catch myself on a headstone. The cut is nothing. It’s four inches, shallow, dropping me anyway. I know the taste in the back of my throat. I know what’s on that blade.

Wolfsbane.

My phone starts screaming in the grass. Bella’s ringtone, the one I set so I’d never miss her, going off ten feet away while I stand here with poison spreading under my skin. I can’t get to it. I can barely stand.

There’s no time. The wolfsbane is eating outward from the cut, and if it reaches deep enough, I’m finished. I let the claws come into my right hand, four blades pushing out through human skin, and I set them against my own ribs below the cut. I tear the flesh out.

It comes away in a wet fistful, the poisoned meat and the skin over it. I throw it in the dirt, and the pain takes my vision for a second. Blood sheets down my hip. But the fire stops climbing. It’ll grow back. I’ve seen worse close over in a night. Right now, I’m bleeding out over my brother’s grave with one hand shifted and my legs shaking. Kylan is laughing.

“Look at that.” He pushes off the headstone, wiping his mouth, watching me hold my own side together. “Alpha-born, and a scratch nearly did it.”

“I’ll kill you.” I take one step toward him and go down on a knee.

He backs toward the trees, taking his time now that I can’t follow. The blade goes back into his coat. “You’re going to pay for what you did,” he says. “And I’m only just getting started.”

“What I did?” I spit blood into the grass. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You will.” He steps over Daniel’s empty grave, the same as he’d step over a log. “Go home, Steele. While there’s still a home to go to.”

Then he’s gone into the dark, and Bella’s ringtone has stopped. My phone is in the grass where I dropped it. Four missed calls stacked up while Kylan had me, all of them hers, and under them a voice message. Panting, I watch my flesh knit together slowly and listen to the voice note,

Bella is whispering, fast, her voice frightened, and I can hear loud voices from somewhere deeper in the house. “Uncle Marcus, where are you?! Sloane’s here, and she’s trying to hurt Jessa! And Mia’s acting strange. Come home!”

I hear the sound of something crashing in the distance, and then she cries out, “Mia, no!”

The line goes dead.

Fuck!

Ignoring the pain in my side, I let the shift wash over me. Running on all fours, I cut through the woods. My side burns, and I can feel my blood drip on the forest ground even as the wound slowly heals. My heart pounding, I try to move faster. If Sloane decides to kill Jessa or maim her badly, my uncle will protect her. Even if I lash out, the damage will be done.

I can feel a faint flicker inside me, a fear that’s not entirely my own. Before I can figure out what that is or where it came from, my wolf charges forward, ignoring the severity of our injury, desperate to get back to our family.

I clear my own tree line, and the scents hit me at once. Cole is here. Sloane’s is all over the lawn, sour and gone stale, so she left a while back. Underneath both, I taste Jessa’s blood, and my legs pump faster.

Some flicker of awareness tells me to shift back. She doesn’t know yet. Stumbling to a halt, I force the change back into my human form and rush through the kitchen entrance before coming to a halt.

The place is wrecked, glass all over the tiles, and Jessa is perched on a stool with her sleeve pushed to the elbow while Cole tapes gauze around her forearm.

Cole looks up. Then he looks down and rolls his eyes.

“Dude.” He gestures vaguely at all of me. “Clothes.”

Jessa looks down, then back up at my face. Her cheeks go scarlet.

“What happened here?” I demand.

“Why the hell are you naked?” she splutters. “And why are you bleeding?”

Cole turns his head, clearly having just registered my injury. “Marcus.”