Page 102 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

The back of his hand catches me across the face. The room goes white at the edges, my head snaps sideways, and the tile opens up my cheekbone on the way down.

Then Luca snaps.

He drives forward off the floor with a sound in his chest that no six-year-old has ever made, and his mouth is wrong, the teeth in it too long and too many. He gets Silas’s hand between them and bites down and pulls, tearing skin away from the back of it in one strip.

Silas roars. He throws my son at the wall by the till hard enough to shake the glasses on the shelf above it.

Luca doesn’t go down.

He lands crooked and stays on his feet with his head hanging, breathing in a rhythm I’ve never heard out of him, and then his spine bows. His blazer splits across the shoulders. There’s black fur coming up through the back of his shirt, and his hands are going wrong on the floor, fingers shortening into something that grips. My heart in my mouth, I watch.

“How is that possible?” Corinne is up against the stacked chairs with both hands at her mouth.

Silas has gone gray to the lips.

My son shifts, and where he was there’s a wolf half the size of a large dog, black to the root, its front paws braced apart and its ears flat to its skull.

Its eyes come around to me. They’re gold.

“Luca!” The scream tears something in my throat. “Baby, no, no, please, don’t—”

Silas moves. He comes off his heels toward the wolf with his ruined hand held against his chest and murder in every line of him.

Something comes out of the passage by the kitchen faster than my eyes can follow.

It’s gray and enormous, and it takes Silas at the hip, lifting him clean off the tiles and putting him through the stacked chairs into the wall. He goes down under it and stays down, one leg twitching against the floor, and the whole room rings with the noise of it.

The gray wolf stands over him. Its head comes up. It looks at my son, and my son looks back with his hackles up and his teeth showing, and neither of them makes a sound.

Then it shifts.

A person straightens up out of the fur in the low light, unhurried, dusting glass off one forearm, and turns to study the small black wolf standing in the middle of the floor.

“How unexpected.”

Chapter 20

Callum

“Are you sure this is the driver?” I crouch over the edge of the grave, peering at the decomposed face of the man. He’s been in the ground for a couple of years at least, and there’s no identifying feature left of his face.

“Yeah.” Damien puts his hands in his pockets. “Ezra Brown. A driver who once worked for the Thornes.”

“So same story as the others?” I look over my shoulder at him.

He nods. “He had a vacation planned. Never made it to the plane.”

I get to my feet and look around. Another body on the edge of Thorne territory. This racks the number to five, all of them linked to Maya. “What did we get on the two female bodies in the nurse’s uniforms?”

“One of them was wearing a signet ring that belongs to a lower pack family.” Damien comes to stand beside me, his expression hard. “They worked as house staff for the Thornes. Both women disappeared around the same time as Maya.”

“Getting out of a clinic so heavily guarded could not have been possible without help,” I murmur. “We always assumed someone left some door open for Maya to walk out, but if Silas had his people there, pretending to be nurses, in the chaos, nobody would have looked at them twice.”

I look in the direction of the Thorne family estate, murmuring, “Every road leads back to the Thornes, doesn’t it? Was this man charged?”

“Yeah. It was a hit and run, but a police car was around the corner, and they blocked him. He made bail, bought a ticket for a vacation, and never showed up to his first hearing.” Damien glances down at the body. “His clothes were in evidence, so I compared the scent. It’s definitely him.”

We have everything we need to bring the Thornes down, well almost everything, but I feel uneasy. Like I’m missing something. This is too easy.