Page 63 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

“Shifter.” She turns the word over. “Which means alpha. You’re the alpha. Which means you’re the leader of all the shifters.”

“Just of the pack in this territory. There are a lot of territories.” I pick my shirt up off the grass. “A lot of packs.”

She nods four or five times at nothing. “I need a minute.”

She’s up before I can answer, walking away across the grass with her arms wrapped around herself. There’s a pond at the bottom of this field that my grandfather put in for reasons nobody has ever explained to me, and she goes down to the edge of it to stop. Then she bends forward with both hands on her knees and breathes.

I give her thirty seconds by my watch, then follow her down to the water.

She looks over her shoulder at me. “This isn’t some trick, is it?”

“No.”

“Right.” She straightens up. “Right, right, no trick. I’m just living in an alternate reality.”

“This is your reality, Ariela.”

She sits down on the bank with her arms around her shins. The pond has gone black except for one strip of orange at the far end.

“Did my sister know?”

“I doubt it. It was kept under wraps.”

“Do you think she found out?” She isn’t asking me now; she’s telling the water. “Do you think that’s why she ran away?”

“I don’t know. It could be, but we’re still looking into it.”

I come and stand next to her.

“So what is this?” She waves a hand at me. “At night you can shift, or what is this? Is this a werewolf thing?”

“No. Werewolves are mythical creatures.” I sit down beside her, which puts my shoulder two inches from hers. She doesn’t move away from it, which I notice. “We walked alongside humans thousands of years ago. My ancestors took the form of the wolf because it was the strongest predator on the ground. Then they found humans to be the stronger predator, so they kept both forms.”

She stares at me for a long time. “That’s a lot to take in.”

“It is.”

Then she snaps her head up so fast that I hear the click in her neck. “But then the disease. What is Luca’s disease?”

“It’s called dormant genesis syndrome.” I keep my voice level. “It occurs in young shifter children. In some of them, the wolf wakes up without maturing and tries to shift forms. It destroys the body from the inside out. The human side resists. That’s what the fevers are. It isn’t an infection at all. It’s his own wolf, pushing.”

“His own.” She says it very carefully. “Luca has a wolf.”

“Every one of us does. His is six years old, and it doesn’t know what it is.” I pick a stone out of the grass. “Because he’s my son, he has alpha blood in him, which makes his wolf stronger than it should be at his age. The progression is different for him. Salar has never seen this before.”

“But he’ll be fine, right?”

I don’t answer fast enough, and she hears the gap. “Callum.”

“The mortality rate is very high.” I make myself say the whole of it. “But we have found a way to keep it at bay.”

She doesn’t cry or say anything further, just sits with her chin on her knees looking at the black water.

“You’re taking this better than I thought.” I’m surprised because I had been expecting something else entirely. Disbelief, raised voices, telling me I’m crazy.

“I’m really not.” Her voice is perfectly steady. “I’m panicking. I’m just not showing it.”

She takes a shuddering breath and then asks, “Does this mean I can now be involved with all the conversations about Luca’s health?”