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Paranoia runs deep.
“What happened to the prisoner?” Tamra asked then took a sip of her drink.
“Dead,” Ledger answered, shooting me a warning look that spoke volumes.
“Ah, for the best, I’m sure.” Tamra’s face grew paler.
“Are you feeling all right?” my uncle asked her, also noticing the change in her coloring.
“Oh, yes. I just remembered something that had slipped my mind,” she replied, swallowing thickly while touching her napkin to the corner of her mouth. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go take care of it.”
We all watched her scoot her chair back and leave the room. When the door clicked shut, my uncle’s demeanor changed completely. His eyes narrowed as he turned to me and his son. An uneasy feeling dropped into my stomach as his gaze took us in.
“I want to know how she escaped and why,” he growled, danger dripping from every word he spoke.
“The why is easy. She saw a chance and she took it.” Ledger shrugged, not overly concerned about the question.
A loud boom echoed through the room as my uncle slammed his fist on the table hard enough that it shook and the plates rattled.
“Whyshe escaped is important,” he seethed, teeth gritted like he was fighting to keep his cool. “There’s more going on, and I want to know what.”
“We’ll find out how she escaped and fix it. She’s dead. Why is it important to know her reasons?,” Ledger asked, ignoring his father’s anger like it was nothing.
“She was the last Alpha Seeker,” he pointed out, his lip curling in disgust. “She rejected me when I was the alpha she’d been looking for.”
His words surprised me. It was rare for a female wolf to reject their mate without a good reason. What could the reason possibly be? Sure, he was quick to anger and paranoid, but he wasn’t a terrible alpha.
“Are you sure you want us looking into your mate?” Ledger asked, a knowing gleam in his green eyes. “Digging up the past is usually ill advised.”
“Usually, but in this case, we need to know everything. Faela wouldn’t wait for decades then randomly decide to escape. No, something drove her to this.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that my uncle was still infatuated with his true mate. There were still questions that needed to be answered, but now I had a name. It sounded familiar, and I wondered where I’d heard it.
“Why are you so concerned?” Ledger asked, obviously annoyed by the orders his father was dishing out.
“Because…” he gritted out before taking a deep breath, “I can still feel her.”
“What do you mean? She’s dead.” I frowned. What I knew about true mates was that when one died, the bond was broken. According to my uncle, they had never completed the mating, so how could he feel her?
“I’m not sure. We never bonded, but I can still sense her, like she’s still alive.”
His answer was definitely concerning. Was it her Alpha Seeker power that maintained the connection after death? That didn’t seem right. Granted, I knew very little about mating and nothing about mating with the Alpha Seeker.
I made a mental note to research more on the mate bond and how it differed between wolves.
First and foremost, I needed to figure out what an Alpha Seeker was and the circumstances surrounding them. After that, I needed to make sure that Faela’s proximity to Pearl’s home was just a coincidence and not something more sinister.
I had to agree with my uncle; I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more going on than just a fluke prison escape. The same went for Pearl’s involvement. My gut told me she was important somehow, and the thought made me uneasy. If Pearl was involved, it was my responsibility to protect her. Mate or not, she was special to me, and I wouldn’t push her away like my uncle had done to his.
I just needed to figure out a way to make her realize that I regretted what I’d done and that I’d changed. But that was easier said than done.
Chapter Five
Pearl
Seeing Rylan out in public like that was eye opening. Not only did my heart skip a beat, but my core muscles had clenched. My body was wracking with tingles and heat while my mind was doing its best to reject him.
We still hated him.
