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To finish things off, they dragged Manuel’s body out of my room and Gabriel slammed the door and locked it again.
“And fucking stay out!” he snarled. Then he sank down on the side of my bed and swiped at the blood on his face. “Hijo de puta—that was close! We’ll need to keep a close eye on the little mouse until the Pack Master comes home.”
“When will that be?” Christopher asked, sinking down on my mattress beside him. “Did he tell you?”
Gabriel shook his head tiredly.
“No. He said he wanted to take his new wife somewhere he could ‘breed her in peace.’”
I shivered. His “new wife” was my mother and she’d had no choice about marrying him.
“What do we do if Zoe’s Heat Cycle starts, though?” Christopher demanded. “You know how bad a first Heat Cycle can be for a female—especially if it comes on late. Are you going to breed her?”
“No, and neither are you,” Gabriel snapped. “She’s our little sister—remember?”
“By marriage—not by blood,” Christopher pointed out.
Gabriel frowned.
“You know Pack rules don’t distinguish between marriage and blood ties. It doesn’t matter that we’re not blood related to Zoe—breeding her would be considered incest. We can’t break the Unbreakable Laws—it’s a death sentence for all three of us if we do!”
“Then what are we going to do?” Christopher asked.
“Just stay here and pray her First Blood isn’t followed by her first Heat Cycle. And hope to God that the Pack Master gets back soon,” was Gabriel’s answer.
I watched them both from the tub, wondering what was going to happen to me. It was a question I had been asking myself for six months—ever since my stepfather had invaded our house, killed my dad, and kidnapped me and Mom.
And I still didn’t have an answer.
THREE
As it turned out, my first period—or First Blood—didn’t last for very long. Just a few uncomfortable days with my two huge stepbrothers taking turns guarding me and sleeping on the floor of my room or outside my door.
After kicking the asses of the other Alphas, Gabriel felt it was safe enough to send Christopher to the store to get “lady things” for me. He came back with a box of bulky pads and handed them to me, blushing and mumbling that he hoped he had gotten the right kind.
I went in the bathroom and put one on. It made me feel like I was wearing a diaper between my legs, but it was better than bleeding through my panties, so I didn’t complain.
The two of them kept talking about my “Heat Cycle” but I had given up asking them to explain. They seemed to think something bad might happen to me after my blood stopped flowing. But to my relief, they seemed to be wrong. When the cramps ended and I finally stopped bleeding, everything went back to normal.
Well…mostly.
The day after the bleeding stopped, I got out of bed and stepped over Gabriel’s long form—it was his turn to watch over me and he was on a pallet on the floor beside my bed. I went to the bathroom and peed and was about to leave when I caught a glimpse of myself in the small, round mirror mounted on the wall.
A girl with platinum hair and pale gold eyes just like my mother’s stared back at me.
My jaw dropped and so did the girl’s—I took a step closer and so did she. After a minute I realized the truth—she was me.
“Oh my God!” I whispered—or thought I whispered. I must have been louder than I thought because a moment later, Gabriel was at the bathroom door, knocking and demanding to know what was wrong.
I opened the door, still stunned, and he looked me up at down, as shocked as I was.
“Mierda,” he breathed at last. “So the Pack Master was right—you do have the blood of the Royals in your veins!”
“The blood of the who?” I demanded, but my stepbrother only shook his head.
“It’s a damn good thing we didn’t let any of the other Alphas breed you,” was all he said.
“What happened to me?” I asked him. “Why did my hair and eyes change colors? And what does it have to do with the ‘Royals’—whoever that is?”
I didn’t expect any better explanation than the one I’d gotten for why I was bleeding, but to my surprise, Gabriel actually answered me.
“The Royal Weres are the ones all the rest of us normal Weres are descended from,” he told me.
“Weres?” I asked.
“Werewolves. Shifters. You must have seen the males in the Compound Shifting one of these full moon nights,” he said impatiently.
As crazy as it sounds, I had. I had seen my stepbrothers and the other men of the Compound from my window on the night of the last full moon. I saw them change. Though it was hard to see from a distance, it had looked like they all turned into some kind of huge furry animals—wolves, I thought. Because after they changed, they all threw back their heads and howled before running off into the night.
