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Emma scarpered, and I looked over to see the other packs watching us closely.
“So, who wants to start?” I asked. We needed to put our cards on the table so we could work together.
“Maybe we should give Wolf a minute and you guys start,” Ava suggested to the other packs.
Damon nodded as Maia settled herself into his lap, and he closed his arms around her with a relieved sigh. “Max, why don’t you update them on everything you found on the Palace servers?”
I listened intently, leaning slightly forward in my seat with an eagerness I couldn’t hide, while Max told us everything he’d found out about the Palace. It sickened me that Ava had been here through it all. He also talked about the secret group, Maven, that was behind everything and what had caused the Crash. We’d known something was up with the military, but I’d never imagined they could be a part of something on this scale.
“But who is behind it all? Who are Maven?” I growled when he finished. It was the one thing Ryder and I had never uncovered.
“That’s Sam’s story.” Max replied. Sam jumped in and told us about his gramps’ old letter and how he’d revealed the names of the people who were behind it all.
“Frank Gascombe was yours and Maia’s gramps?” Nick blurted out. It blew my mind, too. He had been the biggest tech entrepreneur in the world. His death with two unidentified children in the car was fodder for conspiracy theorists everywhere. I was speechless when Sam told me who the rest of the group were and how they were involved. They were well-known leaders of industry and public figures, which I guess made sense. They were powerful men in their own right. I didn’t know how they had kept Maven a secret for so long, though.
“They were a pack?” Nick asked, as he ran a hand through his hair. He looked a little intimidated by the group, which I didn’t like. It made me want to shift closer to him, but I didn’t want to draw attention to it. “That makes so much sense. If they accidentally killed their omega with their tests, that would explain why they were so unstable. They broke their bond. Which one was the prime alpha?”
My ears pricked up at his last question. Finding out more about prime alphas was high on my list of priorities. I hated surprises and if I was going to be part of Wolf’s pack; I wanted to know how to help him.
“The letter never said. It only told us we were adopted, and that our biological mother was their omega. As well as which alphas in Maven were our fathers and why gramps had taken us into hiding.”
“They never had a prime alpha, which is what started all this,” Wolf said with a quiet steadiness in his voice I hadn’t heard before. He looked at me, and his eyes were the clearest I’d seen them yet. The wildness had completely receded, and he was fully here with us. For the moment. His jaw was tight, and he looked pained, though. “But Phillip Barcleay, the CEO of Alpha Tech, was the head of Maven.”
“How do you know?” I asked him, hoping it was time for him to tell his story. He nodded once, briskly, as if he knew what I was really asking. I needed answers. It made me itchy not knowing what was coming for us, or how we were going to fight it.
“Because Maven raised me.”
The silence in the room was suddenly deafening. Wolf kept his eyes on me, as if looking at anyone else would be too much right now. I instinctively knew he needed me to be his strength right now. I nodded at him to keep going.
“Before they brought me here, they mostly kept me in a different facility. They would move me around, but that was their base. It was an entire wing in a manor house on an estate outside the city. My earliest memories are of there, so I don’t know if I was born there or brought there. I never had parents, only a series of carers. There was one consistently, Nelly, when I was young. When I was about five, she disappeared and never came back. It was a rotating roster after that.
“I had no contact with the outside world other than music, not even television. There was a carefully selected library of movies and books, but that was it. I was a teenager when I finally realized I was a prisoner, and not everyone lived the way I did. They didn’t mistreat me when I was young, though. They gave me every toy a kid could want, but they did a lot of tests on me, disguised as games. And cameras were everywhere, inside and out.”
Wolf appeared detached as he talked, and I tried to match his expression, but emotions were roiling within me. I wasn’t usually an emotional creature. Strategy and planning had always consumed me, but I could feel a vortex of emotion trying to pull me under. I forced my brain to focus on the facts, and the implications for us, rather than the image that pulled at me, of a lonely little boy with no-one to love him.
Were the tests he was talking about the same ones they must have given Angel as a child?I tried not to groan in frustration. Every question that got answered lately seemed to bring three more with it.
Wolf blew out a heavy breath as he paused for a moment. Ava snuggled into him tighter as she hugged Angel to them. Ryder reached out and wrapped his arms around them from behind. He looked a little startled, as if he’d been wanting to do it but had been holding back and now he’d moved without conscious thought. Ryder had always been highly empathetic with people, and a hugger. My chest tightened when Ava grabbed Ryder’s hand and gripped it hard.
I felt the draw to move in closer too, but I didn’t want to get distracted from what Wolf was saying right now. Nick had drawn closer, but he was swiveling his gaze between Wolf and me, watching to see where he was most needed.
A sudden realization hit me as I watched them, about the depth of dynamic within a pack, and its strength. It was so hard to be one person’s everything. Even with my twin, I sometimes felt as if I’d failed him. But with a pack, there was always someone to step in, or step up. To help shoulder the load. Wolf needed their emotional support right now, but he needed something different from me. It was in his eyes and the careful way he looked at me. I just had to figure out what that was.
As if he sensed my focus on him, Wolf gazed across the couch at me, ignoring everyone else in the room.
“How do I know?” He asked my earlier question back to me and I sensed his story was far from over. “I know because they would come and stay at the manor. They wouldn’t let me leave the house without supervision, and there was a lot of high-tech security. But as I got older, the carers were around less and Maven were around more. When I was a teenager, I would sometimes sneak out of my room and listen to them talking at night. Looking back, I think they knew I was listening. They were openly a pack at the house, but not like you all. They could barely tolerate each other and were angry that the time together was necessary to maintain their bonds. Their bonds felt forced. They would accuse each other of being the reason their omega died, and they lost their beta and their first experiments.”
Wolf briefly shifted his gaze over to Sam and Maia. “I’m sorry, but that’s what they called you. It was a long time before I figured out they were talking about the children they had with their omega.”
“It’s okay,” Sam said. Lexie was on his lap, and I could see he was gripping her tightly, but his gaze flicked to Maia.
She nodded at him in reassurance. Even though her face had gone pale. “Keep going,” she added.
Wolf nodded and focused back on me, tilting his head slightly as he watched my reactions. I kept my gaze even and my breathing steady. As hard as it was, we needed to hear this, and I wanted him to know I could take anything he needed to unload.
“You have to understand, Maven has controlled our country from the shadows for hundreds of years. They are the product of generations of breeding and their wealth is unfathomable. They always had families, for show, but came together as a pack secretly. Each pack would induct the strongest male in the next generation, the next prime alpha. He inherited everything. The rest of the children would be clueless, thinking they were wealthy getting the scraps.
“Maven were the driving force behind the evil that has corrupted our world. They started the shift to stamping out packs, because they wanted to be the only one. It helped consolidate their power. They drove the change to treating omegas as submissive chattel. Purely because omegas drew packs to them naturally, and they didn’t want them influencing alphas. They also hunted and killed other prime alphas. They didn’t want anyone challenging their line of primes, because they were getting weaker each generation until the current one. This generation of Maven was the first to have no prime alpha born into it.”
