As Stephanie left she couldn’t help but feel hurt, and the pain she felt was more than Malcom would ever know. He hadn’t just turned his back on the pack, the family; he had turned his back on her, again. Yes, she carried blame and burden on her own shoulders, but she had her own reasons for not standing by his side. She had her own betrayals to deal with. She regretted not standing up to her brother, stopping everything that had happened. She could have done it; she could have changed his mind. It all happened before his terrible mental descent had begun. To be honest, she didn’t want to. Malcom had made a fool of her and she hadn’t been able to get past that.
Her entire life, Stephanie was groomed for greatness, the best of the best to insure the Alpha bloodline stayed true and pure. Once Vincent took his place at the head of the pack following his father and chose Malcom as his second in command, it was no secret what her parents’ plans were. They wanted her to be with Malcom. She didn’t protest because she actually adored the man. He was smart, kind, and sexy and he always took care of her and her brother. To be around him now, to see him in such an unbalanced state, it hurt her in so many ways. She thought about the time when the two of them had become so close. It was a time when she would have bet her life that they were going to be together and she had every reason to believe that Malcom was on the same page as her. They had been spending a lot of time together and to her, it was precious and irreplaceable. In a blink she went from being the one he adored to just his bosses sister. She had no idea how to deal with that. She had been replaced, and by a human! He showed no concern for her after Serene appeared. He rubbed his happiness in her face and she hated him for it. Although she didn’t think that he had done it intentionally, she believed that the heart chose what it wanted and the person, the vessel of that love had no other option but to follow where it led them. Just because her logical mind could process it and on some level understand it, didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt her. No, she didn’t agree with what her brother had done, or how the situation ended. It was a complete travesty and Malcom hadn’t deserved the torture he was forced to live through. However, part of her hated him for his choice, because it meant her rejection and to have a human chosen over her, an alpha female, it also made her look like a joke in front of their pack and in a sense she felt exiled herself. No man would want her, and no woman would respect her. Malcom had fought for his own happiness but he did it at the expense of hers.
She lingered for a while on the edge of the territory he had claimed for himself and inhaled the scent of him. It was intertwined in the trees and marked on the wind. She closed her eyes and remembered when that scent was hers to claim along with the man it bled from. She lowered her head back and allowed a low howl to crawl up her throat before she freed her wolf and took off toward home.
~*~
“Where the hell were you, Stephanie?” Vincent waited in her bedroom for her. Ever since their father died, he’d taken on a more dominant role in her life, one that wasn’t welcomed or appreciated. Especially since he was the reason behind their father’s death. He thought she was unaware, of the setup, the ambush that had been ordered from his tongue! Their father was an obstacle for Vincent, like anything else that got in his way; he chopped him down and tossed him to the vamps on a silver platter!
“Running.” She pulled the leather jacket from her shoulders and tossed it on the bed. Her clothing had be left behind, outside of Malcom’s home but she had been smart enough to stash extra outside of their boundaries so that she could wash and erase the scent of her run from her body and any lingering traces of her encounter with ‘the enemy’.
“For nearly a day?” He scoffed. “That’s a hell of a run, and funny, you don’t seem to look or smell like you were running. Why is that?”
Chapter 2
Start from the beginning
