Stronger as One (#1, Completed)

41. The choices we make

"Listen, kiddo, mates and everything aside, there is something that I need to tell you."

I pulled her to sit on the bed together with me and I told her what we had found out from John. I tried to spare her some of the details where I could, as I wanted her to know the truth but not what a monster our father was exactly.

"I am going to confront him now, Nat, and if he admits to everything, I will ask him to stand down as Alpha and to leave the pack forever," I told her as I finished explaining.

"I understand. I want to come with you though- what he has done has affected me just as much, so I want to be there to hear what he will say."

We slowly made our way downstairs but our father was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, someone told us that we could find him in the garden but I was more than surprised to find him at the last place that I would have ever expected to be - my mother's memorial plaque.

We had picked a wonderful, secluded space in the garden for it, as her body was never recovered but the pack and our family needed a place where we could mourn and remember her. My mother loved flowers so we planted some of her favourite ones around the plaque. It's what made it one of my favourite places on the pack's grounds- it always felt like she was around whenever I went to spend time there.

Natalia and I visited regularly, even though Nat barely remembered mother as she was still a toddler when we lost her. But my father was never seen there, not even when the plaque was first put in place. Everyone thought that it was because the Alpha struggled with losing his Luna but now I wondered if it was because of guilt.

Yet, there he was- standing right in front of the plaque, with a glass of whisky in hand. Was he perhaps feeling remorseful because of Nat's kidnapping?

"Father," I spoke first, making him turn to look at us.

"Ah, well isn't this a family reunion?" It could have nearly been a touching moment if it wasn't for the bitterness and sarcasm in his tone.

"I found John. At the mansion. Scott and Travis are dead, and John lost his wolf."

"Fools." That was my father, alright.

Anything aside from victory and success was a failure. He also believed that an Alpha should show no feelings, no remorse, no regret because that made an Alpha weak. Hell, in his opinion it made any wolf shifter weak. Wolf shifters were meant to be fearless, savage, strong, merciless. That is also why he couldn't accept that my sister was born as an Omega. Omegas were feelers- they sensed the feelings of others and helped them heal or find their path. My father made Nat suppress her Omega side so much since she was a child, that she struggled to use her Omega powers by now. It was perhaps a blessing though as I would have hated her to have been able to feel all the pain of the shifters at that dungeon.

"He told me...about you and Markolf, about the Moreaus. About mother."

My father looked at me surprised but not like he had any regret. "He knows nothing, that fool."

"Tell us then. Were you so weak that you had to make a deal with a demon offspring?" My father's pride was the one thing that I knew I could count on to get him to speak. "Let me guess- you were scared by Margot Moreau and you went to the cambion, begging him to help you?"

Before I even finished what I was saying, his face had already reddened and his nostrils were flaring with anger. "You little fucker, I am not weakling and I didn't need that fucking demon to solve my problems. I could have handled Moreau on my own," he snapped at me.

"So why did you go running to him for help then?"

"Running to him for help?" he laughed, "He came to me. He said that he knew that the Moreaus were a thorn in my life and they were - Margot Moreau was causing chaos with her stupid ideas of unity and working together. Did she not know that wolves are the greatest of all shifters? We don't need to mingle with some lesser kinds, let alone work with them. But she was dead set on ruining it for all of us... and to think that she came from a great shifter family. Shame for her ancestors- bet they were turning in their graves because of her."