Claimed Twice

Chapter eleven

Three Days Left

I did not sleep that night. I kept staring at my phone, waiting for another message to appear. It never came, but the waiting was almost worse than the message itself.

In the morning, Marcus the bodyguard drove me to work instead of Priya. He did not talk much, just checked his mirrors every few seconds like he was expecting trouble to jump out at us.

"Does this happen a lot?" I asked him. "People getting threatened over pack business?"

"Not usually this bad," he said. "Mr. Voss is taking it very seriously. He hasn't left the building in two days."

That surprised me more than it should have.

When I got to the lab, Alpha Alexander was already there, dark circles under his eyes, three empty coffee cups lined up next to his laptop. He looked up the second I walked in, and something in his shoulders relaxed, just a little.

"You're here," he said. "You're safe."

"I'm here," I said. "Did you sleep at all?"

"Not really." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I've been going through old pack records. Trying to find out what my father knew about your family before he made me reject you."

I sat down across from him, my chest tight. "Did you find anything?"

He slid a folder across the table. Inside were old papers, some of them yellow with age, with a family tree drawn out in careful black ink. At the very top, one name was circled twice.

Whitfield.

"Your family isn't just connected to wolves, Nora," Alpha Alexander said quietly. "Your family helped write the original treaty between the first packs, over a hundred years ago. The Continuity Clause my father used to force our rejection, the law that let him call you 'unfit'... your family is actually one of the bloodlines that clause was originally written to protect. Not exclude."

I stared at the paper, my hands trembling. "So he twisted the law. He used it backward."

"Yes," Alpha Alexander said, his voice hard. "And I let him."

Before I could respond, the lab door opened, and a young man walked in, tall like Alpha Alexander but with a softer face, carrying two cups of tea instead of coffee.

"You must be Nora," he said, smiling at me carefully. "I'm Julian. Alexander's brother. I heard you like tea more than coffee, so I brought this instead. Also, I heard someone's been sending you scary text messages, and I wanted to personally apologize on behalf of my terrible family."

I could not help but smile a little, despite everything. "It's not your fault."

"No," Julian said, sitting down, "but somebody in this family owes you a hundred apologies, and my brother can only give you one at a time, so I figured I'd start early."

Alpha Alexander shot him a look, but there was no real anger in it, just tiredness.

"Julian," he said, "I need you to help me trace where those messages came from. Can you do that?"

Julian's smile faded into something more serious. "Already on it. I found something last night, actually. Something you're not going to like.”