Betrayed by Her Alpha, Chased by Three

Chapter 4

Evelina's POV

Nobody moved.

I let the silence sit before I continued, because timing was a skill I had learned in seven years of sitting in rooms where the wrong word at the wrong moment cost everyone.

This was not going to cost anyone except the man standing at the head of the table.

"Every supply line redirected in the past eighteen months," I said, turning the first page so the warriors closest to me could read it. "Cross-referenced against the official pack records Malik submitted to the council. The numbers do not match. They have not matched for eighteen months."

Coran reached across and pulled the page toward him, solid and grey at the temples. He did not hurry. He never did. He read it once. He read it again. His face did not change, but his grip on the page whitened at the knuckles, and that was enough.

I put the second page down.

"These are the private Alpha agreements Malik has been building for the past year. Not for this pack. For a territorial expansion he planned alone, without council knowledge, without pack consent, funded by resources that belong to every wolf in this hall."

The Beta to Coran's left picked it up. He set it down and passed it to the woman beside him without saying anything.

I put the third page down.

"And this," I said, "is the one that ends the argument."

I let them look at it.

"Ren was introduced to this pack as the son of Alpha Malik's late brother," I said. "I believed that. I raised him on that belief for four years." I kept my voice even and my eyes on the room, not on Malik. "Ren is not the brother's son. He is Alpha Malik's biological child, conceived with Isadora during an affair that began before the brother ever died. I have DNA confirmation arranged through an outside contact three weeks ago. It is in front of you."

The hall did not erupt. It went the other way, people pulling inward, eyes dropping to the paper and then rising to Malik and then dropping again. A woman near the back pressed her hand over her mouth.

Coran set the confirmation down and did not pick it up again. Sela, one of the younger warriors who had trained under Malik for three years, was staring at the table like she was trying to find the man who had trained her somewhere in what she had just read, her hands flat in front of her, dark hair pulled back the way it always was for training.

Nobody looked at Isadora's empty seat.

"I move," I said, "to strip Alpha Malik of his title and remove him from this pack, and I call for his execution for crimes committed against his own people."

This silence was heavier than the one before it.

Then Coran raised his hand. Then Freda. Then the room moved, not all at once and not easily, hand after hand going up some fast and some slow. Sela was the last of the warriors and she did not look at Malik when she raised hers.

Malik's chair scraped back hard. "This pack will not be handed over on the word of a woman who spent seven years collecting leverage and calling it loyalty."

"I built this pack," I said. "I held every alliance that mattered. I prepared you for every negotiation you ever walked into with confidence. You took credit for all of it and I let you because I believed in what we were building." I looked at him across the table. "I do not believe that anymore."

I was moving toward him when he drew himself up and his voice rang out across the hall.

"I, Malik Voss, Alpha of the Crimson Fang Pack, reject you, Evelina Braddock, as my mate and Luna, before this pack and under the eyes of the goddess."

He thought that would stop me.

The pain hit like a wall, detonating outward from my chest, seven years of bond tearing loose at the root. It dropped me to one knee before I could catch myself. My hand hit the floor and I heard the hall erupt around me, voices and bodies and Freda's voice cutting through all of it. My vision went white at the edges and I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone and breathed.

The pain was enormous.

I breathed through it anyway.

And then the pain cracked open and what came through it was not grief.

It rose from low and deep, burning upward through my blood like seven years of swallowed anger had finally found a way out, slow and furious and nothing like anything I had known before.

I pressed my hand into the floor and let it move through me. When it reached my chest it hit the grief head on and burned straight through it. I exhaled and stood up.

No sound came from the hall.

I looked at Malik across the table and the heat was still moving in my blood, steady and consuming, and for just a moment I could not feel the grief at all. Just the fury. Just the clarity.

I did not know what showed on my face. But Malik saw it and whatever he saw made him take one step back. The calculation in his eyes gave way, and what was underneath it was rawer and older.

He was afraid.

Not of losing his title. Not of the pack at his back turning away from him. He was looking at my face like he was finally seeing exactly what he had spent seven years underestimating.

"Your turn," I said, and started toward him again.

The wall behind Malik exploded inward and the hall became chaos in the space of a breath.

"She dies tonight or none of this matters!" Malik's voice tore through the wreckage, rawer than I had ever heard from him. "Kill the Luna and this pack's mine again, whatever that vote just signed!"

He needed me dead. Alive, I was the vote that hall had just taken, made flesh and standing in front of every warrior who had raised a hand for it. Dead, it was only paper, and paper could be burned, or buried, or never enforced at all.

Stone and timber came through first and then his outside wolves, six through the east wall and more behind them. Underneath all of it, high and sharp and cutting straight through everything else, I heard Ren cry out.

The order to kill me reached the room half a second before the wolves did. Warriors who had raised their hands for me only minutes ago turned that same conviction into motion, closing around me before I had taken three steps.

Omegas pressed toward the walls. I pushed through all of it with one thought and nothing else. I had left Ren at the far end of the hall with Dara when the gathering started. That was where I was going.

A wolf came at me from the left and I dropped under him and kept moving.

Another came from the right and I caught his arm and put him into the ground and kept moving.

The chaos thickened the closer I got to the door. I was three steps from it when two small hands locked around my leg and refused to let go.

I looked down.

Ren was on the floor with his arms wrapped around my leg and his face turned up to me, his eyes red from crying and his jaw set with a stubbornness I had never seen on him before, like he had already made his decision and was only waiting for me to catch up.

"Ren." I dropped to one knee in front of him, hands on his face, checking him over. "Are you hurt? Where is Dara?"

He shook his head. He did not let go of my leg.

"Ren, I need you to go with..."

"No." His voice was small and absolute.

"Listen to me." I kept my voice low and steady even as a beam cracked somewhere behind me and the hall lurched into fresh chaos. "I need you to find Freda and stay with her. You will be safe with Freda."

"No." He tightened his grip. "I'm not staying."

"Ren..."

"Mama." His chin wobbled but his eyes did not. "Please."

I had been called that before. Back then it was just a word kids threw around, not understanding what it cost. Not like this. Not with his hands locked on my leg and the hall coming apart. Not with what I now knew about who he was, and who had made him, standing between us like a wall I could not stop seeing.

Malik's son. Isadora's son.

I looked at his face and thought of the pillow I had held in the dark. This is the boy you almost killed.

His chin was still wobbling. His hands had not loosened.

I picked him up, held him against my chest, and went.

I fought my way to the side corridor, Ren's arms locked around my neck, his face pressed into my shoulder. Coran came up on my left, blood on his jaw, and fell into step beside me without being asked.

"How many," I said.

"More than we knew about," he said. "He had rogues waiting outside the eastern tree line. They moved the moment the hall went up." He looked at me. "We can hold them, Evie. But not if we are fighting to protect you at the same time."

I looked at him.

"Go," he said. "We will hold the pack. You come back when it is safe and not before."

"Coran..."