Mated To The Alpha Triplets (SPICY)

Chapter 13

DARREN’S POV

It wasn't a planned response. I mean, we were triplets. It happens all the time. Our Lycans were synced and we had a strong bond as brothers.

It came out of all three of us simultaneously, the exact same word in the exact same tone, and under any other circumstances it might have been almost funny. Right now, there was nothing close to funny about it.

Bastian stepped back towards the door. "That's not possible. We were out here. No one went past us."

"No one went past the front," Castien said. He was already moving, circling the house with quiet speed, reading the ground the way our father had taught us to read it. He was back in under two minutes. "Back window. Someone came in and out fast. The ground is disturbed. Whatever scent was there has been masked." He stopped. "Professionally masked. This wasn't improvised."

My eyes went wide with shock as I processed his words.

Whoever had taken her wasn’t winging it or panicking. They had known the house would be compromised. They had waited then they’d come in and extracted the body. That level of organisation didn’t belong to a random attack.

This was layered. This was planned from multiple directions. And we still had no idea what the centre of it was.

I looked back at the car. Through the window I could make out the shape of Cassie under the blanket. She looked so still and small in the back seat.

"She hasn't woken up," Bastian said.

I knew he had been watching the same thing I was watching.

"She's blocking," Castien said. It wasn't a question.

Bastian nodded slowly. "Her body is capable of healing faster than this. Even without her wolf, she should have recovered consciousness by now. She's keeping herself under. The traum-" He paused, taking a deep breath "Witnessing that would break something open in any wolf. For her it's worse. She's been wolfless her entire life so she has none of the emotional buffering that shifting provides. Her mind went somewhere and it's not ready to come back."

I stared at the car window. The blanket moved slightly with her breathing. She was in there. She just wasn't coming back yet.

My heart ached at the sight of her. She’d been through so much. She didn’t deserve any of this.

"I can go in," Bastian said quietly.

Both Castien and I looked at him.

"Not deep," he said. "Surface only. I wouldn't manipulate. I'd just… smooth it. I’d replace what she experienced with something softer so the shock has somewhere to go. She'd wake up more gently. It might be kinder."

Everywhere was silent.

Bastian was an empath. In the Lycan world, true empaths like him - the kind who couldn’t only sense emotion but move within it, reshape it gently, reach into another person's experience and manipulate it - were extraordinarily rare.

Our father had told us once that the last recorded Lycan empath before Bastian had lived three hundred years ago. It made Bastian the most quietly powerful of the three of us. He was extraordinary in ways that had nothing to do with physical strength. He could walk into a room full of hostile wolves and have them calm without a single raised voice. He could sense deception before the lie was fully formed. He could feel grief from across a building. He could tell your emotions and feelings just from looking at you.

And he could change or soften a memory. Not erase - he had never done that and had made promised that he never would. But, he was good at softening traumatic experiences.

He was offering to do that for Cassie.

I understood why.

But.

"No," I said.

Bastian looked at me. He didn’t look surprised. He had expected this.

"No," Castien said as well.

"We walked into her life twelve hours ago," I said. "She doesn't know us. She has no reason to trust us. And the first thing we do in her most vulnerable moment is go inside her mind and start moving things around?" I shook my head. "If she ever found out-"

"She wouldn't-"

"That's not the point," Castien said. "The point is we would know. And it would be the foundation of everything that comes after. We don't start there."

Bastian was quiet for a moment. He looked at the car. I could see it in his expression that he could feel her pain. I could tell he wanted to take it away.

He could feel all her emotions, just by looking at her. That was the cost of his gift - he didn't get to turn it off. He felt what the people around him felt whether he wanted to or not, and right now Cassie's subconscious, even from across the yard, was broadcasting something he clearly didn’t enjoy receiving. Our connection to her made it worse. It means the emotions he felt were amplified to him.

"She'll wake up carrying all of it," he said softly.

"Yes," I said. "She will. And we'll be there when she does."

Castien looked between us. "We came to this pack for a reason. We sensed our mate was here. All three of us felt it before we even arrived. And when we saw her-" He left that sentence deliberately unfinished but we all knew how it ended.

It was her. It had always been going to be her.

I didn't know how to explain how I knew - it wasn't one thing, it wasn't her face or her scent or the way she had stood up off that floor to fight men three times her size when she should have stayed down. It was all of it.

My Lycan called out to her the moment we heard her voice in the hallway, even before we walked over and saw her.

"She can't feel it," Bastian said.

We all knew why.

She was mated to Kenny. The mate bond between a wolf and their fated partner doesn't fully activate. It doesn't become something the wolf can sense and reach for, until the existing bond is formally severed. She wouldn’t feel our own bond until she and Kenny rejected each other.

Until that happened, she would feel nothing from us. She would look at us and see three strangers who had helped her, nothing more. All of this - everything we felt, everything our Lycans were doing - was invisible to her.

Which meant we had time but it was not comfortable time. It hurt.

"We can't force the rejection," Castien said.

"Obviously," I said.

"And we can't tell her," Bastian said.

"Not yet," I agreed.

"So we wait," Castien said.

I looked at the car one more time.

She was still under the blanket, still breathing, still somewhere far inside herself where the pain hadn't found her yet.

I've got you, I thought Take your time. We're not going anywhere.

My Lycan settled slightly at that, just slightly.

It was enough for now.