Mated To The Alpha Triplets (SPICY)

Chapter 2

CASSIDY’S POV

The house was quiet when I got home.

Too quiet.

I told myself ,y mom was running late. She did sometimes. The Alpha's household had no particular respect for my mother's time. She was a maid and maids stayed until the work was done and the work was never quite done.

I changed out of the ruined uniform and stuffed it into the bottom of the closet because I couldn't throw it out; even ruined it was fabric, and fabric could be useful. I stood in front of the mirror in my worn house clothes, looking at the faint red staining along my collarbone.

Then I let my hand drop and went to make dinner.

I ate alone. I left a portion on the stove for when she came back.

When I was done, I sat in her chair by the window and waited.

At some point I fell asleep, my head tipped against the windowframe. I dreamed nothing, or nothing I remembered.

When I woke the room was dark except for the streetlight outside. My neck ached and the clock on the wall read eleven fifty-three.

I looked at the empty chair across from me, the one that was mine then I looked at the front door.

My mother wasn’t back.

Eleven fifty-three wasn’t too for a working maid, technically. It wasn't midnight yet. But my mother was always early. She was always home by ten.

Eleven fifty-three.

I stood up and found my coat.

-

The Alpha's castle was at the center of the pack territory. I’d walked past it a hundred times. I’d never been inside. Daughters of traitors didn't get invited through the front gate.

The guards saw me coming while I was still fifty yards out. There were two of them, big wolves in their mid-twenties. Their eyes tracked me the whole walk up. By the time I reached them I could feel their combined attention on me.

"I'm looking for my mother," I said. "Mara Storm. She works here. She was supposed to be home hours ago and she-"

"Turn around." The taller one cut me off"Trespassing on Alpha property is a holding offense. You've got ten seconds to start walking back the way you came."

"She's not here," the other one added, which was clearly a lie because they hadn't checked anything. "Go home."

"She is here," I said. "She works here. She's been working here for three years. Her name is Mara Storm. She hasn't come home. I just need to know if she's alright. That's all I'm asking."

"Eight seconds," the first one said.

"Storm."

The voice came from behind the guards, from the direction of the lit entrance path. It was a voice I recognized.

The guards turned. So did I

Kenny Draven stood on the castle steps in a dark shirt, looking out at me with an expression I couldn't read.

"Let her in," he said.

The taller guard started to say something. Kenny looked at him and whatever the guard had been about to say didn't happen. He stepped back.

The gate opened.

I walked through.

Kenny didn't say anything as I followed him up the entrance path and through the main doors. The inside of the castle was exactly what I'd have expected from the outside. It was large and luxurious.

There were portraits on the walls, thick rugs that my feet sank into. Everything here looked expensive.

I kept close behind him, trying to understand why he was helping me. He hadn't done anything kind since I'd known him, which was the entirety of my conscious life.

Kenny Draven didn’t do things without reason.

We went down a side corridor, away from the main hall, past a set of heavy double doors that he pushed open with one hand. The room beyond was large.

It looked like a receiving hall of some kind. The room had high ceilings with overhead lights. There were chairs along the walls. There was a table in the center.

And in the center of the room, between the table and the far wall, there was a cage.

I stopped walking.

It was a cage made for a dog, not a large dog. A medium-sized dog at most, the kind you kept in a living room, the wire-frame kind you could fold and carry, with a plastic tray on the bottom and a latch on the door.

It was sitting directly on the stone floor with no padding under it, no cushion inside it. It was facing the doors we had just come through so that whoever entered the room saw it immediately and saw exactly who was inside it.

My mother was sitting in the center of the cage with her knees drawn to her chest because the cage wasn’t tall enough for her to sit upright. Her maid's uniform was wrinkled. Her hair was coming undone from its braid. She had her forehead resting on her knees.

She was so still, so carefully still, that for one terrible second I thought-

Then she lifted her head.

Our eyes met.

Hers were dry. She had been crying at some point. I could see the evidence of it, the redness around her eyes, the way her face was composed the way it only was when she had been working very hard for a long time not to show something. But she was looking at me now and she was alive.

I took one step forward before Kenny's voice stopped me.

"That's far enough."

I stopped. My hands were shaking again. I pressed them flat against my thighs as I looked at my mother in her cage.

The sight of her in there brought tears to my eyes.

“Mom” I whispered.

My mom looked at me “It’s gonna be okay, sweetie”

"She'll be let out," Kenny said, "when you've made the right choice."

I turned my head slowly to look at him. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, like this was perfectly ordinary.

He looked comfortable, like there was nothing unusual about a woman old enough to be his mother sitting folded into a dog cage on a stone floor in the middle of the night.

I felt my blood boil with anger. The rage that moved through me was quiet and very cold. I’d been angry before. This was something different. This was the kind of anger that went all the way down.

"Let her out," I said.

"I told you," Kenny said with a smile "when you make the right choice."

I clenched my fists "She hasn't done anything."

"No." He looked at me. "But you have."

My mother shifted slightly inside the cage. The wire pressed marks into her shoulder. She adjusted and found a new position without complaint, without making a sound.

That was the thing about my mother - she endured things quietly, with dignity. She had been enduring things quietly for three years.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

Don't, her eyes said. “Whatever it is, don't”

I looked away.

"What do you want?" I asked Kenny.

He smiled. It was the worst kind of smile - the kind that knew it had already won.