Page 103 of A Chance at Redemption for the Alpha

Tears fill her eyes. “I don’t care as long as you won’t disappear again.”

“I had to leave or it would have destroyed me, but I never wanted to hurt you.” I scribble something down on a sheet of paper. “Here is my number. You can always call me, whenever you want.”

She clasps it into her hand.

“And I won’t leave without a word,” I promise. “You know my pack now.”

“Right,” she says. “Right! If you just disappear, I can hunt you down.” She turns to Dad. “Right?”

“Absolutely,” he pauses. “Please don’t just leave,” he says. To my surprise, I can see vulnerability in his eyes. I have never seen him look at me like that. “Just, please.”

“I won’t just leave,” I promise.

My parents leave the room, while Eugene turns to Flo. “Florence, would you be so kind as to show Ms. Sheila the way to the victims, and maybe tell her any more details she needs to know?”

“I will come with you,” Olive says promptly before leaving the room.

From outside, I can hear Silas’s voice, dripping with sarcasm. “You are coming, too? Oh, what alovelysurprise.”

Before I realize what’s happened, everyone has left the office, leaving Eugene and me behind. It’s eerily quiet around us. Eugene keeps running his hands over his legs like always when he is nervous, his eyes zooming in on me occasionally before he looks somewhere else.

“Do you have something to drink?” I ask.

He jumps up instantly. “Yes,” he exclaims, looking tremendously relieved to have something to do. He pours us both a glass of wine.

“You turned into a wine drinker?” I ask.

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “But Mom and Olive prefer it, and I wanted to accommodate them.”

“You made Elliot your beta,” I say more to myself than to him.

“When you left,” Eugene says quietly while sitting down again. “Everything came crashing down. I never realized how much I relied on you until then. I wish I could turn back time and change how things happened. I sucked so much. Elliot hated me. Dad swept most of what happened under the rug, although I didn’t want him to.”

“He had to for the stability of the pack,” I say. Although he was right, I have mixed feelings about it.

“I know, but I hated him for it,” Eugene says bitterly. “Barely talked to him for a year. That was just me being shitty and pathetic, though. It took me over a year to realize I couldn’t keep blaming everyone else for my mistakes. As for Elliot, he figured things out on his own.”

“Yet you made him your beta.”

“I thought if I did, a part of you would remain with me,” he admits. I am surprised by his sentimental words. I would have never expected him to base his decision on that.

“Olive turned out to be your mate,” I say quietly. “I think you felt it already and panicked.”

“That’s not an excuse. I should have talked to you. And then we fought, and you didn’t tap out,” he says, tears filling his eyes. “Fuck, you didn’t tap out!”

“By our laws, you were supposed to kill me,” I say.

“I couldn’t. There was no way I could!”

“I know,” I say quietly. “Though back then I wished you did. Today I am glad you didn’t.”

“With every step I made back then, every time I met with Olive behind your back up until the point of our fight, I felt our bond getting more and more strained,” he says sadly. “And then, after…”

“It got severed,” I say. “Or rather weakened. A twin bond is supposed to be very strong, but ours broke.” I pause. “I am very happy with my life now, Eugene. I love my pack, I honestly love my task. I have a great mate whom I love from the bottom of my heart, and I have made friends and allies. I mean it when I say that I don’t think my place was here.”

“Maybe, but the truth is, Dad and I are at fault for it,” Eugene says. “Your place could have been here, if Dad treated you better and I actually had more of a backbone.”

“So, you see it now?”