Page 134 of A University of Betrayal

The Russian alpha didn’t sound at all enthusiastic. And immediately all my alarm bells rang.

“Actually, I had asked him to be here, but...” Father began with a sigh as my uncle entered the dining room.

“Good evening.”

There was something strange about him. Either the fact that he was wearing a new dark green vest, which I had never seen on him before, or perhaps the fact that he paused briefly in the doorway and stared at the guests. Alarik was never rude. This time, something in him seemed to be rebelling. Maybe it was his hair, which looked neater than usual. Someone had replaced my uncle.

Anxiety rose in my chest when I saw how rigid the looks he and Dimitrio exchanged with each other were, until my father finally cleared his throat.

Alarik raised his head, nodded to my father and finally walked through the dining room.

I hoped he would sit next to me and the woman, but he took a seat between Mikhail and my brother. Then he gave me a smile, which I immediately returned. His presence put me at ease, because he tended to lighten the mood.

“Alarik... I didn’t think we’d see each other again,” the Russian alpha said. His jaw twitched strangely. He wasn’t smiling.

Had I missed something?

“Me neither,” Alarik replied tonelessly, ignoring the stare from Dimitrio and his sister.

There was something in Tania’s gaze that I couldn’t interpret. She had stopped eating entirely.

Our eyes met, and I quickly turned back to eating.

“And you’re still just as cocky and disrespectful.”

I looked up in astonishment at Alarik, who forked up two chicken legs and laughed. “I don’t owe you any accountability.”

Shocked by Alarik’s disrespectful tone toward the most powerful Alpha of all the continents, I widened my eyes.

“I beg your pardon?!”

Angrily, the Russian Alpha slammed the knife into the dining room table, and I winced.

My father cleared his throat again and exchanged meaningful glances with Alarik.

I tried to catch Alarik’s gaze, but he didn’t look at me, instead looking tensely at his plate before starting to eat.

Mikhail spoke up, probably to lighten the mood. He had a deep, pleasant voice. “Tania said that your food tastes good. I couldn’t agree more.”

Now my uncle looked up, directly at the woman sitting a few chairs away, who was staring at him. She couldn’t hold his gaze for long and turned back to her food. He, however, remained staring, his green eyes full of unreadable emotion, as if he had only just noticed her presence.

I looked at Nash, who wasn’t looking at the two of them, but at Mikhail... tense and with a menacing glint in his eyes.

God,what was going on here?

This was a serious dinner withmajor political significancefor Father, and I seemed to be the only one in this family who understood the assignment. And now it made sense that Finn wasn’t there. He would probably have made some kind of comment that would have made the situation worse.

“Mikhail, don’t you want to tell Emely a bit about yourself?”

I stopped chewing as Dimitrio gave his son an expectant look. Mikhail looked up and looked me straight in the eye. A smile stole across his lips.

If anyone looked like an angel, it was him, even if, as the son of the Russian alpha, he hardly was. I had heard the stories from Alarik. How the Russian pack raised its offspring. Brutal and ice-cold.

“Emely probably doesn’t know that you can cook at least as well as Alarik.”

My uncle looked contemptuously at the Russian Alpha, and I noticed Father kicking him under the table.

“Certainly not better, but yes, I like to cook when time allows.”