Page 20 of Ascendant King

Te quiero mucho, mijo.

Mom

I remembered it. I’d put it on top of my bookshelf, the gift card to the local bookstore spent immediately. It must have gotten knocked over when they destroyed the room. I tried to breathe but could barely get any air.

Beside me, Cade read the card, his expression tight.

He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Should we?—”

But he broke off, waiting as I struggled until I could speak. “We should go.”

“Your parents’ room.” Cade was still staring at the card.

I looked down at it, the looping way my mother had written my name. “Fine.”

It could not be worse than this. My parents’ room was at the end of the hall, and I stayed outside, looking in. Someone had started a fire on the bed, and I wasn’t sure how it hadn’t destroyed the whole house. It looked like a tornado had touched down inside, everything torn and thrown.

Cade stepped in, but after a quick survey, he shook his head. “Let’s go. There’s nothing here.”

He looked up at me, and I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Let’s go home.”

Chapter

Seven

The convoy back to Los Santos had four more cars than the one we’d taken to meet with the alpha council. The five new pack members were bringing their families and lovers with them, adding ten to our number. We stopped at Thelma’s Restaurant on the way out of Flores to collect everyone.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked Morris, not liking the idea of leaving behind loyal people whom Ghost Pack might punish for something I’d done.

“We’ll be fine.” Morris looked around the street.

More people than I’d expected had come out to see us off. It was as though they’d all been in hiding since my mother’s death. Based on the rumors, I’d assumed for so long that every single member of my mother’s pack had been hunted down and killed, but now I was realizing that I wasn’t the only one who’d survived. I wasn’t the only one left alive who remembered my mother the way she’d been in real life, not just in the horror story we all knew.

“Call us if there’s any trouble.” I looked him in the eye, making sure he nodded. Leaving a human in charge was an odd choice, I knew, but Morris was more Flores than anyone else. IfI couldn’t leave one of my betas, I would happily leave someone who loved the town as much as my mother had. “Even a hint of it. If there’s any trouble at all, we can be here fast. We have mages in our pack.”

Both of Morris’s eyebrows went up, and he glanced at Cade. “You do.”

“We do.” I nodded, waiting for him to nod, acknowledging the truth of it.

“There won’t be trouble,” Harrison said. “Ghost Pack hasn’t been back here in months.”

“There’s going to be trouble once they stop paying fees.” I knew how it worked.

“Thanks, Miles.” Morris held out his hand. He looked at Harrison significantly. “We’ll keep an eye out for Ghost pack.”

Morris had already scraped the Ghost Pack symbol off his window, and he dropped a heavy hand on Harrison’s shoulder. The Ghost Pack enforcer flinched, and I couldn’t find it in myself to be sorry for him. With a final nod at Morris, I got in the back seat of the car, Cade sliding into the other side. Gabe gave some last-minute directions to everyone else, and then he was in the front, his music turned down low as he checked his phone for traffic.

As we got on the freeway, Gabe became distracted by an earbud in one ear, talking to his girlfriend in a low voice, giving us more privacy.

Cade didn’t ask at all about what happened at the house, how I had frozen, what I had seen in my memory. It was too much, seeing what was clear as crystal in my mind, how it had used to look, what it had been like as a child and what it was like now, the chaos that Ghost Pack had left behind when they destroyed the Castillo family.

I was still stuck there, even as the scenery around us changed, still fixated on how it had been, on?—

“Do you think we can trust them?” Cade asked.

“What?” I dragged my eyes away from the window, turning to look at him with a frown.

“The members of Ghost Pack who are joining us back in Los Santos. Do you think we can trust them?” Cade was staring at me as though we had been in the middle of a conversation and I was the one who was out of step.