Page 6 of Cruel Alpha (Nightfire Islands Alphas #1)

Homecoming. The word was tinged with a rosy hue, warm and inviting, comforting and safe. I’d never understood it: Lapine was the only place I’d ever called “home”, but it wasn’t somewhere I’d ever hoped to come back to.

The familiar stone cottages, hewn from Lapine’s deep red rock, sat just as I remembered them, arranged in little clusters rather than the straight streets that humans preferred. The road between them was bumpy—people on Lapine didn’t use cars enough to warrant laying down tarmac—and the twins screamed in glee as they were bumped and jostled in their seats. I couldn’t share their excitement. The eyes of every person we passed were on us, watching me return with the same morbid curiosity with which they’d watched me leave.

At least this time, there was a sheet of glass between me and the judgment of the Pack. Just over three years ago, I had to walk between these cottages, my head held high and my eyes on the road ahead, while the eyes of Lapine followed me. Not one of them had stood up for me or offered me sympathy or wished me good luck; they had only stared at the disgraced half-breed who didn’t know her place as she finally turned her back on them.

It hadn’t been my choice to leave; as much as I’d dreamed of it since I was small, I was eighteen and pregnant and mateless. My Pack may have ridiculed me, feared me, and ostracized me, but they were still my Pack. That counted for something on the islands, or so I’d thought. Caleb’s father hadn’t agreed. Apparently, if you were a half-breed and an outcast and you were claiming not only that the Alpha Heir was your mate but that he’d knocked you up, then you were no longer worthy to call Lapine home.

Banishment was usually a punishment reserved only for the worst of the worst: for traitors, for men who’d challenged the Alpha and lost, for murderers and thieves. I had walked the same path as the worst of the worst because I’d told the truth to a man who didn’t want to hear it. I remembered seeing Brandon Doyle standing in his yard when I’d walked past; Brandon’s mate, Hannah, frequently had bruises in circles around her wrists and red welts on her face, but Brandon hadn’t been banished from the Pack, hadn’t been humiliated and forced to leave behind everything he’d ever known. The injustice of it had burned like vomit in my throat, but there’d been nothing to do other than keep walking.

So I kept walking. I kept walking and walking and walking until I came to the Arbor Bridge. When I crossed it, I didn’t look back. I didn’t expect that I would ever set foot on Lapine again. Fate, it seemed, had other plans.

Caleb pulled up outside a home in the eastern part of town, not too far from the center. Curtains of nearby cottages twitched as we stepped out of the vehicle, and I tried my best to ignore them while I unbuckled Jack from his car seat. Across from me, Caleb was struggling to do the same with Emmy. He’d been surprisingly good with them in the first couple of hours of the journey, when I’d been too exhausted and too filled with dread at the thought of really coming back here. If it had been any other guy, it would have sent my heart fluttering, but instead, it had made something ugly and resentful curl up in my gut. I didn’t want to know that he might have made a good father. I wanted to keep believing what I’d always told myself: that he would be just like most of the men on Lapine, ignoring his own children until they made too much noise, and he snapped at me to shut them up. I didn’t want to know that he would take the strain of entertaining them when I was too overwhelmed or that he would listen patiently to their off-key, off-beat singing until they tired themselves out.

One thing that seemed to be beyond him, though, was unfastening Emmy’s car seat. Those things were a bastard, in all fairness, but I watched him frown and struggle for a few seconds longer, just for the petty satisfaction of it.

“There’s a third button on the top,” I said once I’d watched my fill. Jack was already out of the car and on my hip, just starting to wake up after the nap he’d taken for the second half of the trip. “You’ve gotta press all three at exactly the same time.”

Caleb grunted as he found the elusive third button, pressing down deliberately. The seatbelt came free with a click, and he grinned in triumph. It wasn’t adorable, not even a little bit.

Emmy had clearly gotten used to being held by Caleb because she held her arms up to him sleepily as he pulled her out of the car, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. The sight made a new string of anxiety twist itself into a knot in my stomach. How long would he stick around? If we were going to stay on Lapine for the foreseeable future, would he come to visit regularly, or would he go back to pretending we didn’t exist? I couldn’t let Emmy and Jack get attached to him only to have him disappear from our lives. I wouldn’t have them feeling the way I’d always felt: cast aside, unworthy and unwanted.

I jumped when Caleb slammed the car door closed, rushing to follow him up to the cheerful red front door of the cottage. He rapped a sharp knock, and we waited.

When I’d last seen Julia Thorne, she’d been a high school junior, skinny and shy, but the woman who answered the door was commanding and confident. She’d shot up in height over the last few years, so she towered over me, willowy and slender. The biggest change, though, was her hair. It was still long and black and silky smooth, but now Julia wore it pulled back, revealing what she’d always sought to hide as a high schooler: her right eye was not the same piercing blue as her left but was instead entirely milky white. No iris, no pupil.

Her good eye looked from Caleb to me and back again.

“You couldn’t have radioed?” she said, cocking her hip and leaning against the doorframe. My heart sank: did she not know we were coming? Had she not agreed to this?

“No,” said Caleb. “Move, people are looking.”

Julia rolled her eyes but stepped back to let us in. I kept my head down as I slipped past her, embarrassed to turn up on her doorstep unannounced with a pair of toddlers in tow. She didn’t even know that Caleb was going to ask her—no, tell her that we would be staying with her for the foreseeable future. My own family had barely wanted me around; staying with someone who’d had me foisted on her against her will was going to be hell.

Inside, her cottage was much like the one I had grown up in: the downstairs was mostly one large open room, with a fireplace, a couch, and an easy chair at one end, and a small kitchen-diner at the other. The atmosphere was warm and inviting, quite the opposite of how I remembered the large Alpha residence in the center of town.

Caleb started talking as soon as the door closed behind us, telling his sister what had happened on the Arbor road, but she cut him off almost immediately.

“Will you can it until I’ve greeted my guests?”

Caleb’s mouth snapped shut, and he glared at her but did not continue. Julia turned abruptly to me, smiling wide and radiant.

“Alyssa! How the hell are you?” I was surprised she remembered my name, but it was a pleasant, warm feeling. I smiled back at her.

“I’ve been better,” I said.

“I bet. And who are these little angels?” She chucked Jack under the chin, and I tensed for his inevitable retreat and grumble—he hated new people—but to my surprise, he giggled. He still hid his face against my chest immediately afterward, but it was a very promising start.

“This is Jack,” I told her, “and that’s his sister, Emmy.”

Emmy, for her part, was starting to get squirmy in Caleb’s arms. He shot me a questioning look, and I nodded at him to set her down. Immediately, Emmy toddled over to Julia, frowning up at her as though considering something very complex.

“You’re tall,” she said eventually, and Julia smiled.

“Yeah,” she agreed, dropping into a crouch so that she was closer to Emmy’s height. “Do you wanna be tall when you’re grown up?”

Emmy considered this.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well,” Julia said, “are you eating all your greens like your mommy tells you? Because that’s the only way to grow up really tall.”

Emmy screwed up her face.

“Never mind,” she said. Julia bit back a laugh as she rose back to full height, shooting me a significant look. She had Emmy pegged already.

“Do they need anything to eat?” Julia asked. “Food or juice or anything?”

I was absolutely not ready to deal with the juice zoomies, but they definitely needed a snack before they started getting cranky.

“If you’ve got an apple, I can cut them some slices,” I said, but Julia waved me away.

“You sit down,” she insisted. “I’ll get it. Skin on or off?”

“On, please.”

“You got it.”

I settled the twins on Julia’s couch while she set to cutting up an apple. I felt calmer than I had five minutes ago, though Caleb looked like he was about to burst. Julia threw me a wink before she turned to him.

“You may continue,” she said magnanimously, and he scowled as he launched back into recounting the events of the last twenty-four hours. Had it really been such a short time? Yesterday morning, I had woken in my cabin on the outskirts of Arbor town with no idea that my little life there was about to be shattered, and now I was back on Lapine. I was sitting in Julia Thorne’s house, watching my children pick apple slices off her plates, listening to Caleb talk about “getting Alyssa resettled” and “increasing bridge security”.

The low rumble of his voice was familiar and different all at once: it had deepened over the last few years, and the edge of arrogance had rounded into something more like confidence. I’d rarely seen him serious in our teen years—he was always smiling, even when the smile was cruel and mocking—but I didn’t know if I’d seen him smile once since he’d rescued us. It was, I supposed, not really a situation that would merit much smiling, but this stoic, serious version of Caleb still felt strange to me. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to break character and tell me that the Arbor hunters were at the door, ready to pick us up and drag us back with them to face the punishment we so rightly deserved.

“And have you asked Alyssa what she thinks about this plan?” The sound of my name pierced the anxious fog of my thoughts, and I blinked up at Julia.

“What?” I said stupidly.

Caleb leaned forward, no doubt ready to rehash all the reasons why Lapine was the best and safest place for me to be, but Julia held up a hand to silence him. I was in awe of her power.

“Are you okay with staying here?” Julia asked softly. “Or did my brother just railroad you into this?”

That was a complex question. Of course, I had been railroaded into it; left to my own devices, I would never have returned to Lapine, but left to my own devices, my children and I would probably be dead. Instead of answering, I voiced the worry that had been scratching at the back of my brain.

“A lot of people saw me arrive,” I said. “There’s no way your dad isn’t going to find out. What then?”

You could have heard a penny drop in the silence that followed. Julia glared at Caleb.

“You didn’t tell her?” she hissed, and Caleb shrugged.

“There wasn’t a moment.”

“Didn’t tell me what?” I pressed, and the siblings looked at each other for a long second before Julia said,

“Our dad died a few months after you left.”

My jaw dropped. Abe Thorne had only been in his mid-forties, and he was the kind of Alpha who seemed… eternal. He was strong and solid, and he might have ruined my life, but he made keeping the Pack in line seem easy. I could never imagine him doing something as mundane as dying.

“Oh,” I breathed. “I-I’m so sorry—”

“You don’t have to pretend. The guy was an asshole,” Julia’s tone was flippant, but next to her, Caleb flinched. “Cal’s an asshole, too, but I can take him.”

She nudged him playfully with her shoulder, but Caleb didn’t respond. His jaw was tight, and I could see the pain in his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said softly. “I know you looked up to him.”

Caleb shrugged.

“It is what it is,” he said, but his voice was strained. “At least now I can—well, I’m the Alpha now, so you don’t have to worry about anything.”

That was a bit of a stretch: I could still think of plenty of things to worry about, but I knew what he meant. With Abe Thorne gone, there was no one to object to my return to Lapine—or at least, no one whose word outweighed Caleb’s because he was Alpha now.

Caleb was Alpha. Suddenly, his serious demeanor made sense; he’d been thrust into a leadership position long before he was ready. No doubt some of his father’s Betas—men I’d avoided like the plague when I was younger—would be jostling for influence, trying to find weak spots in his leadership. Bringing me back to Lapine was a huge risk for him: to put the whole Pack in jeopardy for the sake of a banished half-breed and her unclaimed children? I could only imagine the kind of shit he was about to get, Alpha or no.

The silence that hung over us was thick and loaded, but what broke it was worse: a knock at the door.