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ELLIETTE

“ O h, shit,” Jen said. “This feels juicy.”

“It’s not juicy,” Kiera said. “It’s sad. And it’s inside berserker information. If Lukas Bakken is unhappy about his situation…El, I gotta say…it makes me like him even more.”

I liked hearing that, but not enough to make the uneasy feeling in my stomach go away. If Kiera had information that was easy to take, she would have said it already.

“Where did you get inside berserker information?” Parvati asked.

“I dated a berserker wolf in high school,” Kiera said, “and he had a very big mouth.”

“Among other things,” Jen murmured suggestively. “Am I right?”

Kiera gave her a scathing look. “He also knew I was good with secrets, so I don’t normally share things like this.”

“Please,” I begged. “Get to the point.”

“Right,” Kiera said. “Okay, chickie. Here it is. Holden wasn’t a Bakken. Totally different clan. But things run the same way in each of them, and being an alpha isn’t necessarily the greatest gig.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jen said. “Power. Money.”

I had to agree. Lukas would be doing even better than he was as a professional athlete. Think of all the art and vintage cars he could add to his collection.

“It’s not that great,” Kiera insisted. “At least, not for someone who’s already in love…” She gave me a pointed look and added, “And inclined to monogamy.”

“Monogamy?” My mouth felt like cotton wool. “You mean…Lukas is going to be mated to more than one female?”

As soon as the question left my lips, I wished I could claw it back. Imagining Lukas with his future mate was always going to be hard, but more than one of them…?

Kiera shook her head. “Alphas are never mated, Elli. Not like regular berserkers.”

I shook my head, thinking that might help me understand. “I thought you said?—”

“They’re breeding studs.” Kiera sat back against her chair.

“ What?! ” I pushed my palms against the edge of the table, and my chair shot back several inches.

Kiera nodded slowly while everyone else’s jaws went slack.

“The way Holden explained it, one of the ways the clans ended their territorial wars, while guaranteeing that the strongest genes were passed on to the next generation, was to have the most prestigious females in the various clans brought to an alpha of another clan. All the alphas are the offspring of past alphas, and the ones with the best genetics. They’re the strongest and best looking with the purest blood. ”

“Sounds like Lukas,” Amy murmured.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I whispered, bowing my head toward the table. How could Lukas be reduced to something so…shallow. So…loathsome.

“Lukas must think of it as being literally whored out,” Kiera said. “That was no joke.”

I inhaled deeply, then lifted my head. “He was drunk when he told me, and when I brought it up, he must not have realized he’d let it slip. That’s why he got so pissed. He never wanted me to know the truth.”

“No wonder he’s so eager to stretch out the hockey season for as long as he can,” Jen said. “He doesn’t want to go home.”

“He wants to stay with you,” Kiera said in a soft voice that was probably meant to be encouraging.

But I shook my head. “He’s so mad at me.”

“My guess,” Amy said, “he’s embarrassed that you know. If he’s mad at anyone, he’s mad at himself for inadvertently telling you.”

“But he didn’t really tell me,” I said, “because I didn’t understand what he meant by it. Not really.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that. From what it sounds like, he thinks you understood and were making a joke of it. He’s probably embarrassed, pissed, and hurt.”

Oh, no. Had I really made him feel all of that with my stupid comment? “I need to talk to him.”

“Before you call,” Parvati asked. “You should plan out what you want to say.”

That was so like Parvati’s logical engineer brain to assume I’d be capable of making a plan. Right now, my head was a complete mess.

“If anyone can bring Lukas some peace,” Amy said, “you can. And maybe there’s even time for him to get out of being alpha. If his father’s been performing his own breeding duties all these years, he must have tons of male offspring. He could choose from any of them.”

“A more perfect genetic specimen than Lukas?” Jen asked.

“That is hard to picture,” Parvati agreed somewhat gloomily.

“He always gets so pissed whenever anyone brings up his looks,” I said as the jigsaw pieces of past conversations snapped together. I now had a much clearer picture of the berserker I’d pined for all these years.

“Now, you know why,” Kiera said.

I nodded slowly. Now, I knew why. How had I been so oblivious?

“Call him,” Amy said.

“You think?” I asked, not really sure that was the best idea. He hadn’t wanted to talk when he was telling me to get out of his apartment.

“Definitely,” she said. “You need to clear the air, and you always find the right words.”

That may have been true a lot of the time, though not so much tonight. Hesitantly, I picked up my phone and dialed. It went straight to voicemail.

“He went out,” I said. “I heard him leaving.”

“Call your brother,” Jen said.

“ Evan?” I asked . “Why?”

“Elli’s right,” Kiera said. “Best to leave brothers out it.”

I gave Kiera a sympathetic glance. Her brother had even bigger problems than whatever Evan’s trouble had been. Way bigger.

“He and Lukas are friends,” Jen insisted. “Lukas probably needed his own kind of debriefing session tonight. Just like what we’re doing.”

I shook my head. “Lukas isn’t with Evan.”

Their relationship wasn’t the same as what Jen remembered from when we were kids. And Lukas wasn’t the type to require a confidant.

However…maybe that wasn’t always true. At one time he must have confided in Evan because Evan knew about the alpha business before I told him, and he’d seemed shocked that Lukas had shared the news with me—shocked because he must have thought Lukas had explained everything to me, which meant…

“They’re not getting along right now,” I explained, “but Evan does know about Lukas’s future.”

“If he knows,” Parvati said, “he might have some advice on how to talk to Lukas about it.”

“He might even know where Lukas would go, if he wanted to hang by himself,” Amy suggested.

“Maybe,” I agreed, not sure I wanted to talk to my brother about anything related to Lukas. Not only were things strained between Evan and me—for obvious reasons; there was also a tension between him and Lukas that seemed to go well beyond their dust-up at the club.

“I still vote for keeping brothers out of this,” Kiera murmured.

“But if I do call Evan,” I said, still working through the wisdom of it, “he can never know what happened between me and Lukas tonight.”

“You mean the sex part?” Jen asked, grinning. “Trust us. Our lips are sealed. And as soon as this drama is over, I want to circle back. Because I still need all the details.”

I rolled my eyes and pulled out my phone. Then—hoping I wasn’t making a huge mistake—I called my brother .

He picked up on the first ring. “Tiny? Are you okay?”

No. I was definitely not okay.

“Hey, Ev. Quick question. And this is totally work related. But do you know where I might find Lukas?”