Bridenapped The Alpha's Choice (9 page)

“This is the food that the chef is suggesting we serve at your banquet,” Constance said, gesturing at the table in the massive dining room. The hand-carved wooden table was easily twenty feet long. “We’ve got sample platters so that you can select the appetizers, the main courses, and the desserts.”

“Suddenly I love wedding planning,” Mary said, gazing hungrily at the table. Lobsters, prime rib, filet mignon, platters of desserts as far as the eye could see…

“See? Getting married to me isn’t all that bad, is it?” Jarrod winked at Mary as he loaded up a plate, moving down the table.

“The food part is definitely acceptable,” Mary said stubbornly, grabbing a plate and a silver fork. She speared a slice of prime rib and dropped it on the plate.

Jarrod gave her a mock-wounded look. “Is that all that’s acceptable? Are you saying that last night wasn’t acceptable? Because I seem to recall-”

“Everything is amazing!” Mary said, blushing and hurrying away from him. Constance followed her.

“What did you find?” Constance asked her in a low voice.

“Something is off there, with the whole Mage thing, and Petra’s an uptight control freak. Why do you ask?”

“Because I was one of the women who felt that there was something off about the whole birth process. I have a five year old son. I love him, and this makes me sound like a terrible mother, but…” she glanced around. “I can’t even explain it. As soon as they brought him back from the Mage and put him in my arms, I felt like there was something wrong. They did a DNA test on him and it showed that he’s mine, but I swear to God he isn’t the child I gave birth to. It drove me and my husband apart. He told me I was crazy, and he left the pack several years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, stunned.

“I’ve spoken to other mothers who told me the same thing. Only with their sons, not their daughters. Only with the babies taken to the Mage. When Jarrod officially becomes Alpha, will you keep investigating?”

“Damned straight,” Mary said, also keeping her voice low. Constance shoved a piece of paper into Mary’s pocked. “My cell number,” she said, and then strolled off.

“Hey, can you get married every month?” Angela wandered up to Mary holding a plate of appetizers. “This food is amazing.”

“Let’s be real here, I doubt I’m getting married even once. Anyway. Tell me about Craig,” Mary said. “Do you like him?”

“He was amazing.” Amanda nodded dreamily. “He likes the same bands I do. He likes horror movies and roller coasters. He’s going to take me to a totally crazy amusement park after you guys get married.”

Wow. This has real promise,
Mary thought in surprise. Angela was talking about seeing the same guy weeks from now? That was the equivalent of her planning a wedding.

Jarrod, who had wandered up just hten, cleared his throat. “I don’t know. It always starts out well with him,” he said, with a very convincing rendition of a worried frown.

“I like him,” Angela said defiantly.

“Well, you let me know when…— I mean if he gets out of line,” Jarrod said. “I’ll tear him a new one if I have to.”

Mary secretly shot him a look of approval.
You’re a genius
, she mouthed at him, and he winked at her.

She felt warm all over. The two of them, on the same side, working together. If only this could be her life.

Jarrod’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at it and sighed. “Enforcer Central. I’ll make it quick.” He grabbed a cream cheese stuffed celery stick and shoved it in his mouth as he walked away, answering the phone with his mouth full. “Alpha Regent Jarrod,” he mumbled.

After a minute he glanced up. “Gotta take this. I’ll be back in a few, and we can go over the final choices for the banquet.”

After he left Mary and Angela went to find Regina, who’d avoided the food sampling because there was too much actual food there, and she’d already had her protein shake and salad.

Regina was in her suite, sitting at her desk and tapping away at a laptop. She was wearing headphones and humming the tune of a Britney Spears song. She ignored them as they walked in, so they sat down on Regina’s bed.

“I do like Jarrod,” Angela said approvingly. “You should just go through with it, you know.”

“Baloney. He’s doing this—”

“To get back at his uncle? Are you still on that? Come on. You know he doesn’t pay any attention to what his uncle wants. He would just have flat-out said no to the bridenapping, and not bridenapped anybody,” Angela said.

“But he needs to be married within the next few months because he’s turning thirty. So maybe Jarrod decided to marry me because I was the lesser of two evils.” She glanced at Regina, who still had her headphones on.

“Again, no,” Angela said. “There are tons of women out there who have tolerable, even decent personalities, who’d love to marry an Alpha. Women from rich families, for that matter. He could have just picked any of them to marry if he was desperate for an arranged marriage. But he didn’t. He picked you. For him to dump you after bridenapping you would make him and his pack look really, really bad, and for him to marry you and commit to spending his life with you, fathering your cubs, just to piss off his uncle? Come on.”

Damn it. Angela was the level-headed and sensible one now? The world might be coming to an end.

“I told you what he did to me in high school,” Mary argued. “And he wouldn’t be seen with me in public but he was hanging out with all the cheerleader chicks.”

“That could have been to keep his uncle from finding out. His uncle had a lot more power then, right? And his uncle was a dick when he found out Jarrod was seeing you, right?”

“It wouldn’t explain why he stood me up at the restaurant and vanished without a word of explanation. That wasn’t just him changing his mind and moving on; that was him being deliberately cruel, and totally out of the blue. I never saw it coming, which makes it hard to ever trust him again. And he’s dumped all those other women. I’m just really afraid that he’s one of those guys who only wants a woman until he’s got her. He just wants me now because I’m still resisting. Mostly,” she added defensively at Angela’s amused look and arched eyebrow. “And when I asked him about it, he immediately changed the subject.”

“Him and Craig went to high school together,” Angela mused. “I could ask Craig about it.”

“Like Craig’s going to say anything bad about his best friend,” Mary said, shaking her head.

“Hey, I found something,” Regina interrupted them. She’d pulled her headphones off and swiveled around to face them.

“Found what?” Mary looked at her curiously.

“I found something weird in the pack’s finances,” Regina said, looking at her computer screen.

“Whoa, whoa, hold the phone,” Mary said, hurrying to look over her shoulder. “How did you know how to get into their bank accounts? And why are you doing it? And how did you get good at computers? I thought you were sitting there checking your Facebook, for God’s sake.”

“Facebook’s for old people like you. I’m on Tumblr,” Regina said, rolling her eyes. “And I’ve always been good at computers, but I don’t tell anyone because Daddy says guys don’t like women who are good at computers.”

“Okay. So why are you hacking into the pack’s bank records?”

“There’s something weird going on at the hospital with Petra,” Regina said. “Right? And I’m a member of the Disappointing My Parents Club. You said,” she added to Angela.

“We are charter members of the club.” Angela nodded vigorously. “I got her to eat half a muffin today.”

“So I started investigating. My daddy always says to follow the money, so I started looking into the pack’s bank accounts. What better way to disappoint my parents than by being a computer hacker?”

“Oh, she’s come so far, so fast. I’ve never been prouder,” Angela said, pretending to wipe away a tear.

“Regina, I really don’t think you should be rooting around in the pack’s bank accounts,” Mary said uneasily.

“So you don’t want to know what I found out?”

“I didn’t say that.” Mary plopped down in the chair next to her. “What did you find out?”

“Earvin and Petra both have secret bank accounts and they’re siphoning a lot of money away from the pack. I can see how much has been deposited, but I haven’t been able to access their accounts yet. However, I can see that Earvin’s sending large amounts of money to an account in Eastern Europe a few times a year. I mean, like hundreds of thousands.”

Mary peered intently at the computer screen.

“Should you tell Jarrod?” Angela wondered.

Mary considered that. “Not yet. Let me mention it to Constance. She’s the pack secretary, she might be able to start looking into it.”

Before she could say anything else, Jarrod flung the door open, and Regina quickly turned her computer off.

“Mary, I need to talk to you,” Jarrod called out, his face grim. “It’s Briony. She just went crazy and ripped a nurse’s throat out.”

Mary paced the floor of the foyer, her food curdling in her stomach. Jarrod was talking to one of the Enforcers on the phone.

“What happened?” she demanded when he hung up.

“She went into labor this morning, and when the nurse returned with her son, she killed the nurse and tried to attack her own child.”

“Where’s the baby? Was he hurt?”

“No, a doctor and an orderly managed to save him. He’s with his father.”

“Are you going to question her?”

Jarrod nodded. “They were forced to heavily sedate her for right now.”

“You said that the nurse returned with her son,” Mary said angrily. “Briony said she didn’t want her child taken from her. She didn’t want to participate in the Mage ritual. So was the child taken from her forcibly, or was she just browbeaten into it?”

“I will definitely talk to Petra about that when she returns. I told her that all mothers must be told they have a choice, and if Briony was pressured into it, there will be consequences. But that doesn’t explain why she’d try to harm her own baby after he was brought back,” Jarrod said, shaking his head. “Did you see anything off about her when you talked to her? Any indication of mental instability?”

“Not in the slightest,” Mary said. “What do you mean, when Petra returns?”

“She apparently left for a weekend off.” Jarrod frowned when he said it.

“And you don’t find the timing odd?”

“It’s not ideal,” he admitted. “I swear I’ll get to the bottom of whatever’s happening. In the meantime, my uncle is using this as an excuse to try to stir up more trouble, so I’ve got to go talk to the council again. I’ll be back this evening.”

The door opened, and an Enforcer stuck his head in. “Sir, are you ready?”

* * * * *

Earvin sat in the town hall’s conference room, boiling with anger. That pathetic cub Jarrod, and Jarrod’s mewling supporters, weren’t due for another ten minutes.

He’d had his fill of weakness. When he was Alpha, he’d scourge all of the weaklings from his pack with cleansing fire.

He snarled into the phone. “Where the hell are you?” he demanded.

“I told you,” Petra whined. “I’m in the woods. On vacation. You know these things take a toll on me.”

He knew that every time they were forced to make the necessary sacrifice for his glorious mission, Petra practically had a breakdown and had to flee the pack lands for a few days, to hide out in the woods and snivel in self-pity. But this time her absence was putting him and all his plans at risk.

“Thanks to that fat bitch Jarrod brought in, everyone’s starting to ask questions!” he barked at her. “And I don’t think I need to remind you that we have another delivery this week. This is not the time for you to disappear. You need to return immediately so we can strategize.”

“Fine. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.”

Why should it take so long? He’d said
immediately
. He didn’t make suggestions; he gave orders.

“Where, exactly, are you?” She was avoiding the question, he noticed. He’d never really cared where she went off to sulk, but now a nagging worry was forming in the back of his mind.

“It’s a private place where I go to recover,” she said, her tone apologetic. “It’s important to me that it stay private.”

“As your Alpha, I order you to tell me.” If she tried to say that he wasn’t the Alpha, that bitch was dead.

“I can’t, Earvin. I need this time to myself or I wouldn’t be able to carry out our important work.” Her tone was humble and wheedling, but her refusal sent a cold jolt of alarm through him. Was it possible that there was another reason she left the pack lands immediately after every sacrifice? What was she really doing, and where did she go? He’d never had her car searched before she left… Clearly he should have, but it had never occurred to him that she might betray him in any way.

He struggled to contain his rage. She’d refused a direct order from him; she’d sealed her fate. For now, though, he needed to make sure that everything was still running smoothly.

“When you return tomorrow, you will take me to the disposal area.”

“What?” He heard both shock and fear in her voice.

So she was definitely hiding something from him.

“You heard me. You will take me there tomorrow. Show me where you dispose of them.”

“You said you never wanted to go there,” she protested, her tone desperate. “You didn’t want to risk anyone associating you with…that part of the mission.”

He gripped the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles turned white and his claws curved out and sank into the wood. “I gave you an order, Petra.”

“But…you said people are asking questions. They’ll be watching us. It won’t be safe. I can’t do it.”

Panic and red-hot fury swelled up in him and threatened to choke him. Damn it, damn it. He sensed his control over her slipping. She’d never argued with him like this in the past. He wanted to scream, to threaten her, but she knew too much. He had to get her back to pack lands first. Then he could take care of her.

“Listen,” he gritted out. “We’ve been working on this for twenty years. We are not going to abandon all our plans now. You’re as much a part of this as I am.”

“I know.” Her voice was miserable rather than proud. She was ashamed of his perfect plans. She was ashamed of what they’d done to bring the pack glory.

When the time came, she’d die slowly, he vowed.

“The Pack Games are in two months, and after we win, we will have enough supporters in our corner to overturn that rule. I will be Alpha. Then I will consider ending the program.”

“Really?” Her voice was hopeful. She believed him. Stupid bitch. Such poor genes in his lineage; he was ashamed, which made him even angrier.

“Really.” He forced all his rage down, but it was still there, a seething volcano about to erupt. “Talk to you tomorrow,” he choked out, and hung up. Then he hurled the phone across the room and it hit the wall.

He grabbed a chair and began bashing it on the floor as red fury flooded through his body.

“Earvin?” The astonished voice of his Mage, Nathaniel, raked through the mist of rage that consumed him. He looked up with a snarl, realized he was halfway shifted. He forced his wolf back down.

“Are you here to question me too?” he barked at him.

“Question you?” Nathaniel gasped. “Oh, no, of course not. Never. I came to offer my support.”

“Weaklings! Cowards! Traitors!” Earvin howled. The most infuriating thing of all was that he even had to hide like this, that he had to carry out his program in secret. The sickly and weak had no right to live; they should be eliminated at birth, without question. Someday, when he had enough power, he’d make that the law of the land.

“Sir,” Nathaniel said timidly. “The council is coming. They’re right outside. I think I hear them in the hall. Sir, please, can you control yourself?” He was cowering, his tone pleading.

More traitors come to question him! Earvin’s fury boiled over and he went full wolf. He had just enough control to stop himself from attacking the astonished council members as he raced past them in the hallway. He ran down the hall, out the front door and into the woods, tearing through the underbrush in a frenzy.