Yes! Make them pay! Make it RIGHT!
Fleance flinched. Caine’s eyes widened and he leaned back, hands raised. “Easy.”
Anger flared inside Fleance. His anger, not his hellhound’s. Why are you wasting time talking? Why not fix this yourself? Fleance swallowed hard over the bile that rose in his throat. Caine wasn’t that sort of alpha. Fleance didn’t want him to be that sort of alpha. He’d spent too long under the boot of a man who used his alpha powers to cage and control him. But now, with this…
He clenched his fists on the torn fabric on the chair’s arms, then released them slowly.
“You were in Parker’s pack the longest out of the three of you, weren’t you?”
Fleance’s eye twitched. Had Caine read his mind?
No, he told himself. He’d just cut straight to the point, like usual.
He dropped his head. “I was the first one he turned. His test subject, Rhys calls me.” Fleance resisted the urge to touch the bite scars on his neck. Across from him, Caine’s knuckles went white as he gripped his upper thigh, where his own turning scar was. “You think he got something wrong when he turned me.” His voice was flat. “My hellhound’s broken. That’s why it’s so violent now that I’m not under Parker’s control.”
Caine made a face. “I don’t think that. And I’ve known Angus Parker since I was at college, remember. Given the way he treated the three of you when you were his pack, I doubt he’d consider violence to be something wrong with you.”
“Is that meant to make me feel better?”
“Yes and no?” Caine’s lips curved in a wry half-smile. “Yes, reassuring, because whatever you’ve been telling yourself, you’re not a monster. I spent long enough thinking I was one, so I should know. And no, not reassuring, because like I said. I know Parker. Not as well as I’d thought, but from what Rhys and Manu have told me…” He sat back and rubbed his face. “This is my fault.”
“What?” Fleance was still managing his reaction to the news Caine had been talking to Rhys and Manu. All those years with Parker had trained him to keep his problems secret. His surprise that Caine thought this was his fault slipped onto his face.
“I’m your alpha, aren’t I? I’m meant to take responsibility for all of you.”
Strange way of saying ‘control’, Fleance thought before he could stop himself, as Caine kept talking.
“I should have seen you weren’t coping. I should have done something to help. I’ve been so distracted with Meaghan’s pregnancy. We knew it would change things, the Heartwells warned us about that, but now…”
A shiver rippled across Fleance’s pack-sense. He leaned forward, trying to trace the source of the disturbance, and gasped.
Fleance had always been keenly aware of his pack. When it was just Parker, there had been no escaping it: his alpha had been like a black hole, dragging at his attention and ready to lash out if he felt he wasn’t being shown due respect. When Parker had added Rhys and Manu to the pack, the black hole had been joined by two other circling stars—caught in its orbit, always at risk of being eaten alive.
Two Christmases ago, Caine had defeated Parker in combat. Suddenly, the black hole had vanished. Now, when Fleance closed his eyes and looked inside himself, past his hellhound’s smoke-filled den, he saw a constellation of lights whirling through a black night sky. Still caught in orbit, but no longer crushed into place by a cruel alpha’s control.
That was what made Pine Valley so precious to Fleance, and Christmas even more so. It felt like a charmed place and time. The longer he spent there the more true that seemed, as he learned about the other miracles the town had experienced each Christmas season. The Christmas before he’d moved to Pine Valley, one of the local dragon clan had found his mate, breaking a curse that would have forced him to lose either his dragon or his human side forever. Then, Caine had met his mate, and broken Parker’s control over his pack. And again, last Christmas, another piece of magic. Two more hearts made whole.
In Pine Valley, Fleance felt safe for the first time since he was a teenager. He didn’t need to keep one eye on his pack-sense at all times, and this must have been why he never noticed the newest changes to his psychic night sky.
Two new points of light, barely pinpricks against the darkness, whirled near the central star, around the shining moon that represented Caine’s mate. Fleance blinked—and there was another rippling shiver, and they were gone.
Two almost-there new pack members. Twins.
Fleance’s eyes flew open and he met Caine’s tired gaze. “They’re hellhounds? Without being bitten?”
“Seems that way.” Caine became agitated. “And Abigail’s been telling Meaghan about things that changed for her after she had Ruby, and there’s going to be two of them, and… It’s going to be a lot.” His eyes went glassy. “A lot.”
And he doesn’t need an uncontrolled, violent, broken hellhound to deal with on top of all that. Fleance gritted his jaw. “This isn’t your fault,” he told his alpha. “It’s—I can handle it. I will handle it. And if worse comes to worst—”
He reached towards the central star in the constellation that represented his pack. Almost invisible against the darkness were the threads of power that linked him to his alpha. They were only threads, not the coiling, choking chains Parker had used to control his lackeys. But they were there. “You can make me stop.”
“It won’t come to that,” Caine replied.
“You don’t know that.”
Caine levelled his gaze at him. His hellhound’s fire moved behind his eyes, assessing. Thinking. Fleance forced himself not to show his discomfort.
Then Caine sighed, ran his fingers through his dark-red locks, and stood up. “Sounds like they’re finished out there,” he said. “Bob’s
