Chapter 82

Agnes

Elijah swiftly sent the rogues away, their handcuffs rattling around their wrists as the warriors led them to the pack cells. Once they were out of our sight, I let out a shuddering breath and dropped my hands back to my sides.

“I can’t believe that Ava would send four rogues after me,” I breathed, hardly even daring to say the words out loud as if that would somehow make it all that much more real. “I mean, she always hated me, but this…”

Before I could finish, Elijah swung toward me and grabbed my shoulders. “She won’t hurt you again, Agnes.”

Something in the intensity in his gaze made my breath catch. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but no words would come out.

She won’t hurt you again.

Time and time again, Elijah proved just how fiercely loyal he was to me. Even with our relationship being one of necessity and not love, he still cared far more than anyone else ever had.

Far more than my own parents had ever cared.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Not that I really even needed to come up with anything to say, because Elijah was already shifting his focus elsewhere: the warrant for my sister’s arrest.

As we waited for Ava to be brought to our doorstep that day, I felt like I was moving in a fog that had nothing to do with the injury on my arm. Was this some kind of revenge for causing her to lose her job at the pack building? It had to be, right?

Still, no matter how simple and basic her little plot was, it still shook me to my core.

Ava was my sister. Stepsister, technically, but we had still spent much of our childhoods together after my father had remarried. Despite every horrible thing she had done, despite every cruel word, I would never send rogues after her.

Never.

By the time Beta James returned with Ava in tow, I was practically seething, the wound on my arm pounding with every rapid beat of my heart. The moment I heard the front door open, I leapt to my feet, my nostrils flaring. Elijah shot up too and strode quickly over to the foyer without a second thought, and I followed.

But the moment I stepped through the doorway, I froze.

I should have known, of course, that my parents would have come with Ava. My stepmother was her mother after all, and as for my father… Well, Ava had always been his precious little girl. He took her side on everything from the moment she came into our lives, and I was the forgotten one.

Even when my child had been stolen from me and my wolf had disappeared along with her, he hadn’t paid me any attention.

To him, I was the disappointment.

At first, when I was younger, I had convinced myself that he just couldn’t bear to look at me because I looked too much like my late mother—that he was just grieving, that he would come around eventually.

But when he didn’t come around, I began to blame myself.

Maybe if I had gotten higher marks in school, he would have loved me more. Maybe if I had trained harder, he wouldn’t have turned around and walked away whenever I entered the room.

Maybe if I hadn’t gotten knocked up with some random man’s baby, lost that baby along with my wolf, and then lost my mind right along with it, he would have held me against his chest like he used to when my mom was alive.

But now that I was older, I knew that none of that was true.

He just didn’t love me. He loved Ava and his new wife more, plain and simple.

And for that, I hated his guts.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed before I could stop myself, my eyes darting back and forth between my handcuffed stepsister, my livid stepmother, and my pallid father.

Ava huffed a strand of hair out of her eyes and scoffed, even though her mascara was running down her cheeks from crying.

“They’re my parents. You think they’re not going to come when your husband arrests me for no reason?”

Before I could answer, Elijah snapped his fingers. Ava was roughly pulled away by James, much to my father’s chagrin. My father followed, of course—and didn’t even look at me as he passed.

Now, only my stepmother remained. And I think the only reason why she didn’t follow them was because she was too angry to move. My gaze immediately locked on hers, and her eyeballs were practically bulging out of her head with rage.

Elijah turned to me and placed a gentle hand on my arm, pulling me out of my stupor.

“It’s going to be a lot of paperwork,” he whispered, keeping his voice low. “If you want to be in the room with Ava for that long…”

I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I shook my head and told Elijah to go on without me. I thought that maybe it was just because I didn’t want to look Ava in the eye, but really, I knew that it was more than that.

My father. I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. Not when I knew that my mother spent every day rolling in her grave over the way he treated me now that she was gone.

Elijah hesitated for a moment, but finally nodded and turned on his heel, striding off down the hall without another word. Once he was gone, the foyer was cast into utter silence.

For several long moments, neither I nor my stepmother said a word. We just stood there, quietly seething at each other like two angry lionesses in the wild.

There was so much I wanted to say to her. So many horrible things I wanted to throw in her face, so many cruel names I wanted to call her for waltzing into my life and rooting herself in my father’s arms just months after my mother died.

But I didn’t say any of them. Not because I wasn’t about to, but because she spoke before I could.

“I hear you reopened the case on that baby of yours,” was all she said.

My jaw clenched of its own accord, a muscle ticking beneath the skin. “That’s all you have to say?” I thrust my bandaged arm forward. “Your precious little daughter sent four rogues after the Luna, and you’re bringing up my child?”

She simply shrugged. “It’s just interesting, that’s all. I mean, I heard rumors that you had Alpha Elijah wrapped around your little finger, but I didn’t think it was this bad. Unless he’s just as delusional as you are.”

“Elijah believes me, plain and simple,” I said coldly. “Unlike everyone else in my life, he actually wants to help me find my missing daughter.”

My stepmother scoffed. “You’ll find nothing but bones.”

Her words hit me like a punch to the gut.

Bones.

I began to see red.

“How dare you?” I whispered, my jaw trembling with rage as I spoke. I took a step forward, and despite the pain in my arm, my hand clenched into a fist at my side. “How would you even know if my baby is dead? You never bothered to look into the matter.”

“Agnes, don’t be absurd,” my stepmother said with a flippant little wave of her hand. “Your baby has been missing for seven years. They say that the chances of an abducted person, especially a child, still being alive after forty-eight hours is—”

I didn’t wait for her to finish.

I couldn’t.

This time, when I surged forward, it wasn’t my wolf who took over. It wasn’t anything or anyone except for me. It was all me, driven purely by seven years of pain, seven years of hatred, seven years of hope being crushed beneath the heel of another person’s boot.

My hand flew out before I could stop myself, and the slap I landed across my stepmother’s face echoed like a gunshot through the quiet house.