“Yeah, whatever. You’re saying that if I hadn’t been born, that curse would have never been able to take root, right? Dad was right; I was the catalyst that killed Mom!”
I opened my mouth to object, to comfort, to do so many things at once, but it was Chris who spoke. “No, Jackie.Theykilled our mother. She died protecting all of us. She was a true wolf through and through, unlike thesecowardswho’ve had theirs stricken away for generations!”
“Enough of the adlibs,” Arlene said, her mouth twisted into a pout. “Comments from the peanut gallery can end after you deal with the result of thesecondcontract I made from beyond the veil. Your darling big brother, of course!”
At that, the woman gestured to her daughter, who looked absolutely miserable even though her face was blank. Alexandria crossed to the other side of the room and pulled aside a curtain, revealing a small alcove, the kind usually made into a reading nook or had a fancy statue shoved into it. Instead of a fancy statue or bookshelves, a cage occupied the space. A cage that held Luther.
I wasn’t exactlysurprisedto see him, but the way in which he was revealed was so high-school drama club that I couldn’t help but think that the Parracidas were viewing this revelationas a performance of sorts. The grand finale of a plan they had been working on since before Jackson was alive. It was pathetic, of course, but it also told me a lot about them and howtheysaw this situation playing out in their own heads.
“Your destruction was assured once your brother chose to abandon his responsibilities to his family to have a clandestine affair with a human. Can you believe that?” Arlene Parracida cackled, actuallycackled,with her head tilted back and everything. If she was an actress, a director would have stopped her and told her to stop chewing on the scenery. “A human! How utterly plebian. The mighty VanMarches of the even mightier Marchendi pack brought down because of a pathetic human!”
“What are you even talking about?” Chris spat, but my thoughts immediately went back to when Cherry had described what she’d seen when she got sucked into Luther’s contained emotions. We hadn’t had nearly as much time to discuss it as I would have liked, but I remember her saying there was affection there. Even love. It made me hope that somehow our brother still had positive emotions toward us, but now I realized she’d seen something else entirely.
I looked at the unconscious woman on the fifth stake, and so many things fell into place at once. How Luther never seemed very interested in mating contracts, and how a series of bizarre circumstances always seemed to subvert any from really getting started. How, as he got older, he began to go on more runs tocenterhimself. How he never really seemed interested in going out or socializing, and how in those quiet moments when he wasn’t aware I was watching him, he always seemed a bit melancholy.
“You used her,” I breathe, horror rolling through my mind in centric ripples of realization. “You found her and used her to set a trap for Luther!”
“And it worked like a charm,” Vincenzo chimed in, clearly tired of his wife hogging the spotlight. “It was simple, really. He had a choice. Either surrender himself to us or let his love die and deliver us to justice. He had to agree to the spell of his own accord. And he did, insanely fast too.”
“So what,” Penelope hissed, “you hypnotized him or something?”
“Oh no, that would be far below my power,” Arlene continued, and I swore I saw her husband give her a disgruntled look. “Your precious brother, the supposedly mighty alpha-heir of your pack, is buried deep within himself in a sealed prison. Nothing about him can reach the surface, so really, he’s little more than a puppet we control entirely.”
That explained his emotionless state. My brother was still in his body, forced to watch what he was doing, but it wasn’t reallyhimdoing those awful things.
“It was quite entertaining watching him cut off his own arm without even so much as blinking. He wiped out your father and handled his own disappearance flawlessly. We were ready to dispose of him, but then the lot of you became much more observant. None of the jinxes we cast or hits we set up for you with your alpha out of the picture worked. Never in my life have I seen two contracts fail after repeated attempts and one remain completely untaken just because Miss Advocate here happened to be overseas.”
“Three contracts fail,” I corrected.
Vincenzo tilted his head like I was speaking in tongues. “What are you talking about?”
“You had three contracts fail, and my sister’s was left stagnant. One for Chris, one for Jackson, and one for me.”
Neither of the Parracidas said anything for a beat. Not until the grandfather leaned in and whispered in Vincenzo’s ear.
“And whose fault is that?” the patriarch snapped, waving his elder away. “I haven’t been to the estate in ages! I can’t be expected to remember every one of Caspian’s boring progeny!”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you telling me that you forgot the middle son of your supposedly greatest enemy?”
“Potentially.”
“No wonder he ended up being such a thorn in our side!” Arlene spat, her voice full of venom as she elbowed her own husband. “If it weren’t for Alexandria slipping trackers into the siblings’ phones while she was at the estate, he might have even found us out!”
Ah. Sothatwas how they discovered our hideout. We’d been hacked from the inside. How, after everything that had happened, had I never thought to restrict the Parracidas’ access to our estate? It wasn’t like they were blood!
I guess that I was just so used to seeing them as an extension of our staff that I forgot to consider they were their own people with their own motives, and apparently real evil ones at that.
“What does it even matter!? We have them here now, and when their brother spills their blood, our family line will finally get their wolf forms back. We will be able to take our place as heads of the entire East Coast!”
So that was the long and short of it then. All the pain my family had endured, from the death of my mother, to the murder of my father and not-quite murder of my brother, was so the Parracidas could steal our shifter birthright from us and topple the entire power structure that had kept shifter war out of the East Coast and protected the weakest of us when magical folks fully revealed themselves to humans.
It was just soselfish.
I was more than willing to admit that all three of the great families were incredibly wrong for continuing the punishment of their family like it wasn’t a big deal. As if it was just a matterof course. And I would be more than happy to pay restitution to them and make things right. But this wasn’t the way to do it. And now, because of the choices they had made, they had to be stopped.
But how?
“You’re right, you’re right. I suppose I lost the plot a bit.” Arlene drew in a centering breath, straightening her posture. I got the impression that she was taking her final bow for her performance. “You, scourge! Slaughter all of them, including that precious human of yours. But make sure you save her for last!”