Four

She’s changed.

Mackenzie Murlow is not the ten-year-old who showed up on the pack’s doorstep all those years ago.

She was an innocent little thing back then, and the pack would have eaten her alive. She wouldn’t have survived us. At least that was what I had believed when she had been there.

It wasn’t until after she left that I found out my mother wouldn’t survive her.

“Your father is waiting for your report,” my driver, Gregorio, said, looking in the rearview mirror. I nodded and looked down at my phone, which was blowing up with Pack messages.

Two others from the Storm Blood Pack had been accepted so far. It wasn’t enough. We needed more on the inside if we had any hope of infiltrating the scientists and stealing the drug they were experimenting with for my father.

The shifting drug they created had been a huge turning point for our kind, but it also gave the scientists too much power. And now they were using that power to experiment on humans ~and~ wolves, something my father found disgusting. “Playing God,” he called it.

He wanted to take something they valued and use it as leverage, so the power could be back in the wolves’ hands. ~His~ hands.

Now that I knew Mackenzie was going to be in the experiment too, though, I was a little more open to the idea of this experiment. I had been waiting a long time to see her again. To finally give her what she deserved after getting my mother killed all those years ago.

I scrolled through the messages, filtering out the ones that didn’t matter before getting to Arlo’s name. He was the scientist my father was blackmailing to get us into the trials.

~“You qualified without me needing to convince them. Your attraction with the hybrid was unprecedented, the strongest connection we’ve had so far.”~

~“Not denying that I want to fuck her. Probably as much as I want to kill her. It sounds like I’m going to get to do one of those things with this experiment, which has me wondering…what drug you are testing? What’s so important about this one that you’re handing out $50k?”~

~“I can’t say. It’d jeopardize the results.”~

I rolled my eyes. For a double agent, Arlo was annoyingly reclusive. He didn’t know we planned to steal the drug from the scientists, of course. He only knew we wanted in.

Gregorio pulled into the gated driveway, buzzing us in before taking us up the dirt drive to the sprawling lands that housed the Storm Blood Pack.

I hated going to my father’s wing of the lodge, but it was a territory and respect thing. He was the Alpha, technically. But once we had our leverage over the scientists, it’d be my turn.

It couldn’t come soon enough. The Storm Blood Pack needed change.

Pureblood wolves were dying out. Mating rates were at their lowest in a century, which meant birth rates were critical. My brother, Arik, was one of the few members of our pack who had a mate and was able to reproduce.

We ~could~ branch out to mate with humans and hybrids, but my father’s traditionalist ways meant he hated anything and everything that wasn’t a wolf. I was going to change that.

I went through my father’s suite, ignoring the wall of wolf heads in the living area.

My father had made sure I knew about the traitor wall since I was a pup. It was every wolf he’d ever killed. My mother’s head was up there. His mate.

Mackenzie had come to our pack and my mother had gone soft for her, then tried to convince my father to let her stay. A complete betrayal of my father’s way of doing things.

She openly disagreed with Cerberus in front of everyone, arguing for Mackenzie’s life.

It was the first and last time she’d ever spoken against him. He had killed her for it.

I hadn’t looked at the wall since she had become a part of it. I couldn’t let myself think about the fact that she would still be alive today if Mackenzie had never showed up.

Maybe it wasn’t Mackenzie’s fault. She was just a kid, I knew that. And I knew it was my piece of shit father who gave the kill order. But that didn’t make the truth any less painful.

Cerberus would never have had a reason to hurt my mother if it weren’t for Mackenzie.

I didn’t hate her for being a hybrid. I hated her for being the reason I didn’t have a mom anymore.

Locking the painful past away in the dark recesses of my mind, I went around the corner to my father’s office. He was in there being ridden by wife number four.

She was bouncing on him, moaning as he fucked her.

I leaned against the door frame and waited, used to the situation. With seven wives, there was barely an hour in the day that my father didn’t have his dick buried.

“I have an update from the trials, Father,” I said, bringing up all the information I had accumulated while being at the clinic on my phone.

I had noted the pre-tests, the layout of the clinic, and the information we had signed to accept. Every detail. Except one.

I had left Mackenzie out of it.

I knew I shouldn’t have. My father would want to know that they had put me in the pre-test cubicle with the hybrid, Mackenzie Murlow of all hybrids. But I couldn’t bring myself to put her name down. Not when I had the image of the wall of heads in my mind.

I had never seen her wolf before. I didn’t even know if she had one, but I knew I didn’t want her head, wolf or not, on that wall at my father’s hand. If it was going up there, I was going to be the one to put it there.

My father looked up from his wife as she looked over her shoulder. Her blonde hair was down her naked back, bleeding claw marks staining her red satin dress. They didn’t stop fucking.

My father pushed back his raven black hair so his blue eyes could catch mine and I could clearly see the scar that ran through one of his. “Tell me,” he grunted, then slammed inside Isla. She cried out, orgasming as he came.

I looked away. When I looked back, Isla was already off my father and he was doing himself up. Isla walked past me, pulling her spaghetti straps up and licking her swollen lips. She winked as she went past and I shook my head. She was definitely going to end up on the wall.

My father did his belt buckle up, the gold-plated emblem on the front clicking together. It was a wolf head with lightning through it. Father sunk back into his chair and nodded to the one opposite his heavy oak desk. I sunk into the leather and my braid fell down over my shoulder.

My father had his braid in a bun at the back of his head, three smaller braids running like tracks toward it. That meant he had killed three wolves already this month. I tried not to roll my eyes. At least it wasn’t more. Three was a good month. That only proved he really didn’t care that our numbers were lessening. Hell, he was part of the reason.

But I wasn’t about to point it out. Mentioning hybrids around my father was risking another head to add to his collection. He was a huge man, thick with muscle, and his tattoos made up all of his dark olive skin. A blended mix of storm and wolves, a moon and flames all over him. Everyone in Storm Blood had similar ones.

“What did you find out? Did Arlo do as he was told or do I need to release the leverage I have on him?” my father smirked.

“And what leverage is that?” I asked.

Cerberus shoved his hands into his pockets. “Never you mind. Just let me know if he acts up and I’ll sort it out. Understood?”

I rolled my eyes. I shouldn’t have expected him to tell me how he planned to extort our inside man.

“The scientists want to test between species. Arlo was able to get me and three others on the inside. They didn’t tell me what exactly they were experimenting on, though.”

“If it involves testing between wolves and other species then it is a gross overstepping of power,” he ranted, pushing his chair back and standing up. “All we have to do is take their information from them and then we control them.”

“You want to control them, not kill them?” I asked. It didn’t sound very ‘Cerberus’-like.

“Well, I can’t extort them for werewolf uses only if they’re all dead now, can I?” he snarled, his fists clenching. “I don’t have the numbers to wage an outright attack, so getting you in to steal leverage is the only option we have.”

I nodded. “I’m to report to them tomorrow morning at the clinic. I’ll be gone for the summer, no outside influences.”

“That they know of,” Father smirked, looking out the huge glass window with wooden framing. “Before summer is over, I want every fucking scientist under our control. Preferably because their drug is in our hands.”

He licked his lips, his eyes feral before his face transformed into the Alpha we had all learned to avoid. “The scientists working with humans is bad enough, but hybrids? That’s unacceptable.”

“It is,” I said warily.

“They’re all abominations who don’t deserve to breathe the same air as we do. Especially after what the one hybrid who dared to enter our home did to your mother. Don’t you think?”

I swallowed tightly, anger making me shake like it always did when he mentioned my mother. His mate. He should never have been able to do what he did to her. But if Mackenzie had never made it past the doorstep, none of it would have ever happened.

“I agree with you,” I muttered through gritted teeth.

He went to the window and slid his hands in his pockets. Then he looked over his shoulder. “I know about the girl.”

I said nothing. It wasn’t hard to guess how he’d gotten that information. ~Arlo.~

He turned to face me, his features stony. “You will kill Mackenzie Murlow while you are there. Understood?”

I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want it to be from his command. My father wanted it to happen because she was a hybrid, but I didn’t care about that. I only wanted to see her suffer like my mother had.

I nodded once, sealing Mackenzie’s fate. “Understood.”