The Merciless Alpha(erotica)

“Of course, Beta. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Meechum. Please come in.”

“Thank you. Call me Randall, please. It’s an honor to meet you, Erica.” I followed her into the cozy cabin, and as she walked in front of me I could see the crisscross pattern of whip scars on her back and shoulders.

She must have felt me staring. “They don’t bother me, Randall. I don’t regret a one of them, and this Pack has accepted and protected me.” She had us sit on her couch, then brought over a pitcher of lemonade and some glasses. The windows were open, letting the summer breeze through. “No air conditioning here, it’s off-the-grid power only,” she said.

“I’m used to worse humidity in Texas,” I said as I accepted a glass. “You need to know a few things before we start, so you know why you can trust me,” I said. I explained about my job, the murder investigation, and the discovery that Talia was my mate and Tania was my younger brother’s mate.

“Wow,” she said. “Talia rescued her.” She sat back in her chair, trying to process it all. “What do you need?”

“I don’t know how to track down Talia, but I’m trying to figure out what really happened with Tania and their parents. I have my suspicions.”

“You think Beta Todd was behind it all.” I nodded. “Talia didn’t trust him, she thought something was wrong and she didn’t want to mate him ever.” She went through everything, from the day Tania disappeared to the Alpha challenge that resulted in Talia’s exile.

“Why did you help her when the Alpha was clear about how it was forbidden?”

“Talia was getting no help from anyone. The Pack didn’t back her claim to Alpha, the Council dismissed her as a girl, and she didn’t deserve her fate. All I wanted to do was to give her clothing and money so she could get away and make a life. She was my best friend, and I had to help.”

“You’re a loyal wolf,” I said.

“Michelle was too, but her parents would have suffered if she did it. My family was gone, so I took the risk and lost.” She traced the scar on her cheek. “The Alphas collected me from the woods after I was cast out and brought me to their Pack. The healer used a cream to remove as much of the silver from the wounds as possible, but it was only enough to reduce the scarring from how bad it could have been. I stay here mostly, raising my plants and joining the Pack when there are no guests.”

“Did the police talk to you?”

“A detective talked to me and a few other girls who were at the beach, before Talia returned. We didn’t know anything. She did a cool backflip off the rope swing, went back to her towel and we never saw her again.”

“Did you follow her scent?”

“Yes, up to the road, then we lost her. A bunch of us were searching for where it went when Beta Todd showed up in his Suburban. He shifted to wolf form and tracked her to the boundary line where her scent disappeared.”

“Wait, none of you could trail her but he did?”

She nodded. “We could smell her at the border, there were some other wolves that weren’t Pack there. We were too young to leave the Pack lands and search.”

“Do you think Beta Todd could taken Tania and handed her over?”

“Maybe. Talia suspected him but had no evidence.” She finished her lemonade and set it down. “Would you like another glass?”

“No, thank you. Did you ever see Talia again after she was expelled from the Pack?”

“No, never,” she said, but her heartrate picked up and she was looking out the window, not at me.

“Try again, this time with the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth.” She was really panicking now.

“Tell me now, or I bring the Alphas in and we get to the bottom of it officially,” I said.Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!

“NO!” She sank back into her chair. “I promised never to tell anyone, please don’t make me.” She was begging me with her eyes.

“I will not tell anyone, but I need to know everything I can about what happened with my mate in the past four years. Please.”

She let out a sigh and looked at her hands. “The summer after she disappeared, Fourth of July weekend,” she said. “I wasn’t leaving my gardens, there were humans everywhere on the river and the Pack had guests, so I had to stay away. I was sitting on my deck, watching the sun set over the bluffs, when I looked over and she was standing in the treeline. She asked me not to say anything, that no one could ever know she had shown up. I agreed, of course, I was beyond thrilled to see her again. All kinds of things had been going through my mind, wondering if my sacrifice was worth anything in the end.”

“How did she look?”

“She’d grown, and she looked stronger and more dangerous. Her scent was off.”

“How?”

“I don’t really know, her base scent was there, her wolf, but something else. I blamed it on being out of the Pack because she wasn’t marked or mated, I checked that.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She wanted to know what I knew about Tania’s disappearance. She couldn’t risk going to the Tomah Pack, and she had picked up my scent at the border and followed it in. We hugged, she thanked me endlessly and said how sorry she was for what happened to me afterwards.” She started to cry. “I didn’t care. I told her everything I knew, and she gave me a phone number to call her if I learned anything about Tania that could help her find her.” She got up and went to her desk, copying a number onto a Post-it Note. “She said it wasn’t a direct number, but I could leave a message and it would get to her.”

“Did she say anything else that could help me?”

“She said she had taken a blood vow under the full moon to avenge her sister.” A blood vow under the moon’s eye was sacred, it meant nothing else would be done until the vow was fulfilled. No Pack, Alpha, Mate or Family could stand in the way. “She found people who were helping her train, and that when she was strong enough, she would find her and destroy those who took her. Her eyes were distant, like she was dead, it was unnerving.”

“Did she say anything about why she was in Wisconsin again?”

“She was given a job.” I thought about it; on July 10th, the Alpha of a Pack in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan disappeared. His body was found four days later in neutral territory by his Pack.

An ace and king of spades were stuck in his mouth.

Randall Meechum’s POV

I spent the next two days interviewing people on the list, slowly building the picture of what happened that day. Michelle was a big help, not so much that she provided any new information, but she was still friends with people in the Tomah Pack and got them to agree to meet her off Pack lands. The excuse was mountain biking on the trails near Sparta, and that was why I was taking a borrowed bike off the borrowed rack on the back of my Jeep.

Bobby had stayed behind, so I put on my gear and followed Michelle on the trail from the parking lot. We rode about five miles in until we found an overlook on the bluff, giving a great view of the rolling terrain around us. I heard some activity on the trail as we stood by the railing before the cliff, and a few minutes later two women and one man, all werewolves, rode up and stopped by the benches. The male was nervous, putting himself between the girls and the unfamiliar wolf who looked older and dangerous. “Hi guys,” Michelle said. “This is Special Agent Randall Meechum of the FBI, he’s looking into Tania’s disappearance.”

“He’s one of us,” the man said.

“I am,” I said. My Alpha dominance was making them all nervous, so I tried to hold it back. “I’m the eighth child of the Sulphur River Pack Alphas. Since I don’t have to worry about being an Alpha or Beta heir, I went my own way and joined the FBI.”

It was enough to relax them. “How can we help,” the teen boy said.

“I’m looking at her disappearance like a cold case investigator, re-interviewing everyone and looking for new evidence. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you each alone. And please, don’t talk about my investigation with anyone, I don’t want to tip off whoever did this that I am looking.”

“The trail loops around, I’ll take two with me and you can talk to Marty first,” Michelle said. He nodded, and she put her helmet on. “We’ll be back in twenty minutes. Come on, Christine, Anna, let’s go have some fun.” They took off downhill on their bikes and moments later they disappeared from view.

A little less than an hour later, I had finished with Marty and Christine. There wasn’t any new information, but they confirmed what Erica and Michelle had told me; nobody scented her between the road above the beach and the Pack border. They didn’t recognize the scents of the wolves at the border, and no other scents were there other than Todd’s. It was Anna who made the trip worth it. “Did anything about Beta Todd’s behavior when he arrived at the road strike you as weird?”

“Yeah. The scent trail Todd followed wasn’t there. I’m a tracker, I’ve got one of the best noses in the Pack, and I was searching for half an hour up at the road before the Beta was even called. That scent disappeared, and the only way that happens is if she got into a car and drove away. I checked for hundreds of yards in every direction before he arrived.”

I paused, this was the strongest evidence yet. Most wolves could scent, but trackers were gifted with super-sensitive noses and bodies built for endurance. Her five-foot-ten body was built for cross-country running, she could probably run for days without stopping in wolf form. “Did you scent Tania anywhere else?”

She nodded. “Beta Todd sent those of us who had followed him to the border back to the Pack House. On the way back, I picked up her scent again in his Suburban.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I asked him that night, he said he had given her a ride that morning.”

Hmmm. “Thank you, Anna.”

“Mr. Meechum?” I looked in her eyes. “I know our Alpha is involved, and he needs to go. Things have not been good since he took over, and I’m praying I find my mate and move away before it gets worse,” she said.

“I’m not letting this go,” I said.

“I hope not, because I think my Alpha had Tania’s parents killed to take over.”

I raised my eyebrow, wondering what she was talking about. “The State Patrol ruled it an accident, the report said they swerved to avoid something, probably a deer, and went off the road into a tree.”

“It’s just my impression, but Todd didn’t seem too broken up by the loss of his Alphas. Plus, I was thinking, what better way to get the Alphas to rush back than to tell them their daughter is missing? Occum’s Razor, the simplest answer is the correct one.”

“How does that work? He’d have to be working with someone else.”

“Yes, because she has to be off Pack lands. We panic, he calls our Alphas and they race home, right into the ambush. He takes out the entire Alpha family and takes over.”

She had the mind of a cop. “Talia wasn’t with her parents, though.”

“Only because she was out water skiing with some other kids, and her parents didn’t wait for her. They told her grandparents to bring her later. If she hadn’t been out there, she would have been in the car too.”