Betrayed Forced Mate (Rosecreek Special Ops Wolves #4)

***

“I am so sorry to bother you,” Aris says, clearing his throat. He’s on the phone with a local spiritual, who is not happy at being interrupted from their party. I stare straight ahead, holding a box with various supplies.

In the box are hemlock and wormwood. Ado and Rafael are collecting the rabbit teeth and bark from a very specific tree. The final thing we need is a blessed blade, which Aris is trying to obtain.

“…yes, of course, I could compensate you very well. Okay, perfect! Perfect. Yes, I can meet you. Ten minutes.”

Aris ends his call and jams his phone into his pocket.

“Okay,” he says, breathing out and running a hand through his hair. “I’m going to go meet with the spiritual; you head back to Triste and double-check that we have everything.”

It takes me ten minutes to get back to the pack center, where I find Triste and Maisie working Olivia over. She’s crying now, her eyes still shut, but tears running down the sides of her face, smudging her makeup.

“I should teach her how to use a spell,” Triste says thoughtfully, “magical makeup never runs.”

“Here,” I say, setting the box with the plants down just as Ado and Rafael appear.

“Rabbit teeth,” Rafael says, “not fun to acquire.”

“You love hunting rabbits,” Triste says, dismissively, “You’re a wolf.”

“But I’m also a man, and I’m not sure I can ever enjoy a good rabbit stew again after that. I might actually need to become a vegetarian.”

“And you are also a vampire,” Triste says, turning to him, her eyes sharp. “So, one would think you had a stronger stomach than that.”

Rafael rolls his eyes at her, and I clench my jaw. It’s taken a lot of time to get used to the “vampires” among us, and to convince myself not to leap to anger every time it’s mentioned. Though Rafael and Veronica aren’t actual bloodsuckers, I’ve spent so long hating vampires that it’s hard to shake away the immediate anger.

A shifter, like us, Rafael’s mother was attacked by vampires when he was near delivery. He survived, but she didn’t, and the venom in her body gave him vampiric powers without the bloody drawbacks.

Veronica is a human—or, at least, started that way—and her mother was attacked much earlier in the pregnancy. She managed to survive, but died during childbirth. That long gestation with the venom made Veronica particularly powerful. Where Rafael has just a few additional quirks to his normal shifting, like being immune to the venom, Veronica has basically all of the strengths of a vampire, without having to hunt or feed from humans.

Still, I close my eyes, taking a deep breath, when my heart starts to beat a little too fast again. It’s difficult to keep the images from flooding back to me, the blood and gore, how fast it happened. My mother crumpled to the floor, her hand over her heart. Their joint funeral, relatives who came from out of town, then left without looking back at us.

I can still hear my mother’s screams. Piercing, heart-wrenching.

“Olivia,” someone says, running through the door, and I turn to see Rosa, looking like she just woke up. She has eye patches under her eyes, and her long, blonde hair is in two loose braids. And she looks equally pissed and upset as she runs to Olivia’s side. “Oh my god, what happened?”

“Curse,” Triste and I say at the same time.

“I didn’t know people used curses anymore,” Rosa says, shaking her head. “Bigby is so fucked for not telling me. He just said Aris called him for an emergency meeting. Let it slip that it was Olivia—the fucking bastard.”

“He probably knew that too many people in the room would make things more difficult,” Triste mutters, and Rosa fixes her with a piercing glare.

“She’s my best friend,” Rosa says, her voice breaking. Then, she seems to compose herself, standing up a little straighter and looking Triste up and down. “Besides, how are we even supposed to be sure that this nonsense about a ritual even makes sense?”

“I still struggle to understand how you can be skeptical of the arcane as a were.”

“I’m not were—I’m a shifter. And that’s genetic. Genes are science. Provable.”

“Someone whispered words to your friend and put her under,” Triste says, quirking one eyebrow coolly at Rosa. “If you can explain that with science, then go right ahead.”

“Could be…hypnotism,” Rosa says weakly, her hand on one of Olivia’s. “Or—”

“Got it!” Aris says, entering the room, slightly out of breath. He looks like he ran the whole way here, and stops briefly when he sees Rosa standing there, then seems to decide it’s not worth it to fight with her. Turning to Triste, he holds out his hand. “Here’s the knife.”

“Perfect,” Triste says, taking the blade and moving to the cot. Without meaning to, I walk to the other side, my body guiding me over to Olivia. I watch as Triste makes a paste with the plants, arranging the ingredients around Olivia’s, whose face is twisted in pain.

I don’t even want to imagine what she’s going through.