Lib Novel Page 67
I give her an irritated look. “I already told you I don’t know what she wanted to say to me. I barely know the woman. She works at the bar. And she seemed a little drunk to me. Maybe she was looking for somebody else and mistook me for that person. I’ve never exchanged more than a handful of words with her.”
Patrick looks away at my blatant lie. The others nod in agreement.
“Even so,” Julia’s upper lip curls, “I want her fired. I don’t want her serving you.”
I give her an astounded look. “Are you crazy? This is a small town, Julia, but it’s part of the South Alliance. You can’t just go up to somebody and tell them they don’t have a job anymore.”
“I can have a few words with the owner of the bar,” she says smugly, shrugging her petite shoulders.
“Do you really think she’s going to fire her employee because you tell her to?” This woman is seriously deluded, and I sometimes wonder why Queen Karina keeps her around.
Julia looks at me in a way that has a shiver crawling down my spine. “I know how to get what I want.”
“What is your problem?” Patrick glares at her. “That woman did nothing to you. Why are you going after her like this?”
Julia walks over to me. Her fingers caress my cheek as she smiles sweetly. “She looked at Alex. She’s lucky I’m not ripping her eyes out.”
My whole body feels cold as I grab her fingers and forcibly remove her hand from my face. “You have no claim over me, Julia.”
This obsession she has with me makes me uneasy, and now that she’s targeting Sophia as a result, it’s making me even more so. I have to limit her interactions with Sophia as much as I can. The only way to do that is to make sure Julia sticks to my side. If I defend Sophia too much, Julia is going to get even more suspicious, and her volatility toward the other woman is going to get much worse.
“Queen Karina promised you to me. One day, I’ll have you eating out of my hand like an obedient dog. I don’t want to have to break you, Alex, but I will if it means teaching you your place.”
My pack mates are on their feet, snarling at the insult to their Alpha. I raise my hand, stopping them in their tracks. This isn’t the first time Julia has revealed the depraved depths of her obsession with me. The age gap between us is twelve years. When I was nine, a few days after my parents’ murder, she tried climbing into my bed. It was only the fact that Karina’s own pack’s elders found the incident deplorable that the newly appointed Queen, who had initially found the situation amusing, finally told Julia off.
But I know her plan had been to give me to Julia as a sex slave. If her plan had worked, there’s no telling how many young wolf pups would have suffered a similar fate. I personally believe that Queen Karina had been testing to see how her pack elders would receive such treatment of wolf pups from other packs. It would have been both convenient and profitable for her to sell off the pups from enemy packs or those she had subdued as sex slaves or to gift those pups as slaves as a way to maintain her hold over the adults of that pack.
However, the Queen can only stay in power as long as the pack elders stand by her side, so she had to keep them happy. But that didn’t mean Julia wasn’t allowed access to me during all these years. She’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from females in general. While I did lose my virginity in my teens, it was to one of my pack mates from school. Our brief relationship was discovered by Julia, who proceeded to shred the teenage girl’s face to bits.
I never touched another woman after that, fearing the consequences she would face.
I stare at the individual before me, this loathsome creature who knows as well as I do that the engagement being pushed on us is simply so that Julia can possess me. The mating will be a transfer of authority from me to her, and the pack will suffer as a result. I will become the one thing Julia has wanted from the beginning: her sex slave. I will have no autonomy.
But I have no intention of letting that happen. I’m no longer a frightened and traumatized child. The weight of responsibility on my shoulders made me grow up a lot faster than I should have. I know it irks Julia that I’m not scared of her like I once used to be. It’s made her more aggressive in her pursuit of me.
“Don’t start chaos in this town, Julia,” I warn her darkly. “We are here on a mission. And if you expose us with your antics, we will get discovered and be executed. You leave that waitress alone. If you don’t like her, stay away from her. But if you compromise our mission, I’ll inform Queen Karina myself.”
The threat seems to work to some extent because she pouts. “Fine. I won’t do anything to the girl. But I don’t want you going to that bar anymore.”
The idea that she thinks she can order me around pisses me off. I get to my feet, towering over her. “If you think you can tell me what to do, Julia, you have another think coming. And just remember, we are writing up daily reports and sending them to the Queen.” That part is a lie, but she doesn’t need to know that. “If you do anything to meddle in this investigation, Karina will not forgive you. And if you cross a line and get discovered, we will not save you. This pack will execute you. And I will happily watch.”
Her face turns pale at my explicit threats. “If anything happens to me, Queen Karina will never let it go!”
I smile at her coldly. “And how will she know what happened to you? As far as we know, you were never here.”
Julia hates admitting defeat, and she glares at me. “I won’t forget this, Alex.”
“Please don’t.”
She turns on her heel and storms out of the room. I watch her leave, feeling nothing but relief.
I lock the door behind her and rub the bridge of my nose. “We need to do something about that woman.”
“I say we kill her and be done with it,” Jared suggests, his eyes glittering in anger.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Patrick says. “You had a point there, boss. The Queen won’t know what happened to her down here. We can just blame the South Alliance and finally be rid of that bitch.”
The others nod in agreement.