Tristan watched Michael storm to the window and look outside. He spoke without turning around. “Get on with it, Cullen. Your arrival back from Mexico can only mean you bring news of our father.” Tristan took a deep breath. If Cullen did bring news of their father, it would mean the time had come to go and destroy Kendrick, the royal six’s sire. As their father’s former second-in-command, Cullen had taken on the quest to find and destroy him as a personal vendetta. The job was what kept Cullen alive. It was rumored he had lived four hundred years now without a mate. Most shifters chose to perform the ritual suicide after less time, feeling hopeless without a mate.
But not Cullen. He’d lived as their Alpha’s second, a bogeyman for the pack’s children, and now as a potential assassin, for longer than Tristan could imagine. If Cullen was at all interested in telling stories, Tristan was sure they could learn a great deal from him, but Cullen was never willing to share or instruct. He was more likely to terrorize and destroy.
“There’s movement inside the facility. He seems to be bringing people in. Several of his flunkies left about a month ago and haven’t returned. I think it would behoove us to find out what they want.” Cullen crossed his hands over his chest while he stared at Michael’s back.
“Was it three men? The blond man with the snake tattoo and two others?” Tristan asked to break up the silence that had taken over the room.
Cullen nodded. “Yes. How did you know that, Prince Tristan?” Inwardly, Tristan flinched at the title. His father had insisted on nonsense like rank and order but he and his brothers had never held to it.
“They attacked me and my mate two days ago after she rescued me from the zoo I was being held in.”
Cullen stared at him. “I think I’ve missed quite a bit.”
Tristan thought it was perhaps the first time he’d ever seen Cullen befuddled before.
He tried not to laugh.
Michael turned from the window. “We’ve been trying to contact you for some time.
You need to start carrying a cell phone.”
“As I am watching the facility as a wolf, there isn’t really a place to carry a cell phone.”
Michael made a noise that was something between a growl and a laugh. “Surely you must go somewhere to sleep for the night, some place where you shower. You can leave the cell phone there and check your messages so at least I can tell you when my brother has been kidnapped and we fear him dead, or when he’s returned with his mate in tow.
Surely Tristan is important enough to warrant that much respect from you.”
Cullen nodded and Tristan snorted, which earned him a glare from Michael. Tristan had never seen Cullen acquiesce to anything before.
“How did you get away from the three attackers, Prince Tristan?”
Tristan itched to correct him about the prince title but he’d long ago ceased trying.
“Rex, Victoria, and I killed them outside the zoo where I’d been held.”
“Victoria is your mate?” Cullen shouted and Tristan blinked in surprise.
“Ah…no, although I don’t know why that would surprise you so greatly. Her eldest daughter Ashlee is my mate.”
“Victoria has a daughter? The young woman who drove me to distraction with her hysterical actions, is mated and mother of your mate?”
It had never occurred to Tristan that any of the antics he and the others had pulled as young pack members had affected Cullen at all. They’d seemed below his notice.
“Victoria has two daughters and she is mated to a plastic surgeon in New Jersey who knows all about us. However, until two days ago her eldest daughter did not know anything about her heritage, and her younger one still does not.”
Cullen looked around the room. “Do you think you found your mate because the danger has finally passed, so Mary Jo’s spell is finally voided?”
“Either that or I really was just in the right place at the right moment.” Tristan didn’t know. Metaphysical questions had never been his area of interest. When it came to pack dynamics, he preferred to be his brother’s advisor, a dominant warrior, and now Ashlee’s mate. Although right now he could kill his brothers for their indecision. The pack needed strength and security. He would never be able to fulfill his role as advisor if Michael never fully took on his Alpha position. Hell, if he wasn’t so completely unfit for the position—hadn’t his father told him so a million times?—he’d take it on himself. Outside of the pack, he painted and sold his artwork. As far as Tristan was concerned, the mystics could take care of the pack’s magical needs without his involvement.
Something about his last thoughts bothered Tristan. His father had told him more times than he could count that he would make a lousy Alpha. Why had he done that?
Tristan’s skin started to crawl.
“Where is your mate now?”
“What?” Tristan’s attention was thrown back to the present. Figuring out why his father had been so adamant he’d never be Alpha would have to wait until later.
Cullen lowered his eyes. Why was everyone doing that? “Where is your mate now, Prince Tristan?”
“Last time I saw her, the Aunts were driving her crazy. I think she’s trying to digest a lifetime of study and knowledge before lunch.”
Theo cut into their discussion reminding Tristan he was in a room with twenty-eight other people besides Cullen and himself. “You never mentioned a sister.”
“Victoria isn’t going to give her to us until she is at least Ashlee’s age, and not until she’s had the chance to finish school. The girls were both raised as humans. Ashlee is taking this all pretty well, but Victoria isn’t ready to limit the sister’s options just for our convenience.”
Theo laughed, hard and loud. “Does she understand we have been living here in agony for thirty years with no women? Not any?”
Across the room, Michael grimaced. “We did have the Aunts.”
As if on cue, the chamber door burst open and Tristan’s two aunts entered, followed by Ashlee. The very sight of her took his breath away. All other spectacles and sounds in the room faded and he realized how Ashlee’s mother could have lived off-island for as long as she did. Tristan could live anywhere, do anything, and be anyone that Ashlee needed. She smiled at him and he grinned back.
She was a precious gift he didn’t deserve but one he was going to keep anyway.
Others had suffered much more than he; the bloodshed that had followed the spell the witch placed on the island had been devastating for Tristan. He’d lost his mother to a violent death perpetrated by his father. Even though he’d been seventy years old and well past the point of childhood, he’d lost his innocence.
Now he really understood the full magnitude of what had happened that day.
Members of his pack had awoken from what felt like a drunken sleep to find they had murdered their mates. Tristan could actually feel the anguish they had felt that day because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he ever harmed even a hair on Ashlee’s head, the pain he would suffer would go beyond all physical agony he had ever endured.
Something on his face must have given away his thoughts, because Ashlee’s eyes narrowed and she looked at him with concern. She thought something was wrong with him. He blinked and tried to cheer up. He was lucky. He could look forward to being with Ashlee for the rest of his life, an existence that finally had a determinable end-date.
Relief surged through Ashlee’s body when she saw Tristan’s mood brighten. If her presence brought on that amount of darkness to his features, she would stay away from him. Except she found that ever since she’d jumped his bones in his bedroom earlier, she couldn’t seem to stop craving him. If he was a drug, she was addicted.