Bogdan looked confused. “But is abomination. All must be wiped out. No descendants, no werewolves. You must see.” He nodded toward me. “It is why she cannot be allowed to live.”
Felipe tapped the man’s bad knee with the barrel of his pistol, eliciting a scream of pain. While he screamed, Felipe shouted to be heard. “You’ll want to stay on the story, big guy. Any more talk about Maddy, and I’ll personally put a bullet into your crotch.”
Bogdan got himself under control again, nodding and wiping sweat from his forehead. “Yes. The royals got too comfortable. We all assumed that the girl had died or that her line had run its course. We were wrong. She had created a family with a human man. Their children created their own families.” He made a spreading motion with his fingers. “You see? But the blood was diluted with each generation. No longer a threat. Or so the royals believe. A great-great-granddaughter of Edemas’s child found a man. They fall in love, they mate. The man? He is wolf shifter. The boy that was born? He is not an alpha, but he has the strongest blood link to Edemas. Rumors come that a boy is showing signs of resurgence of the Edemas werewolf line. The couple go into hiding, knowing the royals will come for them.” Bogdan raised an eyebrow. “What better hiding place than a whole new world.” He raised his arms and gestured around us.
I nodded. “They came to America to hide.” It made sense. Run as far as you can.
“Yes. They hide, and for a time are successful. The boy that was born began his own bloodline. His son grew to a man and met a shifter woman.” Bogdan, despite his injury, grinned. “This is where story gets good. We only discovered this after blood tests. The pair were actually related. Very distant cousins. Both carried the blood of Edemas in their veins. The odds are millions to one that this should happen. They had a son, a single child. He was not an alpha, either, but never before, in three hundred years, had the blood been so pure again. He was unable to shift, of course, but he still had power in his blood.” He looked at me and waggled his eyebrows. “Have you figured out who that boy was yet?”
Maddy nodded. “David Samuels?”
Bogdan grinned at her. It wasn’t a nice grin. It was dark and filled with malice. I didn’t like it.
“Your father. We came for him. He had to be killed. He was not alpha, but there was a chance he could have a child of his own. That child could be alpha. A fear…that was true.” He continued staring at Maddy. “I can smell it on you. You are alpha?”
None of us gave him the answer, deciding it was better to keep him in the dark. Maddy was an alpha. She could open the vault, and she could become a werewolf if she drank Edemas’s blood. Not just a shifter like we’d thought, but a full werewolf. A being so powerful that they had ruled over all the shifters of Europe. A being so powerful, thousands of people had spent centuries trying to ensure it never came to pass again.
The prospect terrified me. I could only imagine what was going through Maddy’s head.
“My mission has failed,” Bogdan said, grimacing in pain. “I am a failure. Know this, she-beast. We will never stop. You must not be allowed to rise.”
His arms were unbound because we hadn’t considered him a threat. His leg was destroyed so he was in too much pain to shift. He had no weapons near him, but he still made one final move. He flicked his wrist, and a tiny blade that Felipe hadn’t found snapped out from beneath his sleeve. It was too small to have done any damage to us, but he didn’t plan on attacking us with it. Instead, he drew the blade across his own throat. I screamed as the fan of dark red blood burst out of his neck.
“Oh, holy fuck!” Felipe screamed and jumped back away from the arterial spray.
I grabbed Maddy and turned her from the sight. I was too late, though. She’d seen. I watched the way Bogdan’s eyes had bulged as the blade split his skin open. The man convulsed a few times and gurgled one last wet death rattle before going still.
It was something I’d never forget for the rest of my life. It hurt me to know that Maddy had seen it and would think about it for as long as she lived.
I sat her in my office while Felipe and I hauled the body deep into the woods out back and buried it. Maddy didn’t speak. She seemed stunned or in shock. I couldn’t even think what to say to bring her out of it.
Just before dawn, I came back in with Felipe, sweaty and tired. We walked over to the office, and while Felipe cleaned the blood, I called Luis. It would be almost lunch time in Norway. I was exhausted, and instead of holding the phone to my ear, I placed it on the table on speaker.
“Luis?” I asked.
“Yeah, what’s going on?”
“Is Kenneth there?”
“Hang on.”
There was a rustling sound and Kenneth’s voice came on the line. “This is Ken.”
Sighing, I glanced between Maddy and Felipe before going on. “Kenneth, did you know that David was a full-blooded wolf?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“What I mean is that not only was your father a shifter, but David Samuels’ mother was one as well.”
“No, that’s not true. David’s mother was a human.” Kenneth didn’t sound as sure of himself as he had before.
“Nope. We’ve just had a…let’s call it a conversation with an assassin the royals sent to kill Maddy. David’s birth mother was a shifter. Not only that, she was also a descendant of Edemas.”
“What? That…that can’t be. Dad would have told us.”
“Looks like your old man had a lot more secrets than you realized,” Nico said, chuckling humorlessly.
“Why, though?” Kenneth asked. “Why not tell his own children the truth?”
