Page 59

Normally, I would have laughed, but an unpleasant feeling mingled with my annoyance.

After the ball, Nicolaj had asked me to come see him.

He never asked me to come see him and probably didn't give a damn about my existence. And it had never been on my agenda to impress him, let alone provoke his attention.

So, I had been all the more nervous when he had stared at me in his dark study as if he wanted to brand me with a scar like the one he bore himself.

“Did your father want you to kill her?”

In retrospect, the question had hit me harder than I wanted to admit. It had paralyzed me. But he had continued talking.

“I have plans for the Senseque.”

He had paced around his study, his tone and facial expressions under complete control, staring at the covered painting above his fireplace as if he could see through the black velvet fabric.

“And you will not ruin them with some ridiculous child’s game.”

It was one thing to argue with Tristan and another to contradict Bastien or ignore Camille's advice. But Nicolaj DeLoughrey radiated something that forced you to forget who you were. Power, resilience, and, if you looked closely, madness wrapped in a straitjacket.

The fact that his own children seemed to know hardly anything about him didn't make it any better.

“You're playing with fire, boy,” Bastien continued, pulling me out of my unpleasant memories. “I've heard that you're constantly challenging the pack, especially the Alpha's children.”

Automatically, I looked at Adrian, who was staring at me coldly in the side mirror, as if he had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today.

Was he serious? Had he really ratted me out to Bastien? How old were we?

“They think they're better than us. Unless you agree it's fair that they won't let us join the football team on principle?” I began to argue.

Of course, it wasn't fair, and I had managed to overcome this hurdle thanks to a certain professor. However, the reason I had done so was not because of the fairness of the pack. But no one here needed to know that.

“What the Senseque decide on their campus is none of our business,” Bastien grumbled, and I could see his tense expression in the rearview mirror.

Had he seriously enrolled us at Vanderwood so that the dogs could push us around?

“It's a shame we have to study there at all.”

Adrian sounded unusually annoyed, which also earned him a look from Bastien.

“Were you drunk the day you enrolled us there?” I laughed and leaned back in my seat.

Bastien sighed. “I'd be lying if I said Camille hadn't fundamentally influenced me.”

Fundamentally?

I raised an eyebrow, and Adrian now looked at his brother as if the latter had been hiding something from him.

My gaze wandered out the window to the partially snow-covered conifer trees lined with ravens.

What on earth had my godmother been thinking?

“Anyway,” Bastien continued. “The girl is the Alpha's daughter.”

Did he have to talk about her now? Did he have to reinforce the feeling in my stomach?

“You visibly upset the Alpha and his pack, not to mention his guests, that evening.”

That might be true... Okay, it was true.