Inside Out. Amy Lee Burgess

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      “Mayflower.” My voice was mostly flat, but there was a tinge of horror buried in it. My mind reeled. Paul and Lauren had renounced me. I had no standing in Mayflower. I realized I had no idea who was Alpha and maybe that should be my next question.

      “Faith Newcastle and Scott Charest are Alphas,” Allerton replied after I asked.

      Faith. My cousin on Lauren’s side. Mayflower was not Lauren’s birth pack. She’d come from Aspenmoon in upper state New York. When she’d bonded with Paul, her twin sister, Lily, and her pack mate, Todd Marshall, had come to Mayflower with her. Lauren and Lily had been inseparable until Lily’s death from complications after the birth of her daughter Faith.

      I’d been five years old at the time. I remembered sneaking into the room where Lily had labored. It had been a hard birth and nobody had noticed me. I’d hidden behind a chair and watched without comprehension of what was happening. I only heard my auntie scream and my mother sob. There had been a lot of blood in the bed then all the women in the room cried so hard I barely heard the thin wail of my newborn cousin.

      Todd, Faith’s father, bonded with the duo who took over as Alphas, and raised his daughter with love and affection. I’d always been jealous of Faith’s relationship with her father. So different from mine. She’d never walked on eggshells the way I had. She never seemed to do anything wrong the way I always had.

      From her toddlerhood, she’d adored me. She’d followed me around and, when I came into a room, her face had lit up and she’d abandon any toy or person she played with to get to me.

      I had been equally smitten because she’d been a little doll of a child with pale blond hair and autumn brown eyes with the cutest rosebud mouth.

      We’d grown less close as we’d matured and the five-year gap became wider. By the time I’d left Mayflower to bond with Grey, she’d been a coltish fifteen-year-old and we’d had virtually nothing in common anymore.

      The passage of time seemed brutal suddenly. Wasn’t it just yesterday she was three years old and I was eight and we’d had tea parties on Grandmother Elaine’s front lawn with my dolls and her teddy bear?

      “Paul renounced me,” I blurted in an attempt to drive away useless memories of a time that would never come back.

      Allerton snorted. It was an undignified sound and indicative of how at ease he felt with me. The formality of our association became less each time we interacted, and I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was with that. I liked to think of Allerton as lofty and untouchable. Always in control. In charge. Vulnerability unnerved me.

      “You are an Advisor to the Great Council. Whether your father likes it or not, you will have access to Mayflower or he’ll answer first to me and then to the Council. I’m relatively sure he won’t present a problem. A minor inconvenience perhaps, but only if you allow him that much. In your shoes I wouldn’t take a thing from him. You don’t have to.”

      I pictured Paul’s sour lemon face when I arrived on Mayflower territory. It almost made the idea attractive.

      “What’s wrong with the pack?” No more serial killers. No more conspiracy death. No more danger and drama. My heart was broken in enough pieces already.

      “That’s the question,” Allerton responded.

      * * * *

      Faith at twenty-seven was not the same as the Faith I remembered at fifteen. Back then she’d been all skinny legs and pink-streaked spiky hair, dressed in black with her nose in a book. Anti-social and rebellious.

      The short spiky, pink-streaked hair was gone, replaced by a sleek shoulder-length layered fringe with choppy bangs. She had my mother’s smile, which wasn’t surprising since Lily and Lauren had been identical twins. Instead of hyacinth blue eyes, hers were autumn-leaf brown and widely spaced—a legacy from her father.

      It was a gorgeous June afternoon and СКАЧАТЬ