Three: Kyle

I was extremely disappointed in myself. I knew that I had some anger issues, as everyone does, but I hadn’t expected to shift into my wolf form on the first day of the combat training. It was a poor display of aggression and now everyone must think I was completely incapable of controlling my wolf. I was beyond disappointed and frustrated with my wolf. He knew the basic rules of combat training and the most important rule of NOT SHIFTING IN YOUR WOLVES was embedded in every pup’s mind as soon as they were able to speak out the word ‘werewolf’.

Alpha Richard was pretty laid-back with me and Ryder. Sure, he admonished us for acting like some six-year-old boys who recently came to know they were werewolves and wanted to proclaim they were the strongest in the vicinity. I winced when he mentioned that we didn’t need to piss everywhere to mark our territory. That particular comment was downright degrading and I deserved to hear every bit of it.

I had no idea how Uncle Richard was going to solve the problem but private lessons for me and Ryder was hardly something I had imagined or expected. As an alpha, I knew he stayed pretty busy and didn’t need the load of babysitting us two boys so that we didn’t end up tearing each other to pieces. On the other hand, I’m feeling really good about it all because how many people can say that they were trained by Alpha Richard, one of the best alphas in the country?

The classes would begin tomorrow and would continue indefinitely but for today I and Ryder were dismissed from training. When we exited the pack house together, Ryder joked about how we at least got a full day to mentally prepare ourselves for a grueling combat session with the Alpha and I laughed. There would be no hard feelings between us. That’s just the way it was!

I reach home and unlock the house with a key. I would be alone for a maximum of twenty minutes. The twins would soon return from their school and would be pleased to find me there. Mom would stay at the pack house for communal cooking sessions till the evening, so it would be up to me to take care of the kids. Which I didn’t mind at all. I called Gretna, the sixty-year-old lady who volunteered to look after the twins while I and mom were away and informed her not to come today. With that settled, I climbed up the stairs to my room to freshen up and energize so that I would be ready for the twins’ incessant chatter and hyperactivity.

The doorbell rings as I enter the kitchen and I breathe and make my way to open the door for the two hellions. Before I can reach the handle, the door bursts open and I look down to see Ariel looking up at me with her giant green eyes, the ones she inherited from her father. “Did you find your mate today?” Ariel asks me in a sweet voice and I wince at her question. I should have guessed this would be her first question to me today.

“A very good afternoon to you too, Ariel Paxton. How was your day?” I ask sweetly, trying to remind her of some manners my mom and dad tried very hard to infuse in her. Ariel just rolls her eyes and moves past me and before I can think of saying something more Ben enters the house with an excited bounce in his step and looks up at me the same way Ariel did, with his piercing green eyes.

“How was your training session, Kyle? Did you pummel everyone you were paired with? Did you throw amazing punches?” Ben jumps on the balls of his feet and mimes punching and I resist the urge to laugh, “Did you throw some hard kicks and your opponent went flying in the air?” Ben mimes kicking in the air again and I pull back my wet hair so that I can see him better.

I take Ben’s backpack from him so that I can watch him perform more moves with alarming clarity. “I did throw a lot of amazing punches and Ryder also planted a lot of amazing punches on me.”

“Really? I just thought it was your face!” Ariel says sarcastically and I swivel around to watch her take off her shoes daintily. She smiles sweetly at me and I narrow my eyes at her. I’d almost forgotten about Ariel’s big mouth.

“I and Ryder were paired up with each other and we fought each other. We both turned into our wolves.” Ariel’s eyes widen and Ben gasps in surprise at the news. “Alpha Richard intervened and dismissed us from practice today.”

Ariel saunters into the kitchen while Ben lingers to talk to me privately. I close the door behind him and look at him questioningly. He gestures for me to lean down so that he can whisper in my ear. I lean down and angle my ear towards him. He touches my face and asks me in the cutest voice possible. “Does your face hurt?”

“No, Ben. It does not. Also, Ryder looks way worse.” Ben beams at the statement and follows her sister into the kitchen after taking off his shoes and carefully placing them on the shoe rack.

I get up place Ben’s backpack on the side table and enter the kitchen to find both Ben and Ariel sitting on the stools by the kitchen island, looking at me expectantly! “Okay, I got the message.” I move further into the kitchen and peer into the fridge for ingredients. “What do you guys want to eat?” After my parents had Ben and Ariel, I learned to cook a couple of easy dishes so that I could look after them whenever I had the chance. “Omelets, pancakes, pasta?”

I stand with my legs apart and my hands placed on my waist, waiting for them to answer even though I knew what they were going to say. Ariel and Ben look at each other as if this routine we did was all so very tiresome. Ariel rolled her eyes and Ben grinned at her sister’s reaction. I’m going to have to keep a check on Ariel’s eye-rolling. If she rolls her eyes more than she does now, her eyes and balls will roll to the back of her head and stay there. They both turn to look at me and I wait for the verdict. “Pancakes!” They both look at each other and scream. I wince because of my super-sensitive werewolf hearing. I have probably told them a thousand times to not scream like that but do they ever listen? No, they don’t. I think they get some secret pleasure after seeing me wince every time.

“Pancakes, it is!” I say gallantly and they both burst out laughing. I quickly gather the ingredients for making pancakes and get to work. “How was your day at school?” Ariel and Ben chatted the entire time it took me to make them pancakes. They didn’t even require my input. I just nodded and hummed at appropriate times and they considered it to be an active participation on my part.

I place two plates in front of them in ten minutes and they both start to dig in. Ben grins up at me and swallows hastily, “Thanks, Kyle!”

“You’re welcome, Ben.” I smile down at him and turn my attention to Ariel, who’s busy chomping away on the pancakes. “Ariel, what do you say to me?”

Ariel looks up from her plate as if I did a crime by interrupting her tryst with food. “Um, you should have made some for yourself, Kyle. I’m not going to offer it to you.” I cross my arms across my chest and raise an eyebrow to say really, that’s the best you got? Ariel sighs and rolls her eyes at me. “Thank you, Kyle, for making us pancakes. You are the most amazing brother ever.” She recites the words in a bored voice and I am nearly tempted to laugh at her bland sarcasm. Instead, I lean forward and ruffle her hair, something I know pisses her off. “Hey! Not the hair.” I lean back and laugh at her disgruntled expression.

I hear the front door open and close and, in a few seconds, Mom enters the kitchen. All three of us become silent because it is a highly unusual time for Mom to get back home. I furtively glanced at my wristwatch to see it was only 2:30 p.m. “Hey everyone!” Everyone wishes her and I’m unable to come up with a good reason for her coming back home at this time. She didn’t look overly sad, like the early days of Dad’s death and she didn’t have that haunted look in her eyes. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“Kyle, can I talk to you for a minute?” With that, she turned around and walked to Dad’s office, knowing I would follow her. When Dad died nearly eight months ago, I would find Mom curled up in his chair, and I’d find it incredibly hard to let her be, to let her battle her grief the way she wanted to. She settles in Dad’s chair, her chair now, and waits for me to take the seat across from her. This room somehow gave me the exact feeling of a principal’s office, with Dad being the disciplinarian.

As soon as I settle myself in the chair, Mom starts speaking. “Rich called me today in his office to tell me about your training sessions incident with Ryder.” I glance down at my lap mortified the alpha felt the need to involve my mom. It was probably the last thing she needed right now, worrying about me. Moreover, I had never given her a chance to worry about me so, it was a disconcerting change of events.

“He told me how you shifted in the middle of a combat session with Ryder. We both know that you have better control over your wolf than just randomly shifting into your wolf form. What happened?”

I shrug, not wanting to expand on the topic. “I don’t know. My wolf just got angry when Ryder started punching me and I wanted to control myself but my wolf took over and I shifted.” I look up at Mom to see a frown marring her face. Her frown lines had become increasingly apparent in the last year, following Dad’s diagnosis. I could see that my words were a source of discomfort to her as if she wanted to hear anything else than what I had said.

“I have never told you about your dad, have I?” I look up at Mom suddenly, not liking the direction of this conversation was going.

“You have never told me about my biological father because I have never been interested in knowing who he is. I have had the perfect parents my whole life and I don’t need anymore.” I say firmly, trying to close this uncomfortable topic before it even starts. Earlier, when she had tried to tell me about my biological father, I would just have to stop her and she would let the matter go but something in her body language told me that this was not one of those times.

“Your father and I were destined mates, as you know. He had been in love with some other girl from his class and everyone expected them to be mates. But when he found out he and I were mates, I had hoped he would let go of that girl and accept me as his mate. As you know, that didn’t happen. We slept together the night of his seventeenth birthday, the night he found out I was his mate. The next day she rejected me and told me that he loved that girl and wanted to be her chosen mate. I bravely accepted his rejection and moved out of his way, even though it hurt a lot since our wolves were still bonded to each other. A month later, I found out I was pregnant and when I told him, he became furious with me. He thought I was trying to trap him, which hadn’t even crossed my mind. So, long story short, he told me he didn’t love me and that I could do whatever I wanted to do with the baby. It was then that I decided to leave that pack because it had become too painful to live like this. No one in my family believed he was my mate, so no one supported me. It was after a few months that I stumbled in this pack and your grandfather, let me stay here. After a couple of months, I fell in love with the alpha’s son, Brad Paxton, and you know the rest of the story.”

I clench my jaw to not snap at her. Of course, I knew about this all. I’d heard it all before. A couple of years ago, Dad had made Mom tell me the true story about my birth, that I wasn’t Brad’s biological child so that I could know more about myself, whatever that meant. But the thing was, I didn’t want to know about a douchebag biological father when I had the most amazing dad right in front of me. Brad was my dad and that was it. I didn’t care where my genes came from!

“I know all this mom. And I know that you know I know this. So, why are you telling me this? Why now? And what has this got to do with what happened at the combat practice?” I question her, amazed by how detached she could be while reciting this story. From the moment, my dad, Brad had marked my mom as his mate, her connection to her destined mate, my biological father, had been broken. So, she didn’t feel any grief over what had been lost or what could have been. She had the most amazing life with my dad, with three perfect children, if I count myself, and all the love in the world. What my parents had was real love and they managed to do it without being destined mates and I was proud of them for that.

“You see, you don’t know the full extent of the story. Your biological father, my destined mate was the son of the alpha of the pack.” I reel back in shock because this was something I didn’t know before. But alphas were always super possessive of their mates and it was unheard of for an alpha to reject their destined mates because it was with their destined mates did, they bred the best progeny. An alpha wolf had super aggressive instincts to lay claim to what was his, why had he then let Mom go? “Which means that you’re the first son of that alpha.”

Unsure about where this was going, I braced for the part that would be coming now. The conclusion of this discussion. “You see, Alpha Richard has told me that he and Brad always wondered how your wolf would act once he grew up. If he would be over-aggressive, over-possessive, something only a true heir of an alpha shows. And you do show these signs. Shifting into your wolf while sparring with Ryder has convinced him of this. So, he has proposed that I take you to my old pack so that your wolf gets a chance to get a chance to get acquainted with the pack there and to see if your wolf and you want to stay and be the next alpha.” I sit numbly, my head running in circles at the way Mom just rushed through the explanation. What the hell?

“And what if my father has already been crowned the next alpha? He was a couple of years older than you. What if he has already transferred the reins to his son?” I ask out loud, just wanting Mom to flinch at my obvious reasoning.

“You think I haven’t thought of all of this before coming here and talking to you? I just can’t see you like this, Kyle. I can’t see your wolf struggle! If there is even a sliver of chance that you and your wolf could find a sliver of peace in that pack, then we are going to go there and see it for ourselves.”

“But what about Ariel and Ben? Won’t their wolves get affected like mine did?”

“No, they won’t.” Her eyes soften at the mention of the twins. “They’re not the children of an alpha but you are. And if your wolf is a true alpha, you need to go to that pack and lay a claim to the title, no matter how you feel. Otherwise, your wolf will slowly go mad and it’s not something I want to see happen to you.”

“But you can’t do this! What about school? My friends? The twin’s school?”

Mom sighed as if my reasonable questions were tiring for her. As if she couldn’t believe she was going to do such a thing. “We leave in two days. I suggest you pack your things.”