Sacrificed To The Triplet Alpha Kings

He stared at the page for a long moment.

Then he got up and went to his father’s cabinet.

The lock was old. He’d broken it at sixteen and replaced it with something that looked identical to the original one, His father had never noticed, because his father had never thought any of his sons would be interested in what was inside.

He pulled out the text he’d read at sixteen and told himself was theoretical.

Historical and irrelevant.

He thought about it now.

He took it back to the desk, opened it and started reading the document again in the grey morning light.

He read it twice.

Then he set it aside and went back to the records.

”Victoria.”

He found her on the fourth search.

Because she didn’t want to be found. She never had. In all the years her name had moved through supernatural circles....whispered mostly, the way you whispered about things that could hear you....she had left almost no trail. No fixed address. No pack affiliation. No coven registration.

Just sightings.

And three direct encounters with the Blackwood family that Nicholas remembered because they had left marks.

The first when he was ten. She’d come to the estate uninvited and stood in the entrance hall and looked at his father with those pale eyes and said something in a language Nicholas didn’t recognize and left without another word. His father had been quiet for three days after.

The second when he was fourteen. A summit. She was there representing herself. She’d looked at the three of them, and she had looked at them with an expression he didn’t understand at that time.

The third time she’d been direct about it. Pulled him aside at the edge of a gathering and looked up at him....she was small, Victoria, smaller than you expected from someone that powerful.....and said very quietly:

”I know what your family did, Nicholas Blackwood. And I remember everything.”

Then she’d walked away.

He hadn’t seen her since.

He found the last confirmed sighting in a record he had to dig for. A border report. Routine. Filed by a Shadowmere patrol and never followed up on because nothing had happened and nobody had thought it was important to look into it since she didn’t do anything.

A woman matching Victoria’s description. Spotted near a small house on the outskirts of Shadowmere Pack territory.

Twelve years ago.

The same year she disappeared.

The same year Lilith Thorne would have been around seven or eight years old.

Nicholas sat very still at his desk.

He looked at the wall in front of him and didn’t see it. Didn’t see anything except the picture that was rearranging itself in his mind....piece by piece, layer by layer, each one slotting into place with the particular quiet click of things that had always been true and were only now being seen.

Beta Thorne’s wife. Invisible by design. From a bloodline that every supernatural creature on earth would recognize.

Victoria....who hated the Blackwoods, who remembered everything, who disappeared twelve years ago and was last seen at the edge of Shadowmere territory....who was that woman’s sister.

Lilith’s aunt.

And Lilith.

Wolfless. Powerless. A woman who had been told her whole life that she was less than. That she was broken. That she had nothing inside her worth anything.

Who had gone into heat without a wolf.

Whose hands had glowed gold when he marked her.

Whose power surge had shattered windows and split stone floors and dropped every wolf in the territory to their knees.

She wasn’t wolfless.

She had never been wolfless.

She had been hidden.

Deliberately. Carefully. By someone who knew exactly what she was carrying and had made the decision....for reasons Nicholas didn’t know yet.....to bury it so deep that even Lilith herself didn’t know it was there.

He sat in the empty library for a long time.

The library was quiet around him. Grey morning light coming through the windows. The old text open on the desk. The records spread out on the desk before him.

One question answered.

One question left.

Hidden from whom?

And why?

He didn’t have that answer yet.

But somewhere out there Victoria knew it.

Because Victoria....who had looked at him twelve years ago with so much hatred that it was obvious that she hated the Blackwood was going to be very, very unhappy about what Kael had done to her niece’s throat last night.

Nicholas looked at the records for one more moment.

Then he closed them.

He needed his brothers.

****

He found them in the east sitting room.

Sebastian by the window. Lucian on his feet....already pacing, already restless, already burning through whatever was sitting in his chest by moving his body because that was how Lucian had always worked.

They both looked up when he came in.

He closed the door.

”I need to tell you both something,” he said. ”And I need you to listen to all of it before you say anything.”

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Lucian stopped pacing.

Nicholas told them what he found, layer by layer. The way he’d found it. Thorne’s wife and her missing records. Almost nothing on paper. A woman who had existed inside a pack for years and left almost no trace of it.

Then he mentioned her maiden name

”Morvaine.”

Sebastian went still the moment he hared the bloodline name.

Lucian simple stared at Nicholas like he had grown a second head.

Nicholas looked at their expressions.

Of-cause they know the bloodline. They know what the Morvaine name meant, every supernatural creature alive knew about that family....the most powerful witch bloodline in recorded history. Thought to be extinct. Or hidden. Nobody had been certain which.

But now they knew.

”Do you remember Victoria?” Nicholas asked his brothers.

He looked at Sebastian who shook his head to indicate that he knows Victoria.

He turned to Lucian who also said yes.

They all know about Victoria’s history with their family.