Alphas Divided 3: BBW Wolf Shifter Romance Series (Part 3 of 3) Read online

  Alphas Divided Part 3 of 3

  By Jamie Klaire

  Writing as J. M. Klaire

  Missed Part 1? Get Alphas Divided Part 1 Here!

  and get Alphas Divided Part 2 Here!

  Copyright 2015

  This is the final installment- part 3 of 3 aprox 15 - 20,000 word wolf shifter romances.

  New Adult Paranormal Romance

  Emma wakes up after being attacked to find not only her life in jeopardy, but Kate's as well. As their mates try to find them, hidden pasts are revealed, secrets are unearthed, and lives are in danger. The respected will fall, the honored will be exposed, and the truth will come out.

  All of it.

  This is part 3 of a 3 part serial. This serial will be bundled for those who do not like cliffhangers.

  Click here for J. M. Klaire's Paranormal Mailing List

  *****

  Alphas Divided Part 3 of 3

  Chapter 1

  Emma felt a dull ache deep inside her head as she fought her way to consciousness. She instinctively knew that she needed to wake up, but waves of pain and nausea greeted her every time she fought her way to the surface. She knew she needed to fight through it, and open her eyes, but visions of her mother kept pulling her down, down, deeper into unconsciousness.

  She'd never really known her mother, since she had died when Emma was so little, but she had no trouble recognizing her in her unconscious, troubled dreams.

  The sound of Kate's pained voice pierced Emma's brain, and Emma tried again to wake up, to help her friend, but the pain and nausea as Emma surfaced again was just too much. And the pull of her mother's visions just too tempting.

  Emma felt herself sinking into the abyss again, giving herself up to whatever tricks her mind was playing on her, just to see her mother one more time. She was still getting used to the whole 'seeing glimpses of possible futures' thing, so she wasn't quite prepared for her dead mother's visions to propel her into the past instead.

  Emma suddenly saw herself at an Alpha Challenge, but this time it wasn't Galen and Elam fighting for position.

  Her mother, Reine, stood tall and proud, her snow white wolf with its soot black paw fighting with a slightly smaller, younger version of what she knew to be Thomas's deep brown wolf.

  There was another, defeated, wolf watching from the perimeter. Emma assumed he was the third challenger Elam had told her about. The one who went after Thomas, just to be taken out by Reine, in defense of her brother, before the challenge had become a two wolf fight.

  Emma turned her attention to Thomas's wolf, to start with, zoning in on him.

  He was familiar, mostly, and didn't bring the longing that looking at Reine's wolf did as she tossed unconscious, her mind many, many years in the past.

  Thomas was vibrant, young and full of life. Emma's reality intruded just long enough to register the thought that she wished she'd been allowed to grown up here, with these wolves, and had known Thomas like this- young and in his prime.

  She heard a threatening growl, and turned her dreaming head just in time to focus in on Reine, before Reine's wolf attacked Thomas's wolf and the pair rolled around on the ground of the very same natural coliseum she'd watched Elam beat Galen in not very long ago.

  Reine and Thomas fought for a long time, seeming equally matched. But Elam had been right- Reine had just a bit more.

  She held a bite just a little longer, biting down just a bit harder. She was slightly quicker, and basically wore Thomas down by being what Elam had already told her, just a bit...more.

  Emma could hear and feel the tensions and surprise around her as she sat in the dream coliseum her mother was showing her in visions.

  Elam was right, no one had expected her mother to be victorious. This challenge, like Elam and Galen's to follow, was just supposed to be a formality.

  Emma looked around in her forced vision, spying a young Ziva, perched on the edge of her seat, watching her mate, Thomas, slowly lose to his sister.

  Realizing that she could see Ziva, and putting pieces together, Emma looked around for the younger version of her father, Henry.

  There.

  Her dad was there, watching his mate and Emma's future mother bit by bit become the pack's first, and so far only, female Alpha.

  She noticed how young her dad looked. Young, and earnest, and worried.

  Emma read so much love on her dad's face as he watched his mate.

  She wondered what his back story was. How he, a human, had come to be the mate of a shifter. She made a mental note to ask him to tell her his story one day. She also wondered what he would say if he could see her, his future unborn daughter, if he just looked over here in her vision. But he never did.

  His eyes never strayed from his Reine, and Emma eventually turned back to watch as her mother pinned Thomas for the final time, becoming in that moment the pack's new Alpha wolf.

  There was no time for celebration, though.

  A strange, wounded wolf bursts onto the floor of the arena, shifting into his human form almost before he'd even come to a full stop.

  Emma looked around, watching wolves and humans both react to the intrusion at first with hostility and then with an urgent call to arms once they recognized the wolf as being from the adjoining pack.

  Something had happened while the entire pack was here, deep in the woods, holding its Alpha Challenge.

  Something very bad, indeed.

  Emma started to turn to the person beside her in her vision, to ask what was going on, but a sudden pain in her head made her stop.

  She groaned as another wave of nausea rolled through her, and she looked to her dad instinctively, only to watch him shimmer and disappear as her vision faded, and reality came crashing down.

  Kate.

  She thought she saw Kate, slowly coming into focus as her eyes adjusted to where she really was.

  She moaned as she rolled over, trying to get her hands and knees under her and stand up against whomever had attacked her in the hot springs. She fell back over instead of standing up, her wrists and ankles tied firmly with some kind of leather straps.

  "Kate. Kate, where am I? What happened?"

  "Emma, I'm so sorry. I thought she only wanted to talk to you. I didn't know..."

  "Kate. What the hell? Where are we?"

  She tried to get up again, the sudden pain stabbing her head, clouding her vision, as she tried to make sense of where she was.

  The cave.

  The cave she'd found right before Elam had kissed her, right before they'd found out Thomas was dead.

  The furs under her were soft, welcoming, and Emma was tempted to give up. She wanted nothing more than to lie back down in their softness, pull a skin over her and sleep until the world made sense again.

  But she couldn't.

  She realized that someone had hit her in the head. Hard. And someone, or a couple of someone's, had obviously brought her here.

  She tried to bring a hand to her head and feel out the damage, but she realized again that her wrists were tied tight.

  If only she could hold a thought long enough to remember...

  Emma shook her head to try and dislodge the cobwebs there, and was surprised to be rewarded with some relief. She felt a bit better. She realized that her wolf's blood was helping her heal faster that a normal human would. She was about to comment on that fact, but decided to keep that little bit of information to herself until she knew more about why she had been attacked and brought here.

  "The hot springs." She started to speak. "You and I were talking. And t
hen a voice said something about devil's spawn, and then nothing. Kate, what the hell happened?"

  Ziva's voice rang out, answering her instead.

  "I called you the devil's spawn, and then I hit you over the head, Emma. Are you really so stupid that you couldn't figure that out for yourself?"

  "But why, Ziva? What is the point of all this? What do you want from me?"

  "Why, your death, silly."

  Kate's shout overpowered Emma's response.

  "You liar! You said you just wanted to talk to her. When we saw her heading toward the hot springs, you said I should go ahead and join her, and you'd be along soon because you wanted to talk to her. Then you charged up out of nowhere, swinging a tree limb."

  "Now Kate," Ziva said with a tired, put out sigh. "Would you have distracted her for me if I had told you I wanted to kill her? Is your generation slow as a whole, or is it just the two of you?"

  Emma could feel the adrenaline flowing through her, and was starting to feel better by the second, but she still wanted to know why Ziva hated her so much that she wanted her dead.

  "Ziva. What did I do, what did my mother do, that makes you hate us so much?"

  "Your mother!" Ziva spat out the words, so full of hatred and viciousness that Emma had to bite her tongue, fighting to bite back a verbal defense before Ziva'd even finished her sentence.

  "Your mother was never supposed to be Alpha. Thomas was supposed to be everything. He was supposed to save me from my fate, after Elam was born. Thomas didn't know, you see. He didn't know that Elam was really mine. No one here did. I'd walked away from that life, that curse. Thomas was my new start. We mated, and I got to start over, clean. He was supposed to become Alpha, give me a real son, and make me whole again. And then Reine won."

  She spoke that last sentence, "And then Reine won," like the words filled her mouth with acid, and the thought alone was an abomination.

  But Emma focused on the part she'd said almost in passing, like it was unimportant.

  "Whoa, what are you talking about? Elam wasn't even born then. He was found in the woods a year or two later, his parents killed. He wasn't yours."

  "Reine won, don't you see?" Ziva was focused, her mind and her words still intent on Reine.

  "It had to be that devil's doing. I knew it immediately. Reine won, throwing everything out of whack, and then seconds later an injured wolf from my old pack bursts in, with news of my old pack's demise? I knew then that he was behind everything."

  "Your pack's demise? He who? Ziva, are you insane? What devil? What are you talking about?"

  Emma tried to keep up, but Ziva's words were too confusing.

  "The one who raped me and left me carrying his seed. Elam was that seed. And you must be, too! He must have gotten to your mother as well, spawning you both! I knew it! I even asked her if it was so!"

  Emma looked to Kate, confused.

  Kate just looked back, wide eyed and terrified herself. There were no answers there, so Emma addressed Ziva again.

  "Tell me, Ziva. Please. Tell me everything. If it is true, and I am what you say, it's my right to know."

  "You have no rights!"

  Ziva came at Emma then, spittle flying as she spoke.

  "No one believed I was raped. They thought I was lying! They thought that because I was their slave that I was nothing! I can't kill Elam, he is too strong. I should have killed him when I killed his fake parents, but I couldn't find him, and then Thomas showed up with him, wanting to take the bastard in, of all the crazy things."

  Emma had a quick thought about that being the least of the crazy before Ziva grabbed a hold of Emma's hair, yanking her head back so she could yell right into her face.

  "But I can kill you! You're a half breed demon child who can't even shift! I bet even your devil father is disappointed in you. I guess all of his magical shape shifter spunk poured into me, making Elam, and none was left for you! Stupid half-breed human. But, that means I can kill you. And killing you will kill Elam, since that idiot claimed you. Two birds with one stone. I'd be doing the world a favor anyway- if two of that devil's children breed together, who knows what hell will be unleashed then!"

  Emma heard the words flying at her, but she didn't understand them. She was surprised to realize that Ziva didn't know that she could shift now. But that was the least of the surprises Ziva'd thrown at her.

  When Ziva touched her, yanking her hair, she got quick flashes of what was running inside Ziva's head.

  Her visions weren't clear, like when her mate Elam touched her, but she could 'see' some.

  She 'saw' Ziva as a young, carefree child, before she was traded to the wolves. She 'saw' flashes of Ziva growing up as the den's slave. She wasn't mistreated, but she wasn't respected either. She was 'nothing'd.'

  They barely acknowledged Ziva's existence, really. Unless they needed her for something.

  Then Emma 'saw' a man come out of nowhere. He materialized like a mist in front of a probably twenty year old Ziva when she was alone in the woods.

  He startled her, and then attacked her. He never spoke, and Emma could see the fear and the fight in Ziva, but she didn't stand a chance against the stranger. He took her, there, roughly on the forest floor, and then disappeared.

  When Ziva realized it was over, that the mist-man was gone, she got up and ran back to her den, crying and screaming, and Emma sensed that she'd lost an important piece of her sanity on that forest floor.

  When she made it back to her den, and tried to tell the wolves what had happened, they didn't believe her. Worst of all, they didn't care.

  And later, when Ziva realized that the mist-man's seed had taken root, she dealt with the whole thing by turning inside herself so deeply that she was almost able to pretend it hadn't happened. That she wasn't really pregnant.

  Until the birth pains.

  After the boy-child was born, Ziva wouldn't have anything to do with him. She wouldn't nurse, or even hold him. She spent a lot of time inside herself, unreachable.

  The wolves eventually gave the child to a wet nurse and Ziva carried on as she had before, as the pack's slave.

  Only changed. Unhinged.

  When Thomas's wolf saw her at that joint pack meeting, and then later claimed her, she came out of her shell some, recognizing and responding to something in him.

  Her pack let her go without even a goodbye, glad that a mating-crazed Alpha's son was so crazy for her that he didn't even notice she'd recently given birth.

  Then suddenly Ziva's/Emma's vision fast forwarded to the challenge.

  Ziva'd been convinced that her mate Thomas would become Alpha, and as an Alpha's mate, she would be made whole again. He would give her a true son, and she would be saved.

  The logic seemed kind of iffy to Emma, but as Emma 'watched,' she was also able to feel some of how Ziva felt, and she realized that Ziva was just barely holding on to sanity, so the logic made perfect sense in her mind.

  When Thomas lost to Reine, and then moments later a wounded wolf burst in, calling her new pack to action to go help her old pack, Ziva felt like the timing couldn't possibly be an accident.

  Emma 'watched' as the strange wolf told everyone in Ziva's new pack that her old pack was being attacked by humans.

  The entire pack ran off to help, but when they arrived at Ziva's old den it was obvious that no one had survived.

  Ziva was happy though, because she'd never cared for them, and it seemed like her bastard son and his wet nurse must have also died in the attack.

  She was thrilled that he was no more, but felt that she was still somehow cursed because Thomas lost to Reine.

  Reine had somehow stolen her dream, her rightful life, and Ziva's unstable mind fixated on her.

  Emma was concentrating, trying to 'see' more and more, to help her understand, but when Ziva let go of her hair and backed away, the connection was broken.

  Emma tried to sort and settle all of the darkness and fear and rage she'd seen swirling in Ziva's mind as the
visions spilled forth, but her attention was sharpened to a razor point when she heard Ziva calmly turn to Kate and say, "You are to take over for me, as Alpha's mate, so I need you to prove your loyalty to Galen, and to me. Kill her, Kate."

  Chapter 2

  "What? No!"

  "You have to, don't you see? You're the Alpha's mate now. The responsibility of protecting this pack falls on you as much as it falls on Galen."

  "Until the pack splits, Elam is Alpha. Emma is Alpha's mate. And besides, this doesn't even make sense. Why would I kill Emma? She's my friend."

  "We won't have to split at all if you fix this, you idiot. Emma's death will kill Elam, and the entire pack can stay here, with Galen ruling, as it should be. Galen wants to go to the adjoining lands? Where I was a slave, and raped? To bow down to Elam and leave? Never! Don't you see? Killing her fixes everything."

  Kate rushed over, putting herself between Emma and Ziva.

  "I won't do it! If I had known what you were planning, I never would have helped you. You said you wanted to talk to her. I thought you wanted to apologize for how you acted when Elam became Alpha, and make up. I thought we were going to go to the pack meeting all together, as a united front, to help Elam and Galen split the pack on good terms."

  Emma had forgotten about the pack meeting. She wondered how long she'd been unconscious. Had the meeting started yet? Did the men realize they were missing?

  She looked up toward the cracks in the cave's ceiling. Judging by the darkening of the cave and the color of the light she could see, it would be dark soon.

  When the three didn't show up for the pack meeting, everyone would know something had happened.

  She closed her eyes and tried to 'throw' visions at Elam. She knew Kate and Galen spoke in words in their heads, but so far she and Elam had only spoken like that in pictures. Even then, the images only went one way. She had no reason to think Elam would 'see' her here, but she tried anyway.

  "Kate. Do that thing where you talk to Galen. They will come for us."

  Kate didn't seem to hear her, she was too busy facing off against Ziva.

  The pair stood toe to toe, Ziva yelling things at Kate, trying to get Kate to kill Emma.