Inevitably Yours
Chapter 35

I stared at the letter in my hands, still unsure how I felt about it. After telling me that Lawrence knew where we were, my mom handed me the letter I had received from him and gave me time alone to read it. I wasn’t sure what to expect. What does a shitty excuse for a father write to the kid who knows he isn’t your kid anymore?

Michael,

I assume that you have found out our secret about you and your heritage. Is your solution to run away? You thought you could be Alpha of this pack, but you can’t face me? Even worse, you took my mate and my actual son with you. I took you in as my own, and I was good to you. This is how you repay me? By embarrassing me and taking away my Luna? That’s fine. It saves me the trouble of telling you that you were never going to be Alpha anyway.

You will never be fit to take on the mantle you’ve coveted your whole life. You’re too much like your s***m donor, weak and a coward. I should have known you’d be just like him, that you would run and hide. Don’t bother coming back. You’re no longer welcome in the pack lands, and you are no longer my son. I also forbid you to speak to my family any longer. So, my parents, brother, sisters, nieces, and nephews are all off-limits. If you want to be a bastard so badly, I’ll make you one.

I won’t embarrass myself further within the pack by making you a rogue but know that I’m coming to get my wife and son back from you. There is no hole you can crawl into or any place that is far enough to keep you safe from me. I will always know. You will always be running. Accept the loss and send them back, or your life will be hell from this point forward.

Regards,

Alpha Lawrence

Tears stung my eyes as I tried to understand how I felt about this. I’d only endured him because I thought he was my father. I’d thought about leaving before, just running away and never returning. I couldn’t leave my mom and Tyler there, though, and she wouldn’t come with me. I could have never predicted he wasn’t my father, but he was still the one who’d filled that role my entire life. Even doing it badly, Lawrence was all I had ever known. Now, I’d lost my grandparents, uncle and aunts, and all of my cousins. I’d never thought of that when I left. It was to get away from him, not them. I loved my family, and now all of a sudden, they weren’t mine anymore? What had I done, and to who? Was it in a past life? Was the Goddess punishing me for all of the dating around I had done over the last few years? It would make sense, giving me Quinn and ripping her away from me with all of this just as I was about to turn seventeen.

I stood, pacing in our tiny room. This was bullshit. How does a man who hurts everyone around him get everything and anything he wants? Why isn’t he being punished? The Goddess either didn’t care and left us to our own devices, or Lawrence was right. Maybe she did believe the twisted s**t he did, and I was better off renouncing her altogether. f**k, I can’t think things like that, or it will make this worse.

“She isn’t punishing you,” Eros assured me.

“She has a funny way of showing it,” I muttered, leaving my room to replace my mom. She was sitting on the couch nervously smoking a cigarette, her eyes on the door as if Lawrence would burst through it at any moment. I guess he could now; he knew where we were.

“Where’s Melvin?” I asked, sitting down in the chair across from her heavily.

“He went into work to see about getting his last check so that we can leave,” she answered, tapping her cigarette into her ashtray. Goddess, how I hated that smell.

“So, we’re just going to leave? Melvin is that scared of Lawrence?”

“He’s being realistic. Lawrence knows where we are, and he could come from anywhere. You know him; he would rather burn this house down around us than lose something he feels belongs to him.”

She was right. Everything had been such a whirlwind that I hadn’t even had much chance to talk to Melvin yet. We’d been shoved into this house that clearly wasn’t designed for a family, and he’d been trying to sort things out with my mom. I didn’t think that was going very well. I couldn’t imagine being fated mates, but with all of this between them now.

He’d settled in a small wolf settlement town on the outskirts of a larger human city, and I couldn’t imagine Lawrence being let loose here. It was quiet, and the people didn’t deserve that. I sighed, imagining having to pick up and move again. I felt like I was just starting to settle in. I’d just met the wrestling team and started off-season practice with them. They were a little leary of a new guy coming in, but I’d made friends with one of them. He’d helped smooth it over. I was trying to throw myself into anything here to keep my mind off leaving everything I knew behind, leaving Quinn behind. Now, we’d have to do it all over again.

“Where are we going?” I asked in defeat.

“South,” she answered simply. “I don’t have more information than that yet, but I will tell you when I know.”

“What’s for lunch?” Tyler yelled from the kitchen. He wasn’t used to the much smaller home we were living in. I could see him from where I was sitting, so there was no need to yell.

“Make a sandwich or something, Tyler. You’re old enough to feed yourself sometimes.”

I could hear him grumbling as he banged around the kitchen. He wasn’t taking the change in our lifestyle well. I was trying really hard to let him be. I knew he lost a lot too, but at least his family was still his own. Still, he was being a brat, and it was hard not to snap at him all the time. I looked over to see my mom on the phone, her face losing all of its color slowly as she sank deeper into the couch.

“What?” I asked incredulously. It’s not like Lawrence had our numbers. She had the volume so low it just sounded muffled.

“Don’t let your brother hear,” she linked me and handed me the tiny flip phone.

I stepped outside and shut the door behind me before putting the phone up to my ear, and what I heard made my b***d boil. She’d called in to check the voicemail on her old phone.

“You have one voicemail,” said the calm computerized voice.

“Look b***h. You will give me my son, or I will f*****g kill you and everyone you’ve ever loved. Whatever you think I have done or that I will do, it will f*****g pale in comparison to what I’m picturing right now. I will bury your f*****g body on that pack’s land, and no one will ever replace it. Stupid f*****g cunt. Do you think you can just leave? You made a deal, and not only did you break it, you took my heir. Wrong f*****g move.”

“You have no new messages.”

I could feel the phone starting to crack in my hand as it balled in rage. We weren’t just things that belonged to him, and I was tired of being treated as such. I saw Melvin’s truck pulling down the street and waited for him to pull into the driveway in front of me. His face went from blank to stressed as he got out of the car and saw me.

“The letter?” he asked gruffly.

“And this,” I told him, cycling back to the message and handing it to him.

I could see the anger flash across his face too, but it was so brief that I wondered if I’d imagined it. He returned to his usual stoic demeanor as he walked over to me, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“This won’t last forever. We’ll get through this.”

“How?” I demanded. “He’s never going to stop!”

“I have an idea,” he told me softly. “Come inside, and we’ll talk about it.”

I followed him to see Tyler had taken my seat, and my mom was still blanched and lifeless on the couch. I resigned myself to sitting on the floor to let Melvin sit next to my mom.

“What’s going on?” Tyler asked, looking between all of us mid-bite.

“Your dad knows where we are,” I snapped at him.

“What do you mean my d-”

“Let it go, Tyler,” our mom insisted. It was still hard for Tyler to understand, even if he knew we weren’t in the best situation before.

“I’ve been talking to a friend, and he thinks Lawrence is tracking you through the mate bond somehow,” Melvin interjected.

“So, we’ll never be able to get away from him?” she asked, looking down at her shoulder as if it had betrayed her.

“It’s not going to be easy, but I think we might be able to do something about this.”

“How the hell do we do something about an unbreakable bond?” I exploded. None of this made any sense.

“Well…” he started, his voice catching as he looked away from all of us. “Obviously, they’re not unbreakable.”

s**t. That was a stupid thing to say in front of my parents. The mate bond was a touchy subject after what they had been through. They wouldn’t tell me anything, though, so how was I supposed to know what really happened? My mom didn’t display her mark much; I only ever caught sight of it when her shirt would move. I always assumed it was Lawrence’s, and now I wondered if she had two.

“Normally, witches aren’t exactly helpful to races other than their own, but they’re a bit more kind to us here. I’ve made friends with some of them, and one of their daughters just mated a wolf. I think they may help us on that fact alone,” Melvin told us, looking a little hopeful for the first time since we’d gotten here.

“You really think they can help us?” my mom asked, resting her hand on his knee. Melvin stood suddenly, jerking himself from her grasp. He’s been weird about her touching him since we got here. It wasn’t until later that I realized he might be able to feel her and Lawrence touching and possibly more all of these years. Then, I understood. He’d been tortured for sixteen years in his own personal hell, and now she was back here as if nothing had changed for him.

“I think so,” he nodded. “It will just take some time for them to research and perform the breaking of the bond, assuming they agree. I’m hoping it can be ready in the next week or two, and then we can leave.”

“What if he replaces us before then?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “He knows we’re here.”

“I don’t think he’s coming quite yet,” Melvin clarified. “What do you think he wants more than anything?”

“Apparently, his only son back,” I replied angrily.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “He wants control. Lawrence doesn’t want to come here himself. He wants control. He wants-”

“Mom to come back on her own,” I finished for him. I looked at Tyler, who was no longer eating his sandwich. He stared down at his plate despondently.

“Exactly,” Melvin told me, confirming my suspicions. “He’s going to keep threatening until he finally snaps.

“Are you okay with this plan?” I asked my mom, who was just listening now.

“Do we have much choice?”

“I don’t see one,” Melvin answered, sitting awkwardly far away from her on the couch again.