Mated To The Alpha: A Standalone Wolf Shifter Romance, стр. 51
"I've been meaning to ask," Emma piped in. "How was it that my dad was still in contact with you all? If he and mom walked away still pregnant with me? I remember him saying that pressure from mom's family was one of the reasons he sent me here instead of leaving me in jail to deal with my own consequences."
"After you were born, and your mom died, Henry got the job with the Sheriff's department. For a while there another pack, over the mountain, was starting to cause trouble in the nearby towns. The Sheriff at the time, when Henry was still a deputy, needed someone to head up some kind of wolf posse to trap and kill or relocate the suddenly troublesome wolf population. Your dad, of course, knowing the things he did, knew that it probably wasn't a wild wolf issue but a werewolf issue. He volunteered to look into the problem for the county, and he came back here to see Thomas.
He told Thomas about your birth, your life as a small child and of Reine's passing.
Together Henry and Thomas were able to keep the other pack's wolves mostly on their own side of the mountain. Their friendship continued. Henry eventually became Sheriff, and kept coming to visit.
Thomas often asked Henry to bring you back here, for you both to stay here, but Henry wanted to honor your mother's wish that you be kept away. He never knew exactly why Reine wished it to be so, but he honored it. Until he felt like he had no other choice, that this place probably was the best choice for you when you wouldn't stay out of trouble."
"Why didn't you say anything before? About Thomas being the mist-man, about any of it?" Elam asked, as Emma still chewed on all of the new knowledge.
"There wasn't any reason to. We were going into the challenge soon, and I figured it was knowledge that would stay with me forever. If he had made peace with it, and Ziva never said anything, well, I couldn't see any reason anyone else needed to know."
"And then I won the Alpha challenge." Elam sighed.
"And then you won the Alpha challenge," Galen echoed. "By turning into a fucking bear."
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"So that's why Ziva flipped out after the challenge," Emma said. "I thought she was terrorizing the pack even more because Elam won instead of Galen. I thought she was angry that Galen didn't win, that her favored son wouldn't become Alpha, not freaked the fuck out that Elam did. And how Elam won... Oh my, no wonder she was so bitchy in those next few weeks!"
Kate wasn't quite following.
"What do you mean?"
"Can you imagine? Put yourself in Ziva's shoes for a minute. On top of being traded to the wolves to begin with, she's raped, by a shape shifter. She abandoned the baby that resulted from that rape, who we now know to be Elam, from everything she said in the cave. Then she finally moves on to a new pack, a fresh start, and her old pack gets wiped out, wait...I thought no one survived the human's attack. How did Elam? And wasn't Elam found wandering alone in the woods at about two years old? And didn't Ziva say she killed his 'fake parents?' Wait, I'll come back to that. So Ziva abandons Elam, only to find herself raising him anyway, somehow, after she thinks he's dead. Then he goes and beats her favorite son, with the shape shifting skills he got from his rapist father, who we now know is Thomas. And Thomas had no idea?"
Emma aimed the last bit at Galen.
"Thomas had no idea that Elam was his?"
Galen shook his head saying, "Not until then."
"I remember, right after the challenge," Emma said. "Elam won and Thomas said, 'I knew that boy was special, but even I didn't expect this. Who in the hell were his blood parents?"
Galen said, "Yeah, that was his first reaction. My understanding was that Ziva's crazed, desperate mutterings around him when he was weak and she thought he was sleeping finally tipped him off. I talked to him again later, right before he died and I went looking for Elam in the cave. He figured out that when he took Ziva, having sex with her in the woods like he did, Elam was the result. He put all the pieces together- her having to raise her son, her not ever telling anyone that she ever even had one before me. Keeping all that knowledge from everyone, especially Thomas."
"And then there was Thomas, keeping his own secrets about being the mist-man, and never realizing until right before he died that he was raising both of his biological sons. Wow, that is crazy," Kate said, shaking her head in wonderment.
"Ok, so go back some," Emma jumped in. "After Ziva's whole pack was wiped out, and she thought Elam and his wet nurse were dead too, obviously they weren't. How did they escape? Where did they go?"
"I'm guessing the wet nurse ran to the village, with Elam. She knew Ziva was originally from the village, and she knew she was nursing Ziva's abandoned baby, so she went there. They took the pair in. I'm guessing that when Reine went there and made that 'we will leave you alone' pact with them, they were in that crowd of women and children. Ziva would have recognized them, but she wasn't with them, she was still in the woods, on her knees, where Reine and Thomas found her when they went back to take care of the dead."
"So the village raised Elam until he was two? Ziva said she killed Elam's 'fake parents' in the woods, and Thomas found Elam wandering around in the woods all alone. So either