Deception (Dark Alpha #3)
Read Deception (Dark Alpha #3) Online
Authors: Alisa Woods
Deception (Dark Alpha, Episode 3)
Copyright © 2015 by Alisa Woods
February 2015 Edition
All rights reserved.
Sworn Secrets Publishing
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. For information visit:
Cover by
Steven Novak
Deception
(Dark Alpha 3) -
New Adult Paranormal Romance
Shifters live in the shadows of Seattle, just under the skin of the alpha male, dot-com entrepreneurs who are building a new Silicon Valley in the Emerald City.
Jak has a plan to free Arianna without the witch's help... but the best laid plans of wolves and men rarely turn out as they hope.
Is love stronger than magic? Or will breaking an unbreakable bond destroy them both?
Deception
(Dark Alpha 3) is 60 pages or 15,000 words.
It’s the third of six episodes in the
Dark Alpha
serial.
Dark Alpha
is the sequel series to
True Alpha,
the debut shifters-in-Seattle paranormal romance from Alisa Woods.
Dark Alpha Release Schedule - 2015
1 -
Torment
(1.19)
2 -
Pleasure
(2.2)
3 -
Deception
(2.16)
4 -
Untitled
(3.2)
5 -
Untitled
(3.16)
6 -
Untitled
(3.30)
Box Set (Dark Alpha 1-6) - releases 3.30
GET THE NEXT DARK ALPHA EPISODE!
pre-order for 3.2.15
OR
Pre-order
DARK ALPHA
Box Set (Vol 1-6)
releases 3.30.15
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Killing Mace would be the easy part—it was the idea of leaving Gage’s pack that twisted Jak’s stomach in a knot.
He had just left Circe and her coven a few hours ago. Normally on a Saturday night, Gage’s pack would be out club-hopping, but tonight, he had brought them straight here, to the Olympic mountains, for some pack bonding time.
Jak kicked at the fall leaves with his boots while he leaned against the pack’s van. Gage was instructing Mason and the others—Joe, Frank, Billy, and Sampson, the youngest and wildest of the bunch, and all the rest—about the rules. All fifteen were in attendance tonight—the hunt was mandatory for everyone, including Jak. It was a standard hunt, and he had developed the game, so he already knew what Gage had planned. The half-moon lit up the meadow well enough for Jak to see
the rest of Gage’s pack punching each other good-naturedly and laughing too loud in each other’s faces, .
It wasn’t actually these jokers he would miss, although they were the closest thing he’d ever had to real brothers—his own were more sadists than siblings. As the youngest, Jak was always omega to their abundance of alphas. It was a regular sport for them to see
how many pieces they could take out of him without requiring a healer to stitch him back together. Jak’s father only encouraged them: he was the leader of their small, country pack, a real alpha’s alpha, and he had a barely disguised disdain for his youngest son, the tech geek. Jak’s mother had protected him from the savagery of his older brothers, but as Jak grew big enough to fight back, it got uglier.
And then his mom died.
Jak’s wolf still howled a long mournful cry every time he thought about her. But Jak’s human side had nothing but rage… and a single photo that he’d had on him when he left his pack and family for good.
His mom was as gentle as they came and beautiful besides. She always kept him close—he had already been the target of his brothers’ twisted humor more than once when she wasn’t watching. Her kitchen was the safest place for him in his family’s sprawling ranch in the mountains northeast of Seattle. She was a captive mate, like Arianna, and dutifully bore pups for his father, but their mating was never a love match—Jak remembered with nauseating clarity the day he figured
that
out.
He was just a kid, maybe ten. His father came home drunk in the middle of the day, somehow missing that Jak was curled up under the kitchen table, putting together computer parts. He had scored a motherboard from one of his teachers—along with parts scavenged off the internet and his friends at school—and he was buried in building a computer of his own.
Jak hardly made a sound, and he had always wondered if things would have been different if he had. His father had always been rough and demanding—Jak loathed him more each day of his childhood. But that spring day, he watched, silently, as his father forced himself on his mother, right above Jak, on the kitchen table. His father never realized he was there.
His stomach still heaved every time he thought of it: the shaking of the table, his father’s grunts, his mother’s quiet sobs afterward. It would forever be seared into his mind.
From then on, Jak tried to protect his mom, to keep her away from his father, even going so far as to take the beatings his father liked to mete out, as long as he didn’t vent his frustrations, whatever they were, on her. But it was no use: Jak was still just a kid. Then
one day he came home from school to find her dead.
It takes a lot to kill a wolf.
Jak’s inner beast howled again, and Jak ground his boot into the rocky forest floor. He had no doubt his father had done it. You could hardly see the bruises on his mother’s neck under her fur, but they blared out his father’s guilt. Jak could only imagine how much she had to fight at the end, even shifting to do it… Jak never figured out why his father did it, but brutes like him didn’t seem to need a reason. Maybe his mother had finally stood up to him. Maybe she had done something innocent that set him off. Maybe his father had just come home stupid drunk one day and didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late.
But Jak knew his father would get away with it because she was
wolf
when she died. If Jak hadn’t been a scrawny 14-year-old at the time, he would have killed his father right then. But he was weak. And outnumbered by his brothers.
The best he could do was to stay alive himself.
His mom would have wanted that.
Even so, he almost didn’t make it out of adolescence alive. Wouldn’t have, if Gage hadn’t saved him from Jak’s own kin. Right in this very meadow in the Olympic mountains, in fact, where he now stood waiting for his alpha to give the signal for their pack games to begin. Back then, the games Jak’s brothers played nearly killed him. Gage was only a few years older than Jak, but he was a decent alpha, even then. Gage stood up to them, rescued Jak from being turned into hamburger, and from then on, Jak had been steadfast by his side.