Child of Prophecy {#Multimedia}

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

I feel a thrill of fury run through me and I know immediately who it belongs to. Now that we have touched, I can tap into Keenan's emotions, and he is clearly not happy with my father. I lean to the side to look around Keenan and see my father quickly take a step back. I assume that it is probably more from shock than anything else. But, when I look at Keenan's face, I realize that my father stepping back was from pure fear. Keenan has his eyes trained upon my father and instead of their usual grey, they are pitch black. His canines have extended and he looks like one wrong move and my father will find his throat on the other side of the room. He looks every bit like the man rumored to have massacred an entire coven of vampires with his bare hands.

It occurs to me that just like I saw Keenan's life, he saw mine. So, he saw every hit, slap, and kick my father has ever dished out to me. He saw every single time I blacked out because I was thrown into a wall too hard. He saw every time I was starved because I did something 'wrong.' He saw every moment of abuse leading all the way up until just a few minutes ago, when my father shoved me on our way up here.

To Keenan, my father broke the biggest rule: don't touch someone else's mate. And if I don't do something fast, Keenan is going to act out the punishment himself. I pull slightly on his shirt to get his attention. He doesn't take his eyes off of my father, but he tilts his head slightly in my direction to let me know he is listening.

"Don't," I whisper. It briefly registers in my head that the whole room is staring at this exchange, but I am only focused on him.

"He broke the rules," Keenan growls out menacingly. His tone would probably instill fear in anyone else, but to be honest it actually turns me on. When I feel a burst of amusement, I remember that like me, he can feel everything that I am feeling. Geez, that is going to get very embarrassing very fast.

"It doesn't count. We didn't know then," I try to reason with him. It's true, if my father were to harm me now, Keenan would be completely within his right to tear him apart. But, the abuse was before we knew we were mates, so Keenan could possibly get in a lot of trouble.

"Alpha Keenan..." my father trails off, unsure of how to address this new turn of events. He can't say I lied because Keenan saw it all himself. He can't explain why because then the others would know not only what he did but why he did––they would know that his mate did not die, but rather cheated on him and left. In the werewolf world, your mate leaving you is not only painful, but it is a great mark of shame. It is not something that you can ever recover from both emotionally and socially.

"I would like to know what exactly is going on here," Darvon is the first to speak.

"Join the club, buddy," the Red Wolf Alpha, Lorenzo retorts with a snort. He is the youngest alpha and you can definitely tell. Not just by the lack of worry lines on his dark brown face, but also just by the way he talks.

"That bitch over there, " Keenan spits out, gesturing to my father, "has been abusing Farrah for eighteen years." I don't worry about him saying anything about my mother. Just like how it would be a mark of shame for my father, being a child born out of a mating bond would be a huge mark of shame for me.

There's a large moment's pause while Keenan and my father have a stare off, before the leader of the Full Moon pack, Alpha Silas, speaks. "Keenan, while I too would be itching to tear apart anyone who hurt Victoria," he clasps a protective arm around his luna's waist as he talks, "you cannot punish him. While it is morally wrong that he would hurt his own daughter, this occurred before you two were mated. You have no jurisdiction to retaliate."

"Yeah, your girl is right," the Wolfblood leader, Cephas, another young alpha, chips in. "You can't do anything, man."

I feel a shock of betrayal and frustration from Keenan's side. He really does not like being ganged up on. He pauses, weighing what they said against his strong desire to hurt the man who hurt me, before deciding. "Fine. But, I swear that if you so much as look at Farrah again, I will not hesitate to rip out your esophagus and beat you with it."