For The Rogues

The Beginning

Sometimes, the beginning of a story can properly set the tone for the rest of it. Everyone I know that can read (which, admittedly, isn't a lot of people) say that they can tell what a book will be like from the first chapter. That isn't how this story goes. Or at the very least, I damn well hope it isn't, because the start of my story was bleak. 

It started with my mother dying during childbirth while being held captive in a dungeon beneath a pack house during a rogue attack to free her. Myself and my brother barely managed to survive, and our sister was born, lived, and died in the dark, surrounded by half starved rogues and the smell of piss, blood and rotting flesh. Triplets would have been hard enough for her to deliver, never mind in the circumstances she was in. Obviously I don't remember any of this, but rogues love a tragic story that make the alphas seem like bastards, so it's a popular story around the campfire. 

Not when my da's around, though. He lost his mate and child that day, even if he did manage to salvage me and my brother. I was twelve before I even knew my mother's name, such a taboo topic it was, although we always kind of knew that we had been triplets. There had always been a cold, dark place in mine and my brother's mind, the old and dusty tendril of a dead link that should have been alive and thrumming like the one between us was. 

Now, we're both seventeen, around a month away from our eighteenth birthday, and already we have quite the reputation. Da first let us play at trespassing on pack ground when we were five, then came how to run away and hide, how to fight, and most importantly, how to steal. By the time we were ten we raided regularly, and by the time we were fifteen, we had our own raiding team to lead. I had tussled with several alphas in my time, courtesy of a very dominant wolf, and Nathan, with his weirdly good mind tapping skills, had managed to extract vital information while I did. Together, we made a good team. 

Except when we were pranking each other. Then we always ended up coming dangerously close to killing each other, but apart from that, we were the dream team. Between us, we had a bounty on our head's for almost two hundred thousand, not that it even held a candle to da's million pound bounty. Still, we were suitably proud of ourselves, with the mutual understanding that we were now in a family competition to see who could drive their bounty the highest. 

"You are being unnaturally quiet. Stop that." Nate reprimanded me, giving me a friendly shove for good measure and sending me crashing into a tree. 

"You always complain that I talk too much! Which is it, man? Talk more or talk less?" I hissed back, shoving him into a puddle of mud and chuckling as he glared at me. 

"Just don't be weird." He snapped back, climbing to his feet and ignoring the mud now generously coating his already dirty clothes. Rogues knew better than most that the best way to get mud off was to wait for it to dry and then use a brush, and we were also better accustomed to being dirty than most. When an icy river was your only option to get clean, personal hygiene drops a couple of priority spots. 

"Says you." I scoffed, though we both froze as we reached the border of the Nightstalker pack. As did all the other packs, the outline of their territory was formed entirely of decomposing rogue bodies, giving off a beautiful stench of rotting flesh and wolf piss. A few meters back from it, we both dropped to our stomachs, me having to wait patiently as Nathan reached out and checked for any spirits nearby, to make sure we wouldn't walk right into a patrol. 

This raid was different... more personal. See, the Nightstalker pack happened to be the pack we were born in, technically speaking, and the alpha that had let my mother die still reigned supreme. Today we were going against our father's clear instructions to avenge our fallen mother and sister, preferably by spilling Ethan's throat over his front patio. It was also why we were on our own for this one, even if we had been willing to risk the lives of our team, they wouldn't go against their leader's orders. So it was just us, with a plan to lure him away from his pack, courtesy of Nate's mind exploiting ability, and then kill him, courtesy of me and my wolf.