Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

Chapter 4

Alec Graves
Lambert – St. Louis International Airport
St. Louis, Missouri

I actually hadn't flown much considering that our family owned two private jets. A lot of the pack liked to claim that it was the tithe from the pack that supported some of the more extravagant trappings of wealth that Kaleb indulged in, but I had it on good authority from Donovan that the tithe was an almost insignificant percentage of the income that my father had him managing.

Our family had been in positions of power for centuries and they'd been gifted with a large number of able financial managers during that time. The actual origins of the family's wealth had been lost in the mists of time, but I suspected that it had a lot to do with the tithe, in some form or another, which had been paid by early members of the pack and the monarchy to my ancient ancestors.

My father claimed to be working towards some greater good, but I suspected that more than anything else he just wanted to see himself restored as the ultimate power over our people. A lot of the expenditures that Kaleb made were absolutely done to maintain the kind of opulence that went with ultimate power. I didn't agree with that on a number of levels, but the planes had actually been a good purchase, one which I supported entirely—not that my approval meant anything.

Neither of the planes were the kind of hangar queens that only rarely made it up into the air. Both planes were worked and worked hard. Other than the occasional shopping trip for Mom and Rachel, nearly all of the rest of the usage came down to operations like the one that we were currently on.

Kaleb had apparently been serious when he'd said that he was going to start sending my friends and me into the field. He'd called us all into his office yesterday and told us that we were being deployed to St. Louis today.

Jasmin had actually been excited at the prospect of getting out of the manor house and seeing some action. Jess had been doing her best to hide just how scared she was, while James was obviously worried about his mother. Addison had long been one of my mother's most staunch supporters inside of the pack.

Back when my parents had first gotten married Addison's support, contrasted against the grudging acceptance nearly everyone else had displayed, had garnered no small amount of favor with Kaleb. As the years had gone by and Mother had become further and further estranged from Kaleb, Addison had become more and more tormented by the rest of the pack.

Mother had done her best to protect Addison, and Kaleb had agreed to forbid the rest of the pack from challenging Addison to any kind of dominance fight, but that hadn't stopped some of his people from tormenting her in a thousand smaller ways.

James had been a fierce protector of his mother for as long as I could remember. Back even before he'd manifested the ability to change to a wolf, he'd still gotten in the face of anyone who harassed his mother when he was around. It had earned him far more than his fair share of beatings over the years, but things had just escalated once he could shift. A wolf was almost never a match for a hybrid, so his aggressive defense of his mother had meant that he had taken a lot more damage from the few hybrids who'd still had it out for his mother after so many years.

Jasmin and I had both been worried that James would end up dead before he hit sixteen, but his relentless refusal to back down where his mother was concerned, combined with his complete disinterest in fighting for almost any other cause, had earned him a kind of grudging acceptance from the hybrids that he tangled with.

They all knew that they could wipe the floor with him at any time, but after a while they'd stopped doing the things that caused him to get in their faces. That would have been a tremendous win for a young wolf, but he also tore into any and every wolf he even suspected was tormenting his mother.