Kris narrowed his eyes as he laid back in his bed. Baekhyun had spent the last ten minutes in his room explaining the ‘situation,’ as he called it, to Kris. Although Kris didn’t really care for the matters involving mates, as a future alpha he would need to be open to his packs problems and willing to help fix them. So as Baekhyun rambled on, Kris sat quietly and listened until the boy was done.

“Are you done yet?” Kris interrupted him, since he had long ago stopped listening. Baekhyun glared at him and rolled his eyes. Kris sat up and faced him as he spoke, “So you want to go talk to the nanny to find out what species she is? And the nanny is a hunter?”

Baekhyun nodded. “Basically, yes, but I don’t want to bring someone who is just going to worry or make a mess of it, like my family would.”

“You mean Chanyeol.”

“I do, yes.”

Kris sighed and got to his feet. “Alright, let’s get it over with,” he stated. Baekhyun grinned and shot up from the chair he had been in. “But I’m not going unarmed. Who know what kind of anti-wolf crap they’ve got in there.” Walking around to his closet, Kris reached up onto the shelf and pulled out a small shoe box. He placed it on the desk as Baekhyun walked up behind him and peeked around his side.

“Dad got it for me or emergencies,” Kris explained as he opened up the box. Inside was a small pistol, and a small pill bottle of silver bullets. Baekhyun instinctively backed away from it. Pulling open the desk drawer, Kris pulled out a glove and slipped it over his hand before he began loading the bullets into the weapon. Once it was loaded, he tucked it into the back of his pants and pulled his shirt down to hide it. “Alright I’m ready. Let’s grab Victoria, and we’ll go.”

Baekhyun shook his head. “What, no,” he stated. “She’s staying here. This could get ugly, apparently.” He nodded towards the box. “She needs to rest anyway.”

“You’re going to go dig up her secrets without telling her anything about it?” Kris asked. Baekhyun shrugged, but nodded. “Well nothing could go wrong there.”

Much to Kris’s displeasure, Baekhyun had them sneak out of the pack without telling anyone, and insisted they take the main road instead of the trails. Baekhyun said people would look for him there, and Kris argued that he didn’t care if they found them. In the end, Kris decided to practice his patients and went along with Baekhyun’s idiotic plan. A few cars passed them on their way, on being Alpha James, who rolled down the window and waved at them as he passed. Even calling out for them to behave and not get into trouble.

“Did you tell dad about this?” Kris turned to his friend after a few minutes of silence. Normally Kris wouldn’t complain about it, he would rather say nothing than dabble in small talk, but a good alpha socializes.

Baekhyun nodded. “Yeah, he suggested I take someone with me,” he said. “I don’t think he meant you, but you were my best bet.”

“He meant me,” Kris stated. His father enjoyed being cryptic if he could, but the pieces were clear. Alpha James hated hunters more than anything. They took his daughter away, Kris’s baby sister. It was after that that his father gave him the gun and began his training for alpha. His mother insisted that Kris was too young, but his father argued that one was never too young. “I mean, all they need is wolfsbane, and we are done. He knew I have this, and he knew you’d get me.”

The shorter boy shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think he was going that deep with it,” he argued. “But if it makes you feel better about it then sure.”

The two of them sent the rest of the walk in a comfortable silence. The main road was the incredibly long way around, and it was nearing dust when they reached her parents property. The two walked up to the gate, and spotted Reese sitting on the steps, a bottle in one hand and a cigar in the other.

The older man glared at them as they approached the gate. “She’s with you now,” the man spit at them. “What more do you want?”

“We just wanted to talk to you,” Baekhyun called back. He grabbed onto one of the bars, immediately yelping and letting it go as smoke rose from his hand. Black charred marks appeared where he had gripped the metal.

Reese laughed and shook his head. “You think I wouldn’t scrub this place down after you started pointing around? Do I look like an idiot?”

The wolf within him growled, and Baekhyun took a deep breath to keep his cool. “Look I just want to ask you some things about Victoria.”

The front door to the house opened up, and a small dark haired woman walk out alongside a stout man with a graying beard. They both looked the boys up and down a minute as Reese got to his feet. The woman spoke first, “Which one of you is the mate?” Her voice was light and airy, but there was a coldness behind it that made them both uneasy.

“Are you her parents?” Kris peeked through the gate with a frown. “Look we don’t want any trouble. It’s not like we wanted this to happen. The rogues started all this, and we want to get rid of them as much as you do.”

The man scoffed and shook his head. “You look just like your father,” he spit at Kris. “Damn alpha’s boy. Where’s my little girl? You bring her home!”

“No one is keeping her there,” Baekhyun rolled his eyes. “But you should know, when that rogue bit into her, he infected her.” The minute he said it, he wished he hadn’t. The smaller man jumped from the porch and rushed the gate. Kris pushed Baekhyun behind him and pushed them into the street and out of the man’s reach.

If the man could growl, he would have been. “You turned my daughter?!” he shouted at them.

Reese rushed down the steps and began pulling the man away from the gate. “No! I told you about the rogue!” he shouted at the man. “He grabbed her in the woods. The damn mate barely got her out.”

“I have a name…” Baekhyun mumbled, earning a glare from Kris. “The rogue bit her and she had already started to transform.” He tried to explain to them. “I had to fix it or she would have died!”

The man shook Reese off of him, and pointed a finger through the gate at the two of them. His wife rushed up behind him and grabbed onto his other arm. The man’s face was beet red and an overwhelming sadness welled in all of their eyes. “You’ve killed her,” he hissed at them. “Even if she’s still breathing… you’ve killed my baby girl.”

Kris slowly began to push Baekhyun back the way they had come, while the other boy was staring at his mate’s father. With an arm around his shoulders, Kris led his friend away. Behind them, they could hear the sobbing of her parents, and Reese’s voice ushering them back inside.