Page 148 of My Unhinged Alphas
Beside me, Lena whispers, “Oh my God.”
And then her eyes catch on something in the bottom corner of the screen, and she goes completely still.
“What is that?” she asks.
No one answers.
Because from where I’m standing, I can’t quite see it yet.
But whatever it is, it’s enough to make the blood leave her face.
Chapter 23
Lena
I stareat the monitor and at first, I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
The feed is grainy, angled down from the upper corner of my bedroom. My bed. My nightstand. The heap of clothes I left on the chair three nights ago. The stupid mug on the windowsill that saysWorld’s Okayest Human.
Then my eyes catch on the lower right corner of the desk, below the screen feed.
The blood drains straight out of my face.
There’s a photograph tucked halfway in one of the drawers. A photograph that should not be here, in this house.
It’s small, old, bent at one corner, and I know it before my brain fully catches up because I’ve seen it exactly once in my life. In the bottom of a storage box when I was sixteen, wedged between school forms and old foster paperwork I wasn’t supposed to have. A blonde woman holding a little girl on her hip, both of them half turned away from the camera.
The girl was me.
I didn’t leave the photo out.
I know I didn’t.
I shoved it back in the box because looking at it made me feel stupid and sick at the same time. Then I lost the box in one move or another, or maybe it got thrown out, or maybe I told myself it had because that was easier.
But here it is.
My mouth goes dry. “No,” I say, and my voice comes out thin. “No.”
Vale turns toward me immediately. “What?”
I point at the drawer because I can’t seem to get my hand to do anything else. “That photo.”
Havoc’s voice loses its usual bite. “Who is she?”
I keep staring at it. “I don’t know.”
That’s not true. Not fully.
I swallow hard. “I think she might be my mother.”
No one says anything.
Vale says, quietly, “You remembered her.”
I nod again. “A little.”
Voss is watching me now, no longer annoyed that I’m here. Just still.
