The next morning.
"You just had to go and bang my girlfriend's mother." Stephen was fuming.
Damien just shrugged his shoulders. "If you can't have 'em, bang their moms."
Stephen stopped pacing. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Damien shrugged his shoulders again.
They were in their ancestral mansion, a sprawling Victorian monstrosity with dark mahogany paneling that seemed to absorb all light and warmth, leaving only the faint scent of old money and older secrets lingering in the air between them.
**
Marcus, the Alpha of the Moonwalker pack, and Shawn, a member of the same pack, were busy examining a laid out map in the former's office.
"Do you think this plan will work?" Marcus asked.
"Yes, for sure." Shawn smiled.
**
"How could you do it, Mom?" Helena asked.
She and Nicole were in the cabin, a weathered sanctuary of knotty pine and river stone that smelled of last night's woodsmoke and this morning's coffee, sunlight filtering through dusty windows to illuminate the hurt in both their eyes.
"Bang your boyfriend?" Nicole asked sipping her coffee.
"I meant disappear for ages." Helena answered. "And for the record, his brother is my boyfriend."
Nicole's lips curled into that same seductive smile she'd worn for decades—the one that had lured countless men to her bed and broken just as many hearts.
She set her coffee cup down on the weathered oak table with deliberate slowness, her blood-red fingernails tapping once against the ceramic as her eyes, wild and knowing, never left her daughter's face.
"Too bad." Nicole said. "Now, I want Stephen too."
Helena slammed her cup on the same table and got up to leave. "I need some air."
She left her mother alone in the cabin, something she swore never to do.
But she left me for years, Helena thought bitterly.
She just started walking on the front porch when a black van pulled up. There were three men in balaclavas and Helena was in the mood to fight.
Helena's fists connected with bone and flesh as she unleashed her fury on the masked men. Her knuckles split open, blood—both hers and theirs—spattering across the weathered porch boards.
One attacker crumpled with a sickening crunch of cartilage, another doubled over retching as her knee found his solar plexus. The third man's arm twisted unnaturally in her grip before she slammed him face-first into the cabin wall.
They lay groaning at her feet, still breathing—information was worth more than vengeance, for now. The hair on the back of her neck prickled too late as a shadow stretched across the porch.
Something cold and metallic crashed against her skull, and the world exploded into fragments of light before darkness swallowed her whole.
**
Damien and Stephen were fighting each other in the grand hall. Furniture was being torn apart. The sight was horrendous.
The brothers latched on to each other, battered and bruised.
"You know what Alfred would say if we saw us right now?" Stephen smirked.
"Yeah." Damien smirked back. "He would say 'You should have taken this outside'."
Just then Alfred appeared.
"Sirs-"
"Yeah, yeah." Damien interrupted. "You want us to take this outside."
Stephen was about to punch him when Alfred interrupted. "Helena's been kidnapped."
Both brothers looked at their butler and said in unison. "Again?!"
**
Helena's wrists burned against the cold steel manacles that secured her to the chair, the metal biting into her skin with every futile tug. Condensation dripped down concrete walls, each droplet echoing in the cavernous space like a metronome counting down to something inevitable.
A single fluorescent bulb flickered overhead, casting sickly green-white light that transformed her skin to alabaster and made the dried blood on her temple look black as tar. The air tasted of rust and mildew, filling her lungs with each shallow breath she forced herself to take.
The door creaked open and in came the figure who most likely had knocked her out cold back at her cabin's porch.
He raised a water bottle in his grasp. "Here, have a drink."
The voice sounded familiar but Helena did not have time for analysis. She sprang from the chair, easily breaking through her chains, and leaped on top of the perpetrator.
She was on top of the mysterious man who was pinned to the ground, and was about to strike, when he raised both hands in defence and said. "Helena stop! It's me, Shawn."
Helena then noticed two men standing in the doorway.
They were Damien and Stephen.
"Well, well, well…" Damien slow-clapped his hands. "Looks like I'm not the only one having an affair."
Stephen ignored Damien's comment and sat down to gently touch Helena's head. "Are you okay?"
Helena realised he was talking about the blood on her. "It's not mine."
Stephen then beamed at Shawn who still had his hands up. "I think I have a lot of explaining to do."
At this comment, every other person in the room was in agreement.