Free Deception (Dark Alpha #3) by Alisa Woods

Killing Mace would be the easy part—it was the idea of leaving Gage’s pack that twisted Jak’s stomach in a knot.
    He had just left Circe and her coven a few hours ago. Normally on a Saturday night, Gage’s pack would be out club-hopping, but tonight, he had brought them straight here, to the Olympic mountains, for some pack bonding time.
    Jak kicked at the fall leaves with his boots while he leaned against the pack’s van. Gage was instructing Mason and the others—Joe, Frank, Billy, and Sampson, the youngest and wildest of the bunch, and all the rest—about the rules. All fifteen were in attendance tonight—the hunt was mandatory for everyone, including Jak. It was a standard hunt, and he had developed the game, so he already knew what Gage had planned. The half-moon lit up the meadow well enough for Jak to see  the rest of Gage’s pack punching each other good-naturedly and laughing too loud in each other’s faces, .
    It wasn’t actually these jokers he would miss, although they were the closest thing he’d ever had to real brothers—his own were more sadists than siblings. As the youngest, Jak was always omega to their abundance of alphas. It was a regular sport for them to see  how many pieces they could take out of him without requiring a healer to stitch him back together. Jak’s father only encouraged them: he was the leader of their small, country pack, a real alpha’s alpha, and he had a barely disguised disdain for his youngest son, the tech geek. Jak’s mother had protected him from the savagery of his older brothers, but as Jak grew big enough to fight back, it got uglier.
    And then his mom died.
    Jak’s wolf still howled a long mournful cry every time he thought about her. But Jak’s human side had nothing but rage… and a single photo that he’d had on him when he left his pack and family for good.
    His mom was as gentle as they came and beautiful besides. She always kept him close—he had already been the target of his brothers’ twisted humor more than once when she wasn’t watching. Her kitchen was the safest place for him in his family’s sprawling ranch in the mountains northeast of Seattle. She was a captive mate, like Arianna, and dutifully bore pups for his father, but their mating was never a love match—Jak remembered with nauseating clarity the day he figured that out.
    He was just a kid, maybe ten. His father came home drunk in the middle of the day, somehow missing that Jak was curled up under the kitchen table, putting together computer parts. He had scored a motherboard from one of his teachers—along with parts scavenged off the internet and his friends at school—and he was buried in building a computer of his own.
    Jak hardly made a sound, and he had always wondered if things would have been different if he had. His father had always been rough and demanding—Jak loathed him more each day of his childhood. But that spring day, he watched, silently, as his father forced himself on his mother, right above Jak, on the kitchen table. His father never realized he was there.
    His stomach still heaved every time he thought of it: the shaking of the table, his father’s grunts, his mother’s quiet sobs afterward. It would forever be seared into his mind.
    From then on, Jak tried to protect his mom, to keep her away from his father, even going so far as to take the beatings his father liked to mete out, as long as he didn’t vent his frustrations, whatever they were, on her. But it was no use: Jak was still just a kid. Then  one day he came home from school to find her dead.
    It takes a lot to kill a wolf.
    Jak’s inner beast howled again, and Jak ground his boot into the rocky forest floor. He had no doubt his father had done it. You could hardly see the bruises on his mother’s neck under her fur, but they blared out his father’s guilt. Jak could only imagine how much she had to fight at the end, even shifting to do it… Jak never figured out why his father did