Her Alpha King

Chapter 35

Amina's POV

I stared down at the picture that was laid in front of me on the table, tears making the face blur.

He was gone.

How could this have happened?

How did it happen with no one noticing?

How am I going to deal with this mess alone?

Another broken promise.

**

"We've got nothing Luna."

Those were the same words that I'd been hearing for the last two weeks that Steve had been missing and I was tired of it. My son was missing and all I had to prove that he might still be alive is a picture that I'd been staring at every day since it came in the mail a week ago. It was a picture of Steve showing him dirty, bound, gagged, and bruised with tears running down his face with a simple message written on the back "I win."

I knew the kind of damage Tony could do to a defenseless child in a week so I knew that Steve's chances of survival were slim at this point and that was more than enough reason to find him as soon as possible.

"Then look again, widen the search."

The warrior sighed but went to do as he was told. We'd all been doing the same thing for weeks, searching the territory for hours with a fine tooth comb and coming up with nothing but a set of child sized footprints that stopped about twenty feet into the forest.

On top of Steve going missing, within twenty-four hours of his disappearance, both Elaine and Tatiana had, according to a guard, walked off the territory with falsified documents of approval in the wee hours of the morning the nigh before. An interrogation of Jaxon revealed that not only was Elaine a traitor, but recordings and documentation found in her room showed that she was the woman that had hurt and threatened Steve. 

I couldn't believe it, that she would betray her pack like that, but it was there in black and white. Elaine was a traitor and she was working for Tony, I just didn't understand why.What did she have to gain from working with Tony?   Jaxon wouldn't talk any more than he wanted to it seemed, so asking him was a bust.

I wasn't able to put much more thought into it as loud wails from the baby monitor broke the silence around me. I glanced up at the clock. He'd woken up early, I should have had another twenty minutes before James was up from his nap.

I sighed as I rushed to my room where I'd had his crib moved. I think out of all of us James was taking this the hardest. Once he realized his brother was gone and not coming back anytime soon, he was inconsolable for days. Although he was always a quite boy, he'd almost stopped talking completely and regressed to crying and sometimes pointing to ask for things. Every now and then I'd hear him calling for his father and brother through the cries but the only person he was willing to call for clearly was me.

The toddler had become incredibly clingy to me and refused to let anyone else too close. It worried me because I knew the only reason it was happening was because he was afraid that he'd lose me too. He'd already lost his first family, and I was all he had left of his second and my heart clinched at the fact that he might lose me too.

His cries grew louder as I pushed open the door, he was standing turned toward Steve's art table and as I listened, I could hear him crying out his brother's name, reaching his hands out as if waiting for him to magically appear and sing to him like I had discretely watched them do so many times before.

"It's okay James. Mama's here."

He whipped around quickly, something that looked like relief crossing his features as his cries died down slightly.