Pregnant With Four Alphas' Babies: A Reverse Harem Romance Chapter 136: Get Out of Here

*Tristan*

Rose is looking at me with a confused expression on her face as she puzzles over my question. “Cora?” she repeats. “Who the hell is Cora?”

I nod, not surprised that she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. I didn’t know who the girl was either until a recent conversation I had with Mark. I hope I haven’t missed any other important mind-link messages while Mark and I were going back and forth.

“That woman who came in with Trevor to tell us that Eli isn’t where he’s supposed to be,” I explain to her. “Do you know her at all? Has Eli said anything to you about her?”

She shakes her head quickly. “No, he never mentioned her to me. If he had, I would definitely remember. I will always remember the names of any women that any of you mention to me.” She narrows her gaze and gives me a pointed look, and I am mentally making the decision to hire a male nanny… make sure my child’s teachers are always male, and never let Rose know if the kind old woman next door to our imaginary cottage in the countryside in my head gives us some freshly baked cookies while Tristan Junior and I are out on a walk….

“Okay,” I say, thinking perhaps Rose isn’t the best person to talk this over with then. After all, she’s already stressed, and I don’t want to make it worse.

“Why are you asking about her?” My beautiful Rose never misses anything. But I am afraid she thinks I am either after Cora because I think she’s cute or she thinks I suspect Eli is getting busy with her on the side.

I don’t want to tell her the truth, that I felt there was something suspicious about the woman. But I know it would be better for Rose to know my true concerns rather than what she’s imagining.

“Well, I just got a bad vibe from her. It’s sort of hard to explain, but I think she might be up to no good. I think she might know something about what happened to Eli, but so far, I have nothing but my gut feeling.” It’s hard to explain how I just know that she’s off. But when I was talking to Mark, he said he felt it, too. I think it has something to do with being an Alpha. It’s like mothers’ intuition but for Alphas.

“Did you say something to Mark or Reece?” I can see that Rose is overly concerned now.

“Yeah, yeah.” I try to calm her mind and pat her arm. “Mark sensed it was something that might be worth keeping an eye on, too.”

“But she might know where Eli is!” Rose sits up straight, and I can hear her heart beating super fast now.

“I know.” Again, I try to calm her with my touch. “And we are working on finding a way to get her to talk, if she knows something, without tipping her off.” I reach up and cup her cheek, aware that I have other messages coming into my head right now, but Rose is more important than whatever Kelly wants to yell at me about. “Trust us, baby. We all love you, and Eli is part of our family, so we will find him.”

I can’t help but wonder why Eli wasn’t able to pick up on the sneakiness vibes flowing off of Cora like stink on a skunk–a skunk with a major farting problem….

“All right,” Rose says, though her expression tells me that she doesn’t feel all right about it at all.

“Tristan!”

I think I hear Kelly’s actual voice coming from somewhere nearby now and mind myself gazing around the room, like she might be a ghost.

But then I remember the tunnels.

In my head, she shouts, “King Gene is coming!”

“Oh, shit,” I say, pulling myself away from Rose just as she puckers up for a kiss. “I have to go!”

“Wh-what?” Rose stammers. “Why?”

Before I can answer, we hear Adam’s voice in the hallway. “King Gene, here we are at the Breeder’s room!”

Her eyes bulge as she processes what is happening, too. I’m glad I kept my pants on as I hastily kiss Rose and then sprint for the wall, just as I hear Rose’s bedroom door knob rattle.

I pull the faux wall open, tugging it closed behind me as I turn and sprint through the darkness.

After about three steps, I smack right into a short, hard, pointy, moving brick wall.

“Oof!” the wall says, and I realize it’s Kelly. “Son of a monkey!” she shouts.

“Sorry! Sorry!” I catch her before she can tumble backward, and I realize it was either her nose or her elbow that connected with my chest. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better,” she mumbles. “Come on! We have to get away from here in case King Gene sticks his head into the secret passage!”

“He’s not gonna–” I begin as the door behind us creaks open once again.

I do my best to smash myself up against the wall, as if I will somehow blend in and become invisible. While a human probably wouldn’t be able to see me in the shadows, any wolf would be able to, I bet. Even one as old and nonsensical as Gene.

I see a familiar face looking at me, wide-eyed, and then hear Adam’s voice as he says, “Nope. No one in here. I guess I was mistaken.” He closes the door quickly, and Kelly and I both turn around and run through the darkness as quickly as we can, feeling along the wall with our hands to keep from colliding with anything else–like a secret door.

“Do you know how to get back to the library from here?” Kelly asks me.

“No,” I admit. “But I know how to get there from the queen’s room.”

“Perfect. I know how to get there from here,” she says, and now that we’re relatively certain that we are not about to be caught by the king, we can slow down a little bit.

As we walk, I can’t help but ask her, “Did your brother ever say anything about Cora to you?”

“Cora?” she echoes. “Who is–oh, that new girl? The one he put in charge of all of the other female warriors?”

I knew none of this, so I’m not sure how to respond. I end up saying, “The one that was with Trevor earlier when he came to say he couldn’t find Eli.”

“Right, that’s her. Uh, no, he just said… he’d trust anyone with those sort of recommendations,” Kelly doesn’t seem concerned either. “Why?”

“I’m just… a little worried about her. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but she seems sneaky to me. Untrustworthy. Shady.”

Kelly stops walking and turns and looks at me, and even though there’s not a lot of light in here, I can see the expression on her face, and she’s confused. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” she says.

“What do you mean it doesn’t make any sense?” I guess she doesn’t understand Alphas’ intuition either. “You see, I just have a gut feeling that she might know what’s going on with Eli, like she’s somehow responsible for the fact that he’s missing.”

“No, I understand what you’re saying,” Kelly begins folding her arm, and staring up at me. “Eli gets those feelings, too. My dad also used to. One time, he told me I couldn’t be friends with a boy in elementary school because he thought he was bad news. I told my dad he was being silly, but a few days later, that kid did something awful to our teacher, so yeah, I get it.”

I am sidetracked now. “What did he do to your teacher?” I have to know.

“Oh, he stole her teeth,” she says with a shrug.

We are wasting time on this; I am aware of that. But when someone makes a nonchalant statement like that, my interest is piqued. “How the hell does someone steal a person’s teeth?”

She sighs and shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have mentioned this. You’ve gone down the rabbit hole.”

“Yes. I have. Please, I must know.” I study her face in the thin light that’s coming in from a crack somewhere up ahead, one I hope is an exit because it smells like the musty armpit of an old fisherman who fell in pulling the net back to the boat in here.

“Okay, so, my teacher was super old, but every day for lunch, she’d eat an apple, and then she’d get pieces of the peel stuck in her dentures, so she’d take them out and soak them after lunch and teach our reading lesson without them in. It’s no wonder none of us learned to read that year. We all sounded way too gummy whenever we tried.”

I bite back a laugh, imagining a group of little kids trying to read without using their teeth. “So he stole them?”

“He did,” she says with a nod. “He gave them back, but by then, well, they were unusable.”

“Why is that?” I ask, knowing I need to move along and get back to what she said before.

“Oh, he’d been wearing them around, pretending he’d shifted and biting people in the butt. By the time she got them back, they smelled like a bunch of farts.”

“Skunk farts?” I ask, not sure why.

She laughs. “Just regular farts. So, anyway, yeah. I get what you’re saying. Alpha’s intuition and all that. But what I don’t understand is why you of all people would have reservations about Cora.”

Confusion washes over me again. “What do you mean? I don’t even know Cora,” I tell her.

“Of course, you do!” she insists, pushing me in the shoulder to drive home her statement.

“No, I don’t. Why do you think I know Cora?”

“Because!” she declares. “She’s from your pack–you were her reference!”