Abby
“Jace, no!” Melody shouted, but he was already halfway to the second floor, and the tight clench of his fists was not a good sign. Though that did seem to indicate that he hadn’t sprouted claws yet.
“Wait!” I raced after him, and from the sound of the stampede, everyone else in house was behind me.
“Abby!” Lucas called from half a flight below. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Not now!” I yelled as Jace hit the second floor landing. There’d be plenty of time to avoid talking about my private life once I was sure Isaac wasn’t going to be killed, or fired, or…systematically neutered. I should never have said anything about Melody and Isaac, but she could be such a little bitch sometimes, and I’d struck out with the only weapon I had.
As I raced up the last half of the first flight of stairs, a door creaked open on the third floor, and Garrett, Jace’s youngest half brother, leaned over the railing overhead. Garrett was my age, and he was the only one of the Malone brothers I’d never wanted to punch. “What the hell? It’s barely six in the morning.”
When Foley Malone peeked over his shoulder, I realized the entire house was awake except for Patricia, and with the level of noise our stampede was causing, Jace’s mom couldn’t possibly be asleep for long.
“Jace is going to kill Isaac!” Melody squealed, as I followed Jace across the landing toward her closed bedroom door. “You guys do something!” She gave Chase a shove and he stumbled past me, but our Alpha’s growl of warning stopped him cold.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Jace snapped, and when he tried to open her door, he pulled the doorknob right off. Not good. “I’m just going to rip his balls off and—”
“Jace!” I grabbed his arm, then wrenched the amputated doorknob from his grip. I briefly considered recruiting Lucas for help, but if any of the guys touched Jace while he was seeing red, this would escalate too quickly for me to control. “That’s my brother!”
“In a minute, he’s going to be your sister,” Jace growled, and my stomach clenched miserably.
“Okay, wait. Let’s talk about this calmly. Melody’s an adult. Just like I am,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t need me to spell out my point. And maybe he wouldn’t have if the knobless door hadn’t swung open at that very moment to reveal Isaac standing in the middle of Melody’s bedroom floor, his hair wet and dripping, a towel tucked around his hips.
Jace’s gaze narrowed and his face flushed. “What the hell did you do to my sister?” he growled, and I could tell from the sound that his throat had already started to shift.
Uh-oh.
“Do to her?” Isaac stood his ground, his hands raised, palms out. “I didn’t do anything to her.”
Melody raced past us and threw herself between her brother and mine, her back pressed to Isaac’s chest. She held her arms out to protect him like a human shield, her brown eyes flashing in anger like I’d never seen from her. “Don’t hurt him, Jace. I love him,” she said as Garrett and Foley stomped down the stairs from the third floor.
I gaped at Melody, still clutching her broken doorknob. She loved him? She could not be serious. Melody was as self-centered as a tabby could get—which was saying a lot, considering that most of us were treated like precious cargo from birth—and she’d thrived on attention from tomcats since she was fourteen years old. From all the toms.
She’d claimed she was only trying to find the right match, which her father had told her was her one and only duty to the world, but her kiss-a-hundred-frogs approach had left more than one of the guys with a broken heart and a chip on his shoulder. Jace had traded two miffed enforcers for two of my brothers a couple of years before, just to patch the rift Melody had carved in his carefully bonded brotherhood. Now she was doing it again.
Or was she?
Tears stood in her eyes. Every muscle in her body was tense. And she wasn’t trying to defend herself; she was trying to protect Isaac.
“You love—” Jace shook his head, and I realized he couldn’t see the change in her. Or he wouldn’t, anyway. “You were in love with Chase this past summer, and Nate Blackwell back in the spring. You don’t know what you want yet, because no matter what year is stamped on your birth certificate, you’re still just a kid. I’m trying to give you time to figure out what you want.”
He’d been encouraging her to get to know herself before she threw herself at the next tom. Or to at least get to know the next tom before she threw herself at him. But she couldn’t be the only one who’d noticed he was preaching one thing but practicing something else entirely, with his endless string of human women.
At least, until me.
“Things are different now,” he insisted. “You don’t have to get married at nineteen and have six kids by thirty. You could go to school. You could get a job. You could even travel—”
“I don’t want any of that!” Melody shouted. “Not all girls are like Faythe and Abby, you know, and just because you want a woman who’d rather throw a roundhouse than a dinner party doesn’t mean every tom wants that. I just want a pretty wedding and a bunch of redheaded babies, and you obviously want the same thing,” she said with another pointed glance at me. “So, stop being a hypocrite.”
“Wait, what?” Isaac looked past Jace to me. “You and Jace? Since when?”
“It’s new,” I said, trying to avoid his gaze.
“What about Brian?” Luke demanded from my right.
“We broke up.”
“Oh. Well…good for you!” Isaac said, though I got the distinct impression he was only saying that because he knew he was currently in no position to criticize his Alpha’s private life. “I hope you’re happy together.” Isaac turned back to Jace. “The least you can do is wish us the same.”
“She’s nineteen years old and she doesn’t know what she wants!” Jace shouted. “You’re taking advantage of her!”
“No, he isn’t!” Tears rolled down Melody’s face, but she stood her ground, still pressed against my brother’s bare chest. “Being an Alpha doesn’t mean you know everything. We’re going to get married, and I’m going to have this baby, and you can’t—” Melody slapped one hand over her mouth, shocked by what she obviously hadn’t meant to say, and astonished silence descended over the now-crowded bedroom.
“Baby? You—!” Jace lunged for Isaac, but I grabbed his arm again as Melody burst into sobs.
“Wait! Let’s talk about this calmly,” I insisted, though I was as stunned as everyone else.
“Well, so much for letting me break the news to him gently,” Patricia Malone said, and I turned to find her standing in Melody’s bedroom doorway, both arms crossed over her long, gray robe, dark brown hair perfectly straight and in place, as if she slept sitting up on a shelf. She glanced around at the gathering of shocked shifters and sighed.
“You knew about this?” Jace pulled free from my grip.
“Of course I knew. She’s my daughter.”
“How could you let this happen?”
“Let it happen?” Patricia bristled—that was new. When I’d joined the Pride, she’d been a quiet, almost cowed woman accustomed to doing what was asked of her and mollifying her husband to keep the peace. “I didn’t let anything happen, and I’m no happier about it than you are, but I do know that killing your nephew’s father”—because the baby would almost certainly be male—“won’t help.”
“He’s not going to kill Isaac,” I insisted, and when Jace didn’t immediately agree, I elbowed him. “Right?”
“No, I’m not going to kill him.”
“You’re not even going to touch him!” Melody shouted. “Get the hell out of my room. This is none of your business.”
“I’m your Alpha, and he’s my employee. And this is my house. This is most certainly my business.”
Melody’s eyes narrowed, and I saw the verbal bullet coming before she fired it. “You’re only my Alpha because you killed my father!”
Jace recoiled, and I could see how much that hurt him, even
if she couldn’t. The truth was that Calvin Malone had only been the Alpha because he’d killed Jace’s real father—according to the rumor mill, anyway—but Jace would never say that to her, even in his own defense.
“Melody!” Patricia scolded.
“I don’t want you here! Get out!” she shouted at Jace, in spite of her mother’s censure. “Not just out of my room; I want you to get the hell out of my Pride!”
Shocked gasps echoed behind me.
Jace was the only Alpha I’d ever heard of who’d taken over his father’s territory rather than his wife’s, and we all knew that someday he would lose both his territory and his home. Again.
But for her to throw that in his face, after everything he’d done for her…after he’d rebuilt the Pride, practically from scratch…
“What did you just say to me?” Jace demanded, and my hair stood on end. He loved Melody in spite of the constant pain in the ass she’d been most of her life, but no Alpha could take a challenge like that lying down. Even if it came from his little sister.
“Okay, wait!” Isaac tugged Melody back and stepped in front of her, shielding her from Jace through a protective instinct surely everyone in the room recognized. “She doesn’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t!” Melody shouted, standing on her toes to glare at Jace over his shoulder. “He wants to keep me a child forever so he never has to give up my territory!”
“No, he’s only trying to protect you,” Isaac told her, without ever taking his wary focus from our Alpha. “Jace, your complaint is with me, not with her. She’s just upset.”
“Of course I’m upset!” Melody screeched, and when Isaac reached back to put a gentle hand on her arm, she actually seemed to calm. Their contact looked familiar and easy, as if they were very accustomed to touching each other, and not just for sex. Melody and Isaac weren’t just fooling around, and their relationship wasn’t new. Not brand-new, anyway.
With one glance at Jace, I realized he saw it too. And that he was kicking himself for not seeing it earlier.
“How long has this been going on?” He sounded at least a little calmer with the understanding that this wasn’t just a hookup gone wrong.
Isaac stood straight and tall, and unless I was imagining it, his chest was puffed out a little. “We’ve been together almost three months. But she’s only about six weeks along, if our math’s right. You’ll be able to smell the hormones soon. I can already, but I think that’s because I know what to look for. Or because the baby’s mine, or…” Isaac shrugged, and with that one simple gesture, the reality hit me.
“I’m going to be an aunt!” I grabbed Jace’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re going to be an uncle. Jace, this is good news!”
He didn’t argue, but neither did he agree. He was still caught up on how young and self-involved Melody was, and he was probably upset because she’d just deprived herself of a world of newly available choices.
“We were going to tell you soon. We really were.” Isaac held Jace’s gaze boldly, and I could hardly contain my surprise. Refusing to drop his eyes meant he was rejecting the subservient role. That was Alpha potential showing itself. Faythe had told me Jace went through the same thing—instinctively refusing to follow Marc’s leadership—the year of the revolution.
Alpha potential is innate; some shifters are born with it, some aren’t. But often, those who do have that potential don’t show it, or even realize it, until some major life event triggers a psychological shift. Jace’s was triggered by a combination of his feelings for Faythe and his grief over her brother Ethan, his best friend.
Melody’s pregnancy had obviously kicked Isaac’s Alpha development into overdrive.
I wondered if our parents had any idea.
The silence from the crowd gathered in Melody’s bedroom told me none of the others had realized it either. And that no one other than Patricia had known about Isaac and Mel’s relationship.
“Okay.” Jace nodded slowly. “What’s done is done, and we all have work to do, so we’ll have to address this later.” He glanced around the room. “Chase, go to the east cabin and wake everyone up. Luke, Warner, Abby, be ready to go in an hour.” With that, Jace leaned down to kiss me—drawing a surprised look from his mother, who’d missed that part of the discussion. Then he marched across the second-floor landing into his own room and slammed the door without another word.
I was brewing coffee in the kitchen of the lodge when Patricia came in and started pulling cartons of eggs and packages of bacon from the fridge. “If we’re all up, we might as well eat,” she said, twisting her long brown hair into a loose knot at the back of her head.
I’d never mastered that particular skill. I had way too much hair.
“How do you take your eggs?” she asked, as I began pulling travel mugs from an overhead cabinet. Which I could barely reach. Being short sucks.
“I take them as an unavoidable ingredient in cakes and brownies. Or fully grown and in the form of nuggets or tenders,” I added with a glance into the backyard, where the rising sun was painting the east cabin with bright streaks of light. So much for getting an early start.
Patricia turned to me with one brow upraised, a strip of bacon dangling over a heated skillet from between her thumb and forefinger. “You don’t like eggs?”
“Not as a main course. Sorry.” The coffee pot gurgled, and I leaned closer to let the scent help wake me up. I’d been fired up and ready to kick serious ass, until the emotionally exhausting drama-fest had drained my energy like pulling the plug from the bottom of a full tub.
Bacon sizzled and grease popped, and I realized I was hungry.
“So, what do you eat for breakfast?”
“Oh, don’t go to any trouble for me. I’ll just grab a few strips of bacon on the way out the door.”
“It’s for future reference.” Patricia was facing the stove, but something in her voice—some softer-than-normal quality—told me that was as close to a “welcome to the family” as I’d ever get.
“I like breakfast meats and breads, mostly. Bagels. Pancakes. Scones.”
Jace’s mother huffed as she cracked another egg over the skillet. “Scones are just fancy biscuits. Do you like biscuits?”
“Yes!” I said, disproportionately pleased to have what felt like good news to give her.
She nodded firmly. “I can do biscuits. Thirty minutes.” With that, she left eggs and bacon sizzling on the stove and headed into the giant, well-stocked pantry.
Melody came downstairs a minute later, her eyes still red from crying. She looked exhausted. “No coffee,” her mother said, carrying a ten-pound bag of flour under one arm and a can of baking powder in the opposite hand. Evidently, she was going to make biscuits from scratch. In thirty minutes. “Caffeine isn’t good for the baby.”
“Turns out there’s caffeine in chocolate too,” I whispered to Melody while her mother dug in a drawer full of metal measuring spoons. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Jace’s sister looked at me as if I were a piece of gum stuck in her hair, and I turned back to the coffee pot as it spat the last of the coffee into its carafe. I decided to have a cup right in front of her.
But guilt got the better of me as I stirred sugar and creamer into my steaming travel mug. “Listen, Melody, I’m so sorry.” I sank onto the bar stool next her. “I should never have said anything about you and Isaac. I had no idea it would set off such a shitstorm.”
“That was kind of bitchy.” She shrugged. “I was almost impressed. But they were all going to find out eventually anyway.” And that was clearly as close to an acceptance of my apology as I was going to get. Like mother, like daughter.
It was a miracle Jace had survived childhood.
“So, you and Isaac are getting married?” I said, and when Melody turned to me with stars in her eyes, I realized I’d just said the magic words.
“Yes, and you have to be my maid of honor. No one else will do it.”
“Oh, I??
?m sure someone will.”
“No.” Patricia dumped a cup of white flour into a big metal mixing bowl. “They won’t.”
“The other tabbies all think I’m a total bitch,” Melody whispered, as if that information might come as a shock to anyone. “You have to be my maid of honor. I’ll totally return the favor for you, if I’m not hugely pregnant when you and Jace get married.”
When Jace and I got married?
We’d only been together for nine hours, but everyone seemed to take for granted that there was a wedding to plan. “Oh, we’re not… We haven’t really talked about the future yet,” I said.
Melody frowned. “What is there to talk about other than picking a date? But I’ve got dibs on Valentine’s Day, so don’t even think about it.”
I held my hands up in a defensive move. “All yours. Like I said, we’re not really…” Another shrug.
“You’re almost through with school, right?” she said, and I nodded. “And it’s not like you’re getting any younger. You may have to go through five or six pregnancies before you get a girl, and I hear childbirth is really hard for older—”
“Okay, I really just came down for coffee, but thanks for the chat!” I stood so quickly that my barstool tipped over and slammed into the floor. Melody rolled her eyes and made no attempt to help me right it, so I picked up the barstool, then hurried out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
I’d been standing outside Jace’s door for nearly a minute, trying to work up the nerve to knock, when he opened the door on his own. “How’d you know?” I asked, as he stepped back to let me in.
“I could see your shadow under the door. And hear your heartbeat.” He pulled me into a hug as he kicked the door shut, and he smelled so good. “What’s wrong?”
“Other than the fact that my brother knocked up your sister?” I laid my head against his chest, trying to come to grips with how much had happened in the past twenty-four hours.
New job. Psycho stalker. Overdue breakup. Sex. Melody’s pregnancy. And now hunting the hunters—the only thing I’d truly hoped to accomplish during my winter break.