My fist slammed into his jaw, and his head hit the tree trunk. His eyes watered, but I couldn’t tell if they were tears of regret or pain. And I didn’t care.
One of the guys tugged me backward by the hem of my shirt, and I stood, the cold forgotten. “We were family.” I kicked, and my boot slammed into his thigh. “You were my big brother.”
Ryan’s tears fell. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. Didn’t want to.
“Brothers are supposed to make sure things like that never happen to little sisters. It’s your job, whether you’re an enforcer or not. Ethan knew that. Why the hell didn’t you?” I kicked again, and Ryan huddled against the base of the tree. He didn’t even try to defend himself. Like he wanted to be punished. Like being hit alleviated some of the guilt.
Marc tugged me again, and I stumbled backward, half-shocked to see the blood on my hand. I hadn’t realized I still carried that much rage.
Ryan looked up. He wiped blood and tears on the sleeve of his jacket and stood slowly. “I’m so sorry, Faythe. I know it’s never gonna be enough, but I am so, so sorry.”
Yeah. Tell that to Sara and Abby. “Get out.” My eyes burned, and I wanted to rub them. Or close them.
“Faythe…”
“Get out!” I shouted. “And if you come back, I swear I’ll wear your canines as earrings.”
“Please…” He tried one last time, swiping at the steady trickle of blood from his nose.
“Go!”
Finally Ryan ran. He looked back twice. And I only realized I was crying when I fell to my knees, and Jace licked the hot tears from my face with his warm, rough tongue. They curled around me, both of them sharing their warmth and their comfort, and I dug my fingers into their fur. And for several minutes, I could only cry.
I sat on the couch in the guesthouse, my fingers still numb from the cold, my face still red from crying.
Marc zipped his pants, and the metallic whisper was loud in the near silence, even from the kitchenette across the room. While Jace finished his Shift, Marc brought me a cold bottle of water; no doubt all the glasses were dirty. Half a minute later, Jace stood, nude from his Shift and in no rush to reach for his clothes.
Marc scowled and tossed him the jeans I’d picked up on our way out of the woods.
Jace watched me in concern as he pulled them on, and the look Marc shot him could have frozen lava. But Jace was unfazed. “I’ll get her fixed up. You go get her a clean shirt.”
“I am not leaving you alone with her. Here.” Where Jace and I had…connected. On the living room floor.
Jace rolled brilliant blue eyes. “Like I’m gonna hit on her while she’s upset.”
“If memory serves, that’s when she’s most…receptive,” Marc spat.
My temper flared and my hands curled into fists, but I kept my mouth shut. He’d survived being cuckolded—I could survive his anger.
Jace stomped into the kitchen and slammed his hands flat on the countertop, staring across the island at Marc. “You can take this out on me if you want, but leave her the hell alone.”
“You talk to me like that again, and I’ll take this out on your face,” Marc growled through clenched teeth.
“Go for it.” Jace stood straight and spread his arms, inviting the first blow. He wanted to fight, but he wouldn’t start it because he knew that would piss me off.
Marc was trying to piss me off. To hurt me like I’d hurt him.
And his tongue turned out to be just as sharp as mine.
“No.” I should have been encouraged by the fact that I didn’t have to raise my voice to stop them, but in that moment, I was kind of seeing the cup as half-empty. “Unless you want to tell my dad that I beat the snot out of you both, you better lay the hell off.” I looked up from the bottle, cold and wet in my hand. “I can’t go in there wearing Ryan’s blood, and if I borrow a shirt from either one of you, someone’s going to ask what happened to my own.”
“Fine.” Marc nodded toward the front door. “Jace, go get her a clean shirt. She has another one just like it.” In fact, I had several button-down black blouses, useful for both work and play.
Jace shrugged. “And what should I say when someone sees me rooting through her drawers, or even just coming out of her room with a shirt?”
“Damn it,” Marc swore. No one would question his presence in my room, or his possession of my shirt—in a good month, I lost a couple of articles of clothing in the line of duty, and at least one more to the force of nature that is Marc and his impatience. He slammed one fist into the countertop, then took off for the door without another glance at either of us.
When he was gone, Jace ran water in the sink, then sank onto the couch next to me with a steaming, damp rag. “Do you, um, want to take that off?” He was staring at my bloodstained shirt. “In the most platonic sense of…stripping.”
“I shouldn’t.” Not until Marc was back. But I could hardly stand the scent of Ryan’s blood on me. It reminded me of what I’d just done to him, and what he’d let happen to me. So I twisted away from Jace and unbuttoned my blouse.
He gave me space to move, but I felt his gaze on me like a palpable heat, and my heart beat faster.
My hand shook when I dropped the soiled cotton on the floor.
“Here, lean back,” Jace whispered, and when I didn’t move—when I couldn’t, for fear of shattering my fragile self-control—he slid one strong hand behind my neck and cradled my skull, tilting my head back with gentle pressure.
He wiped the back of my jaw with the warm, wet rag, and his pulse whooshed faster with each movement. He closed his eyes, and my heartbeat spiked with panic. There was no platonic touching between me and Jace. Not anymore. And I’d already learned that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of…Marc’s fury and pain.
“I got it.” I took the rag from him and perfunctorily cleaned my neck and chest, while he stared at the floor, obviously determined not to watch. To think about something else. When I was done, I dropped the rag on the end table and turned to lean against the couch arm, my legs folded beneath me to keep distance between us.
Jace frowned at me, his intense gaze searching mine. He’d found something else to focus on, and I could already tell I wouldn’t like the change of subject. “Do you really dream about it? About being in that basement?”
I stared into my lap, where my fingers tried to twist one another into knots, until Jace’s hand closed over them. “You think I’d make that up?”
“You never said anything. Does Marc know?”
I nodded. “How could he not?”
Jace inhaled deeply, and I heard his pulse speed up. “If sleeping alone makes it worse…you don’t have to sleep alone.” I looked up with one brow raised, but he rushed on. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just saying…I’m here.”
My heart ached, like it was too full to fit in my chest, and I blinked to keep him from seeing that. “Yeah. Until Marc kills you.”
“I’d like to see him try.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Footsteps clomped up the stairs, and Jace moved a foot away on the couch. The door swung open and Marc took us both in. He scowled, but made no comment. We hadn’t broken the rules—technically.
“Here.” He tossed the clean shirt at me and I stood to put it on. “You better hurry. Angela just turned into the driveway.”
Two
I jogged across the backyard toward the main house, Marc and Jace on my heels. We burst through the back door, and they passed me when I stopped in the guest bathroom to make sure my shirt was straight and there were no leaves in my hair. I had gotten all the blood off my neck, but I had to wash my hands to get Ryan’s scent off my right fist, which was when I discovered I’d split two of my knuckles on his face. Crap.
None of my fellow cats would give it a second thought; they’d assume I’d assaulted the hanging bag without my gloves again. But Angela… She probably wouldn’t know what to make of my split knuckles, not to men
tion the thin white line bisecting my left cheek. At least my sleeve covered the long, zigzag of new scar tissue on my left forearm—that was one less question to answer. Assuming she was bold enough to actually ask.
Her engine growled out front, and my pulse spiked almost painfully. Why was I so nervous? Well, truthfully, everyone was nervous. It isn’t every day you meet your dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend. A human girlfriend, at that. And she had no idea that we weren’t completely human, so a good deal of the ambient tension had to do with hiding our little secret, so she didn’t run screaming into the…broad daylight.
The rest of it had to do with the baby. Ethan’s baby, whose existence we’d only discovered the day we buried my brother. A tiny piece of him we’d had no reason to hope for. The grandchild my parents never expected.
That baby was a genetic miracle, and we desperately wanted Angela to like us. To want to include us in her child’s life.
Yet my own nerves went beyond that. They were a complex mix of jealousy, nostalgia, and relief over my near miss with a tragically mundane life.
Angela would be my first up-close look at anything resembling normalcy since I’d left grad school. The freedom I’d once fought for was now gone—choked out of existence by the iron grip of responsibility—and the life I’d once run from had reclaimed me. I’d made my own choices, and while I had undeniably moved past that escapist phase of my life, there was some tiny part of me that leaned toward panic at the knowledge that I couldn’t go back now even if I wanted to.
I stared into the mirror, trying to see myself as she would see me. Tangled hair, scarred cheek, skinned knuckles. My face was too thin, my arms and shoulders too well-defined. And there was a hardness behind my eyes now, difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.
I’d seen and done things that would have put most women my age in a padded room. I’d fought for my life, my freedom, and my family. I’d been kidnapped, beaten, broken, clawed, and stabbed. I’d caught rogues, and killed killers, and I’d watched my brother die. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago, I’d been a student like Angela.
Minus the whole faulty-condom-turned-miracle thing.
My mother appeared in the bathroom doorway, nervously twisting her wedding ring as I tried to finger-comb my hair. “She’s here.”
“So I heard.” I turned away from my identity crisis and smiled, almost amused to see her so flustered. My mom hadn’t blinked an eye when she’d faced down a jungle stray in her own basement, but now she looked ready to lose her breakfast. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted, while doubt rang in my head, soft but insistent. There was no way we’d come off like the average American household. The Addams Family had a better shot.
What if Angela knew something was scary-different about us, and she took off with Ethan’s baby? What if she decided not to have it?
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” My mother straightened her freshly pressed blouse, and the high arch of her brows managed to convey both eagerness and dread. “I mean, obviously we should help her financially, but maybe we should…keep our distance. It’s not really a good time, with you all leaving tomorrow….”
After months of waiting, lobbying, and fighting on the sidelines, our big day had finally come. Marc, Jace, and I would accompany my father to a meeting of the full Territorial Council, ostensibly for the vote that could reinstate him as council chair—or put Jace’s megalomaniac stepfather, Calvin Malone, in power. But our real reason for going was to present hard-won evidence against Malone as a traitor to our species and hopefully put him out of the running. And completely out of power.
I shoved aside my own doubts and linked my arm through hers to keep her from twisting her own fingers off. “The timing is out of our hands,” I said, and she could only nod. “Let’s just try not to overwhelm her.”
I stepped into the hall, half tugging my mother, and rolled my eyes when I saw Brian, Parker, and Vic peering through the sidelight windows. “Guys. Come on. We’re trying not to overwhelm her.”
Brian shrugged, looking younger than ever, and Vic just frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “You really think there’s any chance of that?”
“If you guys lay off the stares and turn on the charm, yeah.” Though privately I had my doubts. “Remember, you’re normal, nonfurry ranch hands and good friends of the family.” That was close enough to the truth to be believable—if the Lazy S had been a functioning ranch. And if ranch hands were trained to protect their Alpha, patrol their territory, and take down bad guys with badass paw-to-paw combat.
“Brian, go tell my dad she’s here,” I said, and he took off dutifully toward the office, which was virtually soundproof with the door closed, thanks to solid concrete walls.
“This is so weird.” Parker ran one hand through straight salt-and-pepper hair. “Ethan would have been a dad. I can’t picture it.”
“I can.” I steered him away from the door, hoping Angela wouldn’t smell the whiskey on his breath. At one o’clock in the afternoon.
My mother ducked into the living room to tweak an arrangement of snacks, and I squeezed in next to Vic to peek out the window. Our guest still sat in her car with the driver’s-side door open, digging in her purse for something. But I had the distinct impression that she was stalling.
I couldn’t decide who was more nervous—Angela or my mom. Or me.
“Scoot over,” Kaci said, and I turned to find the young tabby standing behind me, hazel eyes wide, long brown hair pulled into a thick wavy ponytail at the base of her neck. Kaci didn’t look nervous. She looked curious. And skeptical.
Ethan’s death had hit her very hard, and she now seemed both fascinated to meet his only remaining link to the world and ambivalent to the woman who’d known a very different side of him. “She looks…normal.”
Jace laughed. “You were expecting two heads?”
Kaci only frowned. “How come she’s just sitting in her car?”
Marc spoke up from the dining room doorway, making no attempt to look through the window. “I’m sure she’s nervous.”
And she hadn’t even met our brood yet. “Okay, why don’t you guys all go sit, so we don’t overwhelm her the moment she walks in the door.”
Marc’s frown mirrored Kaci’s, but he herded the thirteen-year-old tabby toward the living room and shot one last irritated glance at me and Jace before stepping through the doorway and out of sight. I’d been nominated for the welcoming committee because I was the only tabby near her age—at least, the only one with flawless English—and Jace got to play because he’d set up the meeting with Angela. He’d dated her twin for a few weeks, back when Ethan and Angela first started going out.
Yes, Jace and Ethan dated twins. Seriously.
Jace stepped closer to me in the deserted hallway, ostensibly to look through the window, and the warmth from his chest leached through the back of my shirt. “You ready?” he asked, but the question felt loaded, like Angela was the last thing on his mind.
Mom was right; the timing could not have been worse.
I sighed. “Not even kind of.”
He turned me by both shoulders and grinned down at me. “She won’t bite. And she’s probably the only person within a square mile who can swear to that right now.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
I opened the door, and Angela looked up when we stepped onto the porch. Then she took a deep breath and got out of the car.
She’s so young, I thought, taking in her slim form and freckled cheeks. But she was only a year younger than I was, and twenty-two really wasn’t that young to be a first-time mother. Even today, most tabbies already had a son or two by Angela’s age.
I smiled, and her mouth turned up in a nervous reflection of my own expression. Then she noticed the tom behind me, and her whole face brightened.
“Jace!” She sounded so familiar I had to fight a sharp jolt of jealousy, though I knew she and Jace had never been involved. But I was suddenly irritated by th
e realization that she knew more about some part of his life than I did. And even more about Ethan’s. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”
“Like I’d let you walk into the lion’s den all alone,” he teased, and that streak of jealousy in me grew stronger as her smile widened. Though Jace and Ethan had rarely ever sat at home on the weekends, I couldn’t remember ever actually seeing him interact with someone outside the sphere of our secret existence. He was…different. Relaxed and confident, showing no sign of the power struggle with Marc or the bloodlust we’d all been battling for weeks now.
I was amazed that he could turn all that off and set her at ease. And beneath my jealousy, I was grateful, because none of the rest of us knew Angela well enough to play Virgil, guiding her through the hell our world had become since Ethan’s death.
“Don’t worry, they’re all eager to meet you,” Jace said, and I followed him down the steps, hanging back when she hugged him, clinging to him like a life raft in a storm.
“Andrea still asks about you,” she said, when he finally pulled away.
Jace stiffened, like he wanted to glance back at me, and pulled one hand through his hair. “How is she?”
“Fine. Surprised.” She grinned and ran one hand over her flat stomach, and some vague tension in me eased. She was happy to be pregnant. She didn’t resent Ethan’s baby, and that made me like her, in spite of her familiar manner with Jace. “She’s excited to be an aunt.”
So was I.
I’d never expected to be related by blood to a child who wasn’t mine. Few toms ever had children, and though Ethan was a great fighter, he wasn’t a leader. He would never have been an Alpha, nor would he have settled in a childless human marriage like Michael. So if not for Angela and her baby, we would have nothing left of him but memories.