Chapter One
Luca
“This is your last chance to back out,” Rian said, his kindness shining in his eyes that held more hesitation than I’d expected.
We were borrowing Rian’s partner Holden’s house, laying on his bed. It struck me that I hadn’t really considered what it would mean to him to kill me, even if he was going to bring me back immediately.
I opened my mouth to talk, but a vicious bout of coughing interrupted me. The intensity of the now-familiar pain in my chest made me grimace as I tried to breathe.
Rian made a sympathetic face, then cocked his head as he listened for something. He smiled and quietly said, “The boys are worried.”
Of course they were. They’d become friends like the rest of Rian’s best friend Brodie’s pack.
Holden had gotten a work-related call and he’d had to leave before we got going. The situation at the Luxton sheriff’s station was messy as fuck right now, and even though I would’vepreferred he was there for Ben and Max before, and Rian after, my turning, it couldn’t be helped.
Lifting my hand to cup Rian’s cheek, I asked, “Are you okay with this? I can ask Brodie—”
“No,” he cut me off. “I mean, I’m okay with this. I want… I want it to be me as long as you want the same. I know it would be different for you to be a wolf and we’ve gone through everything that comes with vampirism, but….” He glanced away.
Some part of me wondered if he longed for family. He was around two hundred years old and had lost everyone in his family during the Great Famine in the mid-1800s in Ireland. Sure, he had his chosen family, the people who loved him and he loved back, but turning someone was the closest a vampire could get to a blood family—pun intended.
I smiled and pulled back my hand. “Good. So let’s do this before the puppies wear a groove into the floor.”
I heard one thump from the other side of the bedroom door, which meant they’d heard me, not that I’d tried to keep quiet anyway.
I wished I could’ve taken one last deep breath, but I’d been unable to take one for more than a month now. I was near dying, and even though only a couple of months ago I wouldn’t have minded, the McRae pack had given me a home, a family, and enough reason to go on until I figured out something other than their love to carry me. Love was good and fine, but one needed more purpose than that.
Then I suddenly had a thought and I blurted out, “Wait!”
Rian leaned back minutely, looking at me questioningly.
“I just… Max? Ben? Can you come in for a moment?”
I heard shuffling, then the door opened and Max walked in, wearing some sweats and a T-shirt. Ben, however, had opted to stay in wolf form. I knew they’d shifted as soon as we went intothe bedroom, mostly because their instincts to protect us made them feel more comfortable in their wolf skin.
I carefully rolled over to my other side so Max could sit on the edge of the bed. Ben stayed on the floor, but he placed his head next to his brother’s knee.
“How can we help, Luca?” Max asked, his blue eyes so damn filled with emotion that it made me a bit choked up.
“I just… I just realized I didn’t….” I swallowed hard and felt Rian’s cool hand settle over my ribs in support. “I didn’t say anything if… in case… I mean….” Why was it so damn hard to speak all of a sudden?
“In case you don’t make it?” Max made an educated guess, his eyes welling over immediately.
Ben whined, then nudged both his brother and my hand.
Out of the two, Max was a year younger, and much more sensitive than his brother. They could’ve been twins with how in tune they were, and from what little I knew, I had guessed that they’d been largely taking care of each other for a very long time. They weren’t quite thirty yet, and I could practically feel the weariness from them, Ben more than his brother.
They’d both been fans of mine for years. Back when I made music. It seemed like another lifetime now that I was—hopefully—stepping into a whole new one. I knew Max especially had used the music my band had made to cope with a lot of things in his life.
That had given him some feelings that were, by nature, parasocial, as he’d never met me before I arrived at the pack house. Now, though, we’d gotten to be friends, and I could see the heartbreak in his eyes when he considered that I might die here if my body was too weak for the turning.
“Yeah. I… I think I want to say that I’ve found some real friends in you.” I looked at Ben and put one hand on the side of his neck as if he was just a big dog. “Both of you.” I gave Maxmy other hand, which he squeezed carefully with his own. “And if this is the end, I… I just wanted to say thank you.”
Ben whined again, and tears rolled down Max’s cheeks. He leaned over to hug me, and I squeezed him back as much as I could. Then another coughing fit interrupted our embrace, and Max pulled back reluctantly.
He glanced at his brother, then took a deep breath and made eye contact with me in a very pointed way.
“You know how we feel about you and your music. That’s never been a secret. But we want you to know that however you come back to us—and we know you will—we’ll be by your side every step of the way. You might not have known how much you meant to us, how much yousavedus, but you did. But even if you hadn’t, we’d still want to be there for you.” He looked at me so earnestly I choked up.
