“Ezra,” he said. “Trevor’s right.”
Ezra waited a moment for the alpha to speak further on the topic, but he didn’t. Well, he didn’t need to. His perspective was clear from those few words, and he wouldn’t make a personal decision for one of his pack; his input weighed the same as everyone else’s.
“I don’t have in-laws to make peace with,” Aaron said, “but I get wanting to. But…Ezra, the man physically and verbally attacked you. What do you think you can do at this point?”
“I don’tknow.” Ezra spread his hands and sat back in his chair. Would none of them agree that he had to try? “They’re her folks. One encounter and I give up?”
“Given the level of hostility, yeah, I think you do.”
He tried to glare at Aaron, but Aaron only shrugged.
“I won’t tell you to give up,” Arlo said in his low, slow elder’s drawl. “But I’ll tell you to be careful, Ezra. Does the man know you work for Harmony Ridge, in the township building?”
“I’m not sure. He might.”
“Suppose he shows up there to get you in trouble? Suppose he gets his hands on a firearm?”
“I…I hadn’t thought of anything like that. All I’ve been thinking about, strategizing about, is whatIcan do from here. Not what he might do.”
“For your own safety, pup, you’ve got to be careful. Please.”
Arlo’s eyes were somber with more than eighty years of life experience as a wolf, much of that lived before anti-discrimination laws were extended to include lupines. When Arlo was a pup, emergency rooms had segregated lupines apart from humans—and had often ignored them for days. While the resilience of wolves to injury was a fact, they weren’t invincible. They could bleed out; their wounds could become infected; they felt pain as intensely as humans did. But when Arlo was a pup, none of these medical facts were acknowledged. It was only one example of how human dealings with wolves had evolved within the last few generations. And it was one reason wolf packs still preferred to exist self-sufficiently. Arlo would die on the Lane before he allowed a human doctor to help him, and he wasn’t alone in his perspective. Aaron’s training in field medicine was vital to the pack’s daily life.
Ezra let the elder wolf’s history seep into him, weighed it alongside his own family’s—the wound Granny had given Dad all those years ago, the wound Dad had tried to spare Ezra. He weighed both those things alongside the gravity with which his own generation was treating what Brandon Fitzgerald had done to him.
“Y’all are on the same page about this? Nobody thinks I should try to show her folks they can trust me, to—to give them another chance?”
Trevor’s constant low growl rose in volume.
“No, Trev, not you. I need to hear from the rest of the pack.” Ezra spread his hands again. “Please. Doesn’t anybody disagree with Trev and Arlo?”
“No, man,” Jeremy said. “I don’t think anybody does.”
Aaron shook his head.
At last Cassius spoke up, the first time since Ezra had asked the question. “Violence isn’t a one-time thing for a person, Ezra. It never is. The minute he met you, he took his fists to you. That’s it. That’s it,” he said again, his caramel bourbon essence rising with anger on Ezra’s behalf. “Now you build with Willow. You walk forward with your mate. That man lost his chance with you when he chose violence.”
With a deep, rolling growl like a thunderstorm, Malachi voiced his agreement.
No one dissented. No one told Ezra to try again, to work his strategies, to earn his in-laws’ acceptance however he had to. He lowered his head to his hands. His body bowed over with the immensity of it, the weight of what he suddenly fully understood.
“I can’t fix it,” he said into his hands. “I can’t fix it for my mate.”
“No,” Malachi said. “You can’t make peace with someone who sees you as dirty, Ezra. You can never be safe enough, good enough for someone who looks at you and sees a monster.”
“I thought I could find a way.”
“No, friend.” The alpha’s voice rasped harsher, which happened only when Malachi was wrestling his own emotions…which happened almost never. “Please believe us all. Trust us. You can’t.”
A quiet chorus of rumbling growls came from every wolf, Trevor’s rising loudest.
“Okay,” Ezra whispered. “I’ll be careful. I’ll trust my pack.”
When he lifted his head, his brother’s blue eyes shone with pure relief.
Twenty
TurnedoutKelseywasright. The minute Willow took a seat in the circle of camping chairs, Lucy and Ember spoke over the top of each other.
