Niall’s eyes flashed, wide awake now. “Laugh away.” He balled his napkin and dunked it inside his glass of water, then rubbed at the stain on his gray sweatpants.
As he pressed the icepack to the back of his skull, he grabbed the bottle of syrup and doused his waffles, sucked the sticky remnants from his fingertips and carved up his breakfast.
“Did they tell you what the coroner said?” Nolan asked. “I tried calling Nate last night, but he didn’t answer.”
“No.” I felt stone-cold sober again. “They just confirmed the wolf was a shifter.”
“From our pack?”
“They didn’t say.”
As my brothers debated among themselves if the shifter was indeed from our pack, I helped clear the island and slot plates into the dishwasher.
I thought the hour would drag, but soon, Mom was clapping and hollering, “Time to go.”
I grabbed a hoodie and dragged it over my gray tank top, then added my winter jacket. Although my shifter blood made my body run warmer than a human’s, winter was still freaking cold up in Beaver Creek.
Instead of using cars or the main road, we crunched straight through the ankle-deep snow, winding around the timbered dwellings dotting the hill. Ten minutes later, we’d joined the lycanthropic congregation.
The massive piece of land, upon which had been built the compound, had belonged to Aidan Michaels, Cassandra Morgan’s cousin. A man almost as hateful as Cassandra’s son, Alex, had been. The only one in that family I tolerated was Cassandra’s eldest and only surviving relative, Lori. We weren’t friends, or even friendly, and not because she was closer in age to Nate than to me, but because she had little personality. Back when her mother had been alive, Lori had existed in her shadow. In her worthless brother’s, too. After the duel, Lori had returned an outcast who flitted around her mother’s giant log cabin like a wraith.
At some point, there’d even been rumors that she was dead. Nate, who was in charge of the shifters in our district, quickly put those rumors to rest. He also fined the younger shifters who egged her windows or urinated around her house.
I scanned the faces surrounding the pond for Lori’s narrow one. Would she come out today or open her windows to listen from the privacy of her house? Since noise carried up, and her house was perched on the hill like ours, she’d probably hear Liam’s speech just as clearly from there.
Sure enough, a figure as slender as a cypress and as pale as fresh snow stood between the glistening panes of an opened window.
Adalyn, who’d met up with my family during our downhill trek, guided us toward one of the large rocks we used as a diving board in the summer since it jutted over the deepest part of the pond. Adalyn’s sixteen-year-old sister Gracey and their grandmother had found spots on it, along with a few others. Most elders had brought foldable chairs. The younger ones had plopped down on the thick snow blanketing the chalk-like stone that gave the creek the limpidity of a swimming pool.
However profoundly I loathed the man who’d purchased the land, I was the first to admit it was breathtaking. After his demise and then Cassandra’s, Lori had inherited the parcel. Her ticket to stay alive had been to sign it over to her new Alpha.
I wasn’t overly interested in real estate, but one of Liam’s first acts as Alpha had been to create a trust in which he’d placed all pack properties, made his two Betas trustees and every Boulder shifter a beneficiary, so that the acreage belonged to every wolf. That first deed had eased the anger of his detractors and the worry of those who’d found him undeserving of leadership.
His second act was to create a schooling fund, so that those who wanted to pursue studies off the compound could attend colleges of their choice without taking out student loans.
Across the bow-shaped liquid expanse, the door of Alex’s former cabin slid open. The noise level died instantly, and all eyes turned in the direction of Liam and Nate. Where our Alpha had forgone his baseball cap, my brother wore one that cast his face in full shadow. Nate leaned against the cabin’s wall and crossed his arms, straining his brown leather jacket.
Unlike my brother, Liam moved across the deck toward the wooden guardrail and wrapped his fingers around the railing. His hair crested around his tanned face in dark waves.
Adalyn bumped me with her shoulder and whispered, “Don’t forget to breathe, babe.”
“Haha.”
She grinned.
My youngest brother’s philosophy was to date down. Not that Niall had ever had a lasting relationship, so he wasn’t some guru on the topic, but as I took in the perfect cut of Liam’s physique, it did strike me that lusting after him was as futile as trying to catch flies with a butterfly net.
“Where’s his son?” Adalyn squinted, but the pond, although not immense, was wide enough that we couldn’t see into the cabin.
“Maybe napping?”
“Good morning, Boulders!” Liam’s voice boomed through the valley, ricocheting against the watery surface and across every rock and patch of snow. “I’m glad to be back in Beaver Creek despite the circumstances of my visit.”
His gaze glided across the thousand faces staring back at him, settling briefly on our rock. I wasn’t delusional enough to believe he’d paused on it because of me, but it didn’t prevent my wolf from murring. Thankfully, the sound didn’t escape my lips.
“Yesterday, a hiker was attacked in the woods a few miles away from the compound. The police blame the crime on a wild creature, but gasoline was splashed all over the area. Animals don’t cover their tracks. Humans do.”
His gaze cycled around the crowd, as though looking for the culprit, which sent my heartrate into a tailspin.
