Trying to figure out how to navigate the bus system so we could get out of the city to run and hunt.
Finishing school while old pizza boxes were as likely to become coffee tables as they were to make it to the recycling bin.
The next person to speak up startled me.
“I thought you all were so brave, when you left.” Cash’s voice was soft, but it was so unexpected that every person in the room had turned to blink his way.
“Why didn’t you come with us?” Maia asked gently.
Cash shrugged. “Scared, I guess. And?—”
When he broke off and looked away instead of finishing, Jillian finished for him. “You still have family back there, right?”
Cash nodded. “Dad and Uncle Tommy and now his daughter Evie.”
I’d . . . forgotten about his family.
Jill’s and my parents had died when we were young. It made leaving the pack a hell of a lot easier. Maia had come from a pack ours had—well, incorporated was too nice a word for it. Seth had always been there, but he hadn’t gotten along with his dad.
But there was Cash, and he’d had afamily.
When he’d stayed behind, it hadn’t had anything to do with me. At least, it hadn’t had half so much to do with me as I’d thought.
Cash hadn’t doubted me, but to my teenage brain, that’d been the only excuse for him staying behind.
I’d been a shortsighted, selfish, idiot. It wasn’t like we could’ve found out about his cousin from halfway across the country, gone back, kidnapped a kid, and dragged her across the country just so Cash could keep an eye on her. Having Maia there was hard enough, and she could basically take care of herself when she was fifteen.
When I looked at Cash now, he seemed less twitchy and afraid than I’d seen him as the past weeks, and I had no idea if that was because Aleks’s visit made him feel stronger, or if I’d been looking at him wrong all along.
“A new cousin, huh? Evie? How old? How is she?” I asked.
Cash smiled, broad and warm, and ducked his head. “Good. She’s... good. Or was good when I left. She’s fourteen. Grant was talking about—” The way his eyes flicked toward Jillian made my stomach twist. “But she was still, ah—” He shook his head, and I recognized the doubt that had his cheeks hollowing as he stared down. Had he done the right thing, coming here?
I’d do whatever I could to make sure he had, and that he could see his family, safe and sound, as soon as possible.
“She’s so smart and doesn’t take shit off anybody,” he went on. “Gets her in trouble sometimes, but she’s good. Knows how to run.”
Right—because that was one of the most useful skills a girl in the pack we’d come from could have.
Horrifying. No way in hell was I going to leave it like that now that I could do something about it.
I caught Cash’s eye and held it. He wasn’t part of our pack, and now I knew, he wasn’t ever going to be. “I bet she’ll be glad when we can get you home.”
Nervously, he laughed. “Yeah, yeah, I bet she will.”
Cash was the first one to get up, and he started gathering empty dishes from people.
Maia hopped up to help him. “I’ll wash, you dry?”
Cash nodded at her.
And that’s what broke the tension in the room so people could finally go to sleep. Dakota slipped off my lap, but he hadn’t made it a step before he was reaching for my hand.
“Come on, big guy.”
He led the way upstairs. As he wandered into our room, his shoulders were still slumped and defeated.
That wouldn’t stand.
