“This isn’t Flint, baby. And I’m not afraid of Ethan.”
Baby? Who the hell was this? It had to be Flint. Nobody else I knew had that kind of confidence.
Before I could respond to call him out for being a totalasshole, a follow-up text stated,“I’ve heard so much about you. I can’t wait to finally meet in person.”
What the fuck? Now I knew this wasn’t Flint.“IDK who you are, and I don’t care anymore. Lose my number and leave me alone!”
“I’m not going to leave you alone, Millie. I’m going to mate and knot you until you scream my name.”
This conversation was totally unhinged.“GO AWAY! I mean it, asshole! You don’t want me to get Ethan and Flint involved. If you do, you’ll regret it.”
“The only thing I’ll regret is not having ripped out their throats for finding you first, baby. Rest assured, that’s coming very soon. I’m going to mate you in a bath of their blood to punish them for what they’ve taken from me. What should have been mine. My precious omega.”
I was shaking now. Literally shaking. I could see the dots on the other line pulsing as the person continued to type away.
“Why don’t you come outside so I don’t have to come in that cabin and kill everyone you love. If you listen like a good omega, and do everything I say, I might let them live.”
Jumping to my feet, I glanced out the window. But all I saw was the dark sky outside. Then, a solitary light in the woods blinked on, then off. It did it two more times, before it stopped. There was no doubt in my mind that light belonged to the man typing. I just knew it. He was watching me from my window. Letting me know he was there, and that he knew I was calling his bluff.
“Believe me now?”The next ominous text read.
Holy shit.
Heart in my throat, I barreled downstairs shouting Ethan’s name. The moment he heard my panicked cry, and saw my ashen face, he demanded, “What’s wrong?
CHAPTER 8
Ethan
“Flint,” I spoke, barely constraining the frustration evident in my voice, “she doesn’t even understand what it means to be a ware yet. You can’t expect her to understand the danger of a pack like the Tupilaqs if she’s never experienced one before. You shouldn’t have offered to check into her family before you spoke with me about it first.”
Flint’s chin stubbornly rose into the air an inch. “She deserves to know where she comes from, Ethan. We all do.”
That statement hit home, just as my brother had intended it to. We, in our own ways, were all lost souls. Flint, perhaps, most of all. Despite what he’d said about not remembering his parents, and not looking for them, I suspected differently. I thought part of why he’d gone into the military, and intelligence work in particular, was to look for his parents. Thepeople he claimed not to need or want but had always been secretly searching for.
“I know she deserves that information, Flint, and I’ll do everything in my power to see that she gets it. But it needs to happen at the right time,” I clarified. “Now isn’t that time.”
Taking another tack then, my brother toggled his head to the side as he stared me down hard. “Would you wait? If it were you, Ethan, and you didn’t know who you were or where you came from, would you stand around with your thumb up your ass waiting to find out? Or, like me, would you dive into the deep end of the pool and go looking directly for it.”
As I’d assumed, this wasn’t about Millie. Not really.
“Flint,” I carefully began, “when’s the last time you spoke to Laurence?”
Laurence was the caretaker of Cascia House. For over three decades, he’d acted as a father figure to all the boys who’d come in and out of there. To many of us, including Flint, he was the only father we’d ever really known. Whenever he was struggling, though he might not admit it to me, Flint would call Laurence and the man would walk him through whatever he was wrestling with. I knew that because it’s what Laurence did for all of us. The man was tireless in his efforts, and somehow managed to have time for anyone who needed him.
Flint tried to hide his flinch, but wasn’t wholly successful. “What does Laurence have to do with this?”
As always, when it came to this particular brother of mine, the anger and rage was simmering just under the surface, always ready to boil over if the right buttons, or the wrong ones, were pushed.
“When?” I pressed, not giving an inch.
Flint’s body became stiff and tight then. “Last week. And why the fuck does that matter? Are you keeping tabs on me now?”
I didn’t give in to the bait. Such deflection only led down other trivial, unimportant roads. It didn’t address any real issues. “What did he say?”
Snorting, Flint’s gaze shifted to just beyond my head like he was trying to avoid it without outright submitting. I would have hated to be this kid’s drill instructor. He could be one stubborn son-of-a-bitch when he wanted to be. Which was pretty much twenty-four seven.
“Nothing, alright. He said nothing. He had a new kid show up on his doorstep right after I called and he had to go. It’s not a big deal. He’ll get back to me another time,” Flint dismissed.
