He nods. “But it’s not ten years ago, Maddox. You’ve been back from college for three years now. You can’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on here or what the pack needs. What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s hard to take you seriously, Liam,” I say, and I’m annoyed that it takes an effort to sound calm. “You’re older than me and I don’t see you finding yourself a mate. Why is it my responsibility?”
“Try again. I’m not the king of anything. I wasn’t fated to do a goddamn thing but run free and howl. What the hell happened to you?” He shakes his head, looking at me like I’ve maybe turned into a swamp demon or some other low-life scum. “I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“Exactly the same person I’ve always been.”
He’s still shaking his head. “I knew it was a mistake for you to go away. I advised Ty against letting you do it.”
It isn’t that I hadn’t suspected that. But he’s never said that to me before, flat out. I take the blow. I do my best not to react. “Thanks for that vote of confidence.”
“I know you think it’s because I have some problem with you educating yourself, or whatever the hell you like to yell at Mom.” Liam snorts. “I don’t care if you go to class all day every day as long as while you’re doing that, you’re standing up for this pack and our king. Which, as far as I know, is what we all vow to do every fucking year when the Wolf Moon rises. That’s what makes uspack.” He gives that a moment to sink in like the knife it is. “It’s coming up, Maddox. Are you going to promise your undying fealty,once again, to a man you refuse to mate with? Got to say, it makes your loyalty sound like a load of horseshit.”
“You have no idea how loyal I am,” I tell him. Through gritted teeth.
Liam only stares at me until I find myself looking away again, and hating myself for it.
“You’re right,” he agrees, in that hard voice of his. “I don’t have any idea how loyal you are.No one does.And that’s a problem that’s only getting bigger, little sister. One that if I were you, I’d solve.”
He does not slam any doors when he leaves. That makes it worse. I’m sure he knows that.
There’s a reason he’s Ty’s enforcer.
I stay where I am, staring furiously down at all my charts and files before me, and I don’t move until I hear them slam their way out of the warehouse some while later, then drive away.
I sit there a long time. Eventually, I shake myself off and get to work.
Because I also have a vision for the things we can do, and that vision is worth fighting for, no matter what anyone else thinks. Including Ty, who could have changed all of this years ago by loudly and publicly agreeing that he didn’t need his queen to be as traditional as everyone else wants me to be.
He didn’t do that. Here we are.
I can feel guilty about all of this, but that doesn’t make it my fault.
I’ve talked myself into feeling a little more bulletproof by the time I make my way home late that night. I drive into the yard, and the headlights sweep across the dark front of the main house. I miss the days when Winter and her grandmother were in there and all the lights were on.
Maybe I need to stop thinking I’m going to stumble across a home I don’t make myself. Maybe that’s the lesson here.
I am not my brother Liam, so I take pleasure in slamming my car door shut behind me when I climb out. I head for my cottage, only to stop dead a few feet away from my front step.
Because there’s blood all over it. The moment I see it, the wind shifts and I scent it, too. An unpleasant copper that I don’t like. It’s too acrid.
I take a few steps closer to confirm that at the center of all that dark, ominous red there’s another small animal corpse—or what’s left of it—arranged like more of an offering than a kill.
But not an offeringto me.
That’s the only part that’s clear.
5.
I change into my wolf form and take in the scene before me with my expanded senses. Then I backtrack, loping around the perimeter of the yard and taking in every scent that I can find. I can smell that Winter came back here and then left again. I can follow Briar’s confusing scent profile into the woods, seemingly headed down into Jacksonville. By foot.
That’s one of her oddities, out here in a place where predators are so thick on the ground that most folks without their own fangs and claws prefer vehicles, but I can’t smell any blood on her. Besides, I’ve decided we’re going to be friends.
I can’t track the creature on my cottage step. I can track every bird and squirrel within a five-mile radius, but not the critter I want to know about. All I get from it is the sameoffsort of scent that bothered me last night.
If someone is sneaking around, following me and leaving me dead things—and I think it’s pretty clear that they are—I should be able to track them. Or at least get a sense of them here, even if they know enough to cover their tracks. There’s alwayssomethingto find, especially when there’s so much blood and guts involved. And an arrangement that suggests a lot ofhandlingof those things.
But aside from that faintoffvibe, I can’t smell anything out of the ordinary.
