“I’m sorry.” They rolled down the road in silence for a few minutes before she spoke up again. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really. My mother married my father even though she used to tell everyone that someone else was her True Mate and she wished she’d married him instead. My father treated her like crap and cheated on her all the time, so she cheated on him once, and he killed the guy and then beat her until she nearly died. They hated each other.” The memories crawled through his mind like a dark, suffocating cloud, and he tasted bile. “My father used to beat the hell out of me and my two older brothers, but especially me. He used to break my bones on a regular basis, and my mother would just sit there drinking, and watch while I crawled off into the bushes to heal.”
“Good God,” Savannah said with horror. He saw her hands tightening on the wheel.
“You have no idea how much I envy you your family. I know they’re nuts, I know they annoy you, but they genuinely love you. And so much for my not talking about it.” He laughed ruefully.
It was awkward and strange, spilling his guts like this. He was opening himself up and showing her his raw, wounded parts, when his relationship with her had been all about the verbal sparring and mockery.
“No, no, it’s totally fine. I asked. I wanted to know. I’m sorry you had to grow up like that, Austin.”
He gave a bitter chuckle. “Explains a lot, doesn’t it?” There was her opening. Her chance to laugh it up at her expense.Give it your best shot, foxy lady.
“It does. It explains that you’re even stronger than I knew, to survive a cubhood like that and still grow up to be a decent man.”
He paused. “I’m waiting for the punchline.” He felt himself instinctively tensing, his muscles drawing tight. A nasty comment from Savannah at that moment, when he’d opened himself up to her, would hurt more than his father’s worst tortures.
“There is none. You’re a good guy. You drive me crazy when we’re both going after the same marks, sure, but I have to admit, it’s fair enough. Harris puts out the call to everyone. Sometimes you win, sometimes – more often than you – I do. But you’re decent where it counts, Austin. You spend your spare time hunting meat for the food pantry. You came to my house and paid us a bunch of money that you weren’t obligated to, and in all honesty you didn’t really owe us. And you paid for the Haymarches, and Anthony. Anthony’s an annoying little twerp, but you still protected him by sending him home when we could have used him to take over driving when we got too tired.”
Austin was liking this. He was liking it a lot.
“Go on.”
“A lot of wolves would have turned feral, living through what you did, but you were stronger than that. And you don’t even have to work, from what I’ve heard – you could just live off your family’s money, but instead you took a job that’s hard and dangerous and that ends up making everyone safer.”
With every word, a warm glow spread inside him, thawing parts of him that he hadn’t even realized were frozen. Brushing away the darkness.
“Do you talk to your brothers at all?” she asked, her voice soft with sympathy.
“Not much.” He shrugged casually to hide the sting that he always felt when he thought about how cut off he was from his birth pack. “I never fit in with my family. I was shipped off to military school in my teens. I ran away from the school and didn’t talk to my pack again until I was in my early twenties. By then, I had already joined Tully’s pack and there just wasn’t much reason for me to go back to Hidden Hills to visit. I’m fond of my niece and nephews, but they’ve got their own lives – they don’t need me.”
Thinking about that made him gloomy again. He wanted that feeling of light back, the feeling of easiness that only she could give him. “Tell me something happy, Savannah.”
“Um, if we survive this, and we make it back alive, after my mother makes my life a living hell for God knows how long, we will all celebrate with a huge, delicious home-cooked feast. You’re invited. To dinner with my family. Is that happy or horrifying?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Happy, Savannah. Very happy.”
* * *
He hadn’t said no to dinner.He hadn’t said yes, either, but at least he wanted to come.
Savannah was absolutely, totally dying to ask him about his future plans. He’d said he would never come back to Washington after delivering Roy. Did he mean it? And if so, why? If he managed to deliver Roy and collect the bounty, he could live anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted, even with just his share of it.
His feelings for her seemed to go beyond sexual attraction. He actually liked her family, too, which meant that he was clinically insane but also meant that wasn’t the reason he was running for the hills. So why was he leaving? Why wouldn’t he want to live near her? Was he running from something?
Now isn’t the time to ask, she told herself firmly. They didn’t have the luxury of doing the relationship talk. First they had to survive another couple of days withNightmare on Wolf Streetthere in the back seat.
“Oh, that call I made earlier?” Austin’s voice jerked her from her reverie. “I called up the Deep River Pack and told them we’d be bunking down with them tomorrow, for the full moon.”
“I was going to ask you about that,” she said. “I figured you had a plan.”
Shifters could normally control their shifts, once they were past cubhood. During the full moon, however, all shifters compulsively changed to their animal form – and stayed that way throughout the night. They wouldn’t be able to guard Roy, and the idea of him in his shifted form, on a full moon, was a horrifying one.
“So they were all right with it?” she said.
“Not at all,” he scoffed. “They bitched, they moaned, they cried, they tried to say that they had nowhere they could safely hold him. I asked them if that meant I need to report them, and they whined and cried some more, and then they said that they would come up with something.”
Annoyance roiled in Savannah’s gut. She’d never met this pack, but she disliked them already.
