My parents.
The crime scene photos.
Lucas.
Fighting it, I listened for the sound of the twins sleeping in the next room, and through the pack-bond, I felt the two of them snuggled up together like pups in a litter. No matter how many times Ali put them to sleep in separate beds, they always ended up in one. Needing to see them, I crept out of my room and into theirs.
Kaitlin’s foot was resting lightly on Alex’s cheek. His rump was up in the air. When one of them moved, they both moved. They were dreaming the same dream, colors and sounds and running.
Ali’s babies were safe and warm and happy, and I wanted desperately to believe they could stay that way forever, that Katie would never have to deal with the certainty Lake had lived with all her life, that she would never know what it was like to be looked at as a possession, a prize.
I wanted to believe that I would get to see them grow up. I wanted for their lives to be absolutely nothing like mine.
Giving in to the desire to be close to them, I climbed into their bed. Katie—in human form—yipped in her sleep, but didn’t wake up. Alex snuggled in close to my right side. I let their thoughts override mine. I let their senses override mine.
I dreamed their dreams, and I slept.
I woke with the dawn to find two little faces curiously watching mine. Katie was sitting on my stomach. Alex was perched to one side.
“Whatcha doing?” Katie asked.
“Sleeping,” I replied, closing my eyes.
Alex poked me in the side of my face with a damp and chubby hand. I half-expected him to say something, but no words accompanied the poke.
“You go ’way?” Katie asked, wriggling to get comfortable and elbowing me directly in the kidneys. “Mama’s sad.”
I gave up trying to sleep and opened my eyes.
“Big sister has to go away for a little while,” I said. “You two have to take good care of Mama while I’m gone. Okay?”
Alex nodded solemnly. Katie screwed up her face until her little baby forehead was as wrinkled as a shar-pei. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure if she was asking why I was leaving or why I wanted her to go easy on Ali while I was gone. Given that why was my sister’s favorite question, it was probably both. I took the easy way out and didn’t answer. Instead, I blew a stream of breath out onto her face, and she huffed back.
I was her alpha, and she was my girl.
Peeling myself out of bed, I managed to detach the little barnacles from my side. They ran ahead of me into the kitchen, where Ali was already making breakfast.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat.
She placed a plate of food in front of me.
“Eat.”
Ali couldn’t protect me. She couldn’t keep me here or give me the life she wanted for me, but she could feed me.
Wisely, I ate.
“You slept in the twins’ room last night?” Asking questions she already knew the answers to was Ali’s way of demonstrably not prying.
Yeah, right.
“I had a lot on my mind. They keep things simple.”
As if to corroborate my statement, Katie knocked over her glass of milk and started screaming like an irate banshee.
Without missing a beat, Ali flipped into triage mode, sopping up the milk and distracting Katie from her tantrum. “It’s not your fault.”
At first, I thought she was talking to Katie, but then I realized the comment was aimed at me.
“I know you, Bryn. I know what you’re thinking, but what happened with Maddy wasn’t your fault.”
Ali and I had never talked about Maddy’s leaving. We’d never openly acknowledged what Lucas had done, or the way I’d been forced to fight back.
“I killed him,” I said, staring down at my plate. “I killed him, knowing what it would do to her.”
For a long time, Ali didn’t say anything. I wanted her to tell me that I hadn’t had a choice, that if I’d let a challenge go unanswered, I would have been opening the pack up to more, but after all these years’ of living among werewolves, Ali still didn’t think like one.
She wasn’t thinking about the pack.
“You killed Lucas.” Ali didn’t sugarcoat it. She didn’t hedge. “Just like I killed my mother before she could kill you.” The weight of the things we’d done hung in the air between us. “It happened, it’s done, and I’m not sorry that either one of us is alive. You can regret a lot of things, Bryn, but don’t you ever feel sorry for that.”
“Never,” Katie chirped, like this was all a game—because at her age, everything was. “Never ever ever ever!”
So much for crying over spilled milk.
“Everybody decent?” Lake yelled those words from the front porch, and that was the only warning we got before she let herself in.
“Morning, Lake.” Ali gestured toward the kitchen table, but Lake shook her head.
“I already ate. Twice. I just stopped by because I was packing and I thought I’d see if there was anything Bryn wanted me to bring.”
When most girls said the word packing, they meant clothes. When Lake said packing, she meant heat.
“Fix me up with one of everything,” I told her. “And make it silver.”
Lake nodded. At any other time, weapons talk would have made her downright giddy, but this wasn’t just any Rabid we were hunting.
There was a chance—maybe even a good one—that this was a friend.
“We’ll need restraints,” I said, thinking out loud. “And something to knock her out with if she’s …”
If she’s out of control?
If she’s a monster?
If she’s insane?
Across the table, Alex peered curiously up at me.
“If she’s sleepy,” I said.
Lake glanced at the twins and nodded. “If she’s sleepy,” she repeated, “I reckon a Taser or two might help her nap.”
Neither Katie nor Alex wanted anything to do with a conversation about naps. Ali set Katie back down, and the twins began babbling to each other, in words I couldn’t make out or understand. They had their own language, their own gestures, their own little twin world that, even as their alpha, I could never truly enter. The older they got, the more intense that connection was. If I reached out for her mind, I felt his. If I reached out for his, I felt hers.
Beside me, Lake paused in the middle of a sentence in which she was referring to a tranq gun as a pillow. She trailed off, her gaze caught on the twins. Alex reached out and grabbed Katie’s fist.
Griffin.
I didn’t go looking for the thought through the bond, and Lake didn’t send it to me, but in that moment, she was thinking her brother’s name so intensely that I couldn’t help overhearing.
Natural-born females, like Katie and Lake, were so rare because a cruel genetic quirk ensured that female werewolf pups were only carried to term if they were half of a set of twins. It had never occurred to me before that seeing Katie and Alex like this might be hard for Lake, whose own twin had died when we were only a few years older than my siblings were now.
I could barely remember the way Griffin looked and was suddenly struck by the realization that Lake would never forget. That what Katie and Alex had now was something Lake and Griffin had once. Something they wouldn’t ever have again. I reached out for Lake’s mind and felt the ache, the emptiness, the space inside of her where her brother should have been.
How could I have missed this? She might as well have been missing a limb, and I’d never seen it, never noticed.
Stay out of my head, Bryn. Lake’s voice was shaky in my mind, but I retreated, giving her space.
“So,” I said, “about those pillows …”
After a few more minutes of thinly veiled conversation, Lake went off to see about the weapons—and to get away from me. I hadn’t meant to go nosing around in her head.
Just like I hadn’t meant to send Maddy out into the big bad world to deal with a black hole of emotion alone.
Not wanting to prod Ali into another pep talk, I stood up from the table, restless and aching with everything I couldn’t afford to let myself feel.
“We need to leave within the hour,” I told Ali. “I’m going to check on Chase and Jed.”