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Roy lifted blazing, unnatural, glowing blue eyes to Garret. “You’re the first man I will kill.”
Garret kept his face carefully empty, hiding the disappointment.
“You’ll have to get in line. I have a Challenge with my Maker before you’ll get out of here.”
“Maker,” Roy growled.
“I am your Maker.” Garret fingered the corner of the letters. “Do you want me to tell you about who you are?”
“You mean who I was?” Roy growled.
Even the grit to Roy’s voice hurt Garret in ways he couldn’t process. He had done this to him.
“Sure. Who you were.” Roy didn’t answer, so Garret explained. “You’ve known me since I was born. You stepped in when my pa became violent. You gave me a safe place to stay. You were like a father to me.”
“I raised a pitiful pup, then.”
Garret resisted the urge to wince, and continued. “You were married once. She had a small child with her when you took her on. You loved the child as your own. A girl. Little fiery red-head. The mom left you and took the child with her, and that little girl never stopped seeing you as her pa. She loved you. She loves you still. She came back for you.”
A frown took Roy’s dark gray eyebrows, and he cast his gaze to the floor with a faraway look. “Sounds like a farfetched story to me.”
Garret nodded. “Everything still feels like a story to me sometimes, too. The wolf makes the human memories muddy. I have a mate. Never thought I would take one if it wasn’t arranged, but I took her on for a different reason.”
“What reason?” God, he couldn’t even put this demon voice with the man he used to know.
“The only pa she’d ever known asked it of me. Last wish and all.” Garret waited to see if that jogged any memories, but Roy just cracked his knuckles and leaned back on the bench, glared at Garret with those unsettling wolf eyes, void of emotion.
“I was angry at first,” Garret said low. “I was pissed at that man for asking such a big favor of me. I blamed him for ruining my life for a while, but I owed him, you know? He had done so much for me over the years. It was slow, but after awhile, I figured out he did me a favor.”
“How so?”
“I learned to love his daughter. In a way, I think she saved me. I think that man did me a favor and changed my life for the better.”
“And that man’s supposed to be me?” Roy asked, his eyes glowing in the shadows of the cage.
“Yeah. You won’t believe that part though, because you probably won’t have your memory jogged for a while yet. I didn’t remember her when I saw her either. The wolf is so big at first. He consumes everything.” He took the bundle of letters and slid them through the bars.
Roy’s reaction to the infringement on his territory was instantaneous. He Changed into a dark gray wolf in a flash and slammed against the bars, muzzle almost latching onto Garret’s hand. The smoke and the smell of burning flesh was pungent as the wolf pushed his snarling muzzle as far out of the silver bars as he could manage, snapping his teeth, trying to get to Garret.
Garret backed up and ran his hand through his hair, heart aching over the shell of the man he’d once seen as a father. “If you get curious about how loved you were in the before…read the letters, Roy.”
Garret slid his hat over his head and walked out without looking back.
He couldn’t.
He couldn’t stomach witnessing what he had done to the man he cared about.
Chapter Forty-Three
It was the heartbeat that woke her up.
Eliza winced and tried to draw her hand up to her throbbing shoulder, but her body wasn’t working correctly. Nothing was working like she expected.
She eased her eyes open, but everything was blurry. All she could see was darkness, highlighted by a fuzzy gold color in the center.
Hello? She tried to speak, but her lips refused to form the word. It only echoed through her mind.
She blinked hard, trying desperately to bring the gold into focus. The blurry edges solidified until she could see the steady blow of an oil lantern. Everything else was dark.
