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“The wolf?” she guessed.
He nodded once. “Do you want to tell me?”
And she considered it. Did she remind him what he’d gone through? Did she remind him how badly his father had beaten him?
“I hate your father. I’m glad he’s dead.”
Garret’s eyes cooled. “Aaaah.” He sank back and sat with her, arms resting on his knees, eyes on her name. “There it is. That’s all I needed.” There was a growl in his voice now.
“Why would you want to come back here?” she whispered brokenly. “Why would you want to save this place? Why would you want to save his legacy?”
“Because it ain’t his legacy I’m concerned with.” Garret’s bright-blue eyes cleared, and he dragged his attention from her carved name to her. “It’s mine now.” He twitched his head toward the door. “I got people to take care of, and we need territory.” He shrugged slightly. “We need it, Eliza.”
She sniffed, and considered it. Garret was much more than an evil oaf of a man with hot and cold mood swings. He was also a man handling damage and trying to provide for his people. He was a man she was beginning to understand, little by little.
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her cheek on her forearms as she watched the ghosts in his eyes. “I should’ve stopped him,” she said.
“Mmm. There was no stopping that man. I didn’t want you to. I didn’t even want you to know.”
“We don’t have to talk about it anymore. You can if you ever get a wild hair to do so, and I’ll listen, and I don’t even have to talk back. You can just tell me about it. If you want. Or if you don’t, that’s okay too. It’s a lot on a boy.”
“I ain’t a boy anymore,” he said low. “Besides, if he hadn’t made me tough like that, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
“Back at the ranch?” she asked.
“No. I wouldn’t be walkin’, and talkin’, and breathin’. In the early days, when the wolf was new? Even when it was bad, I would tell myself the wolf wasn’t as bad as my pa. It comforted me while my memories were fading.”
“Who did this to you?”
He made a clicking sound behind his teeth. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do. I want to know everything.”
A smile quirked up his lips. “You held a gun to my Maker’s chest.”
The blood drained from her face, and her cheeks prickled with cold. “Wyatt Jennings?” she whispered in shock.
“You won’t pull that trigger on him ever, you understand? That kill is mine to make.”
“Gads,” she whispered, her mind racing. “Why would he do that?”
“His Alpha ordered it.”
“His Alpha,” she repeated, carefully forming the unfamiliar word.
“His father runs the biggest Pack around here. They needed to get me in line. So…they got me in line.”
“Garret Shaw, you are not in anyone’s line. I can’t imagine you minding a single soul. Not even the Devil himself.”
He snorted and hung his head. When he looked back up at her, his eyes were dancing. “They figured that out real quick when I came back here, and instead of signing over my ranch, I brought in more wolves and became an Alpha myself. It hasn’t worked out well for them thus far.”
A grin confiscated her face. She couldn’t help it.
“What’s that smile for?” he asked.
Eliza squeezed her arms tighter around her legs and shrugged. “I’m a little proud of you, is all.”
He huffed a soft chuckle and shook his head. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much danger I put us all in.”
