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“Who knows? Have fun with the monster.”
Her hackles raised. “Don’t call him that. He isn’t a monster.”
Kru dropped his head and laughed. “Ain’t no angels here, darlin’. If the dragon picked him to be his right hand, and he has thrived for years being that? He’s monster enough. That’s why he’s here, right? Who else can control Gunner?” Kru’s smile fell from his face, and a shard of hardness sliced through his gaze. She didn’t understand it, but before she could ask, he turned and made his way across the clearing without looking back. She knew because she watched him until he disappeared in his trailer.
He was so strange.
Monster.
That word rankled her. For all she knew, Kru was a monster. But she’d known Lucas for all her life. Or at least, known of him. He’d been raised well, and raised safe.
She pushed open the door to 1010 and gasped. The living room was thrashed. Clothes were thrown everywhere, his duffel bag was ripped in half and laying in tatters across the arm of the couch. A water bottle had been thrown on the ground so hard, it had exploded.
“I had a moment,” a gruff voice said from behind her.
She should’ve been startled, but Lucas’s voice settled something inside of her instead. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, turning to him.
He was leaning on the open doorframe, a towel around his waist, his dark hair still wet from the shower. His bruises were healing, but they still looked rough. He looked all around the small single-wide. “I never thought I would come back for more than a day.”
“Was it so bad being raised here? In Damon’s Mountains?”
He smiled weakly and shook his head. “It was the dream until it wasn’t.”
“You thought Cadence was your mate, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Things are different when you’re young. We talked about raising our babies here, never leaving this place. Peace for always.”
“What happened?”
“My animal hated her.”
Oh. Fuck. Stunned, Jenna sank down onto the couch. She was fairly certain he’d never exposed this side of what happened like this before. “How could he hate someone you cared for?”
Lucas shrugged up one shoulder. “It happened over time, little by little. At first that side of me was quiet around her, and then he got bigger. Mouthier. Eventually, when I kissed her, the other side of me wanted to retch. I would try to hold it together. Didn’t want to hurt her feelings while I was figuring out what the hell was wrong with me. It was me, you know? She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was trying to be understanding with my push and pull. Hot and cold. She loved me.” He puffed a breath out of his lungs. “I couldn’t love her back.”
“But…you broke up with her.” Jenna frowned, trying to sift through the memories for the timeline. “You broke up with her, and it wasn’t until weeks later that you fell apart. I don’t understand.”
“She hooked up with Gunner to get back at me. We’d always competed. Love, hate, love, hate, and she fucked him just to hurt me.”
“But you broke up with her. You said you couldn’t love her. So why did you fall apart at all? She was allowed to move on.”
“Not like that. Not with him. All it did was make my animal side worse. He hated her more, but he also hated me. I couldn’t control him, and fuck, I hated me too. I was a mess, and Gunner was taunting me, and…”
“And you nearly killed each other,” Jenna whispered, finishing the sentence for him. She was there when they went to war all those years ago—a young blackback gorilla and an adolescent grizzly bear. “The Boarlanders had to split you up, and it took all of the adults. You disappeared for days after that. I looked everywhere for you.”
“Did you?” he asked, his eyes softening.
“Of course. Two days later, you appeared out of thin air and lost your mind in the woods.”
“Do you know where I was for those two days?”
“Where?” she whispered, though she could guess the answer now.
“The lair of the dragon.”
And she could imagine it—Lucas in one of the rooms on the lower level of Damon’s mountain-buried mansion. One of the bedrooms with iron bars in the walls. One of the inescapable ones.
“He gave me a choice then. There was no killing on the mountain, but he could see where I was headed and I wouldn’t stop hunting Gunner if I stayed here. He offered me a job that would take me away from here and allow me to see more than the shelter of the mountains. He gave me some time to think on it and those days felt like…” he shook his head, allowing the words to fade to nothing.
