Clutching my head in my hands, I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the nausea to pass. It cleared out fast enough, only to pave the way for another shot of pain. This one, however, brought a rush of memories back with it—Leaving Darius at the motel. Ronan and I searching for clues at the Landes place, where Gray’s ex had left us a message in the form of a body wearing her mother’s amulet. The two of us getting ambushed by the local pack, headed up by none other than the Raven’s Cape Chief of Police, Elena Alvarez.
My sister.
Damn.
I blew out a breath. At least she hadn’t killed us. From the looks of things, she’d brought us back to her place. I was on a leather couch in the living room, a bright, airy space with gleaming wood floors, lots of windows, and cheerful yellow-orange walls.
As nice as it was, though, something didn’t feel right about the place. It took me a minute to realize what it was.
There was nothing remotely personal about it. No photos. No knickknacks. The books on the shelves were decorative, and the sparsely-placed art on the walls was the kind of framed generic crap you could pick up at any department store.
Still, I knew it was my sister’s place. I could feel her presence everywhere, and the color of the walls was the exact same shade my father had painted her bedroom in Mendoza when we were kids.
Tangerine sunset, it was called. He’d sent me back to the hardware store in town for more when he realized one coat wouldn’t be enough.
Gingerly, I rose from the couch and stretched. My muscles were stiff and tight, my back cracking and creaking.
Shifters aged at about half the rate as humans and lived three times as long, but hell. At sixty-four, even with the body of a human thirty-two-year-old and a long life still ahead of me, I was getting old.
At least my head had stopped throbbing.
I looked around and got my bearings. I was alone in the tangerine sunset room, but Ronan was around here somewhere—his scent was fresh, as was the recently brewed coffee and something that smelled a lot like Mamá’stortilla de papas.
If I let myself, I could almost pretend we were back home. That all the people we’d so fiercely loved—the pack—were still alive. That everything had turned out differently.
But that had never done me a damn bit of good.
So I went with anger instead.
“Elena!” I roared her name, the sound of it still foreign and gritty in my ears. “Elena!”
“Well, well!” came her sarcastic reply. “The lone wolf lives.”
She stepped out from behind a pair of French doors at the other end of the room, arms crossed over her chest, dark hair spilling over her shoulders. Now that she wasn’t pointing a gun at my chest, I took a minute to take in the sight of her. She was thinner than I remembered, but muscular, dressed in jeans and black v-neck tank top that showed off her well-defined arms. She had a long, narrow nose and sharp cheekbones that’d always made her look both beautiful and intimidating. But time hadn’t softened the severity of her face. Just the opposite; there were lines around her mouth and a streak of gray in her hair that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen her.
Her eyes were just like mine.
I couldn’t look away.
She cocked her hip and leaned against the doorframe, piercing me with her intense gaze as if she were daring me to start trouble.
I almost laughed.
Decades vanished in a blink, and suddenly I was a kid again, sippingmatéon our front porch in the Mendoza foothills, grinning at my big sister like I knew all her secrets. She was supposed to have been on a camping trip with her girlfriends, but her boyfriend had just dropped her off, and I’d caught them making out in his car. It was clear she’d spent the weekend with him.
Mamá would’ve skinned her alive if she’d found out. Not because she’d lied and snuck off with a boy—my parents were pretty liberal about things like that.
It was because my sister was the alpha fated to lead our pack, and that boy was human.
You can’t tell on me, Meelo. You’ll ruin everything!
I extorted the hell out of her that summer. Got fifty bucks for my silence, which was basically a million dollars in my kid mind.
But in the end, her secret cost her a hell of a lot more than that.
I cleared my throat, trying to swallow the knot that’d suddenly lodged there.
“How long was I out?”
