“I knew I had to get to my sister. That she and her family would be next, if they hadn’t already been found and targeted. The guys drove me there as fast as they could, breaking just about every traffic law on the way. I never once hesitated to tell them the address.”
I took another slug of water and a deep breath, forcing myself to unclench the muscles that’d tightened like piano strings. This was it. The worst part. The last and most treacherous and most deeply buried memories, the ghosts with the sharpest teeth and claws, the ones who’d fight me every step of the way as I tried to finally release them.
“It was my fault,querida,” I said, my words like broken glass in my throat. Each one cut deep, cost me something, but I couldn’t stop. Not until every last one was out. “All those years with the rumors about the rival pack, it was them. My so-called friends. They were in league with Franco’s family the whole time, and they’d been working me for years, slowly laying the trap. I took the bait, because they made me believe—no, scratch that. Iletthem make me believe—that they could help me. But when we finally got to Elena’s home, the second we got out of the car, I knew. I just knew, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“Two other cars pulled in immediately behind us, full of shifters I’d never seen before—bigger, angrier, their eyes wild with bloodlust. To them, it’d been a hunt years in the making, and they’d finally cornered their prey. I knew it that instant that these monsters were responsible for the fire at my parents’ home, and now they’d come for my sister’s family, too.
“I ran inside and woke up Elena and Jonah, trying to get them out, but we were the little field mice now. The monsters loped into the house like they hadn’t a care in the world, a dozen guys against the three of us. Elena and I didn’t even have time to shift—it all happened so fast. It was… It was a slaughter, Gray. The pleasure they took…”
The scene flashed behind my eyes once again. The sound of Elena’s desperate screams as they’d ripped Maya from her arms. The way Jonah had dropped to his knees and begged, tears streaming down his face. The blood splatter arcing across the bedroom wall as they’d cut his throat. The soft, muted cries as the biggest of the pack had smothered Maya against his chest, pressing all the air from her tiny lungs and discarding her on the bed like a rag doll. They beat the shit out of me and Elena both, leaving us for dead. Lying on the bedroom floor, barely conscious, we watched their filthy boots stomp out of the house, the sounds of their laughter and whoops of victory like another round of blows to the head.
“Then I smelled the gasoline. Saw their silhouettes outside the window, flickering behind the orange flames that rose up suddenly from the base of the house. Their laughter went on and on… I swear it was still ricocheting around my skull even after I heard all their cars peel out.”
The only reason we’d survived that night was thanks to the kindness of an elderly neighbor, who’d risked his own life to drag us out of the fire mere moments before the house crumbled.
“Elena and I woke up two days later, side-by-side in the local hospital, both of us in utter shock. Part of me feared the pack would be back to finish the job, but then I realized they’d left us alive on purpose. They let us go, because they knew we’d never pose a threat again. They’d defeated our family, killed our alpha. Elena and I were broken wolves without a pack—like some pathetic cautionary tale that would go down in the history books as a lesson to anyone that might try to challenge their dominance in the future.
“The moment we were released from the hospital, we went into survival mode, fueled entirely on shock and adrenaline. We had some money—some accounts my parents had set up when we were kids—and we used it all to pay off the right people, get passports and all the papers and tickets we needed to get to the states and disappear. From Los Angeles, we made our way north, seeing the forests and mountain ranges that reminded us of home. We found work and a cheap house to rent in a small seaside town called Raven’s Cape, and for a little while, we lived in relative peace, haunted only by our own demons and the nightmares we never spoke of out loud.”
“Raven’s Cape,” Gray whispered, lifting her head and glancing around the room. “This was your house?”
“No,” I said with a faint smile, smoothing the hair from her forehead. The side of her face where she’d been resting against my chest was pink, her eyes still glassy with tears. “Elena has significantly upgraded since we lived together. The house we’d rented before isn’t even there anymore—it was probably condemned and put out of its misery.”
Gray settled back against my chest again, and for a while we just lay together in silence, the snow still swirling outside, the sounds of the household drifting in along with the mouthwatering scents of Elena’s cooking: ground beef and onions frying, parsley and garlic being chopped up for the chimichurri. My stomach rumbled, and Gray let out a soft laugh, trailing her fingertips back and forth across my abdomen.
“It was a mistake, Emilio,” she said softly. “A terrible mistake. You didn’t intend for anyone to get killed. You thought they’d help keep your family safe.”
I appreciated the sentiment, even though I suspected she knew her words would offer little comfort. When you’d carried a matched set of luggage stuffed to the gills with guilt, self-blame, and regret for two decades, it wasn’t a simple matter of dropping the bags on the curb and moving on just because someone said you could.
“Of course I didn’t intend for anyone to die,querida, but that doesn’t change the outcome. What does intention matter in a situation like that? If a drunk driver kills someone you love, and later says they didn’t mean it, does that change how you feel? Does it ease your pain or change the fact that you’ve lost someone forever? Does it bring them back?”
“But a drunk driver… You could argue that’s negligence.”
“You could argue that what I did was negligence, too. A drunk driver is blinded by alcohol and overconfidence, and they make a shit decision in a moment. I was blinded by a lot of things back then, too. Anger. Resentment. A fierce need to prove myself to a pack where I’d never be alpha. And a deep, endless ache for the family that I’d once had. If I’d been thinking clearly, if I’d kept my promises to protect my sister’s secrets, perhaps…” I trailed off. Those thoughts, too, were part of the haunted house of horrors in my mind. And as such, they needed to be brought out into the light, and released, along with all the rest.
“Elena and I stuck together in America out of necessity, and Elena was still so fragile. Shock, mostly. I knew I couldn’t leave her, even though I was terrified of the day she started asking questions.
“It took six months, but then it happened. The grief… It was like walking through mud. When it finally started to recede, just a little bit, her mind cleared up. The story wasn’t adding up. She began asking more questions—hard ones. Ones with complicated answers I didn’t want to give her. I dodged, redirected, distracted her, tried to convince her it was unhealthy and we had to let it go, had to board up that part of our lives and keep focused on the future. What a load of bullshit that was.”
“How did she finally find out?” Gray asked.
“I’d gone out to pick up a pizza, and when I came back inside, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a half-spent bottle of pineapple vodka and that faraway look in her eyes she’d often get, her hands in her lap. I held up the pizza box and made a joke about how we could’ve just gotten pineapples on the pizza instead of having to drink them. She laughed, but there was something wrong with it. It was totally foreign, like it belonged to another person. A chill went down my spine. Then her smile died, and she lifted her hands and pointed a gun at my chest.”
Gray gasped.
“‘It was you,’ Elena whispered. All the blood drained out of me, and I knew she’d finally figured out the truth. Enough of it, anyway. Enough to know who’d led the wolves to her door. And my God,querida, I’d never seen such despondence. It was like the last thread holding her together just snapped.
“‘I’ve got two silver bullets in here,’ she said. ‘One for you, one for me. That’s how it has to be, Meelo.’ I didn’t even try to argue with her. She was going to kill us both. I was certain of it. And the worst part of it was, I wanted her to. I saw the emptiness in her eyes, and in that moment, I really believed death would be the better option for both of us.”
A shiver raced through Gray’s body, and she reached for the sheet and pulled it up to our shoulders. “What changed her mind?”
“You know how you say there’s no coincidence?” I said.
“Yeah, that’s a lesson I’ve been forced to learn over and over.”
“Okay. So here’s where shit getsreallyinsane.”
“You mean it gets worse?”
