Page 107 of Blood and Trouble

“Hey!” I shoved her back. “I’m not a slut!”

“It’s not a bad thing.” Maeve laughed and shrugged. “I’m a proud slut. Fucking and sucking since I was fifteen⁠—”

The bedroom door opening cut off whatever reply I would have made, and Guin sauntered in, quietly closing it behind her. We went quiet, the children having been caught up past bedtime by our older, meaner sister. She pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips.

“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” She stopped in front of me, and I peered up at her. Despite our difference in appearance, it was like looking in a mirror. If I was the frigid Vanderbilt bitch, she was the ice queen, the template I’d carved myself from.

“About?” I feigned innocence, even blinked my eyes a few times in supplication.

Guin tilted her head to the side. “Don’t play dumb.”

“Sorry, not sorry?”

She rolled her eyes and groaned. “Lycan and Poe? You can’t be serious.”

Maeve laughed. “Oh, stop, Guin. Just because you’re in love with the king of sexually repressed shifters doesn’t mean⁠—”

“I’m not in love with anyone,” Guin cut in, more offended by the accusation of being in love rather than the person in question.

I looked at Sol and mouthed, “Who?”

“Kodiak,” she replied.

“Wow,” I murmured. “Really?”

“No, not really.” Guin scoffed and sat in a chair at the foot of the bed. “He fucking wishes.”

Sol bit her bottom lip while Maeve shook her head and grinned.

“Your thirty days are up on Tuesday,” Guin continued. “Pruitt wants to know what to do with the paperwork.”

Lycan and I hadn’t discussed it since that one conversation after my transition, but I knew what he’d say. He’d started calling me his wife. I thought of him as my husband, even if we weren’t mated, even if we’d never be mated. No, there was no going back.

“Shred it,” I said.

Guin’s features turned to stone, reminding me so much of our father despite how much she looked like our mother. “You’re sure?”

I held my chin up higher, mirroring her expression. “Positive.”

She rubbed her forehead and mumbled something about how a woman with a law degree should have at least had the foresight to get a prenup. What exactly had my JD cost again? Much good it did me.

I ignored her. Even if I wanted to get away from Lycan, which I didn’t, I doubted he would let me go. I wouldn’t if it were reversed.

“Do you really think this is all about Mom’s bloodline?” Sol asked, glancing at Guin with hope in her eyes.

Our eldest sister licked her lips and sighed. “I don’t know. I remember those final days before she disappeared. She’d just given birth to Galahad, but it wasn’t like when she had the rest of you. The delivery was hard. It took a lot out of her.”

I vaguely recalled her extended hospital stay and the solemn look in her eyes when she returned home with our baby brother. I didn’t understand at the time, but looking back now, something had changed in her. She’d lost a spark, a vital piece of her soul.

“Before she died, she told me I had to be strong,” Guin continued. “I had to look out for my siblings. I had to be the rock. She told me it was too much to ask of me; she knew that. But she didn’t have another choice.”

I’d never heard this story before, and I imagined a confused, sixteen-year-old Guin listening to our mother in her final days. Maybe Guin was old enough to understand something was wrong, but she was still a child. She couldn’t have stopped what happened. She couldn’t have known.

“She left in the middle of the night,” Guin continued. “I watched her from my bedroom window, but I thought it was like the other times. She’d go roaming in the woods out behind the ranch, but I know now she was going off to shift. Except the full moon had been the week before. I’ve never been able to make that sit right.”

It still rattled me, knowing my mother had the gene, knowing she’d suffered alone all those years without a pack. I ached to find out all the details. Why had she left her family in the Sierra Nevada? Why hadn’t she mated Zion? What really happened when she crossed into Bastard territory that night? Had the Scorpions done something to her? And if she’d been met with foul play, where was her body? We never had anything to bury, no conclusion to mourn. Nothing but an empty grave, a headstone, and a violent story told by our father.

“Based on everything we know,” Guin said, freezing her features into that stony expression I recognized from the boardroom. “I bet Marx tried to get to her first, and she went down fighting. If this siphon curse or whatever is meant for the Kennedy bloodline, he only had to bide his time until he got his hands on one of us. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. We’re here. We shifted. And we never even got to bury a body. So I stopped asking what happened to her a long time ago. It doesn’t change anything, does it?”