Page 57 of Brock’s Mate

She nodded.

“So they could remain clean and godly.” He couldn’t believe it.

“I guess.”

“That’s sick.” But it explained the smooth pathway, and the dark, putrid well he’d seen by the stone courtyard. How could they do that to an innocent child? On purpose?

Brock couldn’t help it; he was shaking with anger. “Where the hell are these people?”

She put her hand over his. “Brock. Don’t. I got out.”

“No thanks to them.” His wolf growled. “I want to go there and rip every last one of them limb from limb.”

“I can tell,” she said. She paused. “I’m not used to people wanting to do things like that for me.”

Of course he would. She was his mate. Anyone who hurt her deserved to die.

“Don’t you want them to pay for what they did?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I had to let it go. The pain they gave me didn’t hurt me.” He wasn’t so sure about that. “But I figured out pretty quick that holding onto my own anger would be corrosive enough to burn through my defenses. And then everything they gave me…”

It would spill out and destroy her. He said, “I don’t know how you survived that.”

“You survived too. Bad things.”

“That was different. I had my mom and my stepdad, and my pack. And I was helping people.”

“Yeah,” she said. They were silent for a minute. Then she said, “What ever happened to the white wolf? Tristan? Was he okay?”

That was a good memory too. “Yeah,” Brock said. “He’s okay. For awhile he lived in the same pack as my family and I did, in Idaho. Then he met his true mate and moved away. But his niece Michelangela is one of my best friends.”

Desi laughed. “Michelangela? What the hell kind of a name is that?”

“Don’t look at me, she picked it,” Brock said. “Her dad kept messing with her mom when she was pregnant, lobbying for all the different Mutant Ninja Turtle names. From that old TV show? Except for Rafael, because that’s his name. And Terin was like, ‘Hell no.’”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“But one night I was talking to Terin’s preggo belly with my head against it, and I heard the baby. Or her wolf. And she said she liked the turtle names, and she wanted to be Michelangela.”

Desi raised herself on one elbow, her hand on his shoulder. “Get out. Before she was born?”

“Swear. So when she turned out to be a girl like I predicted, that’s what they named her. Her brothers are Leonardo and Donatello. Otherwise known as Neon and Donut.”

At Desi’s snicker, he said, “Michelangela had trouble with her ‘l’s’ when she was little.”

Desi said a little wistfully, “You always sound happy when you talk about living with the pack.” She went quiet. “I guess I’m trying to put that together with them letting you go inside all those broken minds and deal with all that trauma.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Brock said, a bit defensively. “It wasn’t hurting me—or we thought it wasn’t. I would see someone, like Tristan, and just know I had to help. It would make me upset if I couldn’t. So they started calling me in once in a while with really messed-up shifters that no one else could reach. They worried about me, but I kept telling them I was okay. I thought I was okay.”

“Because your wolf took it all.”

“No one knew,” he said helplessly. “I wouldn’t have done that to him if I’d known.” He could hear the desperation in his voice. I wouldn’t have, he said to his wolf.

“Shh,” Desi said. “He knows that. He told me.”

I did, his wolf said. I told her. I protect you. But she needed to see, so she can heal you.

Desi kissed the center of his back, a soft feathery kiss, and then began stroking his skin—his arm, his chest, his hip. Gradually he began to relax again.