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Lacey’s heart ached at the raw pain in his words. “Mason, I’m so sorry.”
Jaw tightening, Mason drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Before she died, she made me promise to get Karis out of there and away from him.”
Karis must be his sister, Lacey thought. Karis, Kari. Neither had come up with truly original new names when they went into hiding.
With a hand, he scrubbed one side of his face, the dark shadows never leaving his eyes, which were now glancing at the floor with his bare feet. He’d put on fresh jeans and a new-looking ACDC t-shirt. “My pack is different from most in that our right to rule comes from the maternal line, not the paternal. My father was only able to be alpha because of his mother, and only until Karis came of age since she was the first biological girl.”
A line of confusion etched over Lacey’s forehead. Out of everything Nathan had said to her about werewolf society, that little tidbit of information had never come up. But then again, he did have Sam for an alpha. “That’s strange, isn’t it?”
Mason nodded, and his eyes glanced upwards to meet hers. “Yeah, we’re the only ones who do it but it’s an unbreakable rule, and my uncle knew it. He planned to marry Karis to his son, our cousin. Benjamin’s a little … behind developmentally, and Sampson easily manipulates him to do whatever the hell he wants.”
“And what does he want his son to do?”
Mason’s dark eyes narrowed to slits and the muscle in his jawline tightened. “Get Karis pregnant until she has a girl and then deal with her. Permanently.”
The venom in his words were undeniable, the same as his meaning. “He’d kill her?”
Nodding, Mason leaned back in his chair and rubbed a tired hand over his face. “And rule the Bluestone Claws with an iron fist.”
The Bluestone Claws.
Sam was Sampson.
The same pack as Nathan.
The bastard.
She’d been tracking down the rightful heirs to the pack’s throne. Lacey knew enough about Sam to know every single word Mason was telling her was true. If an alpha could order the death of one of his own simply for falling in love with an outsider, she could certainly see him marrying his mentally challenged son to his niece in order to keep his iron grip on power.
Setting the cup down on the floor, Lacey rose to her feet, unable to sit still any longer. She started to pace the room. “When did you leave?”
“Ten years ago,” Mason said, slouching back in the armchair, his face showing signs of exhaustion, a side effect of too many transformations in a short time. Werewolves didn’t just change forms during the full moon – they could shift any time they wanted – but outside those particular nights, it took considerable energy. Sunlight streamed in through the window, highlighting this fact, but couldn’t chase the darkness away from his eyes. It danced within them, never letting up. “Karis and I have been on the run ever since then.”
“Where did you go?”
“Everywhere.” Mason released another long sigh. “California, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico. Anywhere that I thought I could keep us safe. We spent a year across the border.”
Lacey’s heart ached at the rawness in his tone. “How old were you at the time?”
“When we left? I was fifteen, Karis just seven.”
Stopping, a grimace pulled at Lacey’s face. He’d been nothing but a kid himself, and already he’d seen his parents murdered, his sister’s inheritance taken away, and then shouldered the burden of raising said sister. How the fuck did a fifteen year old do all that?
Shaking his head, Mason chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “The early days were the worst. We only had the money I was able to steal before we got out of there and it didn’t last long with two of us eating. Shifters eat a lot,” he explained, not realising that she already knew. Nathan could eat a horse and still claim to be hungry. “And me being so young at the time didn’t help matters.”
“What happened? How did you survive?”
“We stuck to abandoned cabins like these. You can find them all over the country, out in isolated areas where there’s no internet to keep folks entertained. The silence gets to them eventually and they need to rush back to civilization. We could hunt for meat as wolves, so that wasn’t a problem, and go into town for other things when necessary. When the money ran out, well, I had a baby sister to protect and I ended up doing whatever I could.”
He means stealing, Lacey realised. Not that she could judge. If she were in his shoes, she would have done the exact same thing.
“But when people realised we had no parents looking after us, and they’d get CPS involved, we’d simply take off again. A few years later, I took on jobs, cash in hand only. That gave us enough income to buy a vehicle, clothes, whatever we needed. Whenever I wasn’t working, I helped Karis with her studies.”
“She didn’t go to school?”
Mason shook his head again, stretching out his hands. “There was no way I could send her to school. And she desperately wanted to go. She wanted friends, to wear pretty clothes, and go to all the parties. All the things human girls take for granted. But how could I? Most of us don’t have birth certificates, and I had to spend most of my cash at one point to get a fake ID so we could get a truck, let alone get her the stuff she needed to go to school.”
That was understandable. A few of her friends had kids and raising them was expensive. Buying fake documents to enrol a teenage girl in school, well, she hated to think how much that would cost. Then there were books, the right clothes, shoes, money to go out with at the weekends …
