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Tess squeezes my hand so hard I have to flex my hand to get her to relax.
"Actually, it's not insane."
Tasha and I both look to Tess for an explanation. At this point, it feels like we're trying to put together a puzzle where none of us know if we even have all the pieces. Tasha has a few. Tess has a few. I have a few. We need everything to come together once and for all if there's any hope of ending up with a clear picture here.
"When we were at the Luna's house, before I passed out, and before I got all worked up yelling at Dominic, I saw pages in one of her books about shifter legacies. And it said shifting from birth is normal. That's it's only modern shifter families that have evolved to shift for the first time at eighteen, as a means of keeping our kind a secret."
"Tess. That's major stuff." Tasha leans forward to rub her sister's arm. "Goddess, no wonder you were overwhelmed. That changes… everything we know about ourselves, doesn't it?"
It takes everything in me not to knock Tasha's hand away. Now that I've marked Tess, even seeing her sister touch her is making me antsy. No one should be touching her but me. Especially not her sister after the revelation that she's been hiding something from Tess all this time. Tess deserved to know something like that.
"But you did know," Tess points out bitterly.
"It's true. I did. And I am so sorry, Tess. Tevin and I, we grew up with Mom constantly telling us how important it was that no one should ever know. She would barely take you out in public after you were born, just in case you shifted where others might see us."
I'm not particularly interested in the apology—Tess can decide whether or not to accept that. There's something else I want to know. The question sitting on the tip of my tongue as hot anger washes over me.
"Who taught her to lock her wolf away?" I ask with a growl that makes both women flinch.
I know what it means to make someone lock their wolf away. As Alpha, I occasionally have no choice but to guide members of the pack through it if there are issues. Typically, a person's wolf is only locked away if there are considerable issues. An unruly wolf that puts the pack in danger. And even then, we use the locking methods only as a last resort. A shifter goes through real agony in order to lock their wolf away.
"Your first adult shift must have been incredibly painful," I mutter, remembering one particular case a few years back where we were able to put a shifter through remedial training so he could bring his wolf back to the surface. The pain he went through to shift for the first time after that nearly killed him. The pack doctor narrowly kept him alive until that pain had passed.
"It was," Tess confirms quietly.
"Tevin had to do it. I didn't have the stomach to watch." Tasha moves away to one side of the SUV, staring out the window as if she can't bear to look at Tess any longer. I hear the guilt in her voice, but it still royally pisses me off to know Tess's own family hid shit like this from her.
There's another feeling too. A guilt of my own. Tess's shift on her eighteenth birthday would have been brutally painful and unimaginably lonely. And in the midst of all that pain and grief, I rejected her. No wonder she was so unreasonable about letting me mark her. I have a lot more shit to make up for than I realized.
Good thing I have the rest of our lives to do it.
"I don't want to talk about this anymore," Tess says with surprising grace. She gestures back toward the highway we pulled off of. "Let's get going, Dominic.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Tess
I'm on the verge of hyperventilating as Dominic pulls out of the parking lot and back onto the road toward the Luna Sovereign’s house. I keep replaying my moment with her book in my mind. It was right about me shifting from birth. I wrack my brain trying to remember the other details. Something about elemental sensitivities. I really should have paid more attention to that, I realize now. Maybe it explains what I did with the ground when confronted.
I rub my temple, an ill attempt to stave off the headache that’s starting to form. I didn't ask for any of this. Suddenly, I'm being thrust into being a Luna for a pack like I've never experienced. I've only ever belonged to quiet, peaceful packs. But Dominic's pack is huge and powerful, and no doubt constantly tasked with defending that power.
How do I fit into that? How can I possibly figure out how I fit in when I'm still figuring out what I might be capable of? Right now, all I've experienced is happenstance. If I don't know how to control my strength or the earth at will, it's really of no use to me. It will only be a liability.
"Tess. Calm down," Dominic says soothingly, his eyes not leaving the road. He doesn't look at me, so he must just feel my anxiety filling the air in the car.
Tasha is silent in the backseat. I want to reassure her that I'm not mad. In her place, I can only imagine I would have done the same thing. She and Tevin thought they were protecting me. They kept me with them, no matter what it took. I don't know if they made the right choices, but I know it must have seemed like the only option at the time.
I can hardly judge a person for that, considering the choice I was forced to make myself between Jimmy and Callum. Sometimes, all we can do is our best.
I release a deep breath and let my head fall back against the seat. It's not far now, we'll soon turn onto the private road to the house. Even though I only met the Luna Sovereign once, it's sad to know she won't be greeting us this time when we arrive.
"Stop the car," Tasha says suddenly.
"What?" Dominic glances in the rear view mirror and shakes his head. "I'm not stopping here." We're quite literally in the middle of nowhere at the moment, the stray gas station he stopped at well out of view.
"Dominic, stop the car!"
I stare back at my sister, bewildered, watching as she puts a hand to her temple and winces. "Someone is talking to me," she says, squinting as if it pains her to listen. I sympathize immediately.
