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“He didn’t mean that,” Shaw told me quietly.
“No, Liam always means what he says.” There was no point in denying it. “When he bothers to talk.”
Normally, he didn’t bother to talkto me.
Karissa pushed back her chair. “I’ll go.”
“Give him some time alone,” I disagreed. “He barely got to know Brennan again before we lost him. None of us understand what this is like for him.”
Karissa patted the table. “Sometimes, you’re wise, oh mighty alpha.”
“I don’t know why I keep you around.” But I took my seat at the table.
“Because I’m very good at baking.” Pulling the chocolate cake closer, she picked up the knife. “Come on, let’s eat dessert. Life is short.”
Depending on how our ambush of the Longroad pack went tomorrow, it might be very short.
After we ate, Karissa went hunting for candles. Shaw rolled his eyes but stayed behind to help her. Whatever she needed to do to make our memorial to Brennan pretty, we would humor. It was part of how Karissa grieved.
When I stepped out onto the porch, Liam sat on the steps, his arms folded around his legs. It drove me crazy when he slept outside, but I knew he would tonight. He might even take to the woods as the wolf all night long.
Something must have reminded him of all those years of captivity. Maybe thatsomethingwas me, and a feeling that was hard and flat pressed into my chest at the thought. I couldn’t help that I looked like our asshole father; as I got older, sometimes my own face in the mirror was jarring to me. Brennan and I had looked alike, but Brennan had died young, and I kept getting older. More like Dad.
I leaned on the porch railing beside him. “You want to go up with us to the grave?”
“He’s not really buried there.”
“No,” I agreed. We’d never recovered his body. No one survived a headshot, though, so we knew his corpse was rotting somewhere; I’d just failed to bring him home. “But it helps to have someplace to go. To remember.”
“What if he didn’t really die?”
Wishful thinking.
“No one could have survived that.” If Brennan had even survived the beating Nathan Longroad had given him before he squeezed the trigger. My hands flexed into fists, then relaxed.
Nathan had sent me the cell phone footage he’d taken of beating Brennan, and my brother had appeared as if he might be dead even before Nathan put the gun against his temple.
With that message, Nathan had signed his death warrant. But I’d bided my time for the past five years, waiting for the right moment to serve it.
I’d caught a glimpse of Amelia in the background of the video. She’d looked wide-eyed and terrified, but she’d been unhurt, unbound. I’d stared at her face a thousand times, wondering what was happening in her head in that moment.
If she betrayed my brother, she deserved to die.
“Brennan was strong,” Liam muttered. “Stronger than any of us.”
I raked my hand through my hair, remembering how Brennan had changed in the years after Dad took Liam away. He’d always loved to read, but over time he’d forged himself into a weapon, into a son Dad was proud of, into an alpha.
His only weaknesses had been Amelia, and us, his siblings.
But mostly Amelia.
“Yeah, he was,” I said quietly. “I miss him.”
“Me too.” He spoke so softly, I wasn’t sure I’d really heard it.
Then Karissa came out with the candles, and she passed one to each of us. I gripped it as the four of us climbed the long, switchback trail to the side of the mountain where we’d buried my brother’s too-light casket. The ground was treacherous and dark, and my candle tilted to one side, spilling hot wax across my knuckles.
Karissa stumbled, and I reached for her, but Liam got there first. He gripped her arm to steady her, then wove it through his. The moonlight shone across their dark hair as the two of them exchanged a quick glance of understanding. I wasn’t sure Liam talked to Karissa any more than he talked to me but the two of them still seemed to have a special bond.
