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Shaw glanced at me as he settled onto the couch beside Karissa. “Maybe it was a rescue mission.”
Don’t flatter yourself. The fear they’d put us through felt nothing like being rescued.
“Please,” Karissa scoffed, voicing what I was still afraid to say. Then she added, “Stone has the pack—and, apparently, even his own idiot brothers—convinced that he’s dangerous. That he’ll kill anyone who crosses him. But even though he’s a pain in the ass, he’s a better man than he knows. One of the best.”
“One of the best?” Shaw asked, an eyebrow raised. He leaned back into the couch, putting one of his boots up on the coffee table.
Karissa kicked his leg, and Shaw winced but refused to move.
“Yeah, Cole and Liam are both pretty decent too,” she said, then gave in and smiled. “Shaw here is a good guy. As long as he keeps his pants on. He’s slept with most of the pack.”
“Always looking for my fated mate,” he replied lightly.
“He’s looked everywhere. Even though we keep telling him that’s not how you find your fated mate.”
“Don’t slut shame me.”
I’d talked to Brennan long ago about what it was like when mates found each other in his pack. It varied a little by every pack, but long ago, Brennan had marked me. My fingers rested on the spot that Brennan had marked, just where my neck met my left shoulder.
Nathan had tried to obliterate that mark with a tattoo. When that hadn’t worked, he’d branded me. Some of his men had held me down while I screamed. But even that burn mark had faded, leaving Brennan’s mark still vivid against my pale skin. Nathan had hacked it off next. I’d screamed and screamed, both of us slipping in my blood, and I’d finally passed out from the pain. I’d woken with my throat raw, covered in my own blood, a tattered wound hacked out of my shoulder.
And yet, when the wound finally healed, leaving a dimpled scar at first, the mark had slowly formed across that new pink skin.
He'd tried half a dozen times, and every time, it took months to heal, to return.
But Brennan’s mark was always on me.
I’d learned to hide it from Nathan. But there was comfort in still carrying something of Brennan’s.
“Tell me about Liam and Cole.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask about Stone, as if saying his name would summon him, but I was curious about these men who might control what happened next to me and my son.
Although I had a feeling Karissa might have a say. Which was interesting, give how powerless I’d felt as a female in my own pack.
Brennan had told me about his siblings, of course. I remembered him leaning back in the booth at the diner where we’d had some of our secret meetings, talking with his hands as he described Karissa, Shaw, Stone, and Liam. One of them was always driving him crazy, but his eyes had lit up with love when he was talking about them too. They had seemed so close knit. I’d been jealous. I loved my little brother and sister, but our love was fractured, ground beneath the wheels of our own survival.
It was hard to reconcile the Stone that Brennan had talked about, with bright eyes and exasperated love, with the terrifying man who had haunted me through the smoke.
Karissa tilted her head back as if to make sure Cole really had gone out the front door. “Cole is Stone’s second in command, although sometimes I think he and Teresa are elbowing each other for that role. He’s one of the most loyal people I’ve ever met.” She shook her head, smiling faintly. “He acts more loyal to Stone than any of us, that’s for sure.”
There went Cole as an ally, then. From the way he’d been so tender with Dylan, I’d dared to hope he might become one.
“And Liam?” I hadn’t met the other brother yet and I didn’t remember Brennan talking about him much.
She hesitated. “Liam is complicated. Don’t let him scare you.”
“Scare me?” I demanded.
“He’s not scary like Stone,” she rushed to assure me. “He’s just…different.”
“Aren’t we all?”
She bit her lower lip. If I was reading her right, she felt protective of Liam, and I was curious why. “Ever since Liam was a kid, he’s been odd. He seems like he exists in a parallel universe than the rest of us. Sometimes it overlaps, sometimes he’s in a world of his own.”
“I see.” If it would keep my son and I safe, I’d try to like Liam no matter what universe he was in. Clearly, he was important to Karissa.
“You never met Liam–” Shaw began, a question in his voice, then broke off. He turned on an easygoing smile on me. I wanted to ask him what he’d been about to say, but he was already going on. “I can tell you all about myself.”
“And probably will at length,” Karissa said.
