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Epilogue
HARLEIGH
MANY YEARS LATER…
A high-pitched screamtore me from my slumber. We all glanced at each other, tired and blurry eyed.
We knew that sound anywhere.
Bentleigh was in trouble.
All four of us launch out of bed, ready to take on the threat. Hunter reached for his gun first and was out the door into the hall before the rest of us. His baby girl was in trouble, and he had to save her.
“What the fuck?” Hunter yelled, stopping short.
Nikolai ran past him like wolves were nipping at his heels.
“Come back here you little puke”—A blue streak flew by the doorway, too fast to track—“You’re dead!”
Not wolvesthistime.
Behind me Dimitri barked out a laugh.
With the sight of what our baby and mini version of Dimitri had done to his sister, Nik would be praying it was just the wolves after him. We’d warned him after the last stunt he pulled that we wouldn’t be stepping in.
Just last month, he had dealt out his own form of justice. Quiet and reserved just like his father, but dangerous all the same. He never got mad, he just got even. When our daughter came to me for help, I knew it was serious. She was sixteen going on thirty. Since we never kept anything about our pasts a secret, she wanted to prove she could be just as independent as her mother.
We searched high and low to try and find her makeup, but there wasn’t a trace of it.
Somehow, I just knew it had to involve one or both of her younger brothers, or even their friends.
An hour later, and fifteen minutes before her date, Nik let out a battle cry. With a flurry of activity, everyone raced outside to see what our littlest hellion was up to. Just in time to see the little shit light a match and toss it into the fire pit. I felt my stomach drop when I saw the flames soaring and heard the loud whoosh. Before my heart rate had a chance to slow down, I heard the excited chatter of the crowd that had gathered.
He bent over and grabbed the shimmery, metallic makeup case that Bentleigh had been searching for, and chucked it into the crackling fire.
Only this time he’d gone too far.
Of course, we wouldn’t allow it to go too far, but he needed to know that there were consequences to his actions. And something told me there would most definitely be consequences.
Turning his sister into a Smurf the morning of school pictures wasn’t an intelligent course of action.
Considering who his father was, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Nik found it entertaining when the guys would call Dimitri Papa Smurf, despite not understanding the context. Even after all these years together, they still ribbed each other good-naturedly. There was a palpable sense of friendship and connection between the three of them I never expected. Although they had vastly different backgrounds, my presence helped bring them together with a collective aim.
To make me happy.
Now they were going to have to redirect that aim at solving the problem of the day. No amount of makeup would ever be enough to conceal the deep blue hue of her skin.
As if he had read my mind, a moment later Brax voiced my exact thought by saying, “How the fuck are we gonna make sure Bentleigh's school pictures don’t look like Smurfette cosplay?”
Phoenix’s door swung open behind Hunter. Our middle child, who would sleep through a bomb, rubbed his eyes, then said, “What’s going on?”
A thunderous crash reverberated from below, causing the floor to shake beneath our feet.
“You’re about to become our only son,” Hunter told him.
His eyes brightened at that comment. “I can’t believe he actually pulled it off.”
