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“I’m sorry about that, Cheeks,” he said, his voice gentler and more soothing than I’d heard it in a while. He sat down on the bed next to me and smoothed my hair away from my brow. “I lost my temper with Denny. I shouldn’t have done it. If I scared you—”
“No. That’s not it.” I rolled onto my side to face him. I tucked my knees to my stomach and folded my hands under my chin, feeling vulnerable as a child. “When you raised your aura at Denny, I…I felt it.”
“You felt it? How?”
It was a good question. I’d only started to sense shifter auras when I’d been pregnant with the boys. With a few notable exceptions—like with Samuel, who rarely let his down—they only came up when there some dick-measuring or a fight in the works. Auras were like a warning system to other shifters.Back off. Back down. If you fuck around, you’re gonna find out.But I’d only been able to feel those auras because of the two shifters growing in my womb. Rylan and Ryder—they had been sensing them. I’d only been picking up on auras because of the boys. It should have stopped entirely after I gave birth.
I thought it had stopped.
Apparently, it hadn’t.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe it’s some kind of lingering side effect of a shifter pregnancy?”
“Could be,” he mused. “Though, I thought all of that would be out of your system by now. Did it feel the same as it did when you were carrying the boys?”
“A little bit, I suppose. It felt like…” I racked my brain for the right way to describe it. The results were hardly flattering. “Like needing to scream and throw up all at once.”
Xander was staring at me like I’d just confessed to assassinating Kennedy. Suddenly, I was deeply self-conscious.
“I know how stupid that must sound,” I admitted, feeling my face warm.
“No. Doesn’t sound stupid to me.” His brow furrowed thoughtfully as he stroked my hair away from my face. “That’s kind of how it felt the first time I raised my aura, actually. Not exactly the same but pretty close.”
“What was different?” It was weird to process that I’d experienced something even remotely similar to what Xander had. So much of his life was still foreign to me, locked away behind a door that only a true shifter could access.
But not this part, for some reason.
“The anger, mostly,” he said. “The first time I did it, Ma had just caught Dylan coloring on the wall of his room. With permanent marker, of course, so she was extra pissed. I came in from outside when I heard her yelling at him, and it just…burst out of me, like my finger had slipped against a trigger while I was holding a gun. Felt like a gunshot, too—for both of us. She said when it hit her, it nearly knocked her on her ass.” He breathed a laugh. “She was so excited, she completely forgot about Dylan and the mess he’d made. I think it might have been one of the few times I actually made her proud.”
I listened intently, always eager for glimpses of Xander’s life before I’d entered it. Unfortunately, as was so often the case about stories of Xander’s childhood, the tale was equal parts bitter and sweet.
“I was angry, though,” I insisted. “I was so angry, I felt like I was going to pass out from trying to hold it in.”
He took my hand and ran his thumb over the ridges of my knuckles. “Are you still angry now?”
“A little. I don’t like waiting any more than you do. I hate that we got our hopes up over nothing, and I hate it even more that Denny’s so unwilling to go down a different route,” I confessed.
“Makes it all feel useless, doesn’t it?” he said, then paused the trail of his thumb. It pressed into the valley between my knuckles, settling on a low point. “Like everything’s moving against us, and if we don’t hold on to what we’ve got, we’ll be swept farther and farther away.”
“That’s exactly how it feels,” I agreed eagerly. “I think you’re right. We need to go back North. Those packs Samuel’s friendly with are definitely hiding something. But…”
“But?” Xander repeated, raising an eyebrow.
“I also think we need to trust Denny,” I admitted. “Finding people is his job for a reason. If his intuition says the ranch is worth staking out…”
Xander sighed. “He’s even more stubborn than you are. I’m not sure I would’ve hired him if I’d known that from the get-go.”
“I’m not that stubborn,” I grumbled. “But every time I think about all we’ve lost, how badly things have fallen apart, I feel like we have to cling to whatever we have left. And I despise clinging to things.”
Xander snorted, then stroked my cheek fondly. “I’ve noticed.”
I chewed on my lower lip, trying to imagine what would happen next if, by some grace of God, Denny was right.
We’d have the boys back with us. That would only ever be a good thing.
But Xander’s mother would still be stuck in her coma, and Xander’s father would still be devastated because of it. Kingston would still be depressed and struggling.
“Something else on your mind?” Xander asked.
