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“I didn’t come to Whisper Creek for the reason I said.”
His brows rose slightly. “So you’re not a journalist?”
She shook her head. Her eyes stung at the heaviness of what she was about to share, but she pushed the tears back and plowed forward.
“When Kerry died, I was so angry. Angry at the wolf who killed her, the alpha who let him go free, and mostly my parents for forgiving the guy and accepting the alpha’s apology. It drove a wedge between us. I spent…an awful amount of time just stewing in my anger, hating every shifter and wanting to go after that wolf.” She sighed and rubbed the space between her eyes. “Then I saw a social media video featuring a man who hated shifters as much as I did: Brent Foley.”
She’d found him charismatic and determined, and his message of “get the shifters away from humans and hold them accountable for their crimes” spoke to the deepest part of her.
“I followed him on social media and sent him a message, telling him about Kerry’s death and how angry I was. He reached out immediately and invited me to meet him at an anti-shifter conference he was holding in San Francisco. The crowd was rabid, shouting for Brent to take care of shifters and set humans free. I wasn’t really a bloodthirsty person, but I got caught up in the rush of the crowd and started chanting for blood too. Then I met with Brent, and he promised he could help me avenge my sister. And he did.”
She paused in her story, the images of the beginning of her relationship with Brent flashing through her mind like a movie. A very bad movie, with her as a villain and Brent as her handler.
“He killed the wolf?” Romeo asked gently after she’d stopped talking.
She hadn’t realized she’d closed her eyes until she had to open them to look at him. “Yeah. It looked like a car accident, but it wasn’t. Brent had Buck go after him. Buck’s his number two, and if Brent is psychotic, Buck is a hundred times worse.”
Romeo made a soft, purring sound that reached into a part of her and soothed it.
“I hated that he’d done that, but a part of me was happy. Happy that Kerry was avenged. But it didn’treallymake me happy. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a leak in a dam. It…staved the flow a bit but it was still there, gushing around the edges.
“And then I owed Brent. He never let me forget that I’d come to him, and he delivered, so I had to work for him.”
The pay had been great, and she’d been able to stay in LA, working to rid the area of shifters, including lobbying local governments to keep new groups from coming in. But her main job was infiltrating the groups and taking down the leadership. She told him about being called to Cleveland, tasked with finding a way to get into Whisper Creek and help take down Midas and as many high ranked tigers as possible.
She thought about the alpha wolf she’d seduced and helped destroy. She hadn’t killed the alpha wolf, but she’d been instrumental in his death, just as guilty as if she had struck the killing blow.
Even though she hadn’t really made a plan on how to take out the tigers when she’d come to town, she’d definitely been on the road to doing the same thing, finding a high-ranked male to seduce because Midas was newly mated and wouldn’t be vulnerable to a female coming on to him.
Romeo was silent as she cried when the story was done. He simply held her and let her have the silence to deal with her emotions.
As the tears finally ebbed, she wiped at her cheeks and blew out a breath. “I’ve never felt so guilty about those two wolves before—the alpha and the one who killed Kerry.”
“Well, you’re a truemate to a shifter,” he mused, “that might be part of it. But I actually believe there’s more to it than that.”
He stared at her but didn’t say anything further.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Let’s get dressed and go sit in the family room.”
“You’re kind of scaring me,” she admitted as he sat up. She followed suit but didn’t get off the bed. “Do you hate me? For the lies and my past?”
“What? Hell no.” He grabbed his jeans and tugged them on. “Sweetheart, if you hadn’t gone down that path—however horrible it is—then we probably would never have met. I’m not proud of my past either, and I’m definitely not looking forward to telling you about it, even though I will. Our pasts are part of us, but they don’t have to define us.”
She got off the bed and grabbed her jeans. “I’m sorry. About spying and lying and being part of Humans Against Shifters. I’m sorry that I thought I could walk into town and find a tiger to seduce, knowing what Brent’s plans are. I’m sorry for whatever danger I’ve brought to Whisper Creek and you.” She paused for a heartbeat as a well of sorrow opened up within her. “I’m sorry you couldn’t mark me because you can’t trust me. I wouldn’t want a liar for a truemate either.”
She inhaled shakily, trying not to cry. Again.
He picked up her sweater from the floor and handed it to her. “Sweetheart, you’re right that I didn’t mark you because I knew you weren’t telling me the truth about why you were in town or just who you were. I wasn’t going to mate you when you hadn’t told me the truth, even though my tiger really wanted me to.” He smiled and cupped her face. “But I will mate you fully, Ashley. Iwillmark your neck and make you mine in truth. But not until we get everything figured out and spend some time getting to know each other, okay? But trust me when I say that you’re my mate, period, mark or not.”
“Okay.”
“And, hey, I do forgive you.”
“You do? Why?” She clutched the sweater to her chest and stared up at him.
“Because we’re truemates. You spent five years being indoctrinated by a madman. Now you have a tiger for a mate and that’s messed with the foundation of your beliefs. You lied to protect yourself because you didn’t know me or know if you could trust me. I forgive you because I would want you to forgive me if the situation was reversed.”
