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With Mom safely tucked away, I kicked Finn out and sent all my brothers away. They would’ve been more helpful to Declan anyway. As for me… I had work to do. This bullshit with the fucking hunter needed to end. I wasn’t sure exactly how, but I’d come up with a way.
Standing in the dark, I stared at the vast treeline as if it’d magically give me something. It wouldn’t. I fucking knew that. The hunter wouldn’t have stuck around after I subdued Raven—at least, I wouldn’t have if roles were reversed.
No, I stood there waiting for my fucking phone to ring as I contemplated just how far away the hunter had been from my family the whole time. It was easier to contemplate that than to look at the shit Genevieve had sent me. I’d looked. Once everyone left, I’d gone through the envelope: divorce papers and the keys to our house as well as our car.
She wasn’t keeping a damn thing for herself. No money, not the house, not the fucking car. She hadn’t used a fucking penny in our account since I’d left—something I should’ve looked at while I was gone. I’d left her with access to everything, and she’d taken absolutely nothing. I funneled money into that account, secretly hoping that at least my wife would be okay while I was gone, and it turned out she didn’t fucking need me.
And now? Now, she didn’t fucking want me.
I had to fucking talk to her. I had a list a mile long of the things I wanted to fucking say to her, but it had to wait. Fucking priorities. I hated my stupid fucking priorities. I wanted to storm my wife’s fucking house and make her fucking listen to reason.
I was so goddamn pissed off that I took it out on the phone when it rang.
“It took you a long fucking time to call me back,” I snapped when I answered. “What the fuck took you so goddamn long, Lane? Have something better to fucking do than answer my goddamn call?”
“Down, boy,” he retorted with a chuckle. “What the fuck crawled up your ass tonight?”
I growled because Lane Stevens was a certified pain in my fucking ass. He was also one of my best friends but still a pain in my fucking ass. We had a simple friendship that revolved mostly around hunting shifters and magical beings. He came and went however the fuck he pleased but never let me down. Usually. There was one time with a fucking panther shifter that I’d never let him live down.
“I called you three fucking hours ago,” I grit out around the cigarette I was furiously smoking. “What the fuck have you been doing?”
“Ah, good old Ian. Forgetting the world doesn’t revolve around him,” Lane said. “I’ll have you know, stalking sirens is a tedious business. There’s dicks involved, and they ain’t mine, buddy.”
“Shit.” I blew out a long breath of air, my anger deflating under that news. “You good?”
“I’d be better if I was a voyeur but whatever.” I could practically hear his fucking shrug from here. “So, what crawled up your fucking ass?”
“We have a hunter in Cedar Harbor.” My statement was met by fucking silence. I expected it. Lane had a sordid history with hunters. Except I wasn’t in the fucking mood to wait his processing shit out. “Do I need to fucking repeat that?”
“How bad?”
“One dead already. And it took over my brother’s fiancé’s wolf to use against us.”
“The sleepwalking feral one?” Lane asked. Yeah, he knew about Raven’s condition. Lane wasn’t a wolf, but he was a powerful fucking witch with a streak for the unusual and borderline wicked. I teetered the line of morally questionable, but Lane made me look like a goddamn saint.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I replied. “I had to subdue her.”
“Your mom had to love that,” he scoffed. Yeah, we weren’t getting into that. Mom was fucking livid about that whole thing as well as learning that I’d lied to her about what I was doing with my life. I planned to avoid that pending conversation as long as fucking possible. “What do you need from me?”
“I need you on this one,” I told him. “I can’t do this one alone.”
“Well, that’s a dangerous ask.” That dark chuckle of his sent a shiver down my spine.
“I know I can’t hunt this fucker down if I’m worried about being a liability.” I dropped my cigarette to the ground and squashed it. Lane would be able to do things I couldn’t dream of when it came to hunting this monster down. “Skip the fucking lecture and just tell me when you can get here.”
“Two weeks maybe,” Lane said. “I’ll swing out as soon as I fucking can, but I can’t promise sooner. They need to be dealt with first.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I get that.”
And I did. I just didn’t like it.
“Need anything else before I go kill another soul-sucking bitch?” He sounded far too thrilled about that. The thing with Lane was, he had some major serial killer vibes. He just channeled all that into his fucking hunts—which always included unnecessary torture before death is possible. And yet, the same fucking man donated half his pay to children’s hospitals where he volunteered. He was fucking unusual.
“My future sister-in-law,” I began, hoping to hell he could help me with my second thing. If he couldn’t, I didn’t think anyone could. “Do you have something that could prevent the hunter from taking control of her wolf? Or could you make something?”
“Ah, shit.” Lane clicked his tongue. “A magical ward would work, but it’d have to be dual-calibrated to both a human and a wolf.”
“So, it’s not possible then.”
