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“I’ll just?—”
We both spoke at the same time, as I reached to turn up the temperature for the passenger side of the car and he reached to push the button that turned on the heated seats. Our hands met in the middle and I sucked in a sharp breath at the feel of his warm fingers sliding over mine. We both pulled our hands back and I stuffed mine into the pocket of my hoodie. He brought his hand to his thigh where he curled it into a fist before bringing it up to grip the steering wheel. I watched the knuckles turn white from how tightly he held the wheel and realized my perfume had begun to get stronger.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… do anything to make you uncomfortable. I?—”
“It’s fine, Ethan. We’re here.”
I’d been so focused on trying to force my body to disappear that I didn’t even realize we’d been rolling through my parents’ neighborhood and were approaching the house. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, so Nate hadn’t arrived yet, but I didn’t know about Aubrey’s guard since he could have parked along the street. Our car came to a stop and I jumped out to rush up to the door, pulling my keys out as I ran, thankful to still have them on my key ring. A muffled curse behind me had me briefly feeling guilty for taking off on Trevor. Probably not the smartest thing to do with everything going on but it was done. I unlocked the door and pushed in, listening for where in the gigantic house they might be.
“Mom? Aubrey?”
“Ethan?”
Turning toward the hallway that led to the kitchen, I saw my mom standing there wringing her hands in a gesture that was so familiar. As she looked at me with her beautiful brown eyes, that still hardly had any lines around them, I saw the tracks of recent tears on her cheeks. I closed the distance between us and wrapped her in my arms and her arms banded tight around my waist as she turned her face into my chest and shook. I hated my fathers. Hated them for what they’d done to me, to her, and for the things I had no doubt they were plotting to do to Aubrey. We stayed like that for a moment longer until she pulled away and reached up to hold my face.
“My beautiful boy. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I’ll always be here if you need my help.”
She moved her hands down to my own and raised them to press a kiss to each of my palms.
“Not that, mi vida. For having the courage to find your own way. To find people who love you and for giving an old woman courage to make the right choice.”
Emotion choked my voice and she began to blur as my vision clouded. I brought her back in for another hug since I couldn’t make myself speak. We held each other like that until there was a knock at the door and she stiffened in my arms. I looked over to see Trevor dip his head to my mom before turning to answer the door. His spine was straight and his demeanor had shifted back into the intimidating Alpha persona that he stepped into everywhere but at the pack house.
“¿Quién es ese?”
“That’s Trevor, Mom. He’s one of my… um, one of the Alphas in Pack Owens.”
My mom’s penetrating gaze seemed to understand all the things that I had left unsaid, or maybe Aubrey had told her about my run-ins with Trevor. She nodded as if deciding something as a deep voice broke the silence.
“Where’s Miss West?”
My hackles rose at the stranger’s rudeness but when I looked at Trevor, he didn’t seem concerned.
“Hello, Noah dear. Aubrey is packing up her room.”
A lemony soap scent hit my senses and I realized he was the same Alpha who I’d run into during my first visit to Drake House with Jade. Judging by my mom and Trevor’s reaction to his appearance, this was the guard they’d assigned to protect my sister. He just nodded once to Mom and went up the stairs to Aubrey’s room without acknowledging me or Trevor.
My brows furrowed and I opened my mouth to call after him. I may have been an Omega, but that Alpha was at least a decade older than Aubrey and she was still my baby sister. Omega or no, all my protective spidey senses were tingling and I didn’t like it. A soft hand squeezed mine and my mom pulled my attention back to her.
“It’s fine, Ethan. Aubrey is quite safe with Mr. Daniels.”
“But… packing? Mom, where are you two going?”
“Yes. That is an excellent question, Ethan. What do you think you are doing, Marisol?”
Fear slammed through me as my fathers came through the open front door. Anger thickened their scents and weighed down on me. Trevor’s growl was so low that it was more vibration than sound, moving through the space and reverberating through my body, like I was standing too close to a speaker at a concert. He had been standing to the side, letting my mom and I have some privacy, but quickly moved to block my fathers from getting too close to us.
Harrison stumbled back a step at the sight of the six-foot five Alpha covered in tattoos in front of him. The only signs that Charles, my biological father, was affected by Trevor was a brief raise of his graying brows and the curl of his upper lip.
“We made it clear the night those… undesirables came to claim you from our home, Ethan. You are no longer welcome here. You have shamed your family. So don’t think you can crawl back here when these miscreants and the criminals they are mixed up with?—”
It was that statement that pushed away the fear and gave way to rage.
“I’ve shamed my family? What about you, Charles?” I’d hoped for a flinch or any kind of reaction to calling him by his first name, but he showed nothing. Nate and I had always called Harrison by his first name, though, of the two dads, he’d been the kindest to us as kids. But it had always been drilled into the three of us that we were to address Charles as Dad, especially in public. “My pack are criminals? You’re the one who has broken the law over and over, and what about what you did to Mom? Using your bark to coerce your bonded Omega because she, what? Dared to disagree with you?”
He reacted then, his mask of aloof disgust cracking to show the same rage that I’d only seen when Jade came to take me away.
