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“That’s vague.”
I dropped my hands and immediately started shredding another napkin. “I don’t know what to do.”
“About what?”
“This. The pack. Everything.” I sighed. “You.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Who says you have to do anything?”
I was confused. “I have to prove myself.”
“Says who?”
“Everyone.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that anyone is saying that.”
“Maybe not in so many words. But it’s—you can’t think that everything is going to be easy. It’s not.”
“I didn’t say it would be. Or that it is.”
“Rico said—”
His expression hardened. “I have a good idea what Rico said.” He sighed. “Look, Robbie. I know it’s tough. And you’ve got all this shit swirling through your head. But Rico is….”
“Justified in his absolute hatred of me?”
He traced a finger along the tabletop. “He doesn’t hate you.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I kind of think he does. I mean, I don’t blame him. I can’t. I don’t remember what happened, but it was bad.”
“It was,” he said bluntly. “But that wasn’t your fault.”
“You all thought it was.” And that caused my heart to seize in my chest. This void in my head, this blank space where apparently years of memories should have been, was vast. I didn’t know how I’d never noticed it before. It
was like I’d been drugged. I didn’t know how to reconcile what my head told me versus what I was hearing from the man across from me and the others.
He winced. “We made mistakes. All of us. It doesn’t make it right. It caught us off guard, and given all that we’d been through, it… I don’t know. We trusted people we shouldn’t have before.”
“And you thought I was the same as them,” I said dully.
He was frustrated. I could see it on his face, could smell it in his scent. His hands curled into fists. “I….”
I shook my head and forced a smile. “It’s okay. I don’t know that I would have thought any different had it been someone else.” I frowned. “And I mean that. I really don’t know what I would have thought.”
He sat back against the booth. “It’s not okay, Robbie. And we should have known better.”
“But….”
“But we were hurting,” he admitted. “And we put blame on people who didn’t deserve it. I know you don’t remember, but my father knew Osmond for a long time. He wasn’t great, but we thought we could trust him. And then Pappas after you. It turned out he knew far more than he was telling us. In the end, before he turned, he tried to make amends. But by then it was already too late. He was the one who bit Mark and spread the infection to him.”
“And Carter?”
Kelly’s mouth thinned into a white line. “When we were kids, Carter hated the idea of someone being hurt. He’s very protective that way. It was worse when he was shifted, because he would always try to lick everyone’s wounds to clean them.”
“Instinct.”
Kelly shrugged. “Maybe. And it’s something he never grew out of. He was there when Mark was bitten. He tried to clean the wound. It spread to him.”
