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“Wait, you’re going?” Teresa frowned at him. “We have a plan, Stone. Shaw works best alone.”
“No,” Stone disagreed. “Shaw thinks he works best alone. Shaw is, as always, an idiot.”
Amelia raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested Stone would be the expert on idiocy.
Karissa rubbed her hand across her face as Stone left the room. Amelia bit her lip. Her tension was palpable, and I wondered if Stone realized how his anger affected her. Would he ever learn to curb it? Would Amelia ever come to trust that no matter how angry he might be, she would never experience that deadly fury?
“So can you mark her?” Teresa glanced around the table curiously, and her gaze locked with Liam’s.
Liam’s lips parted in alarm. “I don’t know.”
I stood to my feet as well. “I have preparations to make sure Stone is ready.”
“Keep my idiot brother alive, please,” Karissa said. “I can’t lose those two.”
I nodded. No matter if she said it like a joke, the burden to keep the rest of her brothers alive always weighed on me. “I’ll try. But Stone wants me to stay here.”
He wanted me close to Amelia. It felt like a gift and a sacred charge… and a punishment. Not that Stone intended it that way. It was just hard to be close to her when she was not mine.
“Good night,” I told them, then went out the back door, shutting it behind me. The night air, with its clean, bright smells, wrapped me in comfort. I sat down on the back steps. It was almost the full moon. Soon, it would be time for the autumn ball, as the pack marked the change of each season. It was an old, sweet tradition.
The door swung open a few seconds later, and my heart leapt, hoping it was Amelia. It was Dylan who settled onto the step beside me, though.
“Does your mom know you’re out here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, though I wasn’t an idiot and knew not to rely too heavily on anything a four-year-old says.
Little kids too easily mix reality and wishes.
Adults, too. I guessed the only difference was how subtly we lied to ourselves.
Dylan said, “You guys were talking about Daddy.”
“About Brennan?” I asked carefully, worried he’d heard our references to that bastard, Nathan, and thought of Nathan as his father. After all, Nathan had played the part all those years. And little kids are desperate to love their adults, even the ones who abuse them.
Dylan nodded. “My real daddy. Mommy couldn’t tell me about him until we came here, just in case, but she sang me the same songs he used to sing to her.”
Dylan said thatjust in caseas if he didn’t understand its ramifications, but I did. Amelia had wanted Dylan to have something of his real father if Nathan killed her. My hands tightened into fists, but I kept my calm for Dylan’s sake.
“You look like your dad,” I told him. “You look just like him when he was that age, except your hair is the same color as your mom’s.”
“What was he like when he was little?”
I didn’t remember anything about Brennan at four. In fact,myonly memory of being four was of being stung by a wasp, which wasn’t a very cheerful core memory.
“I remember him better when he was a little older. He was the kind of kid who always had a band-aid in his pocket.”
He frowned slightly. Right, that wouldn’t make sense to him, even though it was Brennan at his core.
I explained, “He always had a band-aid in his pocket in case one of us got hurt. And between Stone and Shaw and Liam and me… and Teresa too…one of us was always getting hurt.”
“He sounds nice.”
“He was very nice.”Nice enough to grow into the man who ripped his father’s throat out to protect us all.
But that part was more complicated. Dylan just needed to know basic things. Like… “Your father would’ve been proud of you.”
“Why?” Dylan’s lower lip pudged out. “I don’t carry a band-aid in my pocket. I never even thought about it.”
