CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gathered around the Alpha pair’s dining table a short while later, they all stared down at the pile of records they’d swiped from a hidden safe in Myra’s office. She’d given up its location fairly quickly, in addition to the many answers they’d wanted. That hadn’t surprised Luke—he’d sensed that her bravado was as paper-thin as the self-confidence that had shriveled the more his mate toyed with it to rattle her. A spectacle his cat had rather enjoyed.

Rubbing at his nape, Luke once more read the name of the asshole who’d recently contacted Myra wanting to get his hands on the head and fur of a white tiger shifter. “If I couldn’t see the proof for myself, I’d wonder if the bitch fed us a bunch of bullshit.”

Zayne Whiteford wasn’t a regular human. The child actor was now a pop singer with a boyish face and a lily-white image that appealed to teenage girls everywhere. Clearly, he wasn’t quite as innocent as he seemed. Only twenty-four years old, Zayne had hired poachers through Myra on several occasions, an apparent collector of shifter fur and heads.

“I wonder what all his fans would think if they knew about this sick shit,” mused Blair, her eyes flashing. “Celebrity or not, he needs to be dealt with. I know it’s not easy to make someone so famous quite simply disappear, but …”

“He’ll be dealt with,” Tate vowed.

“It’s going to be practically impossible for us to get to him right now,” said Bailey, looking down at the screen of her cell. “He’s on tour, which means he’s hopping from hotel to hotel when he’s not sleeping on his tour bus. He has a massive security detail.”

Behind the mamba, Deke peered over her shoulder to glance at her phone. “He’s also currently in New York, which isn’t exactly a short drive away.”

Tate began to pace. “When does his tour end?”

“Not for another two months,” replied Bailey, pocketing her cell.

Aspen swore, sinking her hands into her hair and leaning back against Camden. “We can’t wait that long to deal with Zayne. He won’t be worried on hearing that Selfridge House burned down with Myra still in it, because he won’t think it has anything to do with him; won’t worry that his dirty secret is no longer so secret. Therein lies the problem. He’ll simply go to another broker, and so Camden will still be at risk of being taken. We need to nip this in the bud.”

Idly snaking his hand up his mate’s back, Luke said, “We could anonymously make these records public, but then it will be obvious that shifters were responsible for Myra and her firm burning down. That wouldn’t be good.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” agreed Deke. “The human authorities won’t take kindly to the idea of our kind seeking justice in such a supreme way, and anti-shifter extremists will pounce on it to make us out to be dangerous vigilantes.”

Isaiah nodded. “We personally wouldn’t suffer blowback, since humans believe us to be human ourselves, but shifters in general would suffer.”

Tate stopped pacing and rolled his shoulders. “Then we need to instead privately and anonymously make a statement to Zayne. We need to do something to alert him to the fact that we know what he’s been up to; something that will make him inclined to pull back. We can then deal with him up close and personal at a later date, when he’s least expecting it.”

“If we alert him that we’re onto him, it’ll put him on guard,” Farrell pointed out. “He’ll be paranoid—and rightly so—that we won’t stop at a simple warning, so he’ll be more careful.”

“It’s that or take the chance that Camden could get shot at again in the meantime,” said Aspen. “And I’m not good with that.”

“Neither am I,” declared Havana, folding her arms. “So, like Tate said, we make a statement.”

Alex licked his front teeth. “Give me a copy of that document stating the history of Zayne’s transactions with Myra. I’ll break into his LA home, pin it to a wall, and claw said wall—it’ll be obvious that shifters have left some form of warning. He’d be a damn fool not to heed it.”

Camden’s brows inched up. “That would work. He might suspect it was me, given I’m the latest transaction and he put Myra onto me in the first place, but I doubt he’d act on it. And if he tries, well, he’ll die for his stupidity.”

Indeed he would. According to Myra, Zayne hadn’t asked that the poachers specifically target Camden, but the singer had put the male’s name forward as a possibility after reading the online article about Camden and another tiger dueling—until then, Zayne hadn’t known there were white tiger shifters.

Blair lifted the list of poachers who Myra kept a file on. “What about these fuckheads?”

“Their lives need ending for sure.” Havana looked at Alex. “Do you think your uncles will be interested in taking care of them?”

“Oh, they’ll be happy to,” replied the wolverine. “They’ll also be happy to take care of Zayne at some point. They’re good at making deaths look accidental.”

“Really? Interesting,” said Havana. “If they offer, we might take them up on that. As for Myra’s clients, they need to be taken care of just the same. But it’s not our justice to mete out. It doesn’t seem right for us to do it ourselves.”

In agreement with that, Blair twisted her mouth as she contemplated how best to handle the situation. An idea came to her. “These records clearly state the identities of each shifter who was killed. It wouldn’t be hard for us to ID and locate their nearest and dearest. We could contact them, pass on the identity of whatever client owns pieces of the deceased, and allow them to mete out their own justice and retrieve the shifters’ remains.”

Tate slowly dipped his chin. “I like that idea. Alex, contact your uncles about the list of poachers. The rest of us will work on locating and unearthing contact details for the families of the deceased shifters. I’ll gather others here to help. We’re going to need as much aid as possible if we’re to get through that list by tonight.”

As it was, even with so many assisting, they only managed to get three quarters of the way through the list. There were just so many victims of poaching. It had been going on for years.

Tate eventually sent everyone home, probably sensing that they needed a break. Blair was glad of it. There had been nothing easy about repeatedly breaking the news of a shifter’s death to their families. Many had sobbed, utterly devastated.

She could relate to their anger and pain and disbelief—she’d felt it all herself when she lost her sister. And by the way Luke pulled inward, she knew he was thinking of his mother. So when they later lay in bed, their minds still a place of unrest, she pressed a kiss to his shoulder and said, “It’s been a messed up day, huh?”

“Yeah,” he replied simply, coasting his fingers up her bare back as she lay flat on her stomach.

Tired of one-word answers, she inwardly sighed. She’d spoken to him several times since they returned home, but he hadn’t done much talking in return. He’d withdrawn too far—not emotionally or physically, but mentally. So even as he kept her close and touched her with utter reverence, he was a million miles away. And she felt so very alone right then.

But there was no way for her to be truly irritated with him. Not when she could feel his turmoil through their bond. Dealing with others’ grief had pulled his own to the surface, and he was struggling to wrestle it back.

Her female whined, distressed that her mate was in pain. She wanted to alleviate it but didn’t know how. She kept butting Blair, urging her to do something. Blair had tried. And tried and tried. She’d done everything from giving him space to pushing him to talk, but she couldn’t reach him.

No quitter, Blair whispered, “Come back to me.”

His brow ever so slightly furrowed, he looked at her. “I’m right here.”

“No, you’re not,” she said, keeping her voice gentle. “You’re mentally someplace else. Somewhere I can’t go. And I need you to come back.”

He returned his gaze to the ceiling, sighing.

“Look, I’m going to guess that your thoughts are centering around not only your mom but the things you haven’t yet shared with me. We need to talk about all that sooner or later. Why not now?”

He scrubbed a hand down his face.

“Talk to me. You’re hurting, and I hate it. Let me help. Offload it.”

Returning his gaze to hers, he stroked her hair. “Not tonight. You’re hurting too—”

“There’ll never really be a ‘good time’ for you to dredge up what you’ve been holding back from me for so long. It’s always going to be hard on you. Do it now, when your grief is already near the surface, so you won’t have to dig it up all over again.”

He didn’t speak. Only stared at her, unblinking. And she thought he might deny her this, but then he let out a resigned sigh and said, “Only if you’ll talk about Marianna. I can feel your own grief and pain like it’s my own.”

Her stomach twisted, and her inner animal pulled in on herself. “You already know about her.”

“I know how she died, but I don’t know much about her. Whenever I brought her up, all you ever really said was that you loved and missed her.” He gave Blair’s shoulder a small squeeze. “Tell me about her.”

Knowing it was only fair that she pick at the scabs on her own wounds when she expected him to soon do the same to his, Blair swallowed and said, “She was such a gentle soul. Full of compassion. Didn’t have a judgmental bone in her body. No one ever had a negative word to say about her. There was nothing negative to say. She was an amazing person … and so I can’t help hating the part of myself that’s still angry with her.”

“Baby.” It was a soft murmur.

“All she had to do was stay down and not move. The gunman would have scampered once the gas station clerk handed over the cash. But no. Not Marianna. She was apparently sure she could talk him into lowering the damn gun. Knowing her, she probably felt sorry for him when she realized he was a hopped-up addict. She was all about helping people. And he killed her. Shot her right in the head.”

Luke’s chest tightened as his mate’s eyes welled up. Sweeping a hand up her back, he edged closer and kissed her temple. His cat rubbed up against her, feeling powerless to help.

“Why didn’t she just stay down, Luke? Why put her life at risk, knowing what her death would do to those she loved, purely to help someone who’d long ago stopped helping themselves?”

He squeezed her nape, wishing he could erase her anguish. “It doesn’t make you cruel that you’re still angry with her.”

Blair averted her gaze, but not before he saw the lick of shame there. An emotion that slicked its way along their bond.

“It doesn’t make you cruel,” he repeated.

“I miss her,” said Blair. “Anytime something big happens—good or bad—I wonder what she would have thought about it. Wonder what she would have said. She had so much to give. Her death was a total waste of life. She died for nothing. The gas station still got robbed. The addict still later got arrested. The bastard killed himself in prison, leaving a note to say he couldn’t handle the guilt. Well then he shouldn’t have shot her.”

Luke swiped his thumb over her cheek to wipe away a tear. He’d known the shooter died in prison, but he hadn’t known it had been suicide.

“Realizing I’d have to live a life that didn’t include my big sister … it scared me. She’d always been there, always looked out for me. She was my role model. And then I didn’t have her anymore. All of a sudden. Just like that.”

Luke tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s a shock to lose someone. You might have moments throughout your life when you think of how horrible it would be to lose them, but you don’t think you truly will. Then they’re gone, and there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to turn back the clock.”

“Nothing,” she agreed, her voice breaking. “What was your mom like?”

Luke drew in a breath, almost wincing at the pang in his chest. “Funny as fuck. Quick to laugh. The life and soul of every party.” He swallowed, his throat thickening. “We argued the day she died. It wasn’t a big fight or anything. She was just riding my ass about the chores I hadn’t done, and I gave her a load of classic juvenile back-talk. I asked her why she couldn’t be more like my friend’s mom, who didn’t assign her kids more than one chore each,” he admitted, a crushing sense of shame settling on his shoulders. “She just rolled her eyes, told me not to be a brat, and then left. An hour later, she was dead.”

“I can see that you feel like a sorry sack of shit for saying that stuff to her, but you didn’t do it to be cruel. And it sounds to me like she wasn’t hurt by it. Not if she rolled her eyes. I very much doubt she walked out of the apartment thinking you didn’t love her or something.”

“I know all that intellectually, but the shame is there anyway. And I’ll always hate that those were the last words I spoke to her.” Luke took a long breath. “It’s ironic that she was killed by anti-shifter extremists when they didn’t even know she was a shifter.”

Blair doodled soft circles on his shoulder with her finger. “Their target was the family who owned and worked at the hardware store they bombed, right?”

He nodded. “To the extremists, any humans inside were simply collateral damage.” He paused as Blair pressed a kiss to his collarbone. “I didn’t think my dad would survive her loss. She was his other half in every way a person can be. He was a shell of a man without her. He weakened a little more every day. Faded and faded, until it was like he was only half-here; like his soul had partially moved on. And there was nothing I could do. I’ve never felt so fucking helpless.” So fucking terrified. “I don’t know how he fought his way back to us, but he did.”

“I adore him for it,” she said.

“So do I.” Luke again stroked a hand over her head, letting the silky strands of her hair sift through his fingers, grounding himself in the feel of his mate. “I struggled to process her death. No, that’s not right. I didn’t want to process it. I didn’t want to accept that she was gone for good. So I was already a mess when me and Toby were taken.”

Blair stilled, her brows snapping together. “Taken? Wait, who’s Toby?”

“My childhood friend. Best friend, really.” Luke very rarely spoke of him or what happened. Just thinking about it made the bottom fall out of his stomach.

“You said you were both taken. What did you mean?”

Luke hesitated, his fingers flexing. It was instinctive to shut the conversation down and pull back. But he didn’t, because the mating bond would never progress if he didn’t share his secrets with Blair. “A few years prior, a handful of our pride left to begin their own. They weren’t the first to do so, and they won’t be the last. It happens. What doesn’t happen is that they return, insisting on reconnecting the prides but having a change of leadership.”

“The Alpha of the mini pride wanted Vinnie to step down so he could take over?”

“Yes. My dad laughed in Franco’s face. The guy was no match for Vinnie. Their animals battled for dominance. My dad’s cat won. Franco and his little group scurried off, but not for good.”

She splayed a warm hand on his chest. “They took you and Toby.”

“Their intention was to punish Vinnie. But they were also blackmailing him. They wanted cash so they could disappear. And they promised not to hurt me so long as he cooperated. But they didn’t promise not to hurt Toby.” Luke buried a hand in her hair as the memories battered at him. “I could hear him screaming. Begging them to stop. I couldn’t help—I was strapped to a chair and locked in another room. They’d injected us with something to be sure we couldn’t shift and to keep us physically weak. The drug worked well.”

Blair shuffled closer and burrowed into his body.

Luke rubbed his cheek against hers, letting her attempt to soothe him although he knew nothing truly would. Not when it came to Toby. “My dad wired over the cash. Franco and his people headed out in a hurry, leaving me and Toby behind, and texted our location to my dad. We were rescued pretty fast, and the bastards were caught and killed. Toby … he didn’t talk afterwards. Didn’t even look at me. Not that day, not any other day. He and his parents left the pride shortly after that.”

“It was another loss for you,” said Blair, an ache in her voice that matched the one in his chest.

“Another moment of sheer helplessness. Another time in which someone important to me was suffering and I could do nothing to help. And not having my mom there afterward to hug me and tell me everything would be fine forced me to accept that she was gone.” Luke paused as pure feminine despair zipped up their bond. “We can stop here. I can tell you the rest another time.”

She shook her head. “No, get it all out.”

Half-wishing she’d asked him to stop, he nonetheless went on, “I didn’t really grieve the way I should have. I was conscious of how hard it was for my dad to cope without her that I thought it best if he didn’t need to deal with my pain on top of his own. And I think part of me felt that, after what I’d said to her before she died, I didn’t feel I had the right to grieve anyway.”

“So everything just built up inside you—anger, hurt, guilt, shame—and never found a way out,” she understood.

“I ventured into an emotional dark place I didn’t know existed. There was this sheet of ice between me and the world. An emptiness. A thick fog. An ever-present mental storm that dragged me under.”

“Sounds a little like depression.”

“Whatever it was, it reached a point when I even felt a sense of detachment from my cat. Everyone thought that I was fine, because I made sure I seemed fine. Only a few people sensed I was having issues—Tate, Deke, Elle, and later my dad. For a while, he was caught up in his own pain so he didn’t sense mine.

“They tried to help, but they couldn’t. No one could. I was lost. Until you.” Luke palmed her face, sweeping his thumb over her cheekbone. “I saw you, and everything changed in an instant. The ice fractured. The fog around me lifted. The emptiness faded. The mental storm calmed. You were a light that pierced the endless blackness—a light I followed like a beacon that showed me the way out.”

At that point, he’d had to confront the anger, guilt, and shame he’d buried deep. It had been hard, but he’d done it, determined to never emotionally check out on his mate. Those dark emotions still lived inside him, but they were no longer a hum in his blood. Instead, they were small, weak, flickering flames in his belly.

Sometimes those flames flared up, which was why … “The mental storm I mentioned occasionally begins to build. But you always quash it in time. You’re what stands between me and that dark, empty place. It’s a hell of a weight for you to carry—I know that. I wish it wasn’t so.”

She frowned and jabbed his chest with her finger—the last thing he’d expected. “It’s not a weight, it’s a privilege,” she said. “You’ve been my shield all these years. It was never a burden, right? You were glad to be whatever I needed. Well, same goes.”

His heart squeezed. Shit, she got to him. Like nothing and no one else ever had.

He dropped his forehead to hers, dragging a breath into his lungs, drowning in her scent. Needing her taste, he closed his mouth over hers, swallowing her little gasp.

Arousal thickened his blood, but he didn’t roughly dominate her mouth. He sipped. Savored. Gently feasted. Poured everything of himself into it.

They touched, stroked, teased, explored. Then he was inside her. Each thrust was soft and lazy and exquisitely sensuous. They tumbled over the edge together, her pussy spasming as harsh blasts of come erupted out of his cock. Peace once more stole over him.

Shuddering from aftershocks, he buried his face in her neck, enjoying the feel of her fingers ghosting over his back.

“Thank you for sharing all that with me,” she said.

He pressed a kiss to her throat and then lifted his gaze to hers. “Thank you for telling me about your sister.”

“And thank you for making me come really, really hard.”

He felt his lips quirk. “I aim to please.”

“Hmm, well, I’ll do the pleasing in the morning. Right now, I need sleep.”

“You’ll do the pleasing?” he asked, intrigued. “What does that mean?”

She gave him a mysterious smile. “You’ll find out when you wake up, won’t you?”