CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Trick buried his face in her neck as he slammed his cock deep and erupted inside his mate, filling her with everything he had. Even as that familiar peace stole over him, the panic didn’t entirely abate. It didn’t matter that she’d been fully healed for over twenty-four hours. Didn’t matter that he had her right there in their bed, all soft and warm and relaxed. Anxiety still had a firm grip on him.

Maybe she sensed that, because she wrapped him up tight, curling her arms around his neck and locking her legs around his hips. He kissed her neck, taking her scent inside him to soothe both him and his wolf.

“Let go of the guilt, Trick,” she whispered. “It’s senseless.”

No, it wasn’t. She’d been scared, and he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t helped. Hadn’t protected her. Hell, he’d barely gotten there in time to save her from being crushed by a fucking building.

She’d firmly assured him again and again that she wasn’t upset with him for not getting there sooner. In fact, she’d ordered him to “give yourself a fucking break.” She didn’t feel that he’d failed her or even that he could have been much help if he had gotten there earlier. Though intellectually he knew that it wasn’t his fault that she’d gone through that shit alone, he couldn’t help feeling like a bastard.

“You have to stop torturing yourself sometime, Trick.”

He softly snorted. “Says the person who won’t stop torturing herself for not bringing Cruz to justice twenty-four years ago.”

She sighed. “I just don’t get why I didn’t tell people what happened.”

Bracing himself on his elbows, he lifted his head and tucked her hair around her ear. “You were traumatized.”

“I just had to say his name. That’s all. Why didn’t I do that?”

“You are not allowed to feel guilty about this. If I told you that a three-year-old pup didn’t name her parents’ killer because she was shocked and terrified, would you blame her?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t get to blame you.” He kissed her softly, sipping from her mouth. “You need to forgive your three-year-old self, Frankie. You need to let it go. Okay?”

She exhaled heavily. “Okay.” She skimmed her fingers along his jaw. “I love you.”

“I know you do. And I love you.” He kissed her again. “And I love that our bond is now complete.”

“Me too.” Her cell phone rang, pulling them out of their own little world.

Trick grabbed her cell from the nightstand and glanced at the screen. “It’s your agent.”

Frankie took the phone and answered, “Hi, Abigail.”

“Hi, how are things?” she asked.

“Good, thanks. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m calling because I managed to find out who purchased the sculpture you told me about. The gallery kept the records.”

“It’s okay,” said Frankie. “I already know who it was.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Cruz Stewart, right?”

There was a pause. “Um . . . no. Sweetie, the name I have here is . . . Well, the buyer was Brad Newman. Isn’t that your uncle?”

Frankie’s stomach plummeted, and her smile faded. “Yes. Yes, it is. I have to go, Abigail.”

“You call me later.”

“I will.” Ending the call, she asked, “Did you hear that?”

Trick nodded. “Brad bought the sculpture that you found at Iris’s cabin.” His brow furrowed. “That makes no fucking sense, baby. Iris wouldn’t have accepted anything from him.”

“No, she wouldn’t have. Yet, it somehow ended up in her hands. I suppose she could have received it from an anonymous sender, but that’s the kind of thing you tell people, isn’t it? Clara said nobody seems to know where Iris got it.”

“She wouldn’t have taken anything from Brad.” Trick was sure of that much. “Maybe he asked someone to give it to her as a gift from them, but I can’t think who—” He frowned at the odd look on her face. “What?”

“I need to speak to Lydia. I have to ask her something.”

“So call her.”

Frankie did so, drumming her fingers on Trick’s back. Her stomach fluttered and her heart pounded, because she was quite sure that she already knew what Lydia’s answer would be.

“Hello,” Lydia softly greeted her.

“Lydia, hi. How are you feeling?”

A long sigh. “Better, thanks. But I’m not the one who was shot. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Listen, remember I went exploring in your mom’s attic? Well, there was a box of my mother’s things there, but it was empty. Someone had ripped open the tape and took whatever was in it.”

“Really?” Lydia puffed out a breath. “Well, I remember your grandparents demanded all your mother’s belongings. Like they were trying to erase her from our lives. Mom was mad about it, but she cooperated because she was hoping they’d let us see you if we kept everything civil.”

“Do you know if there was anything that Iris held back?”

“She only kept two things, and that was because she was positive that your grandparents would destroy them. She kept the dress your mother wore for her mating ceremony, and a ring that Christopher gave her.”

Heart pounding even harder, Frankie asked, “Can you describe the ring?” But she already knew, because she could see it in her head; she remembered it from the photos she’d seen of her mother in Iris’s albums.

“It was white gold studded with diamonds, and it had a gorgeous gray pearl in the center.”

Frankie closed her eyes. “Thanks, Lydia. That was a great help.” When Trick put her phone back on the nightstand, she said, “I know what it was now.”

He frowned. “What?”

“I know what I overlooked. I saw pictures of my mother, but only my subconscious seemed to notice the ring. I get it now.” She bit her lip. “There’s someone I need to talk to.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who?”

A little while later, Frankie was sitting on the curb in a busy parking lot, near a very familiar car. A car she’d ridden in many times, completely unaware that its owner had betrayed her family in too many ways to count.

It wasn’t long before said owner came along. Even with the sounds of traffic, she’d heard his shoes ticking on the asphalt before she saw him. She knew what hours he worked, had known what time he’d leave his office.

Rising, she waited for him to stop fumbling with his car keys and look up. Finally he did. Her wolf snarled, flexing her unsheathed claws.

Brad stilled and blinked. “Frankie, hey.” His face split into a grin that quickly faded. “Is everything okay? You don’t look so good. You have shadows under your eyes.”

“I’m fine,” she lied. She inhaled deeply, searching for calm, and instead ended up with a lungful of the annoying scents of exhaust, motor oil, and hot pavement. “I wouldn’t be fine if it weren’t for Trick. He got to me in time.”

“In time?” Brad crossed to her, the picture of concern. “What does that mean? Honey, what happened?”

She kept her tone even. “I was held at gunpoint in the basement of my old home.”

His mouth fell open. “What? By who? And please tell me they’ve been arrested.”

“It was the person who killed my parents.”

He sighed, pinching his nose. “Frankie . . . it was Christopher who—”

“Who Cruz framed, I know,” she finished. “He made a full confession when he pointed that gun at my face. A full confession.”

Brad’s eyes flickered nervously.

“I remember when I was a kid, I was helping you pick cuff links to wear out of that big box you have. I found a ring. A ring with a gray pearl. I picked it up and asked if I could have it. You freaked out. Snatched it out of my hands, shoved it in a drawer, and told me to never ask about it again. Cruz got the ring and her dress for you, didn’t he?”

Brad glanced around. There was one other person in the lot, but he was chatting away on his cell phone, not paying them a lick of attention. “Okay, yes, he agreed to get me Caroline’s things,” Brad admitted in a low voice. “They didn’t deserve to have anything of hers, Frankie.”

“And he agreed to give Iris the sculpture too.”

That comment surprised him. “I liked the idea of her having one of your pieces without even knowing it.”

Frankie narrowed her eyes. “You sensed that Cruz was jealous of my parents’ mating. You saw an ally. You used him.”

“I encouraged him to push her to leave the pack, sure, but that’s all.”

Frankie shook her head. “You gave him the gun.”

“Frankie—”

“You gave it to him,” she insisted. “You’ve fed me enough lies over the years. No more.”

Brad closed his eyes for a moment. “He was only supposed to drive Caroline out of the pack. If anything, she became more determined to stay. I told Cruz to be patient, but he wouldn’t. He asked for a gun. Said if he couldn’t have Christopher, then no one would have him.”

Her wolf swiped out her claws. “And the idea of him shooting my father suited you just fine.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Really?” Frankie shrugged one shoulder as she asked, “Why not? You hated him. He was a shifter. An animal. What would be so bad about putting him down?”

Brad let out a ragged sigh. “There are things you don’t know.”

“Explain them to me, then.”

“Christopher planned to take you and your mother to Canada!” he burst out.

She lifted a brow. “Canada?”

“Yes. He didn’t like that we were in her life. He wanted to switch packs, to take her and you far away.”

“Far away from you and your ‘You need to leave the pack’ bullshit, you mean? He was tired of you trying to make her leave him. Tired of seeing her so unhappy about the way you were acting.” Like Trick had been unhappy with how the Newmans treated Frankie. “He wanted to put distance between you.”

“I’d have rarely seen her, Frankie. I wouldn’t have been able to watch you grow up. I’d have been a damn stranger to you. I wasn’t going to allow that. I wasn’t going to allow him to take her away from me.”

A disturbing amount of possessiveness coated his latter words, and Frankie stilled as the truth hit her. “Did she know?”

“Know what?”

“That you loved her a little too much?” It explained why he’d never been in a relationship and didn’t have a family of his own. All he’d wanted was Caroline. It even explained why he thought of Frankie as a daughter. “I’ll bet my father sensed it. No wonder he wanted her far away from you.”

Brad swallowed. “I was never going to allow him to keep her from me.”

“So you gave Cruz a gun, even knowing that if Christopher died, she’d die.”

He scoffed. “That’s what shifters say, but it’s not true. The bond isn’t some magical thing.” He paused at the beep of a remote car lock, but the owner of the car didn’t even look their way as they hopped into their vehicle. “She was convinced that the bond was unbreakable. Convinced that she couldn’t live without him. I knew that when he was dead, she’d see the truth. See that he’d fooled her, lied to her, manipulated her.” He swallowed. “If I’d known that Cruz really meant to kill Caroline, I would never have given him that gun. I would never have urged him on. You have to believe that, Frankie.”

“Do I?” She sneered. “You say you hate that pack because they stole Caroline from you. But you knew exactly who killed her. You knew . . . and you didn’t tell anyone. You protected his identity to save your own skin and because it suited you just fine that I was taken from the pack. And then you used him in other ways—maybe even threatened to expose his secret if he didn’t do things like steal her belongings, pass the sculpture to Iris, and God knows what else you asked him to do. By that point you’d truly convinced yourself that you played no part in my mother’s death.”

“If she hadn’t mated with him and joined that pack—”

“Oh, everyone else is to blame but you, aren’t they? The person who you should be angry at is yourself. You played Cruz. You armed him. You, you, you. If you’d have exposed Cruz for what he was, I wouldn’t have almost died yesterday. That’s right, I almost died. That’s on you.”

“And you deserve to be dead for that alone,” Trick rumbled.

Brad swerved to face him, eyes widening as he noted that both Ryan and Marcus were closing in on him. Brad turned to her. “You wouldn’t let them hurt me, Frankie. I’m your uncle. Hell, I’ve been a father to you all these years—”

“Because you helped Cruz murder mine,” she snapped. “And now you’re going to pay for it.”

Fear flashed across Brad’s face, but he jutted out his chin. “You can’t prove that I did anything. There’s no evidence. If you go to the police—”

“There would be no point in handing you over to the police, although I did record your confession on the cell phone in my pocket. See, the crimes occurred on pack territory, which is out of the police’s jurisdiction. Even if there was some way they could charge you for something like conspiracy to commit murder, a good lawyer would get you off—especially since recent events prove that Cruz wasn’t entirely stable. No, the human authorities wouldn’t make you pay for what you did. But someone has to.”

Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I’m not responsible for Cruz’s actions. He was the one who stabbed and strangled your mother. He was the one who fired the bullet that killed Christopher. If Cruz really wanted them dead so badly, he’d have done it regardless.”

“Maybe Cruz would still have killed my parents without you feeding his anger and giving him that gun—I guess we’ll never know. But you gave him that gun knowing he intended to kill my father. You say you loved Caroline, but it sure didn’t bother you that her killer wasn’t brought to justice. No, you protected his identity and let my father take the blame for something he never did. Heartbreakingly, both his parents died believing he was truly guilty of it.

“Because of you, I lost my parents and was taken from my mate, my paternal family, and my pack. Call me a bitch, but I can’t let any of that go. I don’t think either of my parents would want me to—not after all the pain you caused, not after I almost died. And I really can’t expect Trick to let it go. Not when we’ve been apart all these years because of what you did, and not when you betrayed me and my mother the way you did—he’s my mate, he’ll never be able to overlook that someone hurt me that way.” She cut her gaze to Trick. “I’m done.”

Brad’s eyes bulged as Trick grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “Wait! What are you doing?”

“Like I said, you need to pay for what you did,” Frankie told him, astonished she could sound so very calm.

“They’ll kill me!”

“Maybe. To be honest, I don’t want to know what they’ll do to you. All I’ve asked is that they make you . . . disappear. They’ve assured me they can stage things so that it looks like you packed your shit and left. People will certainly believe that when they hear the recorded confession and I tell them how I assured you that I’d be sharing it.”

Fear blazed in his eyes. “This will destroy Marcia and Geoffrey.”

“You should have thought about that before you gave Cruz that gun,” said Frankie. “But I think it’s been a very long time since you’ve thought of anyone but yourself.” With that, she turned her back on Brad and strode over to the SUV.