Chapter 51

They didn’t fucking listen. Not a single one of them.

I couldn’t blame them. Not really. I wouldn’t want to be stuck at the pack house indefinitely. Fuck, even I wasn’t listening. I stood waist-deep in the ocean as clouds snuffed out the morning’s early light. The bite of the cold water and the chill of the mist against my skin was a welcome reprieve from the emotions threatening to detonate inside me.

It’d been a rough fucking night, which led to heavy emotions trying to take me out with them. I was fucking exhausted before the day even started.

The ocean helped.

Declan waited silently on shore, but I ignored him. At least for now. I needed this.

The waves tugged at my hips, and I buried my feet deeper in the silt for stability. I welcomed the sway. I just wasn’t quite ready to be swept away by it. Not this time. That was a plus, right?

I was too mad to be down about shit. It was too difficult to contain the pack while we were being hunted by someone we didn’t know how to find. Going back to their everyday routines was the smartest course of action. We had no knowledge about the hunter. We couldn’t predict the next attack. We had no way to protect them.

It made no sense to hide. What were they supposed to do? Hide for the next few years? That wasn’t plausible. It was hope for the best and plan for the worst.

Theywere hoping for the best. I was planning for the worst.

And then there was Genevieve. I could feel how every interaction cracked my duct-taped heart. The sound of her crying herself to sleep fucking haunted me. She was hurting, and it was my fault. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to fix what I’d broken. Was this all that was left of us? Two broken people destined to hurt each other over and over?

I didn’t want to believe that.

“You make it fucking hard to be alone,” I growled as I heard Declan step closer.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be alone,” he countered. Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“What the fuck makes you say that?” I demanded, facing him. He looked as exhausted as I felt. He buried his hands in his hoodie and shoved his hair under a backwards hat. A small tug of the water threatened to take me out by the knees, and I nearly lost my fucking balance. “Damn it.”

“Mom used to let you be out here alone, but I always came by to keep an eye on you. Just in case. Especially after…” His voice faded, his brows coming together as he refused to say the words.

“After I tried to kill myself,” I finished for him, the edge in my voice vanishing.

“Yeah,” Declan whispered. He drew in a deep breath with the memory. From what I understood, he was the one who found me. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. Every time he looked at me like he was now, the guilt came back with a vengeance. I’d never be able to make him—or any of them—understand why I wanted to be done with everything. No amount of words could make the feelings make sense, and I was stuck with that burden.

“I’m fine, Declan,” I told him. A half-truth but a necessary white lie.

“The ocean was always a good indicator of how you were doing, even when you didn’t talk,” he said instead. I frowned. What the hell did that mean? “When things are good, you just stand on the shore. But the worse things get… the further in you go. It’s almost like you want the ocean to take you away.”

Oh. I glanced down to where the ocean wrapped around my waist. Well, fuck.

“That doesn’t mean a fucking thing,” I muttered. Even still, I trudged my sorry fucking ass out of the ocean. An icy shiver rolled down my spine as cold air and water clashed, and I did my best to shake it off.

“I’m worried about you, Killian,” Declan continued.

“I’m fine. If that’s why you are out here so fucking early, you can go right back home and go to bed.” Instead of doing just that, he sat down in the sand and wrapped his arms loosely around his knees. So, we were going to sit on the beach and talk. Fucking great. I wasn’t in the mood for one of Declan’s talks.

“I can’t sleep.”

“I thought your wife was the one with the sleep disorder,” I said and dropped next to him.

“My wife doesn’t have a brother who casually announced he killed a guy,” Declan shot back.

“Jesus fuck, Declan,” I growled. “You say it like I went out and fucking killed a guy just to see if I could!”

“That’s what you fucking did,” he retorted.

“Fuck off,” I snapped. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

“So, enlighten me, Killian. Enlighten me because I can’t wrap my head around the fact that my baby brother killed a man—”

“Killed a hunter,” I corrected.

“Who was still a man! Hunter or not, he was still a man! Wolf or not, we are still men!”

“I know!” My voice rose, laced with anger despite how hard I fucking tried to hold it back. Fighting with Declan wasn’t how I wanted to start my fucking morning. “I know what he was, okay! Is that what you want to fucking hear? I know! I have to keep telling myself he was a fucking hunter. I can’t go down the other fucking road.”

I couldn’t think about the lawyer from Boston with a Great Dane and a corner brownstone full of plants. It became too fucking real when I traveled down that road. Instead, I focused on the monster inside the man and what that meant for me and the pack.

“He knew shit, Declan,” I continued. “Not even five fucking minutes into talking to me, and he knew what pack I belonged to, what part of the country we lived in, and more.”

“But you said he didn’t hunt,” my brother said.

“His family were fucking hunters. God only knows how many hunter friends he had.” I pushed my hand through my hair in frustration. “What if he talked? What if he did talk? Who fucking knows if he did? I couldn’t risk it—not any more than I did while trying to figure out how best to handle the situation.”

“You can’t just kill someone to protect the pack. Fuck, we have a literal rule that says you shouldn’t! I don’t even know what to fucking do with that one. I want to protect your dumbass, but I also want to honor our pack laws. I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do! You should’ve—”

“Would you have fucking risked Raven’s life on the off chance he wouldn’t say something?” I demanded.

“That’s not fair, and you know that,” Declan growled.

“Would you risk your wife’s life on a chance?” I repeated. I’d make him fucking answer if I had to.

“No, I wouldn’t, and you fucking know that,” he replied. “I’m selfish, and I know it. I’m not about to apologize for wanting to keep her safe.”

“My point—”

“I wasn’t fucking finished,” he snapped over me. “I also know that I’d do everything in my fucking power to make sure it never got to that point. I’d fucking kill a man to protect her if I absolutely had to, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to preemptively do that.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” I said. We would never see eye-to-eye on this. Grabbing my boots, I shoved them on and stood. “I’m not waiting around for the bad shit to happen. I’ll do whatever the fuck it takes to protect the people I care about—the pack, our family, you. I don’t care what the fucking cost is. And even if that cost is your respect for me.”

“And what if the cost is that you started a feud with another hunter? What if you’re the reason the hunter is here?”

It was a thought I’d had—one I hated to even entertain.

“Then I’ll kill this one too.”

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked quietly. “What the hell made you so cold?”

“The world showed me just how fucking cruel she could be,” I said. As I stormed away, I called over my shoulder, “No one is safe in this world, Declan. You either do whatever it takes to survive or you let her eat you alive.”