“Ethan wants to know if he can have brunch with you tomorrow. He really needs to talk to you.” I looked over my shoulder to find Josh’s brow furrowed in curiosity.
“About what?”
I wasn’t sure who he’d directed his question to, but Ethan couldn’t answer because his lips were pulled into a rigid line. He couldn’t do anything other than growl, and a deep rumble emanated from his chest.
“Ethan,” I whispered. He closed his eyes and pulled in a slow breath, and when he opened them, he cut a sharp look in my direction.
Leaning in, I said, “That look doesn’t really work on me.”
Again, Ethan and I found ourselves in the awkward position of balancing our relationship with his position in the pack. Out of principle, he didn’t like being told what to do and coercion made him more resistant. I stood my ground on this and wouldn’t waver. I’d compromised a lot in our relationship, but this was something I couldn’t give in on. I hated the secrets between them. I hated secrets in general.
Ethan ran his hands along his face as if he were rubbing a beard, but his face was clean-shaven. “You seem to have a lot of questions about the things that have occurred over the past few months, and I want to clear them up for you. Especially the ones you have about me being able to perform spells you can’t and how I can break protective fields.”
Josh’s curiosity was piqued. His lips kinked into a little grin. “Why wait until tomorrow? I’m free now and I’m pretty hungry. We can have a late lunch.”
I was looking up at the face of a Faerie-hosting, very upset wolf. I returned his snarl with a cloying smile. I could hear Ethan’s heart beating faster than it ever had, and mine responded with a slight uptick. Anxiety. I didn’t think he was capable of it.
I said his name softly and slipped my hands over his. In a low voice, for his ears only, I asked, “Are you okay?”
The tension relaxed some, but he was noticeably uncomfortable. Ethan lived in the shadows and was ruled by secrets. They were so entwined in what and who he was that he had to feel raw and exposed. This was chipping away at what he had become to protect the pack and his brother. It took a few moments before his fingers laced through mine.
His voice was as soft as mine and barely audible to anyone not immediately next to us. “I’m fine.” Sighing heavily, he looked at Josh. “Now is fine.”
Josh swiftly moved toward the front door and waited for Ethan to join him.
Reading over Josh’s notes reminded me just how talented a witch he was. I was reduced to relying heavily on Google to translate the Latin. It appeared he was close to a solution or rather had narrowed down the many spells he’d come up with. It wasn’t surprising that he’d left the one Clostra out. It was pretty harmless since we didn’t have the other two. We’d had to give them to the witches as a condition of their helping us with a curse. First, we’d had to retrieve the Clostra from the indomitable Samuel, who was dedicated to ridding the world of magic. In the end, the Clostra had simply switched from his possession to theirs. I frowned when I opened the volume in front of me and discovered the pages were blank. The spells weren’t revealing themselves to me—I couldn’t read it anymore.
“You can’t read them, can you?” Steven asked, sitting on the table and looking down at the blank pages.
I shook my head; that bothered me more than anything. My ability to use them had been an advantage for the pack so many times.
He chewed on his lips and moved his attention to the books on the shelves and stacked on the table. “This is a mess, isn’t it?” he said in a constricted voice. He was talking about more than just my inability to read the Clostra. He had the same tone I’d heard various members use when they’d carried the burden of something that had harmed the pack or one of its protected.
“Didn’t you do what you were instructed to do?” I asked.
“I should have waited until they changed or maybe approached them at their homes.” He’d had time to compose several alternative scenarios. His emerald eyes were dull, and he wore a rigid frown. Worry had achieved something he’d been struggling to do for years: it had aged him. Despair hung on every note of his words.
“I doubt any of those alternatives would have ended with a different result. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. They had the option to be lone wolves or join us. They weren’t even working on their own—they were working for Dexter. Make no mistake, he knows what he’s doing,” I assured him.
“Do you think we’re giving him too much credit? Is he really diabolical and Machiavellian or just a guy stumbling into some success and becoming a pain in our ass?”
“Don’t underestimate him.” I frowned as I remembered the state of the basement where he’d been experimenting on people and were-animals for a way to nullify our immunity to magic. “Doing so will be to our detriment.”
He considered it. “My mother isn’t dealing with this well. It’s causing problems between her and Sebastian. They rarely disagree, and she never challenges him. They are on the phone now and …”
“It’s expected, Steven. She’s as protective of you as you are of her. I’m sure Sebastian realizes it’s not the Southern Alpha challenging him, but a mother.”
“I know. I just don’t want to be the reason there’s a strain on their relationship.” Sebastian and Joan’s interactions were peculiar. He was far more lenient with her than the other Alphas, and she was afforded courtesies the others weren’t.
“What’s the deal with Joan and Sebastian?” I asked. “They seem closer than other Alphas are.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. You should ask them.” He’d given me the same stock response that Josh, Ethan, and Winter had. It wasn’t as if the pack was above petty gossip—there was plenty swarming around—but when it came to talking about Sebastian and Joan, I was referred to them, as if I would get an answer from either one. Joan gave information far more freely than Sebastian, but she also didn’t mind pulling from the Alpha playbook, responding with a look of cool examination and a breath of incredulity. It didn’t encourage more questioning when they simply responded with, “Is there a reason that information is important to you?”
“Because I’m nosy as hell” wasn’t an answer that would get a reply.
I looked at my phone again, frowning. Not just at the fact that Ethan hadn’t returned any of my text messages, but also because my mark had started to prickle, a light burning that flared and disappeared.
“What’s wrong?” Steven asked.
“Nothing.”
“Should I point out which one changed: your heart rate, the cadence of voice, or the number of times you’ve blinked your eyes?”
“Sure, and I can point out what a freak that makes you. You all can continue with your party tricks, but it doesn’t make it any less weird,” I said pointedly.
He laughed. “You do it, too, but for some odd reason you lower your head and blink, keeping count with each beat. Now that’s weird.”
I’d never get used to how observant they were. Predators to the core, they often noticed things that others didn’t. Everyone else was reduced to nothing more than prey and studied and watched as such.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly, taking a book off the table and absently thumbing through it, occasionally looking down at the pages.
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
With a great deal of reluctance, he nodded. There were few secrets between us, and I didn’t want this to be one, but I needed time.
Ethan and Josh had been together for nearly four hours. Ethan had a lot of secrets, but no matter what circuitous route he’d taken to explain them to Josh, it shouldn’t have consumed that much time.
Ignoring the rising uneasiness was getting more difficult. Maybe I was wrong. Ethan knew Josh better than I did. There was probably a reason for him not telling his brother, and I’d missed it. I’d pulled at the threads of the relationship and might have damaged it.
I frowned.
“I think I screwed up,” I whispered, looking up from the page I’d been looking at for over an hour, unable to concentrate because I was focused on Ethan and Josh.
Steven pushed his book forward and relaxed back in his chair as he clasped his hands in front of his stomach, giving me his undivided attention.
“There are things about Ethan I felt he needed to share with Josh, and I pushed him to do it. I think that was a mistake.”
“Does it have anything to do with killing Ethos?”
My eyes widened. “You saw that, too?”
Steven gave me an incredulous look. His eyes flickered with bemused disbelief. “Sky, we all saw it. We tend to be observant. No one knows the specifics, but there’s something different about Ethan. It’s one of those things we all notice but don’t talk about. I figure he has a reason for not telling us. Maybe keeping us in the dark is his way of protecting us.”
It was hard to accept the idea that sometimes darkness was the safest place. It didn’t matter that many in the pack believed it; I thought the darkness made us vulnerable. I found comfort in the fact that Steven was okay with being in the dark, so I didn’t elaborate on the topic of Ethan and Josh’s conversation.
He leaned forward and patted my hand gently. When he left it there, I felt the comfort I desperately needed. “I’ve seen Ethan punch Josh in the face, not once but twice. Josh has used magic to throw Ethan through a wall. Take a look at the wall in the den near the door. You have to look hard, but you can see where it was repaired. Then there was the time Josh pinned Ethan to the wall for nearly an hour, which led to Ethan punching him in the face a second time. If their relationship can survive that, I’m sure it can survive a few secrets.”
Steven’s confidence eased my anxiety.
I covered his hand with my free hand and gave it a little squeeze. He always made things better. I smiled when he didn’t try to move it. We were still in the same position when Ethan walked into the library.
“Are you ready to go home?” he asked. His voice and expression were level, and his uncharacteristically mild demeanor caused Steven to sit up straighter and watch him with a prey’s unease. His eyes tracked Ethan as he moved closer.
“How was lunch?” I asked.
He responded tersely—“Fine”—then repeated his question, “Are you ready to go home?”
I nodded and straightened everything on the table, putting it back the way I’d found it. It ended up a lot neater than it had been originally.
We were heading out the door when Ethan stopped and looked over his shoulder at Steven, who hadn’t moved. “Are you coming?”
“No, I need to talk to Sebastian. I’ll get a ride. I’ll catch you all later.” It was doubtful he had anything pressing to talk to Sebastian about, but it was never difficult to detect Ethan’s emotions—unless he worked to hide them. Ethan was working so hard that Steven knew something was up.
Most of the drive home was spent in silence. I wondered why Josh had gone straight home instead of coming back to the library. Was that a good or bad sign?
Ethan’s indiscernible look gave me no feedback. A four-hour lunch where Ethan had disclosed secrets he’d kept from his brother for years. The world as Josh knew it had changed; Ethan had admitted that he’d colluded with Sebastian, and even Claudia, to keep secrets from him. How would anyone respond to that? After several furtive glances at him, my curiosity had sharpened to a blade and suppressing it was impossible.
“How did it go?”
“I’m going to give you the same answer I gave you twenty minutes ago. It hasn’t changed. Lunch was fine.”
“Just fine. That’s not an answer, Ethan.”
His laughter filled the space as he enjoyed my unsated curiosity. Ethan was having just as difficult a time dealing with his role as my Beta as he was with being my mate. As a member of his pack, I should have been more biddable. He was used to, and expected, compliance from his pack members. But anyone who’d dated Chris couldn’t have become accustomed to acquiescence from a lover. Their tumultuous relationship had been nothing but challenging. It had been dysfunctional to the core, and they seemed to have found an odd comfort in it. Our relationship was different—or I thought it was—but being part of the pack and dating Ethan were incompatible. Seeing his fading smile, the attention he paid to the road as he drove—something he never did—and the times he clenched his lips between his teeth in thought eased my nagging concerns. He had them, too; we were bonded by our mutual struggle and that offered me some comfort. But that wasn’t an excuse for him acting like a Betahole.
“That is an answer, even if it’s not the one you want. Am I correct?” he offered. His jaw was set. His lips quirked into a smile, but he refused to commit.
“Ethan, how did it go? I want specifics.”
“More specifically, it was fine. I talked, he listened, and we had lunch.”
My cheeks burned with anger; this was a less than subtle act of defiance, censure for my having coerced the situation into my timeframe and not his.
“Ethan!”
He laughed, amusement coursing over the planes of his face. He took his eyes off the road to look at me. He obviously found a great deal of pleasure in my frustration. More than what I’d found earlier when I’d gotten him to commit to telling his brother. Ethan had a patent on being a stubborn wolf, and at the moment, it was on display.
“It went fine, Sky. He was upset and rightfully so. But”—his smile broadened—“he took it well. He’ll be okay. We are fine.” There was palpable relief in his voice. He patted me on the thigh and kept his hand there, where he continued to caress it. After several moments, he gave in to his relief.
“I told you so” people were annoying, and I prided myself on never having been one—until now. If there had been enough room in the car, I might have done an “I told you so” dance. I settled for fixing him with a smirk.
“So,” I started off slowly, “I was right, and this is a good thing.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was planning on doing it anyway.”
Did he really say that with a straight face?
“What? When were you planning to tell him? On your deathbed?”
Another shrug as he bit back his own smirk. “Now we will never know because you intervened. Quite unfortunate, isn’t it?”
My mouth hung open for several long moments before I snapped it shut. Ethan was enjoying the situation too much, and I was obstinate enough not to give him the satisfaction.
CHAPTER 5
Ethan was still wearing his smug look from the night before as he prepared breakfast. Steven hadn’t returned to the house, texting that he’d be back that night. I assumed he wanted to give us time to discuss things without an audience.
Under Ethan’s watchful gaze, I ate my stack of pancakes, stopping occasionally to take a bite of my steak or snag a few pieces of fruit from the salad. Ethan liked to cook, which worked out well because I hated it. I took the meal as his show of appreciation for my intervening with him and Josh. Contrary to what he believed, I thought he was grateful for my unsolicited intervention.
He picked up a chunk of mango and chewed it thoughtfully before asking, “What do you have going on today besides peppering me with questions about the trial?”
“Well, I figure that will probably take up a great deal of my time.” I grinned, but flashes of the numbers in my bank account reminded me of more pressing things. “I guess I need to spend the day sending out more resumes. I haven’t heard back from anyone.”
I tried to shrug off the heaviness of my concerns. I needed a job. My last employer had had every right to fire me because I’d let pack business interfere with my job. It was the best job I’d ever had, and I’d considered emailing my ex-employer to ask if she would reconsider. But after considering my performance over the past year, I’d realized if I were in her position I would never rehire an employee like me. The four basic form letter rejections I’d received just compoun
ded my feeling of bleakness.
A smile curled Ethan’s lips. “Josh is looking for an assistant. You can work for him.”
“I would love to work for Josh if I actually knew what he did for a living. I haven’t seen him do anything but flirt with pretty women, dance with pretty women, drink with pretty people, and host salacious events for pretty people. Does he really need help doing that?”
“You know he does more than that,” Ethan asserted.
“How would I know? I haven’t seen him do anything but that.”
“Give it a try. If you don’t like it, quit.”
Working with Josh would likely be fun. Probably more fun than I could handle, and everything else in my life revolved around the pack. I wanted a little slice of it to be different and just my own. If I took a job with Josh, in a pack-owned business, 100 percent of my life would revolve around them. I was embarrassed that I always had that knot in my chest, that apprehension that I was just one event away from leaving. It was silly, and I was past that—or at least I thought I was. But the feeling resurfaced more often than I liked to admit, that overwhelming claustrophobic feeling of having been dropped into a world I was inept at navigating. I’d been thrust into a clandestine land that was constantly unraveling, each event more unsettling and portentous than the last. Among those things was my mate hosting a spirit shade who was a dangerous and powerful Faerie.
“Your expenses can’t be that much. I can cover them. Once you move in with me, your only expense will be your car.”
I didn’t respond. Rendered silent by his comment, my mind went into hyperdrive.
Expenses? Live with you? What?
When he brought it up before, I knew we would have to address it at some point; but I didn’t think it would be soon. My eyes widened, and it took me a while to realize my mouth had dropped open and I’d lost the words I wanted to say. “W-what?” I stammered.
He looked around my house, which could fit inside his house with room to spare. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to move in here. Your neighbors find me inconvenient.”
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