The sound of Hilary’s shouts was getting louder. It was time to make his move. Titus took one last look at Kylie and then strode off, ducking beneath low hanging tree branches and shoving aside bushes in order to do so. Younger and Duke were right behind him. It was strange to have them at his side. He wasn’t used to that. Even when Jason had still been alive, Titus would not have expected nor welcomed his brother’s company on an errand like this.
“Get out here, you little twit!” Hilary’s voice was shrill with a note of panic. “You better not have run off and died out there. That would just figure. You’re such a loser and a wimp that you can’t even stand a few days in the shed!”
The language was odd. It sounded a bit to Titus as though Hilary was a grade school playground bully looking for her targets. But Titus didn’t pause for a single second. He stepped onto the old cement pathway that led down toward the main courtyard and what had once been a fountain.
It wasn’t hard to spot Hilary once they got clear of the thickly overgrown shrubbery. Titus stood there for a moment and watched Hilary walking in circles through the cluster of buildings that had once sold park passes, cotton candy, and housed games of chance and skill. Now the booths were dark and derelict, even in the fading afternoon light.
“Looks like we’re in for a storm,” Younger murmured as he jerked his chin toward the thunderheads massing just behind the hills.
Titus could smell the weather rolling in. The electricity in the air made him feel wild. He wanted to shift back to his wolf form right now and attack Hilary like some wild beast. Not unlike his brother had attacked Hilary’s sister.
The thought was a sobering one. Titus exhaled a long breath filled with tension and then tried to figure out what to say. “Hilary! You and I need to talk!”
She spun around so quickly that she lost her balance and wound up doing a drunken sort of twirl. The bright afternoon sun suddenly disappeared behind a dark cloud and all four were left standing in the gray light with a strong breeze buffeting them from the north. Hilary stared at Titus and her anger and loathing were so potent that he could feel them like a physical touch.
“You killed my sister and now I’m going to make you pay!” Hilary stomped closer.
Titus could feel Younger and Duke’s stares as they looked to him to see how he would respond. “You refuse to see the truth of that no matter what I tell you, Hilary. That’s fine. Let’s go down to the police station right now and we can talk it over. Detective Sellers is willing to make the call to Bitter Spring and tell them you think I’m responsible for that murder.”
But Hilary was already shaking her head. “I want a confession! I want you to tell everyone that you did it. I want to march you down the middle of Route 76 with a sign on your chest saying you murdered Heidi Allenwood.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Titus told her flatly. “I didn’t touch your sister and quite frankly, I never could see what my brother found to like in her. Heidi was as spoiled and self-absorbed as you are and just about as intelligent.”
“How dare you!” Hilary fisted her hands and jumped up and down on the pavement as though she could no longer contain the force of her anger. “You don’t get to say things like that! You never talk about her! Do you understand? And you don’t have a brother!”
Duke sighed and murmured for their ears only. “This isn’t working, boss. She’s about to lose her marbles.”
They could all see it happening. But Titus was done catering to Hilary’s crazy antics. There was just no point in it anymore. Titus decided to push her over the edge. “No. I’m not saying I committed any crime. If there’s evidence enough to support an attempt to reopen your sister’s case, then so be it, but I’m not giving you a freebie just to make you feel better about being a shitty older sister.”
Hilary snapped in a hail of curse words and name calling. And that’s when she pulled the gun. It had evidently been stashed in a tote bag she’d left propped against the fountain. Younger and Duke moved restlessly beside Titus, but he remained calm.
“Boss,” Duke prodded. “Time to hogtie crazy. Don’t you think?”
“You ready?” Titus murmured.
“You will confess!” Hilary shrieked. “I was a good sister! I loved Heidi. She was just determined to date some country hick boy she’d met at a bar. That’s not my fault! She wanted me to leave her in the bar that night. She wanted to go home with that boy. How was I supposed to know you were going to kill her!”
“For the last time, I’m not the man your sister went home with.”
But it didn’t matter because Titus was already rushing her. He went first, his sprinting wolf power instantly outstripping Younger and Duke’s human legs. And that was as it should have been because the gun went off with a loud pop. It was a tiny weapon. A twenty-two caliber pistol. The bullet entered Titus’s upper arm on the right side and did not even slow him down.
Titus slung his arm around Hilary’s waist and picked her up off the ground. He lifted her high as she screamed in rage and surprise. Then Titus slammed her to the pavement with no small amount of force. He used his other hand to protect her head, but the fall stunned her long enough to flip her over.
Younger was ready. He had zip ties in his hands. They were the exact sort they used in their regular line of duty when they had unruly suspects to keep a handle on until the police arrived. Younger trussed Hilary up like a steer at the rodeo and then jumped to his feet and flung his arms in the air.
“Time!” Duke called out.
They both looked relieved. Then they happened to notice the trickle of blood running down Titus’s arm. Maybe that was when he realized it was time to come clean with his big secret. And maybe that was a relief.
Chapter Thirty
The abandoned amusement park scene was no longer like a Scooby-Doo cartoon. In the cartoon, when the kids finally solved a mystery there was likely to be no more than one police car around for the great reveal. At this point, Kylie was pretty sure there were a dozen police cars, two ambulances, three fire trucks, and the fire marshal’s emergency response unit. EMS workers poured through the now unlocked and open main gates of the old park. They beat the bushes and entered every single closed structure on the property looking for evidence.
For now though, Kylie was content to sit on the back steps of the ambulance well away from the interior of the amusement park. Friends surrounded her. They probably weren’t the friends Doug Thalman had been talking about the other day when he’d put together his shopping illustration, but these were the friends Kylie would rely on when push came to shove.
Mindy and Ash, Younger, Duke, Ellie, and Titus were clustered around the area where Kylie was sitting beneath an umbrella as a steady rain fell with a strangely soothing pitter patter on the roof of the ambulance and the parking lot all around them. The scent of the rain was so strong that it had finally drowned out the acrid odor of gunpowder and maybe even the smell of the sweat that permeated Kylie’s hair and clothes. She wanted a shower so badly, but a natural shower would do for the time being.
The EMS worker that had taken Kylie’s vitals and then handed her a couple of bottles of water was helping in the search for evidence. Adam Cathcart walked up with his phone to his ear, just finishing a call.
Adam looked at them all in turn and then winked at Ellie for good measure. “Well, I just got off the phone with the head of the management company that still owns this place. They’re looking into the possibility of one of their employees giving Hilary the keys as a payment for keeping some kind of scandal out of the Register.”
Titus shook his head. “The woman had this whole town wired, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, she did.” Duke was looking distracted. “Uh, boss. You got shot. You should probably have someone look at that. I know the macho bit and all, but gangrene ain’t pretty.”
Titus’s expression was pure amusement. He was laughing at them and Kylie knew why. “Gangrene? Gee, Duke. I’ll keep that in mind. I wouldn’t want to have t
o do a field amputation of my right arm.”
“Can I at least look at it?” Ellie reached for Titus’s hand to yank him closer.
Titus looked at Kylie for a long moment. They hadn’t even had a moment to talk about what it was he needed to tell the rest of his team. But Kylie’s feelings about Titus and his not quite human status were far different from what they had once been. She gave him a nod and waited.
“Yes, Ellie. You go ahead and you take a look at my arm,” Titus suggested. He held out the limb in question and waited.
Ellie grabbed his arm and, along with Younger, carefully maneuvered the short sleeve of Titus’s T-shirt. You could see the hole against the black fabric. You could see the blood soaking the cotton. But when the fabric went up over Titus’s arm, something tiny fell out and hit the edge of the ambulance stairs with a metallic ping.
“What was that?” Ellie frantically dropped to her knees and came up a moment later with a tiny, very smashed bullet in her hand. “This is the bullet, Titus! How is that possible?”
“Well,” Titus said in an obnoxious tone. “You fire the gun and there is a pin that hits the center of the casing where the primer and the powder are located. The force of the reaction sends the bullet spinning through the barrel of the weapon and pushes a tiny projectile at the intended target. Of course, it’s rather hot so…”
“Shut up!” Ellie groaned. “I know how a gun works. What I want to know is why the bullet was just stuck in your shirt!”
Titus craned his neck to look at the wound in the front of his bicep muscle. “I’m going to say the fabric had shifted and was holding the bullet right there against the hole. Kind of like a bandage. When you moved the fabric, there was nothing to hold the bullet anymore, so it fell.”
Younger cleared his throat. “Boss, I’m pretty sure the part we’re confused about is why the bullet wasn’t in your flesh any longer.”
Mindy sucked back a gasp and grabbed hold of Ash. He was holding an umbrella over her head to keep her dry and now she tucked her face even closer to his arm. Kylie wondered if Mindy had somehow worked the whole thing out thanks to all of the information in the files on her computer that Caroline and Hilary had put together.
“What?” Ellie cranked her neck around to look at Mindy. “What’s wrong?”
Ash cleared his throat. “Mindy and I were kind of aware of a few little things about Titus. Nothing for sure, of course, but his family was known to have at least one member who suffered from Hypertrichosis.” Ash looked at the others and could see not everybody was on board. “It’s called werewolf syndrome. And I guess, we figured that where there’s smoke…” He left the sentence dangling.
The whole group swung back around to look at Titus who was now shaking his head. “I don’t have Hypertrichosis. My father did. And various other relations. But we are wolf shifters. It’s just a family trait. We have heightened senses, even when we’re in our human bodies and we can also heal very quickly. If I’m shot, the bullet will just push itself out of the hole and the flesh will sort of knit back together.” He looked down at his arm and grunted. “See? Now that the metal is gone, the hole is closing. You can watch it.”
Ellie was absolutely fascinated. She leaned forward and let loose a low curse. “That is absolutely nuts! Look at that! I never would have believed it!”
“So, the story,” Titus continued pointedly, “is that I was winged and that’s all. Got it?”
“Right.” Ellie made a face. “I don’t think we need the whole town thinking you’re a murderous werewolf. That would make Hilary right.”
Duke looked thoughtful. “Which is what she thought she’d threaten you with at the start. Did she actually know?”
“No. She knew about the Hypertrichosis,” Titus told them all with a sigh. He glanced at Kylie. “Kylie is the only one who has ever known what I really am.”
Now they were looking at Kylie. She squirmed a bit on her seat. Then she drank down a few gulps of water to give her something to do. She didn’t want the speculation. Not right now. Not yet. She wanted to stay on the fringe of this confession thing and just let everyone else do the talking.
Adam Cathcart puffed out his cheeks and shrugged. “Well, I suppose that it makes some sense why you’re in security then. God knows it probably makes you more effective at your job.”
“No doubt!” Younger snorted. Then he turned and looked at Kylie. “And by the way, Laurie told me to let you know that she and Olivia would be happy to help you with anything you might need at home. Laurie went down to the winery to explain the situation to the operating managers. She said they’re very sympathetic and can’t wait to have you back.”
“Wow. Thanks?” Kylie wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that. But the gesture was just plain nice. Friends. Maybe this was what Doug Thalman had been talking about all along. “I’ll have to have Laurie and Olivia over to sit on the patio and hang out a while.”
Titus gave a snort. “That sounds like a much better group of friends than the last bunch of bimbos.”
“And yet,” Kylie quipped, “I feel as though the risk of another food fight might be just as strong.”
“Only if you invite Ellie,” Mindy teased. Then she spotted someone waving to them from the entrance of the amusement park. “Oh look. Detective Sellers needs a hand. I’ll admit the guy isn’t crooked and since the entire Sergeant Caprico fiasco, he’s a whole hell of a lot less arrogant, but I feel like this town is going to be lucky to have us giving Sellers as many hints as we possibly can.”
Ash was already nodding as he and Mindy started to walk in that direction. “No doubt. Sellers couldn’t find enough clues to get out of a room.”
Kylie expected Titus to go with the rest of his group as they all hurried through the steadily falling rain toward Sellers and the raincoat clad cops who were still beating bushes and attempting to gather evidence before it all washed away. But Titus stayed with her instead. He perched on the step beside her and was silent for a moment or two. After a bit, she realized he was waiting for her to be the first to speak.
“Titus, I didn’t react very well to that whole Caroline Fry situation.” Kylie wasn’t sure that was the best way to open this topic, but maybe that didn’t really matter. Maybe the only thing that mattered was making him understand she didn’t hold his biology against him. “I’m sorry. I really am. I never… I guess I was made aware recently that I’m not a big participator in intimate relationships of any kind.”
Titus reached out and touched her cheek. “I don’t blame you for that, sweetheart. People can disappoint you and let you down in a whole lot of really bad ways.”
“Yes, but you were right!” Kylie felt a wave of shame. “I was letting my fears dictate who I was willing to believe. Honestly. Caroline? I thought her accusations held more weight than your word just because I was so afraid to admit that I’ve fallen for you.”
“Fallen for me?”
His expression was one she would never forget. Titus had a man’s face. A clean cut, sharp jawed, handsome face. Though at that moment, he looked like a little boy who was almost unwilling to believe something was true. “You must know how I feel about you, Kylie. You’re it for me. Wolves aren’t like humans and shifters aren’t either, but that’s because we settle down with one woman and that’s it.” He stared at her for one long moment and Kylie felt a tingle sliding down her spine. “Even if you told me it could never work, Kylie, you are it. There would never be anyone else. My heart wouldn’t allow it.”
Kylie gaped at him. Then she frowned and pursed her lips. “Wait a second. Are you saying if I told you I never wanted to see you again, you would just wait the rest of your life until I changed my mind?”
“Yes.” Then the right side of his mouth quirked up into a mischievous smile. “Don’t think I’m not above using whatever methods possible to convince you though. I can be very persuasive in certain areas.”
Kylie felt her heart begin to speed up. She was so tired and she nee
ded a shower and a good night’s sleep, maybe two, yet this man could still get her wound up. She felt her body softening towards him. Her mind was already there. This was what it felt like to want to be with someone as more than just friends. The real thing. This was home. However you wanted to put it, this was it.
“Titus, thank you for saving me,” Kylie whispered. She had no fears that he wouldn’t hear her. He could probably hear her heart beating. “I was so afraid in that stupid shed. I thought I was going to die. She just left me there at night and went about her business. I was never sure that anyone was coming back in the morning. I had this horrible nightmare about being left there to slowly starve to death and dying of thirst and…”
“Hush, now.” He wrapped his arm around her. “I’m sorry it took me so long. You were angry with me. I thought I was giving you time. I never imagined this was what was keeping you away from me.”
He held her close and lightly stroked her rat’s nest of a ponytail. She felt grubby and nasty and she just couldn’t make herself care because it was obvious that he didn’t. He was right there with her. Gently holding her and whispering promises.
“Titus,” she said, pulling back just a little. “Let’s make a pact. All right?”
“What sort of pact?”
“That we will never stay angry at each other. My mother used to say you never let the sun go down on your anger because if you don’t wake up you wouldn’t want to have the last words you say to someone be cross.” Kylie had made fun of her mother for saying that but it was so true! “I never want to go to bed angry at you.”
“Deal.” He didn’t even balk. “And sweetheart, for the record, if you’re angry at me when we go to bed I can envision a dozen or more ways to change your mind and apologize in every way possible.”
Kylie giggled. He was such a surprising man. This guy who was so enigmatic and serious and sometimes seemed totally humorless wasn’t really like that at all. He was surprising and kind and sweet and maybe even gentle when he wasn’t ready to rip someone’s head off. She was lucky. She knew that. She could feel it.
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