by Lily Cahill
“Don’t cuss, Mateo Lopez.”
Grace loved her little brother with an intensity that hurt sometimes … probably because he was constantly giving her a migraine. He’d always been an incorrigible boy, the sort that would hug you fiercely then hide a tarantula in your bed. Grace was seven years older and had been a junior in college when her aunt and uncle had been killed. Mateo, only thirteen, had discovered their bodies back behind the farmhouse. Both had been mauled almost beyond recognition. The authorities said it was a bear attack.
Mateo, the brightest star in Grace’s sky, had exploded into a supernova of pain and anger that had consumed him for years. He’d tried dropping out of school at sixteen, and only stayed in because Grace threatened him daily. Now, he was one month from graduating. Grace had thought she’d gotten a handle on him. A bit of his old luminosity had returned. That was before their cousin had shown up and thrown their world into chaos. She wished he’d never returned.
Grace shook away the black thoughts. She couldn’t dwell on things she couldn’t change. Mateo revered his older cousin, and where Mateo went, so did Grace. It was the only way she could truly protect him. He was eighteen now. If she pushed him away, there’d be no bringing him back.
Mateo yanked the door open and slumped against the frame. “I was out running last night.”
“Is that why you couldn’t come fix that water pipe like I’d asked you a hundred times?”
Mateo shrugged. “It got fixed, didn’t it?”
Grace glared. That was beside the point. “Running will do us both good.”
“Sleep would do me better.” Mateo sighed heavily and leaned his head against Grace’s shoulder. He was a foot taller than her by now, but he still felt like the little brother she’d loved since birth. “But for my big sister, I guess I can.”
Grace grinned. “Come on then. You know Tuco doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Mateo followed Grace back down the stairs and out onto the back porch. Their little white farmhouse—inherited from their aunt and uncle—stood at the end of a lonely dirt road. They could see for miles in every direction. It was a rolling land of sagebrush, cedar scrub, gullies, and cottonwood groves hugging the banks of creeks.
The muggy air held a tang of electricity. There’d be storms later. But for now, the sky was dotted with white clouds and the wide open expanses begged to be explored. Grace met Mateo’s dark brown eyes, then nodded.
The shift happened quickly, easily. She felt her face lengthen, her teeth sharpen and grow long. She dropped to slender gray paws and bounded from the back porch. She jumped in a circle to face her brother—also shifting into his wolf form—and yapped impatiently. Her long, shaggy tail shook with anticipation as Mateo padded down the steps to join her.
Her wolf longed to run, to stretch her legs, to wrestle playfully. With another joyful bark, she took off.
Grace shifted back to her human form and stopped before the abandoned oil rig deep in the wilderness outside town. She hated these meetings, hated that she was part of this. But Tuco Espinosa was family, and you stuck with family no matter what.
The oil derrick was a wooden tower, slats coming loose and breaking down more with each spring storm. There was an attached building, a clapboard shack with a low roof and only one tiny window. It felt like a coffin inside. Grace took a steadying breath and then tugged the door open wide.
Mateo sauntered in before her, adopting the swagger of a confident young man. But Grace knew it was all a front. All the more reason she needed to be here to stop him from doing something stupid. Grace rubbed the still-healing pink scars on her arm. That’s how she’d gotten those, after all, by stepping up for a foolhardy mission before Mateo could volunteer.
The room was nearly full of men and some women. Grace recognized many members from the Espinosa clan—her mother’s people—but that wasn’t all. She also recognized bear shifters that outwardly pledged allegiance to the ruling Alvarez clan, leaders of the Southern Clans, and solitary cougar shifters from the mountainous edges of clan territory.
“Cousin,” someone boomed.
Grace snapped her head around to see Tuco striding over. There was a deep, ugly scar running down the left side of his face that had turned his eye milky white. Grace still had a hard time looking at it—a remnant of his time in the Southlands prison camp with other shifters. Grace squirmed nervously. It’d happened before he’d broken out, became an escaped felon of the shifter world. He promised Grace he’d been imprisoned illegally, that it was right and good that he had broken out, but nothing about it sat right with Grace.
Lord, how could this be the same boy she’d so loved growing up? What had become of the whip-smart, charismatic cousin who’d been able to make her laugh like no other? Was he still in there somewhere? Grace had to hope so. If not, then to what exactly had she promised her support?
Tuco’s head was shaved—something else that’d happened while interred at the Southlands prison camp—and his body was etched with crude black tattoos. The biggest was block letters marching down his forearm that read ESPINOSA.
Tuco hugged Grace, then slapped Mateo on the back. Mateo looked up at him with awe in his eyes. It made Grace’s stomach turn.
“Now that you’re here, we can begin,” Tuco said, before turning back to the assembled group. The people milling around practically froze as Tuco raised his voice. He’d always had that effect on people.
“First, a moment of silence for our fallen comrade, Errol Hart,” Tuco began. “When he came to me at Southlands, I was nearly a broken man, but he showed me that us shifters can still be strong. Still be a power to be reckoned with. We’re hogtied by the rules forced on us by the so-called chieftains of the territories, but I can tell you, friends. They don’t represent me!”
The small room shifted and rumbled with the sound of bodies moving, hands clapping, men calling out their support for Tuco. Grace stood back and tried not to feel sick.
“I heard he was slaughtered by his own son,” someone cried out.
Tuco nodded. “I was there; I saw. He asked for mercy, and he got none. Just like the Harts and the Alvarezes do to us.”
Grace knew the grievances the Espinosa clan had with the treaties that had brought peace to the shifter world. A hundred years ago, when the Hart chieftain made peace with the Alvarez chieftain, the Espinosas had lost nearly all of their ancestral land to a “neutral” zone. Tensions had been simmering for decades since then, but it was only in the last few years, since the Western Clans had lost some of their strength with the ousting of Errol Hart, that the Espinosa clan saw their chance to take back what was rightfully theirs.
Tuco kept talking, riling up his loyal troops. Grace stopped listening. She’d heard it all before. Her eyes blurred, her mind wandered … back to Tim. Back to the image of him without his shirt on. She didn’t know what she was going to do about her attraction to him. Though if she listened to the deep ache between her thighs, that something would involve very little in the way of clothing. God, the thought of his mouth on her, fingers in her ….
Grace blinked hard and found herself staring at another man across the room, a man that sent shivers racing down her spine for entirely different reasons. Carver Bain. Tuco’s closest ally who’d broken out of Southlands with him.
Carver’s mouth curled up in a smile, but his blue eyes remained ice cold. He was good looking, but there was something about the sum of his parts that just seemed … wrong. His smile was sharp, and his eyes were soulless. And right now, he was fixed on Grace.
Grace looked away, but she felt him eyeing her, moving through the crowd toward her. There was nowhere to go, no way to get away from him. The tiny shack was practically body to body. Carver eased through the people and stopped next to Grace.
“You seemed lost in thought,” he said, his voice close at her ear.
Grace fought the urge to shiver again. “I’m just tired. There was a problem at the bar last night.”
“I’
ve told you before, Grace, I can take care of anything you need. Anything at all.”
Grace smiled thinly. She never wanted to find herself beholden to Carver Bain. “I took care of it. Thanks, though.”
Carver roughed his hand through his tangled, dirty blond hair. It was tugged back into a low ponytail, and Grace could see smudges of dirt at his neck just above his shirt collar. That was the thing with Carver. He was a beautiful man from far away, but get close enough and you saw it was all a lie.
His calloused fingers slid along the edge of Grace’s scars. He leaned closer. “These make you incredibly sexy,” he growled in her ear.
He’d been there that night, when she’d gotten them. God, if she could go back to that night and do everything differently. Grace shifted away from Carver and glanced at Mateo. He was hanging on Tuco’s every word. There was no doing things differently. There was only protecting Mateo.
As soon as Tuco was done speaking, Grace grabbed Mateo. “We need to get back to the bar,” she said, keeping her features still. People in this room could smell fear. Wolf shifters like Carver couldn’t just smell it, they drank it up.
“Tuco was talking about a raid on an Alvarez sentry outpost in the mountains. You think I could—”
“Absolutely not,” Grace said. Terror gripped at her heart, stole the air from her lungs. How long could this continue? How long could she keep Mateo from going down this path to ruin?
“I’m an adult, Grace,” Mateo began. It was the same argument they’d had a million times before.
“If that were true, then you wouldn’t let the work around the bar be handled by another adult. Prove to me you can be counted on at the bar, then we’ll talk about ….” She didn’t finish the sentence.
Tuco had ambled over, and he stood between them and the door. Grace’s fingers went rigid around Mateo’s arm.
“You’re in a hurry, cuz.”
“I got a guy at the bar doing some repairs. I don’t want him making off with the cash drawer.”
Tuco rubbed his finger down his grotesque scar. “You want me to go make sure he won’t?”
“No!” Grace stopped, took a breath. “Mateo and I have it under control. But I’ll call you if I need any help.” She realized it was practically the same line she’d used to get Carver away from her. She hated that she was so afraid of her own cousin.
Tuco stepped aside and pushed the door open for them, and Grace smiled. She let Mateo go first and was nearly past Tuco when his arm shot out. He pressed his meaty hand against the opposite side of the door frame, barring Grace’s exit.
She laughed shakily. “Is there something you need?”
“I can sense your reluctance, you know.”
Grace blinked quickly. “I don’t know what you mean, Tuco.”
Tuco stared at her, his milky eye close. “Your last name may be Lopez, but you’re an Espinosa.”
“I know my last name, Tuco.”
Tuco dropped his arm, but he didn’t move. “And I know you won’t betray us, not after what you did. You were there. You attacked those Hart bastards just like I did.”
Grace couldn’t breathe. She had to get out. She had to get Mateo out. She forced her feet forward, one step, then another.
Tuco called after her, his voice whipped away on the growing wind. But she heard him clearly, like he was right next to her, hissing in her ear.
“You’re a part of this now, cousin. There’s no turning back without consequences.”
Chapter Three
Bret
I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE running from, but it doesn’t matter how far you go. It’ll find you.
Those words from Grace poked at Bret’s mind. Was it that obvious? Or maybe everyone in this desolate town was running from something, real or imaginary.
Bret hoisted the new length of pipe onto his shoulder and muscled it into place in the office. Grace had bought all the needed supplies weeks ago, apparently, but her little brother had never gotten around to fixing it. Or anything else, it seemed.
Bret didn’t want to admit how happy he was for it. Or for the fact that Mateo was her brother, not her boyfriend.
He’d spent the better part of the morning taking down and replacing the busted water pipe, and that was just the beginning. There was the dishwasher to tend to, and a broken fan to look at in the main bar. And a hundred more things, by the looks of it.
Bret collapsed into the office chair with a glass of water and used his shirt to wipe sweat from his brow. He should probably add the stuttering old air conditioner unit to his list of tasks. But it felt good to do some mindless physical labor. It’d been too long since he’d felt his muscles burn when he wasn’t in his bear form.
He missed this. He’d always done this sort of heavy labor on the ranch back in Montana. It kept him too busy to miss his brothers, to wonder if they missed him too. Bret eyed the old landline phone sitting on the desk. He could call Mac, just to check in. He didn’t even know if they’d continued the tour without him. And the conclave … had Drew claimed his place as the chieftain of the Western Clans?
His fingers inched toward the receiver. One call wouldn’t hurt. Maybe … maybe they could patch things up. Maybe he could go home. He’d never missed Montana as much as he had in the last month.
Out front, a door slammed and a voice called out. “Hello?”
Frowning, Bret pushed himself to stand. His muscles protested moving so soon, but he gritted his teeth and strode down the hallway. A man stood in the middle of the closed bar, his sharp eyes narrowed as he searched the place.
“Can I help you?” Bret wiped his dirty hands on the towel slung over his shoulder and pulled his shoulders back. There was something about this man that set his instincts on high alert. The man looked nearly feral, just a thin veneer of humanity hiding the beast underneath. Was he a shifter?
Bret walked closer, his steps measured and his senses working overtime.
The man, too, sized him up. “Who are you?”
“Tim Smith. Grace hired me to fix a few things around the bar.”
The man sneered and smoothed short, thick fingers over his dirty blond hair. “She’s got men for that already.”
“Maybe she should have asked them then. But I’m here now.”
“What’d you say your name was again?”
“Tim Smith. And you are?”
The man didn’t answer him, but circled around Bret, his eyes still roving the place. “Have you seen Grace? I heard she was headed here.”
“I haven’t seen her yet today. Want me to take a message?” Bret wanted to get this guy’s name. He felt it was important to know who was looking for Grace.
The man stopped, regarded Bret. Then he shook his head. “Don’t bother. I’ll go find her. I know all the places Grace goes.”
Without another word, the man turned and left. But the stench of his intentions stayed behind. There was something off about him, something that wasn’t right. Indecision worried over Bret’s skin like an itch for a few moments, but then he shook his head.
That man wasn’t right. And Bret wasn’t about to let him go find Grace without Bret nearby to help if he needed. Bret jogged out of the bar and out into the blistering sun. A stiff wind buffeted him, and he had to shield his eyes to search for the man.
There, tearing away in a rusted-out Ford pickup. Bret strode down the sleepy main street, his eyes on the man in the truck. He needed to follow the man, but he couldn’t shift, not here. By the time he’d made it out of town, the truck was nothing but a plume of dust being kicked up in the distance.
Bret jogged off the road and waded into the sagebrush and scrubby grasses. He peered around, then crouched low and let the transformation take hold. He felt his body grow larger, bulkier. He wasn’t the largest of bears, but he was fast. He sniffed the air for the burn of exhaust, then took off running.
Chapter Four
Grace
GRACE COULDN’T SIT STILL. SHE paced through the farmhouse, h
er mind jumping and chaotic. She’d kept it together the whole way home with Mateo, and even got him out the door in time to meet his study group. They were preparing for final exams with a tutor she paid to come once a week from UT-Austin.
But now that she was alone, Grace felt jittery and unsettled. Tuco’s threat to her replayed on a loop in her mind. Because that’s what it was: a threat. He wasn’t a dumb man—he could tell she wasn’t in this heart and soul like he was.
The truth was, Grace wasn’t twisted by hatred of the Alvarez clan like Tuco and others in the Espinosa clan were. For generations, it’d been a rumbling of discontent about the loss of their ancestral lands, an amorphous idea more than anything. But that discontent had exploded to all-out war when her Aunt Maria and Uncle Eduardo had been murdered by a bear. Tuco pointed to that as reason enough to overthrow the ruling Alvarez chieftain once and for all.
Grace had mourned their death. She still found herself sometimes standing in the kitchen waiting for her aunt to come help make dinner. But she’d known them better than anyone else, and Grace was certain—absolutely certain—they wouldn’t want to sow chaos in their name. Sometimes, it was almost as if Tuco was glad to have a reason to revolt.
Grace shook her head, but the thoughts held on tight. Tuco loved them. He might be different than she remembered, but the old him had to be in there somewhere.
He was still the same boy who made her laugh and listened intently when she played piano. He was still the same boy who had saved Mateo’s life. Grace still shivered to recall the memory.
She’d been about fourteen at the time, which would have made Tuco seventeen and Mateo seven. They’d been out hiking along the creek beds out behind the farmhouse—not far from where Mateo had discovered their aunt’s and uncle’s bodies. It was early spring, and the sun was wonderfully warm overhead. The creek had disappeared around a bend, and Mateo scurried on ahead, jumping from rock to rock at the edge of the water. Grace had only lost sight of him for a second, but then she’d heard him scream.
