by Moira Rogers
Julio met her gaze. “Sometimes I think Miguel only agreed because he figured he’d need to be stronger to survive everything that was going to go down.”
“Like his big brother?” Sera touched Julio’s cheek, tracing a line down to his lips. “You’re not strong because you’re a wolf. I think he knows that.”
“No.” His gaze turned bleak. “But physically, I can survive things that would kill a human in a heartbeat.”
Torture. She ghosted her thumb over his lower lip again, then pressed her forehead to his.
“Tell me?”
Julio barely moved, except for the fine tremor that shook him. “Knives. Heated wire. Pretty much the only part of the theatrical torture guidebook they didn’t break out was the car battery.”
The ground was cooling beneath them, stealing warmth, but this moment was so fragile.
They were lost together in a world where no one else existed, and she took her time stroking her fingers over his cheek. “Kat told me you stayed strong for her.”
“Well, it’s a lie.” He snorted. “The only reason I didn’t crack and blubber all over everyone is because I didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction.”
“Uh-huh.” Another circle, stroking from his cheek to his neck and back. “You still kept her in one piece. They picked the perfect way to crush her, and you fucked it all up. If you’d let her see what you were going through, it would have broken her before Andrew and the others found you.”
He relaxed into her touch. “I grew up with an empath. I know how it goes.”
“You did what you could to protect her. And that’s the unfair part. That’s the balance.” She cupped his cheek and nuzzled his nose. “You alphas get all the power, and all the responsibility.
You have to protect everyone else and you never get to be the one hurting.”
“There’s never any time for it.”
“There’s right now.”
He chuckled. “Naked, in the woods, with spiders biting your ass?”
“You’re the only thing that’s bitten my ass this week.” Not that the thought didn’t make her squirm her way back on top of him—just in case. “I know what the first thing on my not-smothered list is.”
He slipped both arms around her waist and pulled her closer. “What’s that?”
She caught his gaze and held it. “Now might not be the time, but if you don’t think you can share things with me, then I’m not a partner. When you keep all the responsibility, you keep all the power too.”
Julio arched one eyebrow. “You think I’m playing Mr. Tough Guy? That I’m not vulnerable?”
“I don’t know.” She smoothed the furrow from between his brows and tried to pick her words carefully. “I know you like me. But you keep coming into my life at the low points. When I’m beat up or bruised or broken inside, and you pick me back up, and sometimes…” She swallowed hard and made herself ask. “Do I give you anything back?”
He caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “Being with you… It’s loud and quiet all at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“As much sense as being sheltered and free.” A sharp breeze cut across through the trees, and she shivered. “Okay, I want a bath. Or a hot shower. If you’re nice, I’ll share with you.”
He got to his feet with her in his arms. “If? How heartless.”
She laughed and closed her teeth on his jaw. “Poor Julio. Maybe I’m trying to go easy on you. I do have the sex drive of a twenty-two-year-old, you know, and you’re an old man.”
“I’ll show you old.” He swatted her hip, and she laughed again and kicked her legs, trying to squirm out of his grip.
Laughter. She’d laughed more in the past week with Julio than she had in recent memory.
Josh hadn’t laughed unless he’d thought she wanted him to. Like everything else about their relationship, his laughter had been a bribe, a calculated action meant to keep her too content to go running home.
Everything about Julio was honesty. Painful, sometimes. He wouldn’t fib or sand the sharp edges off the truth, even when they bruised her. But he let her laugh. He let her feel. He made her hope.
He was everything she’d known he would be the first time he’d touched her. He was the kind of strong a girl could drown in, but he wouldn’t let her. If she tried, he’d drag her up and tell her to start swimming again.
Hell, maybe if she let him, he’d teach her how to fly.
Chapter Eleven
“I don’t want this last one,” Julio murmured in Sera’s ear. “You still hungry?”
“Maybe.” But her lips found his throat instead, and she kissed her way down to his shoulder with complete disregard for the remains of their late breakfast.
The pancakes were cold anyway, so he pressed a hand to the back of her head and guided her mouth to his with a pleased growl.
With most of the pack gone for their own day-to-day business, Sera seemed to have no problem squirming into his lap. Not that she’d skimped on the possessive touches while they’d been around the other wolves, but now she bumped the picnic table back to give them more room and tangled her arms around his neck.
“Well, I guess Carmen didn’t warn you,” a male voice drawled from the direction of the house, a low voice edged in dangerous blankness.
Oh shit. Her father’s voice. Julio held Sera tight as she tried to spring back out of his lap, then released his hold on her slowly. They had nothing to be guilty about, damn it, and they didn’t need to jump apart like a couple of teenagers. “Franklin. Welcome to Florida.”
Sera’s father stood a few steps past the sliding glass door, his arms crossed over his chest.
Sera flushed pink, but she still untangled herself from Julio and climbed to her feet. “Hey, Dad.”
“Sera.” Franklin’s face softened as he held out his arms, and Sera hurried to hug him. He eyed Julio over his daughter’s shoulder. “Are you going to let me talk to your gentleman?”
“Depends. Are you going to give him hell?”
“Depends. Should I?” He released Sera, but he was smiling, like it was a common joke.
“Carmen would love to see you, if you’ll indulge me with a few moments as an overprotective father.”
Sera turned and looked at Julio, both eyebrows raised in silent question. He shrugged in equally silent answer, then gestured to the opposite bench at the picnic table.
Franklin walked past Sera and slid onto the bench. When she hovered near the door, he shooed her. “Scoot.”
With a sigh and a mouthed, “I’m sorry,” Sera capitulated. She tugged open the sliding glass door and gave her father one last look. “Be nice, or I’ll call your girlfriend.”
The door slid shut behind her, and Franklin smiled a little. “Lily keeps the peace by pointing out when I’ve crossed the line between doting father and well-meaning but unreasonable asshole.”
Something, Julio suspected, only Lily could get away with. “Want some coffee?”
Franklin waved the offer away and met Julio’s gaze squarely. “You saved my life. I’m never going to forget that. But you are half again her age, and she’s my baby girl.”
“I’m nine years older than Sera. That’s hardly the biggest age gap I’ve seen lately, though I’ll concede your last point. She’ll always be your baby girl.”
“Yeah, she will.” Franklin spread one hand on the table and stared down at it, as if he was struggling to choose his words. “She seems happy. The last time Josh contacted her, she was rattled for weeks.”
A father’s concern, and yet a question lurked somewhere in the words. “I didn’t run him off.
Sera did that all by herself.”
“Did she?” His brief smile faded all too quickly. “I want him dead. Not just because he hurt her, but because I’ve seen coyotes who let the mating madness take them, and they don’t get better. They stalk and they take until someone ends them.”
“I get it.” Josh’s continued survival wasn’t par
ticularly important to Julio, either, but he wasn’t ready to step up to being judge, jury and executioner for anyone. Not unless his hand was forced. “He won’t stop.”
“Probably not. I need to know you know that, and that you won’t let anything happen to her.”
It brought Wesley’s words—and his dire but vague prediction—crashing back. “I won’t, and neither will she.”
Franklin studied Julio in silence for a good thirty seconds before he sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re serious about her, aren’t you.”
It barely sounded like a question, and Julio couldn’t tell if Franklin was relieved, or if that odd note in his voice was something else entirely. Something like dread. “I’m not messing around,” he said finally. “The rest is up to Sera.”
A short nod. “Mendoza, don’t take this the wrong way. I trust and depend on your sister, and I respect what you’ve done for New Orleans in general and me in particular. You pulled my dying ass out of a burning building…”
It didn’t take a genius to see where he was going. “But my uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” Julio finished.
Franklin opened his eyes, and there was sympathy there. “Your uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” he agreed mildly. “I don’t blame you any more than I blame Carmen, but I worry about what a man who was willing to kill me would do to my daughter to keep her away from his nephew and his fortune.”
Julio leaned forward, unsure how Sera’s father would take the truth. “My uncle is still alive because he’s family. But the moment he puts her in danger is the moment I forget that.
Completely.”
“Killing your own kin is no small thing.” Franklin held Julio’s gaze as he lowered his voice.
“When Alec challenged your uncle last spring, he was hoping to spare you that. It’s a choice he looks at damn near every day. It’s a choice I’ve made, which my daughter does not know.”
Neither did Julio. “What do you mean?”
“Sera’s mother…” He hesitated. “Callum called me and said you’d seen Kelly.”
But had Callum told him everything? “We did.”
Franklin stared at his hand where it rested on the picnic table. “When I was in my last year of medical school, my brother found Kelly’s family. They were in hiding because a bastard from Oregon kidnapped Kelly’s older sister, and their father died in the challenge that followed. Kelly was all of eleven years old, but Iris was eighteen and had a healthy baby girl. My brother saw that little coyote baby and he lost it. Lost his mind, his humanity, every goddamn thing that made him human.”
Coyote babies were rare, surely rare enough to inspire fascination. “He wanted one of his own. A family.”
“So bad he didn’t care that Iris was an eighteen-year-old girl who’d been brutalized.”
Franklin’s voice had gone numb. “I wanted to think he’d come back from it, but he turned feral when Iris wouldn’t warm up to him. So I put him down before he could destroy what was left of that girl’s life.”
He’d killed his own brother, his blood. Done the thing Julio always promised himself he could do if he had to. “Doesn’t sound like you had a choice.”
“My family didn’t agree.” Franklin met Julio’s gaze again. “Sera doesn’t know. I don’t want her to, because she doesn’t need more reasons to feel like instinct is inevitable. Not before she gets a chance to prove it to herself.”
“To prove what? That it isn’t as inevitable as she thinks, or that it is?”
He smiled. “That it’s not, unless we want it to be. I saw that coyote baby too, you know, and I wanted one more than hell burns. But I walked away, straight to the army to start my surgical residency and service. Not a backward glance, and that might have been that if Kelly hadn’t grown up a little and decided to chase me.”
But she had. And then, somehow, tragedy had struck again. “Sera’s mom—Kelly—she didn’t want me anywhere near her. You deserve the truth about that.”
It didn’t seem to surprise Franklin, though his smile slipped away. “Of course not. You’re male, and you’re a shifter. I haven’t seen Kelly more than a handful of times in fifteen years because it upsets her too much. The only man who can go within five feet of Sera without getting his ass chewed is Callum Tyler.”
“Because he’s not a shifter?”
“More likely because he’s an empath, a powerful one.” Franklin raised an eyebrow. “I heard you got to experience one of his tricks firsthand. Alec was pissed that he taught Kat how to jack a shifter up on adrenaline.”
If she did it to the wrong shifter, she or someone else could wind up dead. But Kat was smarter than that, something Callum knew. “It was a last resort. Kat knows better than to do it if she doesn’t have to.”
“That’s what I told Alec. Your sister probably did too. She’s still the only damn person he actually listens to.”
Alec’s voice drifted to them as the man appeared around the side of the house with Sydney at his side. “That’s because Carmen’s smart. And could kill me in my sleep if I pissed her off.”
Julio rose. “She wouldn’t. Not in your sleep, anyway.”
“No, maybe not.” Alec stopped short of the table, looking like he was trying not to laugh.
“Well. You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
With Sydney listening, not to mention Franklin, there wasn’t much he could say. “I guess it really is true—I get more work done on vacation than the rest of you bastards do all year round.”
“Better not tell me that, Mendoza, or I’ll have you visiting every pack in the region. Judging by what Syd here tells me—and my own painful experience—most of them won’t trust us enough to ask for help until we show up and hand it to them.”
And who could blame them? “Heard from my uncle lately, Alec?”
“Not a damn peep, which means I’ll be paying him a visit soon enough.” Alec’s expression turned stern. “You leave him to me, Julio. Not because you can’t handle him, but because you shouldn’t have to. For Carmen’s sake, if not your own.”
He’d done that once before, but maybe it was time to learn a lesson from Franklin—take care of your own, good or bad. “We’ll see.”
“We will.” Alec jerked his head toward Sydney. “Our new friend was going to show me the trailer camp he’s got set up for his people. Why don’t we all take a walk and see what we can do to help these folks out?”
“All right.” Eventually, he’d have to rescue Sera from his sister. For now, he had work to do.
Patty, the unbelievable traitor, had abandoned her.
Sera sat in Patty’s well-worn living room and studied the empath sitting across from her. The first time she’d met Julio’s sister had been the night Carmen had called with the news that Franklin had been injured in an explosion. The night Sera had rolled into New Orleans in a stolen truck with her face on fire from the force of Josh’s rage.
Not an empowering start…and now Sera felt every bit of the pressure. Carmen was the family that mattered to Julio, the one who could look at her and judge her unworthy, or even unready. Too young, too battered, too-“Would you like some tea?” Carmen held up a tall glass clinking with ice.
It broke through her brain’s nervous rambling successfully, and Sera laughed and shook her head. “No, I’ve had enough to last me a month. Patty and Syd have been great hosts.”
“Yes, they have.” Carmen set down the glass. “You’re nervous. Don’t be, please.”
It probably hadn’t taken empathy to guess. Sera shrugged and tried to smile. “You probably know how I’m feeling better than most.”
“Perhaps. Or you could tell me.”
“I care about your brother.” That came out almost confrontational. A challenge, as if she was braced for Carmen to try to snarl her into submission, and she tried to moderate her voice. “I want to be with him.”
The woman’s dark gaze softened. “And you expect me, at the least, to think it’s
a bad idea.”
There was no sense in lying. “I can come up with a half-dozen reasons why it could be, so I can’t really blame you if you do.”
“That would be hypocritical of me, considering how many wolves think Alec should have known better than to debase his legacy and lineage by marrying me.”
“And you’re at least from an important wolf family. You could have shapeshifter babies. No one knows what sort of children Julio and I could have because it isn’t done. It’s taboo.”
“That’s all true,” Carmen allowed. “But my brother has never been one to stand on tradition.”
Sera swallowed and voiced the fear she hadn’t been able to press with Julio. “And your uncle and father?”
“What about them?”
She stared at her hands and struggled for the right words. Her left hand still had a bit of stubborn dirt wedged under the nails, from when she’d buried her fingers in the grass and sobbed through the pleasure of Julio fucking her. Claiming her.
He’d never let his relatives harm her, but one thing scared her more. “I don’t want him to get hurt, and I don’t want him to have to hurt his family because he’s protecting me.”
Carmen’s sudden expression of sadness lasted only a moment, though it lingered in her eyes. “Sera, if there’s one thing I can tell you with confidence, it’s this. The time may come when Julio has to fight his own blood, but it’s been a long time coming. It wouldn’t be your fault.”
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t even know what she was apologizing for. Maybe just because it felt like the world owed Julio and Carmen and even Miguel an apology for the shit it had dragged them through.
“Don’t be sorry.” Carmen stirred a sprig of mint into her tea. “Be sure.”
How long had it been since she’d been sure of anything? Probably at seventeen, when she’d been sure about everything with the recklessness of any super-healing teenager. Had it only been five years ago?
God, she felt ancient.
Ancient, but not confused. She wasn’t sure—not that she and Julio could make it, or that the attempt would be worth the pain it could bring. She wasn’t certain if she was ready to face a relationship with a possessive shifter, if he was ready to live beyond being tortured, or that their combined scars wouldn’t be more than lust or affection or even love could overcome.
