So he had seen me… He had been there. “Thanks for your permission.”
He grumbled some unintelligible words. “I don’t get you. Really, I don’t.” He shoved a lock of hair off his forehead.
“What don’t you get, Liam? Did you think I’d enjoy everyone finding out that I went on a date with a guy for money?” I hugged my arms against me, trying to squelch the tremors shooting through my limbs. I was cold and I was mad. Not a good combination.
“You said you didn’t sleep with your customers, so there’s really nothing to be ashamed about. Unless you do…sleep with them.”
My stomach bottomed out. “Them?”
He held my gaze. Did he know about his father? He couldn’t, could he?
Keeping my eyes fixed on his, I said, “I only went out with Aidan.” Technically, it was true. I hadn’t gone out with Liam’s father; I’d stayed in. “But I’m not doing it anymore, so if you can stop telling people—”
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.” I tried to step around him again, but he whipped his arm out to stop me.
“Come back inside. Let me buy you a drink to make up for being a prick.”
“In what world do you think I’d want to go back in there?”
“Then let me buy you a drink someplace else.”
I tightened my arms. “God, Liam, I don’t need a pity drink.”
“It wouldn’t be a pity drink. It’d be an apology drink.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I just want to walk around.”
He lowered his hand, and I passed by him. But then he was striding next to me.
“The bar’s the other way.”
“Maybe I want to walk around, too.”
“There are plenty of other sidewalks.”
“I like this sidewalk.”
“Liam—” I huffed.
“What? You don’t have to talk to me.”
“That’s not going to be weird at all.”
I thought I detected a smile, but it could’ve been a twitching nerve.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why are you walking with me? And if you say it’s to protect me from a handsy passerby—”
“My earliest memory is of your birth.”
“My birth?”
He glanced down at me. “Your dad came over to our house to announce that he’d had a kid, and that kid was a girl. I remember how appalled my father was.”
His strange confession unsettled me. “You were four.”
“So?”
“That’s young to remember something.”
Liam’s gaze dropped to my collarbone as though not daring to meet my eyes. “My father advised your dad to take a paternity test.”
I gasped. “My mother would never—”
“It gets worse, Ness.” Liam palmed his hair uneasily.
Worse than implying my mother had betrayed my father?
“He also told your dad that he should take you out into the woods”—the volume of Liam’s voice dropped so suddenly I had to strain to hear the rest of his sentence—“leave you there, and then try again.”
“Leave me in the forest? To do what?” I frowned but then I didn’t. Then I opened my eyes so wide my lashes hit my brow ridge. “Oh… He told my father to kill me?” I all but shouted. “Because I was a girl?”
Liam’s gaze finally climbed back to mine. “Your father was outraged. My mother, too.”
“And you?” I snapped.
“Why do you think it’s my earliest memory, Ness?” His voice was as thick and dark as the fur that cloaked his wolf form.
Heath had made my father doubt my mother and then suggested I should be murdered because of my gender! If Liam’s father weren’t already dead, I would’ve found a silver blade and wrenched it inside his black, black heart.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Liam asked, whisking my mind off my homicidal deliberations.
I racked my brain. When the memory slotted into my mind, I blinked. It couldn’t possibly be my earliest recollection. I hunted through my mind for another but found none.
“Your mother’s funeral.”
He flinched.
I’d been five at the time. I could still remember what I’d worn—a scratchy black wool dress with thick white stockings and black patent mary-janes. The air had smelled of overturned earth and tears, and there hadn’t been a dry cheek.
Except Heath’s.
He didn’t weep, but Liam cried enough for the two of them.
Liam had been a gangly boy with features too large for his face. He’d grown into his body, grown into his features. He didn’t even resemble the narrow-faced sixteen-year-old boy I’d last seen on the winter day I begged the pack to accept me.
“I remembered wondering if you had a hole in your heart,” I said as we crossed the street toward a little park. “But now I know.” Mom’s gaunt face flashed into my mind. “I’m sorry.”
He glanced down at me. “For what?”
“For reminding you of her.”
“Because you think I forget? Not a day goes by where I don’t think about her, Ness.” His voice contained the same shadows that had collected over his face.
We carried around the same pain, he and I.
“You never forget the people you love, but I guess you know this now,” he said softly.
A snare snapped around my heart.
I thought about my mother, about my father—who was most definitely my father—as we passed by the playground of my youth. It had changed, gotten a shinier swing set, but the monkey bars I spent hours scaling were still there. Dad would swing alongside me sometimes, while Mom looked on, shaking her head and laughing, telling him he looked ridiculous—a gorilla in a hamster cage.
I didn’t realize I’d stopped walking, didn’t realize I’d started crying, until I felt the swipe of a thumb over my cheek.
I drew in a sharp breath when Liam did it again.
Oh, no, no, no.
His face took on such an intent look that I jerked backward. His fingers slid off my cheek and fell slowly, curling into a fist at his side.
My heart whizzed around my chest like a stray bullet. I prayed he couldn’t hear my pulse, prayed he couldn’t see how it made the thin cotton of my shirt quiver.
He shifted his gaze to a plump tree dripping with lilac blooms. “I’m sorry about laying all this on you. I just thought you’d appreciate knowing.”
“I do appreciate it, but it doesn’t make me sorry your father is dead.”
Liam didn’t respond for a such a long time that I hesitated to apologize, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t apologize for saying words I meant. His father was evil.
“Do you want to go home?” he finally asked.
Did he mean to the inn or to Los Angeles?
Probably to the inn… “Yeah, but I’ll call a cab.”
He shifted his gaze to me. His eyes were so dark, as though his pupils had stretched from lid to lid and corner to corner. “I’ll drop you off. It’s on my way.”
Was it really? “Okay.”
In silence, we made our way to his car that was parked across the street from the pool bar. I could see the pack through the glass façade, wielding cue sticks, laughing, and drinking. I prayed they couldn’t see me. I didn’t want new rumors to spread.
Liam pulled my door open, and instead of making a fuss, I got in. The tension inside the car was so thick it was stifling. I cracked my window open, but the brisk air did little to deflate the ripe atmosphere.
I rested my cheek against the headrest and watched the darkness unspool outside the car, the same way it was unspooling inside my mind: Liam wasn’t attracted to me; he pitied me. He thought I was pathetic and sad and way too proud for my own good. Besides, I wasn’t attracted to him. Sure, he was handsome, but plenty of guys were handsome. Just because my body reacted to his didn’t mean I should encourage the feelings swarming through me.
“The elders
want to meet on Wednesday.” His voice jolted me out of my deliberations.
I turned to look at him, his profile lacquered by the glow of his dashboard.
“To discuss the next trial.”
“I shouldn’t be part of the next trial.”
His jaw flexed as he slid to a stop in front of the inn. “But you are.”
“But I shouldn’t be.”
“Look, if you don’t want to take part in the contest anymore, go to the meeting and have it out with them.”
I flinched from the harshness of his voice. “Fine. At what time will it be and where?”
“It’ll be at my father’s house at 6:00 p.m.”
A shudder shot down my spine. “Why at your father’s house?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Do you have a problem with going there?”
I clicked my seatbelt and pumped my door handle. “No.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me for the address?”
“I remember where it is.”
“Of course you do.”
My pulse became a chaotic mess of heartbeats.
I didn’t ask what that was supposed to mean, because I dreaded his answer. Had the agency told him I’d been the girl they’d sent to see Heath, or had Liam figured this out on his own? Or did his father have security cameras? I hadn’t seen any, but that didn’t mean the sleazeball hadn’t installed some.
What did it matter? It wasn’t as though I’d killed him with my three little anti-shifting pills. They were innocuous. I knew that firsthand, because I’d had to swallow one every day for the first three months after we left Boulder. Even though distance from the pack eventually blocked the change, Mom had used pills to drain the werewolf magic from my veins. The pills had belonged to my father, who’d taken them to avoid shifting while his bones mended after he’d broken both his legs.
I hopped out of the car and muttered, “I’ll see you after tomorrow.” And then I slapped the door closed, feeling the vibrations all the way inside my joints.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The following day, Lucy stopped by my bedroom at sunrise to ask how I was doing. I wondered if she honestly cared. I shrugged and told her I was better.
“I heard they’ve kept you in the running,” she said, pulpy arms folded in front of her Double-Ds.
“I heard that too.”
I waited for her to tell me to quit the contest. She didn’t. And I didn’t share my intention to drop out.
Her hazel eyes combed over the bare legs peeking from my sleep shorts. “Can you work?”
“Yes.” I stretched my arms. They no longer felt attached to dumbbells, but a faint soreness remained.
So she assigned me guest bedrooms, and I donned my gray uniform and tackled her task, scouring rugs with a vacuum, stretching sheets to their breaking point, dusting the mason jars filled with homemade potpourri. The physical exertion kept my mind off what Liam had insinuated.
But only for a while.
By the afternoon, after eating with Evelyn in the kitchen, I paced my bedroom like a tiger locked in a cage. At some point, I picked up the framed picture on my nightstand—a shot of me with my parents. I studied my father’s face and compared it to my own. Besides our matching dimples and perhaps the shape of our mouths, I’d inherited all of my features from my mother.
I growled as I realized what I was doing. How dare the Kolanes insert doubt into my brain.
I was my father’s daughter.
I was a werewolf, like him!
I set the frame down so hard the glass rattled. Thankfully, it didn’t break.
A knock snapped my attention off the picture. I went to the door and then thrust it open. Crossing my arms in front of my chest, I scowled at Everest, then gave him a piece of my mind. I gave him all the pieces of my mind.
He dropped a shopping bag on my bed.
“What’s that?” I grumbled.
“A dress. I hope it’s the right size.”
“What the hell? You bought me a dress?” I threw my hands in the air. “You think I’m going to forgive you because you got me a present?”
“I didn’t buy it to cajole you. I bought it because you’re going to need it tonight.”
“Why am I going to need a dress tonight?” I realized I was yelling when Everest pressed a hard finger against my lips.
“Keep your voice down.”
“Don’t you dare tell me to keep my voice down. You don’t get to tell me what to do! You ditched me.” My voice caught on a sob.
Everest sighed and tucked me against him. “I’m sorry. My parents.” He shook his head. “And then—then I found out something, and I was working on a solution before I came to you. Now calm the hell down, so I can explain.”
I pushed him away.
“Liam hired a PI,” he explained.
My throat became a dry husk.
“The man’s been sniffing around to find out what happened to Heath. Guess where it led him? Straight to the escort agency.” His whispers sounded like shouts. “Sandra didn’t give him your name. She contacted me, though, when she couldn’t reach you. Anyway, she promised not to give you away in exchange for some hush money.”
“You paid her off?”
“Yes. I paid her off.”
“How much?”
“Don’t concern yourself with how much. I covered it.” He palmed his mussy red hair.
“I think Liam already knows. Last night, he implied—”
“He doesn’t know. He’s trying to guess, but he doesn’t know.”
I dropped heavily into the armchair, rested my head back, and sighed. “I realize my being there the night Heath died doesn’t look good, but I didn’t kill him, Everest. I should just come clean.”
When Everest didn’t say anything, I propped my head back up. His lips were so thin and his cheeks so pale my heart stilled for a couple beats.
“What?”
He sat on the foot of my bed.
“You’re scaring me… What?”
“Ness, I heard Lucas and Matt talk about Heath’s tox screen. How the coroner found drugs in his system.”
My spine went rigid. “So?”
“He drowned because those pills… They fucked up his nervous system.”
“Are you—are you—” Tremors crawled over my arms and legs, rattled inside my chest, rippled over my skin. I lifted a trembling hand to my gaping mouth. “No,” I whispered.
Everest hung his head then craned his neck and shot me the grimmest, most doleful stare in the history of stares. “Yes.”
The room distorted. “You mean to say… You mean to tell me…”
“That you killed him? Yes.”
My breathing halted as fear clambered down my throat and squashed my lungs.
I killed Heath.
For all my talk of murdering him, I would never have gone through with it.
I wasn’t some blood-thirsty executioner.
Everest leaned forward and caught one of my hands. “I have a plan.”
I tried to swallow, but jagged lumps clogged my airway like clumps of hair in a shower drain. “I need to…to run away.”
“No.”
I killed Liam’s father. The pack Alpha. The pack was going to come after me and shred me to ribbons.
“I have a plan. A plan that will keep you safe. I promise. It’s foolproof.”
Nothing was foolproof.
Silver bars materialized in front of my eyes. The Boulders were going to toss me in that hole of theirs. I removed my hand from Everest’s and massaged my temples. If the pack didn’t kill me, the authorities would lock me up for involuntary manslaughter. It wouldn’t matter that it hadn’t been intentional.
Shit.
“Ness. I got a big player to help you,” he said.
I didn’t think the President of the United States could get me out of this mess.
“Julian Matz,” Everest said, as though the name should’ve meant something to me. It didn’t.
“Who the
hell is Julian Matz?”
Everest flinched from my shrill tone. “The Pine Pack Alpha.”
My skin broke out in goose bumps. His plan was to involve the Alpha of the greatest enemy pack? Ice spilled into my stomach as an even more chilling thought settled. “Did you…tell him?”
“I had to.”
He had to. I was straddling the brink between fury and anger, and it was giving me a strong urge to gouge my cousin’s eyes out. “You told him! How dare you!”
Everest blinked. “Ness, I did it for you.”
Fuck. My life was fucked. Maybe I should attempt to fly off a roof like Becca. Or maybe I should turn into a wolf and travel to a distant mountain range and lose myself in the wilderness.
“Look, you’re going to meet with Julian tonight, and he’ll explain how he’s going to go about clearing you.” He gestured toward the shopping bag. “Wear the dress and meet me in the driveway at five. I’ll take you to him.” He checked his watch. “You have two hours to get ready.”
He got up and started walking toward the door.
“Why do I have to wear a dress?”
“It’s his nephew’s engagement party.”
Stab me through the heart. Not only did I have to meet with an enemy Alpha, but I had to attend an engagement ceremony where surely the entire Pine Pack would be assembled.
I’d almost rather have died.
Almost.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The dress Everest had gotten me fit like a glove…an actual glove. The stretchy black leather hugged each one of my curves, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. Nor did it leave any room to strap a knife to my thigh, which I’d considered.
But then I’d reconsidered it.
Bringing a weapon to a werewolf engagement party was surely in poor taste. What would I do with a knife anyway? If the blade wasn’t welded from silver, it would do me little good. Everest’s revelation made me bang a clenched fist against my mirror. A fissure streaked the glass. I stared at the crack as though it were an omen. What did breaking mirrors mean? Right…seven years of bad luck.
I was doomed.
I took one of the pins I’d sandwiched between my lips and stuck it into the bun that was supposed to look sleek but ended up resembling a ball of yarn a cat would’ve chased down a staircase.
A Pack of Blood and Lies Page 13
