by Anya Nowlan
“I said, what the fuck do you think you’re doing in my fucking yard, Hamilton?” the man seethed, walking right up to Ragnar.
“I came to see who our neighbors are. I don’t mean any disrespect,” Ragnar said calmly, keeping his gaze level with the man.
The man was obviously strong, years of hard work having shaped and molded him. He had narrow eyes and a thick nose, with a square, sloppy haircut. Add that to a short neck and his snarls of fury, and the werebear—Ragnar could smell it on him—looked every bit the part of a bouncer or a thug. The door flung open again and another man stormed out, a copy of the first.
It was then that the fog in Ragnar’s head cleared. Of course. He knew who these two were!
“Hasslebacks!” he blurted, making the brothers stare at one another in confusion for a moment.
“Yeah, we’re the Hasslebacks. What, you lost your memory or something, Hamilton?” the first one scoffed, who Ragnar guessed to be Slade.
Sear stepped up as well, his blue eyes the only thing that really told him apart from his equally bulky brother.
“What the fuck do you want, Ragnar?” Sear asked.
Ragnar relaxed a bit. Okay, so he wasn’t the only one who remembered.
“Like I said, I came to say hello to the neighbors,” he said, looking around now with renewed interest.
He and the Hasslebacks had been friends for a short while when they were kids. It was something Ragnar had gone to great lengths to hide from his family. The Hamiltons and Hasslebacks had never gotten along. Ragnar wasn’t entirely sure if it was written in their DNA or their bear ancestors had decided it on some sort of a clearer rationale than simple dislike, but that was how it stood. Hamiltons and Hasslebacks didn’t mix.
Way back when, both clans had been equally large and constantly at each other’s throats. In an area as big as the mountains they occupied, one would think that two bear clans could get along without ripping one another’s hearts out constantly, but that had never proven to be the case. Too stubborn to move, both of them stood their ground, and as the clans grew the conflicts only got larger.
It was sort of poetic that both the clans were now reduced to the very basics of what they’d once been. The Hasslebacks had had a compound as massive as the Hamiltons, maybe even bigger. Ragnar knew for a fact that there had been more than ten smaller homesteads dotting the surrounding forests, but he was willing to bet that none of them had any inhabitants in them anymore.
“Well, hello. Now get the fuck out,” Slade barked, sneering.
“What’s with the warm welcome, Slade?” Ragnar said, smirking slightly. He wasn’t about to be intimidated, especially when the scene before him was ticking off all the wrong boxes in his head. “I remember we used to get along. Isn’t that worth something?” he asked.
“I don’t think a city bear has a place to come waltzing in here, demanding any kind of treatment,” Sear commented, always the more level-headed of the two. “And I think Slade’s right. You need to go, Ragnar.”
“Before something happens you’ll regret,” Slade added grimly.
“Is that a threat?” Ragnar asked, cocking a brow.
“It’s a promise,” Slade said, grinning.
There was a look in his eyes that Ragnar knew too well. He’d seen it before. The cold, uncaring eyes of a man who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Nodding slowly, Ragnar looked from Slade to Sear.
“It was good to see you. I’m sure my brothers would send their greetings,” he said, whipping around and heading back to the truck.
He took notice of the can in the back seat again, studying it for a brief moment.
“We don’t share the sentiment,” Sear added flatly.
Ragnar smirked as he climbed into the truck. It was surprising how much gusto the Hasslebacks still had, despite the fact that their situation seemed to be as dire as the Hamiltons. Well, more even, as Ragnar didn’t see any cubs anywhere and the feeling he got was that the two brothers were the only ones on the grounds, the last members of their line. Ragnar knew how that shit stung.
He turned his truck around, feeling Slade’s and Sear’s eyes on him the whole way out of the front yard. In the rearview mirror, he could see the moment when Slade exploded at Sear, flailing his arms in aggravation and pointing at Ragnar’s truck.
Guess I hit a nerve, he mused.
He hadn’t thought of the Hasslebacks for years. Even when getting back to Idaho, he’d been so enamored with the good memories that he had about Hamilton House that he blocked out the bad completely. But there was a lot of darkness in the past, and Ragnar felt he’d struck the nail on the head with his little trip. It looked less and less realistic that the fires had been an accident. He finally had his first real suspects.
Combining that discovery with the romp he’d had with Abigail that day, Ragnar felt like he could consider the day a roaring success so far. Now if he could only focus on his work and get his mind off of her sexy curves and that dirty mouth of hers, maybe he could get something done.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Abigail
It was hard to work on the truck when all she wanted to do was to discover what kind of glorious growly sounds the werebear she liked made, and she didn’t like it one bit.
Grumbling to herself, she tossed a wrench out of her toolbox and dug in deeper, doing her best to remember why she was there to begin with. When she saw the wrench she’d originally been looking for, it dawned on her and she relaxed, just a little though, and pulled it out. Spinning around, she glared haughtily at Old Bell.
“Bitch, you better start working with me. This is no time to go through adolescence all over again. We’re both too old for it,” she huffed to the flaming red truck, sitting innocently above the service pit, ponderously staring into the yard outside.
Somehow, Abigail got the feeling that Old Bell wasn’t going to hold a conversation with her anytime soon. Sighing, she flung her toolbox shut and lugged it up with her as she scaled the side of the truck, getting to the fire hose hookups. There was something hinky going on with the water pressure and her current theory was that the hose connections were to blame. It was that or take apart the whole water tank, and as much as she enjoyed a good challenge, she wasn’t feeling that at all.
Ragnar had made himself scarce for the past day, coming and going when it was still dark. She was sure he wasn’t avoiding her, though her first reaction had been a girlish bout of “What have I done?” followed closely by “He doesn’t deserve me anyway” and then “There has to be a better explanation.” After having gone without seeing Ragnar for a full day, her nerves couldn’t take it anymore, and in the evening she’d cornered Redmond and asked where his elusive brother was.
Redmond had shrugged, giving her a good-natured grin, and said that Ragnar had mysterious ways about him. But he followed it up by explaining that Ragnar had a lead and he’d been chasing that down for a while now. That had set Abigail’s mind at ease without sending her teetering on the edge of madness.
So when Ragnar Hamilton decided to show up at the door to the shed/workshop/garage of hell and catch her off-guard while she was thoroughly in the middle of missing him, the wrench she threw in his general direction ended up being very close to his head.
“Jesus H. Christ! Ragnar! You scared the living hell out of me,” Abigail shrieked, clutching her chest and clinging to one of the hoses while giving him a dirty look.
Ragnar, of course, looked completely unfazed. With his hands in his pockets and a calm, authoritative look on his face, he was every bit the hot dreambear she’d been missing. The surprise of him showing up wore off quickly, but her heart still pounded in her chest like someone had given her a shot of vodka straight to the vein.
“You busy?” he asked, wearing a slight smirk that seemed to be reserved just for her.
“Do I look busy?” she asked, letting the toolbox fall down with a clank.
She wasn’t entirely sure what she expected him to say to that. S
he obviously looked busy, after all.
“Yes. But are you?”
“No,” she replied firmly, brushing her hands onto a rag she’d conveniently left on the cab of the truck before jumping down gracefully. “What do you need?” she asked.
Abigail knew very well what she wanted him to say, but the somewhat solemn look on his face told her that romping around in the closest hay bale wasn’t currently in the forefront of his mind.
“Come with me. I think I need another set of eyes on this,” he said, reaching out his hand to her.
She took it without thinking, and the pleasant, tingling warmth she felt every time she was with him spread through her like a wildfire would go through dry grass, catching everything in its wake. It felt damn nice. They walked over to his truck and she climbed in while Ragnar circled around and got into the driver’s seat. Bringing the engine to life, he whipped it around and took the shortest road toward Shifter Grove.
“What do you need help with?” she asked, curious what her favorite werebear could have in store for her.
“Well, I figured we could have lunch and then you could tell me whether or not I’m going insane,” he said casually, brushing a hand through his short hair.
“Yeah? That sounds easy,” Abigail noted with a chuckle.
The drive went by fast, even with Ragnar being not very talkative. She’d come to expect that with him. He was a man of few words, but that meant that when he did speak, the words were that much more important. She liked the way he rolled in that sense—Abigail didn’t need any help to talk someone’s ear off, and maybe it was for the best if there was someone a bit more reserved near her to even her out.
He parked in front of the Sunrise Diner, the main eatery in Shifter Grove. Peeling herself out of the seat, Abigail was surprised to find Ragnar’s strong hand waiting for hers, leading her into the diner. They slipped into a booth and ordered a quick meal, all while Abigail was becoming thoroughly smitten by the simple act of holding hands.
Cerise, the diner owner, brought over their coffee and left them alone for a minute. One sip of the scalding, but completely delicious tar-like coffee untied Abigail’s vocal chords and made her speak up.
“So, do you want to tell me what this is about?” she asked.
She wanted to ask a million other things too. Like, what did this mean? Was there ever going to be a repeat of their little “session” in the workshop? And so on and so forth, but she managed to corral herself to the topic at hand and keep her mind from wandering too far.
Ragnar glanced around as if expecting someone to pop up from the shadows as he slid a musty looking folder over to Abigail. Frowning, she took it and opened it, curiously peering at the contents. It was a set of newspaper articles and clippings that seemed to be at least twenty years old, arranged in chronological order from oldest to newest. There had to be more than ten of them.
“What’s this?” she queried, flipping through them with a frown on her face.
She could see that the names Hamilton and Hassleback featured prominently in most of the articles, and they all seemed to revolve around a big wildfire that had happened around that time, killing several people in the area. Apparently it had been the cause for why a lot of the then-local residents had chosen to leave.
“I found them in an archive in a town about two hours from here, Adderville. I remembered the place from when I was a kid—it was the closest town we had back then. They talk about a big fire in the area that killed three people. One of them was my father,” Ragnar said, sipping his coffee with a hard expression.
Looking up, Abigail could see the creases of worry on his forehead, the little signs telling her that he wasn’t quite as together at the moment as he wished to let on. She reached a hand over and put it on his.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
To her relief, he didn’t pull away from her touch.
“I am. It’s been a long time. I think I’ve dealt with it in my own way, but it’s hard to face things like that no matter how much time passes, you know?”
Abigail nodded. She could imagine, at the very least.
“But what do these have to do with what’s going on now?”
Frowning, she looked at the articles closer now. They spoke of a long-standing feud between the Hamiltons and the Hasslebacks, and the main theme of the articles seemed to be trying to determine who exactly was at fault for the fires.
“I think it’s the same thing all over again.”
“What do you mean? Whoever did it then is doing it again?” she asked, gathering from the clippings that arson was suspected back then.
Shaking his head, Ragnar took another mouthful of coffee before continuing. “No. There aren’t a lot of people around here from back then. Most left after the fires when they lost their homes and their community. The only ones that remained sort of intact were my family’s homestead and the Hasslebacks. But they both lost their Alphas. My father and Eric Hassleback. They were two of the three victims.”
“How could that happen?” Abigail asked, genuinely perplexed. “I mean, if there were only three dead, and two of them were Alphas… I’m no shifter expert but I know enough to assume that the Alphas are the strongest and the best in their clans. How could the leaders of two clans that got out of the fires mostly unscathed both die?”
Ragnar smiled grimly, a sad look in his eyes.
“Yeah, imagine that.” He paused long enough for Cerise to place their lunch in front of them and told them to enjoy their meal. When they were alone again, Ragnar continued. “It started a lot like now. It was a bad summer, really hot, water levels were low. Small fires started up here and there but they were put out without much loss. But then they started getting bigger, harder to control. Closer to people’s houses. People got scared. My father was a firefighter, a firebear. He ran the department back when the area still had one.
“From what I can tell from these articles, he was vocal about thinking there was foul play involved. He thought the Hasslebacks were doing it. And the Hasslebacks retaliated by starting rumors that it was actually my father who did it, that it was odd that he was always the first one to respond, petty shit like that. No one believed them, at least no one with enough sense to think for themselves. But small rural areas like their gossip.”
Shaking his head, Ragnar fell silent for a moment. He picked at his food, obviously not hungry anymore. Her stomach twisting, Abigail felt much the same about the eggs and bacon she’d ordered.
“Until the big fire happened. An elderly wolf shifter got caught in it before his pack got to him, and the only two other victims were my father and Eric. But I was there that day. I think I’ve been blocking it out, but I remember the fire.”
Ragnar swallowed hard and instinctively. Abigail scooted over to his side of the booth, sitting close to him. She put a hand on his thigh, squeezing it slightly. It felt like his heartache was hers and that was chilling, in a way. To care so much about someone so quickly was something she had never anticipated for herself and yet, here she was, living it.
“Go on,” she urged, knowing he needed to get it out.
“Royce and Redmond were with Mom, but Rhodes and I were at the house with Dad when he got the call. Well, he didn’t even need a call to know there was a fire. We could see it from the house. You remember where we were sitting? We used to have a forest there and that damn thing went up in flames so fast. Dad scooped us up and put us in his truck. He went back into the house to get his gear, but I saw Eric Hassleback run out of the woods right toward us.
“He was grinning like a maniac. I think he wanted to take me and Rhodes and… hell, I don’t know what was going through his head. Next thing I know, my dad was on top of him, both of them rolling around, snarling at each other and fighting. They shifted and they were pretty evenly matched. Eric kept trying to get to the truck and my dad kept tearing him away until the fire was right at the edge of the forest. Last thing I remember was Dad dragging and shoving Eric into t
he fire. I guess he never made it out either, because that’s where we found his body when everything was put out.”
Ragnar’s lips were pressed into a thin slit and his face was pale. His sunken eyes told Abigail clearly of a memory he had been trying to repress, yet it had governed his life. Why else would he be in the line of work he was now in? Tears welled in her eyes and Abigail had to fight hard to keep them down. It wasn’t just compassion or some kind of random reaction—she felt his pain. And it was suffocating.
“I’m sorry, Ragnar,” she whispered, putting her arms around him.
She loved Shifter Grove for what it was. No one gave them odd looks. Abigail was entirely certain that if they looked like they needed some compassion, Cerise would be the first one at the booth, asking what she could do. But they were also allowed their moment together and Abigail took it for what it was worth.
Ragnar cleared his throat and she didn’t need to guess to know that he was pressing down tears that wanted to bubble up.
“Thank you. But that’s not entirely why I asked you to lunch. Could you read those articles and tell me if you’re seeing what I’m seeing? I honestly hadn’t remembered much about the incident. I was very young back then and Rhodes even younger, but when I read them, they all came back. The feeling I got was that Eric Hassleback was the one who set all of those fucking fires with the express interest to get my family to leave the area. And I guess he succeeded. Now, I think his sons are doing the same thing to us.”
Abigail let him go gently, starting at him with surprise in her eyes.
“His sons?”
“Slade and Sear. They still live on the old homestead. It looks fucking abandoned, so I think they’re there alone. When I asked around in Shifter Grove, no one knew a damn thing about them. They never come to town if they can help it and from what I can tell, they’re practically ghosts. Slade works for Ares Goldplains in the mines, and I don’t know what the hell Sear does.”
