“Call hers first,” Roel said. “The less we have to deal with Ace the better. Unless you’re up for a flight to Vegas tonight.”
Alex raised his eyebrows as he pulled up Mena’s number. “Looks like I’m calling Mena’s phone.” He put it to his ear.
Phoenix’s eyes drifted shut and he let his head fall against the headrest when he heard Mena’s sweet voice speaking into the cop’s ear. What he’d told Roel was only half-truth. What he had managed to leave out was the fact that he could hear the guilt in her voice when she’d talked to him earlier. He hadn’t asked, and she hadn’t told him anything, but he knew she had feelings for the Alpha lion she was bonded to. It terrified him that the next time he talked to her she would confess. He’d be fine as long as he didn’t know. Or that’s what he kept telling himself.
“Yeah, he’s sitting right beside me,” Rhodes said, and Phoenix’s head whipped around to look at him. The cop grinned. “Want to talk to him?” He pressed his lips together as he shook his head. “No, we’re all fine. Hey, look, Mena, we are about to find shelter for the day. Do you think you can lift the hourly command to call you until we wake up and get back on the road?” Rhodes chuckled. “Yeah, I promise someone will call immediately after dusk… I understand that’s an order. Yes, ma’am… Sorry… yes, Mena, someone will call you with an update. Okay. Bye.” He ended the call and relaxed in his seat with a long sigh. “She really needs to come home—”
“Holy shit!” Heath shouted at the same time Roel slammed on the brakes.
Phoenix leaned forward just in time to see a massive wolf cross the road in front of them.
Roel let out a loud whoop, and then threw the car in first gear and followed it through the empty field.
Phoenix gripped the driver’s seat as the car bounced over the dirt and weeds. “This isn’t a four-wheel drive, Roel,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s a fucking Mustang!”
Roel pointed to the red wolf in front of them. “And that’s our moonrising wolf!” He pressed the gas pedal to the floorboard.
Chapter 12
Thursday, February 5th 2015 3:51 a.m. PST
Las Vegas, Nevada
Ace
“How is everyone?” I asked when Andra set her phone on the nightstand.
“Everybody is fine,” she replied. “They won’t call again until tonight.” I nodded. Andra sat up, excitement filling her eyes, then she winced and reached for her ankle. “Ouch.”
I chuckled lightly. “It’s going to take more than fifteen minutes to heal that sprain, Andra. You almost broke it.”
She frowned as she laid the icepack back on her swollen ankle. “I was going to tell you that Clay was the one calling earlier, but I didn’t get to answer it before he hung up.”
I grinned. “I know. I was reading your thoughts.” I paused, frowned. “And your thoughts were one reason I couldn’t leave. After I left you alone, I knew you were experiencing what I feel when you go to him.”
Nobody in the room needed to say out loud who ‘him’ was. It was known.
“That was one reason?” she said. “There are more reasons?”
My eyes cut over to look at her. “Only one more,” I said. “I couldn’t do it, Andra. I can’t even imagine touching another woman the way I want to touch you. You would have never had to kill any girl I chose to go to, because I would have never been able to make myself even leave the driveway.”
She smiled. “How could you anyway? I had your keys.”
Ace laughed. “You had the keys to Charlie. The pride owns over twenty vehicles and motorcycles. Nobody lays claim to only one. We take whichever one is available.”
Her expression fell. “Oh.”
I picked up a grape and held it up to her mouth. She parted her lips so that I could put it on her tongue. As she chewed, I could tell there was something on her mind, but she’d thrown her walls up again. “Spill it,” I said.
She pulled her uninjured ankle under her knee and sat up slowly. “I’m sorry about earlier… about what I did when I was asleep. The bond makes me dream of you. I guess with that and me eating all those oysters earlier, well… It’s no excuse, but I wasn’t in my right mind. I’d like to say that it will never happen again, but we both know that I’d probably be lying. I don’t know what to do, Ace. I love Phoenix. You know I do. And I’m sorry if it hurts you to hear me say this, but I hate the bond. I want to be with him.”
“But you want to be with me, too… don’t you?” I said.
She huffed. “I need to be with you. If we never—”
“But we did, Andra. You have to stop thinking about what if’s. It happened. It’s done. And now we have to make the best of a shitty situation. I’m not sorry that we bonded, and if Phoenix wasn’t in the picture, you wouldn’t be, either.”
“But he is, Ace. I fell in love with him before I met you, before you and I bonded. True love never dies. I believe that, and I believe what Phoenix and I have is true love.”
I shook my head. “How do you know you love him?”
“I just know—”
“How much do you really know about him, Andra? What’s his favorite color? You know mine.”
She gave me an absurd look. “I have no idea what your favorite color is.”
I stared at her. “Yes, you do. You got every single one of my thoughts and memories when I got yours. You know everything about me. You just haven’t taken the time to explore anything about me in your head because you keep putting him in the way. Tell me what my favorite color is.”
Andra shook her head as she rolled her eyes, but then she stopped and looked at me. “It’s dark green.”
I nodded slowly. “And why is that my favorite color?”
She swallowed. “It was the color of your mom’s eyes.”
“Yes, and your favorite color is green, because it reminds you of Spring, your favorite season. Now, what is Phoenix’s favorite color?”
She looked away from me, suddenly nervous. “Blue.”
Another lie. She didn’t know. I frowned. “Why is blue his favorite color?”
“I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
I took her chin with my fingers and forced her to look at me. “This isn’t a game. This is us being honest with each other, but it seems I’m the only one telling the truth here. You can’t even be honest with yourself.”
“What do you want from me, Ace?” she snapped.
“Just a chance,” I said flatly. “Maybe you wouldn’t have given me a chance if we’d met before you met Phoenix or before we bonded, but we did, Andra. We bonded, and now we have to make it work. But I’m the only one trying. It’s not going away, and neither am I. All I want is a chance to be more than what you need. I want to be what you want, too.” I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice, but I needed her to see the way things really were.
She jerked her head away and swiped at a tear. “I can’t.”
“You won’t,” I corrected, then took the plate off my lap and put it on the comforter, frustrated beyond belief at her unwillingness to even try to understand the truth.
“Can we talk about something else?” she said.
“Gladly. What do you want to talk about?” I said, and hated that I was fucking irritated with her. I didn’t want to be.
“Justice,” she said.
I rubbed a hand over my hair and blew a big breath out. I still didn’t feel right telling her yet, but it was inevitable. If Justice had been the one who sent those humans after her last night, I’d need her to realize how much danger she was in — correction — how much danger I had put her in by bonding with her.
Here goes everything.
“Justice is my cousin,” I said. After a moment, I turned my head to gauge her reaction. Her eyes were wide. I chuckled when I remembered she had once thought we were lovers. “His father and my father were twins. Both were very successful business men and extremely competitive with one another. They lived each day to see the other one fall.�
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“Wow,” she said, and tucked her other ankle under her other leg, Indian-style. She didn’t even flinch or acknowledge that the sprain must be on the mend. “Go on.”
“My uncle married the senator’s daughter. My father fell in love and married a jazz singer. I was born ten minutes after my uncle’s son.”
“Justice?” Andra said.
I nodded. “Yes, though his name wasn’t Justice then. It was Julian.”
“I love jazz music,” she continued. “My grandpa had an old phonograph that he forbade me to touch, but he would play music on it for me to listen to.” She laughed. “He was in love with this one singer. He always used to say that if he’d been born a few decades earlier he would have given her husband some stiff competition. I think her name was MaeLynn or something like that.”
My lip curved up in amusement. “I bet he would have.”
She waved a hand through the air. “That’s just old man talk. He thought she hung the moon, though.” She giggled. “I guess he thought of her like I do of Clay. People like that are untouchable, though. I don’t even think of them as real people. They’re just so talented that I don’t see them as even living in the same world as I do. Anyway, enough of my rambling. Tell me about your mom and dad.”
I sighed. “My mother was never good enough for my father’s family, so, after about a decade, my father grabbed what he could and left town with my mother and me. The old saying is true about your past following you. It really does. You can run, but it always catches up with you, especially if you stop running and try to hide from it.”
Andra took a cube of cheese from the plate and put it in her mouth, and then she took another and offered it to me. I bent my head and took it from her fingers with my lips, being sure to let them linger on the tips of her fingers a moment before leaning back and eating the cheese she fed me.
“They stopped running, and then what?” she said.
I shrugged. “They got a job in a jazz club. My father played in the band and she sang.” I took a moment to remember that time in my life. I could almost smell the whiskey and cigars. I smiled sadly. “I wasn’t only my parents’ son there. I belonged to everyone: the bartender, the owner, the musicians, the dancers and the customers. They all raised me to be a good man. They loved me and I loved them. We were a family, a family that accepted us. I met a girl… Emily. We were to be married in the fall.” I shook my head when the demons of my past broke into my memories and destroyed my happily-ever-after. “And then Julian found us.”
She paused just before popping a grape into her mouth. “What happened?”
I grimaced. “You already know. All you have to do is sift through my memories in your head, Andra.”
“I don’t want to sift through those memories. I want you to tell me.”
I looked in her eyes for a long moment, and then I nodded. “Okay. I still don’t know how he found us, but he did. Even though he was my age, when I saw him for the first time after over twenty years, I remember thinking that he looked younger than me. That may be what caused me to pause long enough for him to take everything that I loved away from me. I honestly don’t know. That night is still a bit foggy to me. I’ve tried to remember and I’ve tried to forget. But no matter what I do, it still haunts me.”
Her hands flew up to cover her mouth, and then she dropped them. “He killed your parents? Oh, God, how awful! What kind of sick person could do such a thing?”
I suddenly felt sick. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t tell her everything. “Let’s get some rest. I’m not feeling so well. I think I need to hold you for a while. We’ll talk about it more some other day, okay?”
“What? No, you can’t leave me hanging like that. Here…” She moved the plate to the nightstand, grabbed the duvet from the foot of the bed, spread it out over us and cuddled up next to me. “… Now talk.”
That made it so much easier. I sighed. “Julian barred all the doors and set the place ablaze.”
Her head shot up so that she could look at my eyes. I could only imagine what she saw; my vision was blurred. I looked up to the ceiling and blinked away the moisture.
After clearing my throat, I lowered my head and continued. “Emily was with me, but my parents’ were on stage on the other side of the club. I tried to get to them, but the flames and smoke were too intense. I hate myself for not trying harder to save them, to save everyone, but Emily passed out from smoke inhalation, and I had to carry her. There was a small window in the kitchen, so I ran for it to get her out. I planned to go back in and save all those I could after I got her to safety, but I didn’t get the chance. I put her in the floor long enough so I could break the window, but after I lowered her to the ground outside the window, she was attacked by wolves. I was stunned so much that I couldn’t move. I was hanging on the windowsill by my waist, and then someone hit me on the head with something. I woke up a few hours later about a hundred yards away from the club… or what was left of it.”
“Emily?” Andra said, and her voice cracked.
I shook my head. “Julian took her.”
“Was she… dead?”
“No,” I deadpanned.
She sat up quickly and laced her fingers through mine. “Your love is still alive? Did you try—?”
My eyes met hers. “You’re not going to like me very much if I finish this story, Andra. Ever since we bonded, I’ve thought of barely anything else but ways to tell you about this, ways to break it to you so that you wouldn’t hate me or think I was a monster. If there was any way I could keep it from you forever, you gotta know, I would. The truth is, you have to know—you have to know everything or you won’t understand the danger I’ve put you in.”
She swallowed, but instead of releasing my hand, her grip grew tighter around my fingers. “I’m ready to know. I really am stronger than everyone thinks,” she said resolutely.
Reluctantly, I took my hand from her. She watched me with wide eyes, but didn’t move to correct my action. Her touch made me feel secure, but I couldn’t touch her while I explained the rest. She needed to feel everything I had felt all those years ago in order to understand. I realized that she would also despise me for what I had done, but I needed her to feel that, too. It was imperative that she come to her own conclusions about this. The bond didn’t need to soften the blow on this subject.
“I hated him,” I began. “I was young and human and full of rage. He had taken everything from me, Andra, and I wanted revenge for what he did.”
“I understand,” she said softly. “I would, too.”
I reached up and brushed the back of my fingers over her cheek. “I hope you still do after you’ve heard everything.”
She placed her hand over mine and pulled it so that it was encased in both of hers in her lap. “I’m listening.”
I withdrew my hand again, and she frowned, but, again, didn’t make a move to touch me. “I went back to Knoxville in search of him. I knew he would be waiting for me, but he wasn’t the only one I was looking for. I wanted him to hurt the way I was hurting, and I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do on my journey back home.”
Andra sniffled, and I looked at her. “You killed your aunt and uncle, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “And my cousin, too. My aunt gave birth to a daughter sometime after I left. I didn’t even realize I had another cousin until I read the paper about the accident two days later. She was only fourteen.”
“Oh, God, Ace.” Andra wiped at her eyes. Her grief and sadness fell upon me and I wanted to weep myself for what I had made her feel. It was all I could do not to reach out to her, so I crossed my arms over my chest to keep my hands from seeking her out.
“I expected to feel better after hurting him like that. I expected my grief of losing all my loved ones to be lifted in some way. It only made it worse, and I hated him more for it. I wanted him dead, Andra, and I’m sorry if you hate me for what I did, but I won’t apologize for wanting that. I still want that.”<
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She reached for me, but I recoiled. She stopped. “I don’t hate you, Ace. Please, let me touch you. I need your touch.”
I shook my head. “I’m not done. If you still want to after I finish telling you everything, I won’t deny you. Believe me, there’s nothing I want more in this world right now than to feel you against me, but I won’t let that happen until I get through this and you know everything.”
Growling in frustration, Andra threw herself against the pillow and sighed up at the ceiling. “I’m waiting… impatiently, might I add, but I’m waiting.”
I chuckled lightly. “Aren’t all women impatient?”
Glancing over at me, she smiled a little and turned so that she was on her side, facing me. “Just tell me, Ace. I’m being open-minded here.”
I nodded. I couldn’t put it off any longer. “I figured he would retaliate. It wasn’t like I was hiding, but I had no clue where to find him. It had been over two decades since I saw him last. I didn’t know where to start looking for him, so I waited. I didn’t have to wait long. Some of his men found me that night and beat the shit out of me. I didn’t care. I had no sense of pain by that point. I had two things on my mind: kill Julian and save Emily. I just wanted them to take me to Julian, and that’s what they did.
When I saw him, I was struck again by his youth. He appeared no older than twenty-five at best, barely a man, though his muscular build suggested otherwise.”
I fell into the memory of that time.
The room was large and full of people. Even though the two men who held me back by my arms were a lot smaller than me, their strength was great, and I was weak from their beating. Though I still thought I had enough might to do what I came to do.
Julian smiled as he approached me. I hadn’t been expecting such a cheerful greeting from him. I wanted him to be furious with me for what I had done to his family, but he wasn’t.
“Where is my fiancée?” I snarled.
Julian chuckled menacingly. “Emily is fine, better than fine, actually. She is one of us, and no longer your… fiancée. She belongs to me.”
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