by Ellis Marie
I turn away from the bathroom and make my way over to the bed, lightly skimming the rich material of the deep burgundy bed cover as I take in the room. Maybe I thought that his room might be dark and daunting, like the beast he tries so hard to hide, but it isn’t. It’s full of books and maps, of languages scribbled across the wall and pictures of friends. It has plants sprouting from corners and dark mahogany frames holding his bed, his drawers, and his windows together. The room is like a sanctuary—Trent’s sanctuary.
Maybe I shouldn’t be here.
I decide that it’s best to leave, but as I do so, a loose picture catches my eye beside the bed.
Butterflies erupt as I look at our faces, my heart swelling at the photo that he took of us at the barbecue and my blushing face a dead giveaway to the kiss we had just shared.
Just as I pick it up, careful not to knock the frame behind it, something falls out, sliding along the tabletop.
Another picture. This one is of a family, the four of them smiling with grins as wide as they can possibly be. The two boys have their bodies linked with the smaller of the two hanging off the other’s back. The adults’ smiles are softly amused, like they’re used to the antics. It’s undeniably Trent and his family.
His parents. His brother. Michael.
He looks so much like Trent but at the same time so different. His hair is curled tight and is a much lighter colour, but their faces are so similar; the only difference being that a thick beard coats his brother’s sharp jaw whereas I’ve never seen Trent’s past a stubble. Their parents are a mix of the two of them, but from the photo, I can see where both boys get their features from—their father’s strong nose is on all three faces as well as their mother’s bewitching smile.
“That was on his nineteenth birthday. He died less than a year later.”
Swearing, I almost drop the photo as I spin around, attempting to act natural while trying to calm my racing heart. Trent stands in the doorway to the room, folding his arms across his chest as he leans against the frame, watching me with hooded eyes that seem sad, even in the soft light.
“Sorry,” I gush. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just couldn’t sleep, and I came to see you and I just saw the picture of us and . . .”
He shakes his head, a ghost of a smile on his lips as he walks in. The door shuts behind him quietly. He walks over to the wall on the opposite side of his bed and points to a photograph that hangs between many, his finger tracing the frame.
Oh good, he’s not annoyed.
“This was us on his sixteenth birthday,” he reminisces. My feet pad over to stand beside him, gently putting down the photo as I do. “He’d just experienced his first ever shift into a wolf. I was so happy for him.”
I can see that from the picture; Trent’s face is lit up in excitement and his arms are clinging to his laughing brother who looks half-shocked and half-elated at what has just happened moments before. Their faces are much younger, and I can’t help but melt a little at the adorable smile on chubby Trent’s cheeks.
“You must have been, what? Eleven here?”
He nods, eyes unmoving from the memory that the picture holds, and it’s as if I can hear their laughter in my head. I can feel the love between them with only a snapshot of their life together.
It breaks my heart.
“We’d waited all day for it to happen, and when it finally did, I could only watch in awe. All I did for the next four years was tell him how I couldn’t wait until we could run together, how I couldn’t wait to be as strong as him.”
I can see the hallmarks of melancholy dotted all over his features, the slight shake in his voice a beacon for pain.
“But that never happened.” He clears his throat. “And sometimes, I can’t help but feel grateful that he never saw me like that.”
“Don’t,” I argue, my hands already reaching for him. “Don’t say that. You don’t actually mean that, do you?”
Trent pulls away from me, turning his head down as he walks back over to the bed. As he sits, it’s as if his whole body crumbles, slumping down with the weight of his own words.
“When you shift, you’re meant to feel this connection with your wolf, you’re meant to become one.” He furrows his brows as he looks at his hands. “I felt nothing like that on my first shift. I felt as though the wolf was taking over me, like it was overpowering me. Like it was too strong for me to contain.”
I stand across the room, watching but keeping my distance, not wanting to stop him from talking about this but struggling with the urge to comfort him. To tell him that it’s okay.
“But you’ve never lost control in front of me before,” I counter. “So you must be strong enough to control it.”
“There’s a difference between controlling something and managing to just lock it away,” Trent mumbles. “If you ignore something, it festers and grows until it can’t be contained anymore and then there’s a blow up, which is larger than you ever thought it could be. You’re scared to ever let it back out again.”
“But you controlled it this time, you managed—”
“That was the first time ever, and you jumping in front of me was completely insane,” he snaps, curling his fists as he refuses to look at me. “You should never have done that. I can’t even begin to think of what I could have done to you.”
I try to wave off the worries that he has as I walk over to him, reaching my hand out to his cheek in an effort to soothe the pain that is building.
“You don’t know that—”
My words are cut off by his eyes lifting to finally meet mine, the anguish in them indescribable. I can only stare, waiting for him to speak.
“I do,” he whispers, his words like gravel. “It’s what happened to Lou.”
Oh.
I hold my breath as I sit beside Trent and wait for him to speak, our heartbeats the only sound in the lowly lit room. When he finally does, the words that come out his mouth aren’t the ones that I anticipate.
“Growing up with a brother who was meant to be the next alpha was always pretty difficult, especially when it came to impressing my father, or anyone in the pack for that matter. Michael was a force to be reckoned with, and me?” He shakes his head. “Well, I was nothing. I wasn’t going to be an alpha, a beta, or anything remotely close to where my brother was heading, and that . . . well, I just wanted to be noticed.”
He clasps his hands together in front of him as he leans forward, his eyes locked on the moon outside his window, but his gaze is full of memories.
And pain. So much pain.
“Lou used to hang around with Cole and I when we were young. His older brother, George, was Michael’s best friend and beta, so we were all like brothers.” He laughs humourlessly. “Scarlette used to complain that we’d leave her out all the time because she was a girl, but the truth was that Lou had a crush on her and was too embarrassed to say anything about it.
“The three of us snuck out one night when we were fifteen. We wanted to go and see if we could see the pack on their night runs; it was something that we all loved to do. We’d sit and talk about what we thought our wolves were going to look like and how amazing it was going to be when we finally could shift.
“But there were rules, ones that were there to protect us, and we didn’t listen. I didn’t listen.”
My throat seems to swell at the crack in his voice, and my fingers shake with the low vibrations of his anguish.
“Michael had told me about this rogue that they had caught the scent of earlier that day, but they hadn’t managed to track it. They’d lost it in the woods and were going to send people out to look when it was light, when they were human, and when it was safer, but when we were out there and we watched the pack flying past us, just patrolling our borders but not going after anyone, I felt so useless, so unimportant. I tried to convince Lou and Cole that we could go and find the rogue instead, that we could creep around in the dark, and by morning, we would be awarded with the acknowledgement of ou
r families. We’d have proven ourselves.”
His voice is low as he runs a hand absentmindedly across his chin, his fingers hovering over the only scar that mars his perfect features. It’s so small that I barely ever notice it, but I have always wondered how he got it. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it seemed unimportant to ask.
“Cole being Cole, didn’t take much convincing, but Lou? Lou was scared. He didn’t want to anger anyone or get ourselves in a bad situation, so we left him behind. We left him standing, begging for us to not go out there. We didn’t listen. Instead, we found the trail that the rogue had left, and we followed it, way further out than we were allowed to and into no man’s land—your town, actually.
“We didn’t even realise that we’d stepped over the barrier until the rogue appeared right before us. Waiting for us. Like he had planned it.”
When I realise what’s happening, the world starts to feel like it’s stopped spinning. He swallows.
“When the rest of them appeared from the trees, we knew they had. I thought we were going to die.” He shudders. “I wish we’d just died.”
I’m frozen in place, my horror only growing with every word that leaves his mouth, with every clench of his fists and shake of his back.
“Lou had gone to our brothers. He knew that I could never forgive him for telling my dad, but my brother . . . my brother wasn’t alpha yet and he was my best friend. They’d come and help us, but my father would never have to know about it. And they did!”
His chest heaves with the breath that he takes. “He and George burst into the opening before they made their final pounce, just when I thought I was going to pass out from pain and blood loss. Their wolves were bigger than any of our attackers, and they looked like gods stepping into that field. They took the rogues by surprise, managing to get them back just enough to reach us. Michael told George to get us out of there, to get us back to the safety of the border, the safety of the pack, but Michael . . . Michael stayed. He stayed to fight, to let us run.”
Realisation hits me like a frying pan. I gasp, covering my mouth with my hands in an attempt to hold in the reaction, but I know he hears it. I know that he feels the anguish beginning to overcome me as his eyes begin to tear up, his leg beginning to bounce. He tilts his head upwards, the veins in his neck protruding as he tries to blink them back.
“I screamed, I begged, I fought to stay, to try and help him, but it was useless. No person could have ever made it out of there alive. No wolf either. They wanted to get the alpha, so I don’t know if it was meant to be my father that went out there, but they wanted to hurt this family . . . and they did. Better than they could have ever hoped for because I led the heir right to them. I served Michael up on a silver platter. I heard him die while I was rushed away to safety, watching as he was torn apart by our own kind, the sound following me the whole way home.”
He was only fifteen when he saw his own brother get murdered in front of him. He couldn’t even drive yet. How does someone cope with that exactly?
I don’t know what to say.
Trent seems to realise that his voice has grown louder the more he has spoken. He pauses, taking a breath as his shoulders slump forward. When he continues to speak, it’s softer. The anger is missing.
“My father never forgave me. He could barely even look at me when he got back. I still remember the sound of my mother sobbing, the roars of my father as he realised what had happened. Michael and I used to watch horrors together, and we’d always laugh at the sound of wailing ghosts in them, but that’s the exact sound my mother made; it was chilling. It was only then that my father told me the real reason why they hadn’t gone after them yet. The rogue wasn’t random. It was the same scent that they had found twenty-something years prior, when my dad was the new alpha . . . when his sister was murdered.”
It’s late at night and my head is struggling to keep up with all the information being piled on me, but I manage to follow it. Although, the images of a teenage Trent losing his brother are far too horrific for me to dwell on for too long.
“Your aunt,” I clarify as he nods.
“She would have been,” Trent explains. “But she was younger than my dad. She died when she was seventeen. Apparently, she had this friend from Northern Valley and would go and visit her a lot. One day, she went and never came back. They found her body in the woods between the two towns. Rogues had attacked her out of nowhere and then ran. No trace, no leads, as if they’d planned it.”
My mind clicks back to weeks before with Kristie’s mum, Linda, and her sad smile as she spoke about her friend.
“Jemma,” I whisper, causing Trent to turn to me in shock. “That was the name of the girl that Kristie’s mother was friends with. She said she died when they were in high school, that she was mauled by wolves. That was your aunt?”
Out of all the people in the world, how is it that this happened? How much pain had the people around me been in due to things they couldn’t understand?
His jaw tightens and he raises his brows at my deduction, his mouth slowly twitching into a tight smile.
“That was her,” he confirms quietly. “That’s kind of when all the issues between our towns started. Each one blamed the other for her death, and the murder of a young girl attracted a lot of media attention as well as the attention of hunters who started moving in. Before we knew it, we had isolated ourselves in our safe haven . . . in East Bay. We banned rogues and trespassers and made it a rule that the pack wasn’t allowed to go into the town. We were terrified that more of us would get killed.
“It worked for a while. The hunters that were after us lost their trails, and we didn’t have any more rogue attacks, not any that we couldn’t handle anyway. My dad worked secretly on finding Jemma’s killers, but eventually, he gave up and focused on the pack and the future—my brother.
“That was until that same scent was picked up just in our borders, and my father got everyone together to make a plan of attack. He knew that there was a chance that it wasn’t just one rogue, that there were a group of them waiting for a fight, that if we wanted to do it, then we had to do it right, but I didn’t know that, and my brother died because of it.”
The air around us feels close and my breaths don’t seem to fill my lungs. I almost want to joke and ask if someone has turned the heater on, but I know that the only thing stifling me is the emotions I’m beginning to feel through Trent. I can picture this small and pure boy who only wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, who only wanted to make his father proud and not feel so worthless.
I understood that more than anyone.
“My parents blamed me,” he mumbles after a pregnant pause, his voice emotionless. “They stopped treating me like a son and more like a soldier. They told me I would never be as good an alpha as Michael should have become, that they wished there was anyone else to take the role, but I was the only option they had. My father’s mind started to rot, the torment of not only his sister, but also his son being taken by the same group was too much for him. How could he protect a pack when he couldn’t protect his own blood? I lost my whole family when my brother died.
“And so did Lou. Where my parents blamed me, I blamed him. I stopped talking to him. I berated him. I treated him as if he should have let me die, but when his brother, George, decided to leave the pack and move away with his family, he stayed. I don’t know why but he did; he refused to abandon me. To abandon our pack. Not when everything was falling apart.”
Trent stands up, heading for the window that lets moonlight stream in and looks out of it as he curls his fingers around the dark wooden ledge.
“I prayed to the moon goddess every night after that,” he whispers, his reflection like a ghost. “I begged her for a way to avenge my brother, I bargained and offered everything I could to her just for a chance to make things right. I asked for her to give me a way to make them pay, to make me strong enough to overcome them, and when I finally turned on my sixteenth birthday,
that’s exactly what she did. I became a monster that no rogue could dream of beating, a wolf that no one would ever dare to cross . . . but it had a price. I couldn’t control it.
“I didn’t care. I saw the way that the pack watched me with astonishment as I turned back human. I basked in the attention that it got me, the respect that the fear gave me.
“But not from my parents, never from my parents. At the time, my father was still alpha. It had been months since Michael died and he was still clinging onto it. His mind was deteriorating, and people were starting to notice. We were becoming weak and ununited. That’s why, when a couple of days later, when the same scent passed through our borders again and my father told us all to leave it saying that the rogues were too much of a threat, I didn’t listen. I disobeyed my alpha. I waited until everyone was asleep and then I went out on my own.”
I don’t miss the way his voice stumbles over his words. I’m quickly reminded of the way the younger boys would repeat a similar thing to each other—all of them scared to ever disobey their alpha. Was this why Trent was so harsh with them? Was he scared that one of them would disobey him and get hurt? I already know that it is.
I can see the way he’s punishing himself, the way his lip is curled in disgust at his own actions. It’s been years since it happened, but it’s clear that he’s never let up on his self-hatred, not for a moment.
“As soon as I caught the scent, my wolf took over me. I don’t even remember finding the rogues. I just remember their screams of agony as I ripped into them, their voices echoing like my brothers.” His words send a chill down my spine as I try to not imagine the carnage. “I can only recall the feeling of pure murderous rage and the satisfaction I felt every time my claws dug into another body. It was as if I was sitting in the passenger seat and I’d given the steering wheel to a maniac, but I was enjoying it too much to care. It didn’t matter what the person had done. Everyone there needed to die. I could hear my father’s voice in my head, my mother’s screams, my brother’s cries. They urged me to avenge them, to make my family proud. I just wanted a way to stop feeling so much pain, I just wanted to do it for Michael. I needed to do it.”
