“You didn’t.” I trailed him past the nightshift doorman, working yet another double. Just my luck. He narrowed his eyes on me, more suspicious than ever. Until Ford firmed his mouth. That was all it took for the doorman’s expression to relax several degrees. “I was thinking that must be nice. Not to have your worth decided by your blood.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” He opened the passenger-side door on his truck, cupped my hips, and lifted me. “Gwyllgi decide everything by blood. Usually by how much they’re willing to spill to prove a point.”
Ford’s boost left me bouncing on the seat when he let go and made me curious how often he interacted with other species for him not to know his own strength. The pack’s heir might not be the only one who’d benefited from a recent promotion.
Then again, it might be a reminder of what he, and his kind, were capable of should I fail to get justice for Shonda.
Paranoid? Nah. Not me.
Once I settled in, Ford shut the door and jogged around the truck to join me in the cab.
“You’re the best driver I’ve had since I got here,” I confessed as he merged into traffic.
“Momma always says it’s one thing to drive a monster of a truck and another to drive like a monster in a truck.”
“Your mom is wise.”
“Yeah, she had to be to survive raising four boys on her own.”
“There are three more of you? Two brothers were bad enough, but three?”
The slip caused my breath to catch, my heart to thud louder in my ears, and my palms to go damp.
Hadley didn’t have brothers. She only had a sister. I had to keep it straight. I had to sell him on me.
Luckily, he seemed to think I was referencing his earlier mention of his brothers and not my personal experience with having them.
“All older.” He was grinning now. “I’m the baby.”
“So, you’re spoiled.”
“Harsh.” He cut his eyes toward me. “I wouldn’t use that word exactly.”
“What would you call it?”
“Lucky? Besides, you’ve got no room to talk. You’re the baby too.”
“No, I’m—” The middlest. I bit my tongue so hard it bled. Frak. This was why making friends was dangerous. Too much potential for blowing my cover, especially with Ford. He was slick as spit. “Sick kid trumps birth order.”
“Yeah,” he said after a minute. “I could see that.”
With that brilliant zinger, I single-handedly managed to kill the vibe, and we settled in to listen to the radio for the rest of the trip.
Three
Fresh from visiting the Randalls, Midas sat with his back against a ratty pine gnarled from abuse and rotting from the inside out. The sun was rising, the air warming, but the earth remained cool beneath his palms, and a faint breeze nudged the warped plank he and his sister had fashioned into the seat for a rope swing what felt like a million years ago.
This was his thinking place. He came here to escape when life closed around his throat like a fist. The only corner of the city left where he could breathe without choking on duty, on expectations.
Here he vented all the things he would never breathe to another person, even Lethe, though he still directed his gripes to her out of habit.
“You screwed me over, sis.” He tipped his head back against the trunk. “I don’t want this. I never did. I’m not like you.” He grimaced when the coarse bark tugged on the long hair he ought to trim soon. “Shonda is dead, the Randalls are demanding justice, and Mom is sitting back to see what I’ll do to get it for them.”
Nine out of ten gwyllgi deaths were what Hadley would call open-and-shut cases. Dominance fights kept the highest-ranking pack members from enjoying their full lifespans, and an accidental sneeze on the wrong person could spark a throwdown that spun into an all-out brawl.
Hadley.
A frown carved his mouth when he realized her name—and not Linus’s—had popped into his head first.
“I met Linus’s apprentice. There’s something about her.” A growl entered his voice. “I know her from somewhere, but I can’t place her. Yet.” He rubbed his face. “It’ll come to me.”
Overhead, the frayed rope creaked in the only agreement he was likely to get.
“I paired her up with Ford, but it ought to be me. I’m the beta. It’s my duty to protect the pack, not his. I did what Mom would have done. I passed the buck.” He gritted his teeth, grinding down on the insubordination in his tone. “She does things a certain way, and it works for her, but it’s not working for me. I was trained to be a soldier, not a prince. You were supposed to take the mantle, not me.”
That was all water under the bridge now that Lethe had her own pack, her own home, her own city.
She was an alpha, and one day he would be too, whether he wanted to be or not.
“Mom has booked my Friday and Saturday nights with her handpicked potential daughters-in-law since I got sworn in. I haven’t gone on any second dates, and she’ll run out of candidates before I agree to one.” His sigh left him sagging on weary bones. “You’d think she would understand why I...” He snapped his jaw shut, unwilling to speak of it, even to the empty air. “Some days I’m tempted to let Mom arrange a match. Just mate someone and get it over with.”
Then she would expect grandkids, and procreation required a level of physical intimacy that broke him out in cold sweats, even after all these years. Whatever unlucky female he chose might expect love when all he had to offer any woman was elevated rank. For some, it would be enough. More than enough. Those were the ones he ought to focus on.
Fingers bumping over the crosshatch scars raised down his forearms, he conceded it was no less than he deserved. To be used. Though he had trouble breathing when he pictured sharing a life, a purpose, a bed, with another person.
“You should have left me there,” he said, not for the first time, but added the words he would never utter to his sister, who had tried so hard for so long to fix him. “You didn’t save me.” He let his eyes close. “No one can.”
Four
Perkerson Park was a fifty-acre oasis for the city dweller in southwest Atlanta. Beyond the tennis courts, basketball courts, disc golf course—whatever that was—ball fields, rec center, and pavilion, I saw what must appeal most to the gwyllgi. Shady woods crisscrossed with walking paths, open fields prime for frolicking—though they would never call it that—even a stream for a quick dip in the summer heat.
Parks like these were a veritable paradise for the urban predator.
Hmm.
Can I get away with asking Ford if he can doggy paddle?
Probably not. Unless I was willing to find out how it felt to get bitten by a gwyllgi.
Ford parked without skimming signs the way I had been, so I assumed he was familiar with the area.
Unsnapping my seat belt, I scanned the otherwise vacant lot. “Anyone meeting us?”
“Midas returned to the den.”
The den made it sound primitive when the truth was the seat of the pack was a sprawling estate with an elegantly modern home flanked by miles of forestland. The alpha lived there, most of the pack did too, but I had never been invited for a tour. All I knew about it I’d heard in secondhand accounts from the POA.