Joe looked over at me and I thought, for the briefest of moments, that I wouldn’t reach my crowbar in time, that regardless if I was an Alpha, I was still a human Alpha, and Joe was anything but.
“I almost tore into him,” Joe said, taking a step toward me. “The first time I saw him. The way he stood by you. The way he touched you. He knew you. He’d known you for years. I knew that before either of us even said a word. And you were just standing there. You were just allowing it to happen. I come home and I find him… and he’s touching—”
He was standing right in front of me, blood dripping from his hands in little drops where his claws had pierced his palms. His eyes were wide and wild, each breath sounding like it was being forcibly pushed from his chest. His words were spoken in a low growl, and he was big, so very big.
But I wasn’t afraid of him.
I’d never been afraid of him.
I said, “Joe.”
“Ox,” the wolf growled, and I could feel his breath on my face.
“He lives here. He is part of my pack and he lives here. He lived here for a long time before he moved into the main house. You know this. I know you’ve been told this. Your mother. Mark. The others. They told you.”
Joe blinked rapidly, eyes flickering red, then back to their normal blue. He took a step back, looking horrified. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to—”
“Stop,” I said. “It’s not—”
“I would have hurt him,” Joe blurted, sounding impossibly young. “If I’d thought I could have gotten away with it, I’d have hurt him. That first day. When he came at me, it took holding back every piece of me. And even then it almost wasn’t enough. I would have killed him without a second thought.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” Joe snapped. “You don’t know what it felt like. Coming home, finally coming back home, and finding… him. And all of you. Just like you were. Just like you didn’t even need the rest of us.”
I nodded, taking a step back, trying to put a little distance between us before I reached out and clocked the fuck out of his face. “So that’s how it’s going to be,” I said, gritting my teeth. “That’s how it is. We’re going to do this. Now. This way.”
This startled him. “What? What do you mean? What way?”
I took another step back, just to be safe, because I might have cared about him and I might have been waiting for this day, but sometimes, oh sometimes, Joe Bennett could be so fucking stupid.
“My mother died,” I said as evenly as I could. “My Alpha died. The boy I lo—the decision I made, my choice, turned into an Alpha. And a little over a week later he was gone.”
“Ox,” Joe said. “You know why I had to—”
“No,” I said coolly. “I don’t. I don’t know shit about what you had to do.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You told me he couldn’t get away with this. You sat there next to me and told me Richard Collins had to pay for what he’d done to you. To us. To our pack.”
“My mother had just been murdered,” I growled at him. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“And I was?”
“Clearly enough that you made a fucking decision behind my back—”
“You just said your mother had been murdered. You weren’t thinking clearly.” He started pacing in front of me. “Do you really think I wanted to put any more weight on your shoulders? That I wanted to drag you into this further than you already were? Ox, I was a seventeen-year-old Alpha who had been tortured by the man who had just killed my father. I wasn’t thinking about the pack. I wasn’t even thinking about my mother, god help me. I was thinking about you. And the only way that I could protect you.”
“So you kept everything from me until the last minute,” I said. “And then disappeared for three years. Because that was the best way to protect me.”
He stopped pacing and stared at me as if I was stupid. For a moment, I hated him because I remembered my dad giving me a similar look. “I didn’t disappear—”
“Bullshit,” I snapped at him. “Don’t you try and tell me otherwise, Joe Bennett. Because anything else would be a lie.”
His jaw tensed and he fisted his hands. He took a breath, visibly trying to calm himself down. I tried to do the same, because if things went any further like this, they’d just end before they even began. I hadn’t meant for it to get like this. At least not yet.
“Look,” he said. “I… made choices. Because I had to. They may not have been the best in the long run, but they were the best at the time. You can’t fault me for that.”
I laughed bitterly. “Yeah, Joe. Funny thing is that I can. And I do. That’s the problem.” I walked toward the kitchen, trying to get as far away from him as I could. I leaned against the counter. He stayed near the door.