“Ox came to me. Needed help, but he didn’t know how to ask for it. But I knew. He wasn’t mine, but I knew.”
“Even back then?”
I shook my head. “No. It was… it took longer. Because I didn’t know how else to… I didn’t know how to be who I was anymore. I hated wolves, and I hated magic. I had a pack, but it wasn’t like it was before.”
“The guys from the garage.”
I nodded. “They didn’t know. They don’t know, and I hope they never find out. They don’t belong here in this world.”
“Not like we do. Not like Ox does.”
I hated that. “Does he? Don’t you ever think what his life would be like if you hadn’t found him?”
Joe laughed bitterly. “All the time. Every day. With everything I have. But it was—it was candy canes and pinecones. It was epic and awesome.”
Dirt and leaves and rain—
“Is that how you justify it?”
“It’s what forces me out of bed when I want nothing more than to fade away.”
The yellow lines on the road blurred.
“I gave him a shirt with his name on it. For work. For his birthday. It was wrapped in paper with snowmen on it because it was all I could find.” I sighed. “He was fifteen years old. And it was… it shouldn’t have happened. Not like that. Not without him knowing. But I couldn’t stop it. No matter how hard I tried. It just—snapped into place. In a way that it couldn’t with Rico. Chris. Tanner. They’re my pack. My family. Ox is too, but he’s….”
“More.”
I was helpless in the face of it. “Yeah. More. I guess he is. More than people expect. More than I expected. He became my tether after that. Because of a shirt. Because of snowman wrapping paper.”
“What was it? Before? Your tether.”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I didn’t—aside from wards, I didn’t do magic. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of it.”
“Was it Mark, once?”
“Joe,” I said, the warning clear in my voice.
Joe stared out at the dark road ahead. “When you don’t speak, when you lose your voice, it causes you to focus on everything else. You spend less time worrying about what to say. You hear things you might not have heard before. You see things that would have stayed hidden.”
“It’s not—”
“They found me. My dad. Mom. After… he took me. They found me, and I wanted nothing more than to tell them thank you. Thank you for coming for me just like you said. Thank you for letting me still be your son even though I was cracked right down the middle. But I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t find any words to say, so I said nothing at all. I saw things. That I might not have seen.”
“I don’t understand.”
Joe said, “Carter. He puts up a front. He’s big and strong and brave, but when I came home, he cried longer than anyone else. For a long time, he wouldn’t let anyone else touch me. He’d carry me everywhere, and if Mom or Dad tried to take me from him, he’d snarl at them until they backed away.
“And Kelly. I had… bad dreams. I still do, but not like they used to be. I would close my eyes and Richard Collins would be standing above me again in that dirty cabin in the woods, and he’d be telling me that he was only doing this because of what my father had done, how he’d killed their entire pack, that my father had taken everything away from him. And then he’d break my fingers one by one. Or he’d hit my knee with a hammer. You can’t go through what I did and not dream. He was there every time. And when I would wake up, Kelly would be there in the bed next to me, kissing my hair and whispering that I was home, home, home.”
A splatter of rain against the windshield. Just a few drops, really.
“Mom and Dad would… well. They would treat me as if I was fragile. Like something precious and broken. And maybe I was. To them. But it didn’t last, because Dad knew what I was capable of. What I could become. I was home for two months before he carried me on his back out into the trees and told me what it meant to be an Alpha.”
He was smiling. I could hear
it. God, how it fucking ached.
I knew where he was going. Who was left.