“My father killed three,” he said. “I watched the rest tear him apart. I learned then that you can’t survive on your own. You need numbers. After they ate, they went after my mother. The wire on which I hung cut through the branch and I fell. By the time I got free, she’d stopped screaming.”
I shifted closer to him. “And then?”
“I ran. They chased me, but I knew the mountains and they didn’t. I lost them. They set up camp at our house. For about four months I lived on my own in the woods, trying to get stronger, while they tried to catch me. I’d come up the crags to watch their camp, waiting for an opportunity to pick them off one by one. Never got it. They were always together.
“In the fall, Mahon found me. His cousin made money guiding hunting parties into the mountains. The loups found one. Left nobody alive. Mahon took it personally and brought twenty shapeshifters with him, most family, some from other clans who owed him a favor. I watched them comb the woods for four days before I let them see me. Mahon offered me a deal. If he gave me a shot at the loups, I’d come with him out of the woods. I agreed.”
“Did you get your shot?” I asked.
He nodded. “I got one of them. Bit his neck in half. It was my first battle kill.”
Mine was at ten. Voron had paid a street tough half a grand to kill me. I killed him instead and I was sick after, and then he brought out the second guy.
Curran’s eyes looked into the distance. “People think I built the Pack, because I’m the guy who has the welfare of all shapeshifters in mind. They’re wrong. Everything I built, I did so that when I mate and have children, nobody can touch my family.”
“That’s why you stabilized the clans. No infighting.”
He nodded. “That why I built the damn castle. I fight for them, I deal with their petty politics, I make them play nice with the Order and PAD and every other asshole with a badge. I do it all so my children won’t have to see their sister’s half-eaten corpse.”
My heart squeezed itself into a tiny painful ball. “And here I thought you were only pretending to be insane.”
Curran shook his head. “No, I’m the real thing. Paranoid, violent, not happy unless things are my way. Right now I’m back in that damn tree watching loups feed on my father. I promised myself I’d never feel it again, but there it is, right there. I built all this so I can protect you. I need to know that you want it. I need to know if you will stay.”
I sat up straighter. “There are some papers in the pocket of my jeans.”
He reached for the jeans and fished out several torn book pages, folded into a small square. I’d ripped them from a ruined book after Erra trashed my place.
Curran unfolded the pages.
The first showed a tall man in a cloak marching down the road to the city. Tendrils of smoke, made with short ink strokes, stretched from the man outward, like a foul miasma. Before him animals galloped through the fields, cattle, sheep, oxen, horses, dogs, all caught in a terrifying stampede. The caption below it said, Erra the Plaguebringer.
Curran looked at it for a long breath, wet stains spreading through the paper from his fingers, and dropped it on the floor of the bathroom.
Second page. The same cloaked figure walking through the street as people fell before it, their faces disfigured by boils. He discarded it, too.
The same figure with seven others crouching in the fog before him.
The fourth page, Erra again, depicted as a man, laughing, his arms held wide, as a temple burned behind him.
“Erra,” I said. “Drawn as a man, but really a woman. Over six thousand years old. Roland’s older sister.”
Curran was looking at me.
I swallowed. Breaking twenty-five years of conditioning was a lot harder than I thought.
I pointed to the page. “What do you see?”
“An enemy.”
Thank you for making it that much harder, Your Majesty.
I had to say it. He put his cards on the table and he had a right to know what he was getting into. You can’t smelt happiness out of a lie. The world doesn’t work that way.
I unclenched my teeth. “I see my aunt.”
It took him a moment. Understanding flared in his gray eyes. Yep, he got it.
“She won’t stop until she or I are dead,” I said. “There is no place I can hide, and even if there was, I’m not running. You saw what she does. If I don’t fight, she’ll go after everyone I’ve ever known. She’s my family and my responsibility. It’s to the death now.”
My throat was so dry, my tongue turned into a dry leaf in my mouth.
“If I lose, I die. If I win, Roland will want to know who nuked his sister. Either way I’m screwed. There are consequences to being with me. This is one of them. By my presence, I’ll endanger you and your people. I know I said things before about wanting warmth and a family, but the truth is that I’m alone for a reason. Once we’re together, you and everyone you know will become a target.”
I couldn’t read his face. I wished I knew what he was thinking.
“I’ll never sit demurely by your side. I’ll tell you exactly what I think and you won’t always like it. I won’t be your princess all snug and safe in the tower you built. That’s just not me. And even if it was, no army in this world could make me safe. If I choose to have children, they may never be safe. That’s the kind of mate I’d make.”
He said nothing. I was rambling. This was important and I was mangling it all to hell.
My fingers had gone cold. All this hot water and I was freezing. My voice came out flat. “Being without you makes me very unhappy. I don’t have enough willpower to walk away. I’ve tried. So, if you want to break it off, I need you to use whatever it is that made you Beast Lord and leave. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear, unless you really mean it. No hard feelings. Climb out of this tub, get Derek to find me a separate room, and I’ll never bring it up again.”
I looked at Curran. He still wore his Beast Lord face: flat and about as expressive as a stone statue. I was a hair from punching him in the jaw just to see some emotion. Any reaction would do at this point.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“No.”
Curran shrugged and pulled me back to him. “You don’t pick the family you’re born into. You pick the one you make. I already chose my mate and glued her ass to the chair to make sure she knew it.”
He didn’t care. The stupid, stupid idiot.