Luke looked down at his feet. “Yeah, but it was just talk. He wouldn’t have done it. He hates humans.”
“I’m sure he does. But we think he tried to do it before, with Amanda.”
He couldn’t know that, of course, but somehow, he’d become pretty sure of it all the same. That was why the medical examiner hadn’t been able to pin down the cause of death. A failed turning was ugly, and it didn’t look like anything that would normally happen to a human. They would have seen a bite-mark—but the rest of the damage would have been too strange to figure out.
He watched that possibility sink into Luke.
Then Colby added, “If he did it before, he could do it again. Especially since he’s short on wolves now. Weston’s dead. Eli let him die—Eli pushed him into it, for that matter. And he ditched you, because he’s an idiot.”
It was possible that Eli would come back for Luke, of course. In a lot of ways, that would make more sense than hoping a human would survive the change and prove to be a capable fighter in her wolf form.
But Colby thought he had a pretty good sense of Eli Hebbert at this point, and he wasn’t a guy who did the smart, sane thing. He’d thrown away all the things and people he should have valued.
And the only part of life that he valued at all was the mindless violence he thought, mistakenly, was the law of nature.
He was absolutely, one hundred percent a guy who would rather attack a woman and risk her life than mend fences with his younger, more vulnerable cousin.
In a dark, twisted way, he and Eli had some things in common. They had both los
t their dads, men they’d admired their whole lives. They’d both narrowed down their identities, focusing mostly on one half of who they were. Colby had sidelined his wolf half and tried to convince himself that as much as he wanted a pack, he didn’t need one. Eli had all but erased the human part of his soul.
And they’d both been hugely, completely wrong.
Wolves weren’t as savage and ruthless as Eli thought.
And humans weren’t as self-sufficient as Colby had imagined. He knew now that he could have told his friends that he considered them his family. They wouldn’t have thought he was weird or weak.
Their lives had mirrored each other’s, with Eli as Colby’s dark, backwards reflection. And now that they’d finally clashed, it was like only one of them could survive.
He could almost hear a clock ticking in his head.
“Eli needs someone to fight alongside him,” Colby said. “He doesn’t want to face me by himself, especially now that he knows I took on him and Weston and came out still standing.” He cast a sideways smile in Aria’s directly. “Of course, you had something to do with that.”
“Only in the sense that I was almost the reason you didn’t come out still standing.” She added to Luke, “I shot at them.”
“Oh, cool,” Luke said.
“Not cool,” Mel said, smacking his arm. “Don’t shoot people. If you’re going to live under my roof—”
“I never said I was going to live here!”
“Of course you’re going to live here,” she said. Her tone was one of purest exasperation, and Luke blossomed under it. “So shooting people—or biting them—is off-limits, you hear me?”
“Yes, Mel,” Luke said. His face had turned slightly pink.
“And we’re getting you some glasses first thing.”
Colby decided to bail the poor kid out of his embarrassment. While Aria had been able to break Mel’s mild loyalty to Eli by appealing to her wolf nature—and Eli’s transgressions against it—he thought the key to cutting Luke’s ties to Eli was right there in front of him.
It was in the kid’s essential chivalrous streak.
The only woman in Luke’s life had been nice to him. He wouldn’t want to see another woman get hurt, even if he didn’t know her. That had made him help them out before, and it would make him help them out again.
“I don’t know that I’m right,” he said. “Maybe we won’t find him anywhere near her. Maybe we won’t have the first clue where he is until I get a whiff of him and he rushes us again. But it doesn’t have to come down to a fight, Luke, not if I can find him before he finds me. But it’s not the fight part that bothers me. It’s how I might feel if he shows up—and he has a newly minted wolf with him, one who’s really a terrified woman dragged into all this against her will. I don’t know that he’ll do it. But you can’t know that he won’t. He’s desperate.”
Luke was almost shivering. He had to fight his instinctive loyalty to Eli like it was some kind of fever.
“Eli’s my alpha,” Luke said desperately.