“You’re not giving me a choice,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. His jaw was so tense I could hear his teeth grinding.
“Do you want to talk privately?” I asked.
“What, so you can drag me off to the woods and let one of your uncles rip my throat out?” he said loudly enough so the rest of his pack could hear.
I growled. “Clay, stop being a jackass,” I snarled. “You bring your second, I’ll bring mine.” Samson stepped forward and gazed longingly at Alicia, which was not appreciated by one of the younger males in Clay’s pack. I added loudly, “And everyone here will behave themselves like good boys and girls!”
Uncle Jay, wolfed out and ready to go, huffed and rolled his canine eyes.
I led Clay to a little clearing behind the clinic, with Samson and Alicia trailing on our heels. The farther we got away from Main Street, the more Clay’s shoulders seemed to sag. By the time we reached our destination, he looked liked a haggard old man.
“OK, this is just us here, and when we leave, no one’s going to know what was said, right Samson?” Samson was busy giving Alicia moon eyes. “Samson?”
“Huh?”
I looked across the clearing to see Alicia giving him the same stupid look. I rolled my eyes. “Never mind.”
“Before we go any further, I have to ask, did you hurt Billie?” I asked. “And I’m not just talking about at the end. Did you ever lay a hand on my aunt?”
“We wouldn’t have hurt Billie,” Alicia insisted, her eyes welling up with unexpected tears. “We actually liked the old lady, no matter how many butter knives she threw at me. She reminded us of our own aunties. And she had these moments, I think, when she knew we weren’t who we said we were, but she knew that we were taking care of her. I always thought of those as her good days.”
Clay shook his head. “I’m a lot of things, but I wouldn’t hurt a defenseless old woman.”
“What happened the day she died?” I asked.
Alicia wrung her hands a little bit, looking more at Samson than at me. “When I left, she was napping, I just wanted to take the kids out for a breath of fresh air. I just wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. I wasn’t even gone that long, just long enough for Paul to need a fresh pull-up. I came back, and you were there, and she was dead.”
I looked to Samson, who seemed relieved. And although I didn’t quite trust his skewed judgment on the subject, I found I believed her. Why would they lie at this point? They didn’t have much to lose. If anything, Clay would have used killing Billie to provoke me into a fight when he was outed.
“OK, and I want honesty here, what about the brakes on my truck? Or the break-in at my office? Or me getting my head bagged that day we went for a run together? Or Samson getting shot?”
Alicia shook her head. “Honestly, no. We were just as surprised by all that as you were. The sneakiest thing we did was tell our packmates where the video cameras were planted, so they could sniff around without being seen.”
“We came here to watch you, to try to find a way in,” Clay said. “That was all.”
“Considering your dad tried to kill my whole family, I have a hard time believing that.”
He shot back, “Well, your brother did kill my entire family.”
“He was provoked!” I yelled.
“Don’t you think I’ve considered that?” Clay yelled back. He took a steadying breath. Several inquiring howls drifted up from the valley. “Look, I see my Dad’s mistakes. What he did was wrong. But he was still my dad. Do you know what happened after your precious brother killed my father? We’d been drifting around for months, nomads, before Dad finally decided to make a move on your valley. There were only three old women left to take care of us. Our parents were supposed to come back, take us to our new home. We went to bed, feeling like it was Christmas Eve. When we woke up, everything was going to be different. No more sleeping in the woods. No more bathing at campgrounds, when we were lucky. No more shifting around without a home. And it was different, all right. We woke up, and my aunt Sarah was crying. She didn’t know what had happened. She and Aunt Linda waited and waited for my parents, for the other adults to come back. But they never did. I was too young to join the fight but old enough to know that we’d been screwed out of what was ours. That my mom and dad were dead, and I couldn’t let that go unpunished. Aunt Linda tried to convince me that it was time to forget, to move on. When she died, I found letters from my dad to Eli, plans for the new pack they were setting up.
“So I contacted our good friend Eli. I told him I was going to blow his whole ‘man of the people’ thing wide open. I wanted to meet him, but he kept putting me off, said he had an ailing mother to care for. It made it hard for him to find time. Your brother killed him off before we could meet up, so he wasn’t of much use. But thanks to his letters, it was easy to tell you some nice story about being Billie’s long-lost relatives. You were so willing to let us step in, to let us take care of Billie. It was disappointing, really. I thought you’d put up more of a fight. I thought you’d be less trusting. But we moved right in. Hell, you practically rolled out a red carpet. And we stayed, and we stayed, and hell, I even started to like it here a little bit. And the whole time, I kept going back to my pack and telling them to be patient; just a little longer, and we’ll have the home we always deserved. And then Billie died, and it all went to hell.”
“But why did you come back now?” I asked him, scanning his pack. “You knew how many of us would be here. Why would you come back, knowing that we could destroy you?”
Clay threaded a handed through his hair, leaving it disheveled. He looked tired and scared and much younger than he was. “I’d spent so much time talking it up, I couldn’t not bring them here. I already have a couple of cousins who think that I shouldn’t be alpha, considering the fuck-up my Dad made of the position. If I backed out, I would lose any authority I had. There was no way out of it. And now I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to them now and tell them that the story we’ve been surviving on for years was a load of crap. That we’re not even going to try to fight for this place.”
“But you don’t have to fight. You could have a home here.”
Clay stared at me as if I’d grown a second head. He scoffed. “What, you’re just going to let us waltz in and join you? Sure.”
“We would. Don’t make the same mistake Jonas made, Clay. Take the offer,” Samson said, his gaze never leaving Alicia.
Clay’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Cooper offered Jonas a place in the valley. He offered your pack a home, and Jonas refused,” I said.