Silence, except for my fellow travelers, chatting and sipping predawn coffee. Then my brother sighed. “I’m sorry Faythe.”
I sighed and let my hand fall into my lap. The light from the airport was bright after my self-imposed darkness. “I’m just glad there’ll be plenty of ass to kick soon.”
“How soon were you thinking?”
“The day after tomorrow. That should give everyone time to converge. Could you call Uncle Rick for me? I’m about to get on a plane. If he’s good with the timing, I’ll call the thunderbirds when we land and tell them where to meet us.”
“No problem.” But he exhaled heavily, and I knew that if Marc didn’t come back, his absence would be hard on more than just me.
“Hey, Michael?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell anyone else about Marc. I’ll tell them when I get there. It’ll be better coming from me.”
“You sure?”
I sighed, anything but. “Yeah.”
Jace returned about a minute after I hung up, and we boarded the plane five minutes after that. He dozed during the flight, his fingers intertwined with mine. I stared at the empty seat on my other side.
“Wait, he just left?” Kaci frowned at me from the couch and pulled her earbuds out of her ears, as if she may have heard me wrong. “He wouldn’t do that. Marc would never just leave.”
My mother put one arm around her, but Kaci’s accusing gaze never left me, and it grew colder with each second. “What did you do?”
“Kar—” Holly shook her head and started over, still trying to get used to the tabby’s real name. “Kaci, I’m sure it was nothing Faythe did.” Obviously looking for support, she glanced across the breakfast table at Manx, who sat nursing her baby, then up at Michael, who stood behind his wife, sipping a steaming mug of coffee. Neither of them spoke.
“Yes, it was,” Kaci insisted, and no one argued with her. Except for Holly and Ryan, the rest of them knew about Jace and had no doubt already figured out the basics of how it went down. “The only reason he’d leave us is if he had to leave you. You dumped him again, didn’t you?”
“Kaci, that’s none of our business,” my mother admonished softly, but her gaze held mine, equal parts sympathy and curiosity. She’d been in my shoes, and no doubt she hadn’t tripped all over the place in them, like I had.
“It’s okay. She has a right to know.” I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the wall by the door, wishing for some of Michael’s coffee. “You all do.” Because Aaron Taylor was right—there was no such thing as privacy for an Alpha. Everything I did affected them all. “He dumped me.”
“Why?” Kaci didn’t miss a heartbeat, and I wished I’d been half as perceptive at her age. “What did you do?”
I glanced at Jace, who mirrored my stance on the other side of the door, and I was suddenly glad we’d both showered before our flight. Otherwise, they would all have smelled us on each other—except for Holly.
Ryan followed my gaze to Jace, and his eyes widened. Kaci caught on a second later, and the hurt in her eyes ripped right through me. “Do you have to take everything for yourself?” Without waiting for an answer, she stood and ran for the hallway. An instant later, a door slammed.
I started to go after her—with no clue how to start that particular conversation—but my mother stood. “I’ll talk to her.” I hesitated, then finally nodded. Kaci probably didn’t want to hear from me, anyway. At least, not for a little while.
I headed for the kitchen and the lure of fresh coffee, but when I passed by Ryan, his mouth opened, his brows high in what could only be amusement over my catastrophic personal life. I didn’t even slow. “One word, and I’ll rebreak your nose.”
Ryan’s mouth snapped shut. Though his nose had been broken several days longer than mine, his looked much worse. He obviously hadn’t Shifted as much as I had. I wasn’t sure which one of us that said the most about, considering that my last Shifting binge nearly left me unconscious.
I drank two cups of coffee alone in the kitchen, trying to concentrate on the upcoming fight. Our allies had all RSVP’d, and I’d given the birds the pertinent details, including the fact that all the good guys—the ones they weren’t allowed to slaughter—would be wearing a strip of bright orange construction tape tied somewhere on their bodies, be they human or cat.
But my thoughts kept wandering to Marc, and to my fervent wish that I’d thought to tell Kaci about Jace without an audience. I’d completely forgotten about her crush on him, with all the other life-and-death drama going on around me. But to her, that crush probably was life-or-death, and I’d just given her a double scoop of bad news.My father would never have been so thoughtless.
“So…Faythe was with Marc, but then she slept with Jace?” Holly said, drawing my attention to the card table, where Michael and Owen had joined her and Manx. “And when Marc found out, he left you all high and dry without your major source of muscle?”
“Um, yeah, I guess that sums it up.” Michael shrugged at me in apology, but I could only roll my eyes. My life had become an open book. Evidently a very adult book.
“This place is like a scary, furry soap opera,” Holly opined, evidently oblivious to the fact that I could hear her. And see her.
“I could not agree more.” I set my empty mug on the counter and headed into the living room without waiting to watch Holly flush. But when I saw my mother on the couch with Ryan, I frowned.
“She didn’t want to talk,” Mom explained, and I sighed. I didn’t want to go to war with Kaci hating me.
In the hall, I started to open the door to the room she was sharing with Manx and my mother, but stopped when I heard Jace’s voice from inside.
“Hey, kiddo, don’t be mad at Faythe. She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and neither did I.”
“I’m not a kid,” Kaci insisted, and I could tell from the nasal sound of her voice that she’d been crying.
“I know. Sorry. People called me ‘kid’ until after I turned twenty. And now that I’ve said that, I remember how much I hated it, too.”
“I’m not mad at Faythe. I’m just… I knew you liked her—everybody knew that,” Kaci said, and the air mattress squeaked as Jace squirmed. “And I guess I kinda knew she liked you back. But…what about Marc?”
However, what she really meant—but wouldn’t say—was: What about me?
“Kaci, sometimes things just happen,” Jace said softly. “And it’s nobody’s fault. Or it’s everybody’s fault. Sometimes people connect when they don’t mean to. When it isn’t convenient, or even fair. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything, and they can both go their separate ways afterward. But sometimes it changes things for them both, and for a lot of other people.”
Kaci was silent for a minute, presumably thinking that over, and I held my breath in anticipation of her response. When it came, I nearly laughed out loud. “When you say ‘connect,’ you’re not talking about some sappy, deep eye gazing, are you? You mean you and Faythe hooked up, and things got messy—figuratively speaking—so Marc walked. Right?”
“Um, yeah. That’s the short version.”
And suddenly I felt sorry for Jace. He wasn’t prepared for Kaci’s birds-and-bees routine, or her uncanny ability to boil down any complicated situation into two sentences or less. Nor was he prepared for her complete lack of a verbal filter.
“But she still loves Marc,” Kaci said, as if she weren’t gutting us both and laying our dripping emotional innards on the floor for all to see.
“I know,” Jace admitted, and my heart ached for us both. For us all. “That’s her business.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I don’t know. I hope he will. He’ll always have a place in the Pride. But he’s really mad and hurt right now.”
“He might get over it. If you stay away from Faythe for a while.”
Oooh, clever girl, working her own angle! I was almost proud.
Jace cleared his throat, and I knew he’d gotten serious. “I can’t do that, Kaci.”
“I know.” She sighed, but no longer sounded like she was fighting tears. “But it was worth a shot.”
I snuck back into the living room before I could be caught eavesdropping, but the place was packed, and every gaze seemed to be trained on me. There was no room to breathe. So I stomped out the front door and sank onto the top concrete step with my elbows on my knees, staring at the driveway, where Marc’s car still sat, unclaimed. A minute later, the door squealed open, and Vic sat down next to me. “Well, you really fucked up this time.”
I choked on the absurdity of his understatement and probably would have been irritated by his delivery, coming from anyone but Vic. “Does the term ‘Alpha’ mean nothing to you?”
“You know I’m right.”
“Doesn’t matter now. He left.” And just saying the words made the bloody hole in my heart gape wider.
“Do you blame him?”
“No.” I turned on Vic, and the back of my throat burned with words I needed to say, but probably shouldn’t. “I blame myself. It’s all my fault—I’ve never denied that. But he just got up and walked out, in the middle of the night! Without even taking his stuff.”