But they’d left half a pizza on the countertop, still in its grease-stained box. Huh. My mother hadn’t made lunch. Not that I needed her to. However, it was unusual for her not to insist.
I grabbed a slice and ate it cold while I brewed fresh coffee. The fifth pot of the day, by my count. And as my coffee brewed, soft music drifted into the kitchen from across the hall, and I realized my father was in his office. Alone.
When there was enough coffee in the pot, I paused the production and filled two mugs, then carried them into the office. My father sat in his rolling chair with both elbows on his desk, his head in his hands. The stereo on the shelf behind him was broadcasting Mozart softly, several green bars tracking the pitch and tempo of the music as it played.
I set one mug in front of my dad, then lowered myself onto the couch without a word.
“Thank you,” he said, without looking at me. His voice was rough and very deep, but not with anger.
He’d been crying.
“Are you okay?” I asked, relieved to hear my question come out with a gentle, empathetic tone. I sounded like I’d been crying, too, yet my throat was actually raw from holding tears back. The few I’d shed were nowhere near enough, and the rest would have to fall eventually, I knew. But not now.
“Is there any other option?” My father raised his head to meet my eyes, and his were bloodshot, as if he’d been drinking heavily. An empty bottle of Scotch sat on one side of his desk, but he’d finished it long before I’d Shifted with Kaci, so alcohol wasn’t the cause.
“You need some sleep, Daddy.” I wasn’t sure he’d been to bed at all the night before, and knew for a fact that he’d had no more rest than I had over the past few days.
“Yes, I do.” He nodded matter-of-factly and picked up his mug. “But every time I close my eyes, I see Ethan. Or Calvin Malone. Neither of those thoughts seems to usher in sleep.”
“I know.” When I closed my own eyes, images passed behind my eyelids so fast I could barely focus on them. I saw Marc, and Jace, and Ethan, and Manx, and Kevin Mitchell. A slide show of everything that had gone wrong in my life in the past week—my mind bursting with energy, while my body hovered on the edge of exhaustion and collapse no two-hour nap could avert. But there was no time for more sleep, or true rest. “Dad, Kaci’s Shifted, and I have to go back to Mississippi. I have to find Marc.”
A weary sigh slipped past my father’s lips as he pushed his chair back. “I know. Michael and Manx should be back any minute. I want you to brief Michael, then when Dr. Carver has pronounced Kaci fit, you can go.”
As he stood, I glanced at my watch. Two twenty-five. If we left by three-thirty, we could be there by nine. Just in time to take a freezing, after-dark shift searching the woods. “Any word yet from Vic and Parker?”
My dad sank into the armchair at the head of the gathering of furniture, one hand cradling his coffee mug like a lifeline. His free hand curled automatically over the scrolled arm. “They haven’t found anything yet, Faythe.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, clutching my own mug. “We will.” I opened my eyes and stared at him, daring him to tell me the truth. “You believe that, don’t you, Dad?”
“I…” But before he could finish—before he had to finish—an engine growled softly from the front of the property, and I recognized our old van’s labored rumble. “Michael…” My father smiled apologetically at me, then rushed past me into the hall and out the front door. I followed him across the porch and down the steps just as the van rolled to a stop.Michael was out in an instant, and he barely paused to meet my eyes, his own bloodshot and red rimmed behind the useless lenses of his glasses. Then he turned to slide open the side door and bent into the van to fiddle with something. When he faced me again, he clutched Des carefully to his chest, the baby wrapped in a tiny blue blanket my mother had knitted for him.
For a moment, I stared at him in surprise; Manx never let anyone but my mother handle her son without permission. Michael shifted the baby into a careful, one-handed football hold, like he’d been juggling infants all his life. Then he reached back into the van to help the young mother from the vehicle, his hand supporting her elbow. And that’s when I understood: Manx couldn’t care for her own baby. She probably couldn’t even lift him safely, because her hands were wrapped in thick bandages, from fingertips to wrists.
When she nodded in thanks, he let her go—she still didn’t like to be touched—and turned to hand me the baby. But suddenly my mother was there, carefully lifting Des from Michael’s arm and cradling him gently.
“Come inside before we all freeze,” she said, her voice high and tense, as if she had to force the words out through an unwilling throat.
I followed them all in, staring at Manx in shock. They’d really done it. They’d taken her claws. She’d never be able to fend for herself again, and until she’d fully healed, she wouldn’t be able to feed, clothe, or bathe herself, much less her child. She was at the mercy of people she hadn’t even known four months ago, and she would have to endure our touch just to survive.
And the dull, hopeless glaze of her eyes said she damn well knew it.
They had killed her spirit. And my inner Alpha-bitch wanted someone to pay for that.
I pulled the front door closed behind me and followed everyone into the living room, where Manx sank carefully onto the couch, Michael’s hand on her elbow to steady her. My mom sat beside her, to keep the baby as close to his mother as possible. But Manx looked miserable, being so near her child yet unable to touch him. Her eyes never left the infant’s face, calm and relaxed in sleep.
I paused in the doorway, watching Michael. I’d never considered his resemblance to our youngest brother before, mostly because while Ethan and I had our father’s green eyes and dark hair, our other three brothers had our mother’s blue eyes and the light brown waves she’d had in her youth. But now, watching my oldest brother hover over the injured tabby, waiting to see if she’d need any more help, I realized that though their coloring was different, behind the glasses and beneath the perfectly styled lawyer haircut, Michael’s face was shaped just like Ethan’s, from his strong jaw to his high, smooth forehead and faint, sparse sprinkling of freckles, lending them both the perpetual look of youth.
Tears blurred my vision, and when I reached up to wipe them away, the movement caught Michael’s eyes. An instant later I was in his arms, surrounded and supported by his quiet strength, squeezed so tight I thought my ribs might snap. My head found his shoulder, and the tears came faster when I realized how well it fit there; he and Ethan had been the same height, and I’d never even noticed.
“Shh…” he whispered into my ear. “Don’t upset Mom.”
Nodding, I clenched my jaws and squeezed my eyes shut, denying my grief an outlet one more time. There would be time for tears later, when Marc was there to mourn with me. I could wait that long.
I straightened, and Michael looked at me through his own damp eyes, wiping my tears with his bare fingers. “You did everything you could,” he whispered.
But that wasn’t true. If I’d remembered the fourth tom sooner, I could have warned Ethan. And if I’d insisted on taking Kaci myself, Malone’s men would never have resorted to violence in the first place. They would have been more careful with the life of a tabby than they were with just one of the many toms we had to spare. Either way, Ethan might have lived.
However, there wasn’t time to indulge my self-pity, so I nodded and squeezed his hand briefly before following him to the main grouping of furniture, where everyone else had gathered.
“How do you feel?” my mother whispered to Manx, rocking side to side on the couch with a motion so natural it must have been a reawakened maternal habit. Had she rocked us like that when we were babies? Did we sleep so peacefully in her arms, secure in the inarticulate certainty that nothing could hurt us?
“I feel like this will never be over,” Manx mumbled, her accent thickened with pain and grief as she watched her son comforted in another woman’s arms. She held up her heavily bandaged hands for all to see. “Des and I will never live peacefully on our own.”
“Probably not.” My father settled into his armchair and met her tortured gaze. “But you are both welcome here for as long as you want to stay. Forever, if you like. You are under my protection.”
For what little good it does, I thought, the fracture in my heart widening with the private admission that my father was no longer invincible, his protection no longer a venerated guarantee. After all, Kaci was under my father’s protection, too, and look what had almost happened to her. And the price Ethan had paid to protect her.
My mother dared a small, comforting smile. “And you’re not without choices. Umberto Di Carlo called this afternoon to extend that same offer from the southeast Pride.”
He had? I must have slept through that.
“No strings attached,” Michael added, making it clear that he’d already known the offer was coming.
Manx’s beautiful features twisted into a frown at his idiom. “Strings?”
“It means he won’t expect anything from you in return,” I explained, impressed by Di Carlo’s generous offer. “You don’t have to marry one of his sons. Or even sleep with any of them.”