“Marc?” I asked when I was finished, wadding my wrapper awkwardly in one hand. His silence could not be good.
He finally looked up, watching me in equal parts fear, anger, and grief. “He loves you.”
I closed my eyes and counted to five, then forced them open again. Made myself meet his gaze. “I know.”
Marc shook his head, his brows drawn low. “I mean, he really loves you. It’s not just some instinctive need to possess the tabby, now that he’s coming into his potential. He’s in love with you.”
“I know.” My throat wanted to close around my next breath. “Could you please stop saying it?”
“When were you going to tell me?”
My heart ached. My eyes stung with unshed tears. My throat burned from holding back words that needed to be said. “What was I supposed to say? You already knew. You beat the shit out of him for it.”
“No.” He stood and stomped away from me until he got to the wall, then turned abruptly, anger flashing behind the gold specks in his eyes now. “I beat the shit out of him for being careless. It’s his fault Miguel got to you.”
I could have argued that point all day, but we’d honestly already beat it to death, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I knew he had a crush. A stupid, little boy’s crush on the unattainable. But this is different, Faythe. This is dangerous.” He rubbed his forehead as if he was fending off a headache. “Does your dad know?” Then, before I could answer. “He knows.”I shook my head, but Marc ignored me. “That’s why he sent him. Sent both of us. He knows we’d die to protect you.”
“I don’t want that.” My tears finally overflowed, and I wiped my cheeks with my scarred left arm.
Marc watched me, and I saw the very moment when his expression went unreadable. He’d closed me out and the room was colder from his silence.
We couldn’t go on like this. I had to tell him as soon as Kaci was safe—assuming we survived the next day…
Twenty-Six
The sun was warm, but the northern wind was cold and bitter, even on the short walk to the rental car. During my last Shift, Marc had scrubbed blood from my jacket so the scent wouldn’t attract unwanted attention, but that left my sleeve damp and my arm cold.
As Marc drove, my thoughts raced, circling the risks we were taking like buzzards around a fresh kill. If anyone spotted us, we were dead. We were deep inside enemy territory, and both sides had long since dropped any pretense of polite politics or manners. Jace’s mother seemed to be the only one still clinging to such fragile reassurances, and I think that was solely the product of her own denial. She could not believe that her husband would order one of their sons to kill the other. And if she couldn’t face the truth about Brett’s death, she couldn’t possibly understand what Jace was risking by coming to visit.
Even if he wasn’t really making a social call.
I held Marc’s backpack on my lap, fingering Jace’s duct tape through the thick material. I was already wearing the brace on my right wrist, and it smelled like him, just because he’d taken it out of the package for me. The rest of the car smelled like Marc, and like the unseen traces of my own blood, still lingering in the backseat.
Neither of us spoke. We’d both said so much already, and the confession I still held inside was so staggeringly awful that I could hardly grasp the consequences of voicing it. Yet keeping my secret was unbearable. It had turned to acid in my gut and was surely consuming me from the inside out.
Did Jace feel the same? He must. He’d wanted me to tell Marc all along—had been waiting on me to find the right time and place.
But there was no right time, and certainly no right place. As badly as it hurt to keep quiet, I was starting to believe that we could never tell Marc what had happened. Not because he might leave me. Not because he’d probably hate me. Not even because of what it would do to the Pride.
If I told Marc, he and Jace would fight, and one of them would die.
My mind refused to move beyond that certainty. I couldn’t entertain the idea of an “after,” and wasn’t even sure there would be one. So the Confession remained a hulking, dark cloud on my mind’s horizon, a distant goal I was afraid I might never actually meet.
When we turned onto the old country road we’d traveled the night before, Marc turned on the radio rather than speak to me. I shrugged out of my jacket and took off my brace, then stared out the window while I concentrated on Shifting just my right arm.
In the motel, I’d Shifted into and out of human form four times, for a total of eight transformations. The first four were the most physically painful experiences I’d ever had in my life, but after that, the pain began to ebb until—with the last one—Shifting almost felt normal again.
The gash in my left arm was completely healed, and the long, jagged ridge of a scar could easily have been a month old. There was no more pain, and I had regained all muscle control, except for an annoying—and hopefully inconsequential—weakness in my pinkie finger. It stuck out just a bit now, when I formed a fist, but didn’t seem to hinder normal activity. That had been my biggest fear—the possible loss of function or flexibility in my left hand—and that had seemed likely in the beginning, when I couldn’t make my fingers obey orders from my brain. But in the end, I was both grateful and relieved to have avoided catastrophe. No pun intended.
My right arm was another story. After eight Shifts, it no longer hurt to move my hand and I had regained most of the flexibility in my wrist. But the injury still felt very tender, and I was afraid that overuse—or even short-term stringent use—could lead to further, and possibly permanent, damage.
“What are you doing?” Marc glanced at my arm, and his question broke into my concentration. My palm shortened and my fingers lengthened. Fur never got the chance to sprout.
“Just trying to be ready.” I couldn’t shake the feeling that something would go wrong on Jace’s end, and if that happened, we all needed to be able to fight.
Marc sighed, and I had the overwhelming urge to touch his jaw. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the stubble on his face had bypassed the painful, scratchy phase and slid right into soft-and-sexy. “Let’s just forget about it for now, okay?” he said, and I realized we were talking about Jace again. About our little problem, and the desperate need for some kind of a resolution. Of the sort that wouldn’t get anybody killed. Or even dumped, preferably.
“Okay,” I agreed, because there was really no other option.
Marc nodded decisively. “We’ll shovel his emotional shit after this is all over. For now, let’s just focus on getting the job done. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to concentrate. Right?”
“Right.” I’d become a parrot. I almost asked Polly for a cracker.
“I know this can’t be easy for you, either,” Marc conceded, and his reasonable tone made me want to cry. “He’s put you in a tough position. Put all of us there, really. Not that he meant to…”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it.”
“Yeah.” Marc linked his fingers through mine on the center console. “Sorry.”
At not quite three in the afternoon, Marc parked the rented SUV on an overgrown dirt trail that ended several hundred feet into the woods, about a quarter-mile from where we’d parked the night before.
“Maybe we should Shift.” I stepped onto the forest floor and my hiking boots crunched into several small pinecones. “If this goes bad, we’re going to need claws.”
Marc shook his head, then drained the last of his coffee, watching me from the other side of the vehicle. “You need to conserve your energy, and you should try to keep your weight off that wrist until it’s fully healed. Besides, if nothing goes wrong, Jace may need extra hands to help with Lance.”“Okay, you Shift and I’ll stay like this. Best of both worlds.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Marc stripped and handed me his clothes, then dropped to his knees in the fallen pine needles. I dug in his pants pocket for the rental keys, then stuffed his clothes into the backpack he’d stocked with bottles of water and snack bars, and locked up the car.
When he’d Shifted, Marc rubbed the entire length of his body against my leg, and I let my hand trail through his fur, all the way to the tip of his tail. He purred noisily, then walked off into the woods, expecting me to follow.
“Wait. We’re early. Let’s take a peek at the compound before we head to the deer stand.” Though, the term compound was a bit flattering for Malone’s collection of buildings.
Marc shook his head firmly and kept walking.
“We won’t get caught. I just want to get close enough to make sure he’s not in any trouble. I need your eyes and ears. Come on.”
Marc refused to turn back, so I headed west without him. Before I could count to five, he huffed, then jogged after me so silently I never would have known he was there, if I hadn’t been listening for him. Pine needles don’t crunch like dead leaves.
Marc whined when he came even with me, and I understood the gist, if not the specifics. “I’ll be careful. And thank you. I feel horrible sending him in there alone, with no backup. That’s not how we work.”