Trial by fire(24)

“He’s coming for me, isn’t he?” Lucas was awake. His voice was dull, and on the bed, Maddy made a noise halfway between a whimper and a whine.

“No.” I wanted to kneel down next to Lucas, to put myself on his level, but I didn’t move, allowing Lake—long-limbed and lethal—to stay between us at all times. “Shay isn’t coming, at least not yet, but he said something, and I need to know if it’s true.”

Lucas pushed himself farther into the corner. Through the pack-bond, I caught a flash of an image from Maddy’s dream: the back of a hand connecting with a toddler’s chubby cheeks. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know who, but the fractured memory was enough for me to feel, just for a second, the intensity with which Maddy looked at Lucas and saw the life she and the others had lived with the Rabid. I glanced at Lake, and since I couldn’t kneel next to Lucas, she did.

“We’re not looking to hurt you,” she said. “Not unless you’re looking to hurt us.”

“I’ve never hurt anyone.” Lucas’s words rang with the kind of truth that I didn’t need a werewolf’s sense of smell to recognize as honest and bare. “I’m the one who gets hurt.”

His words twisted like a knife in my gut, but I soldiered on, softening my voice but delivering the message all the same.

“Shay says he’s not the only one after you.” I paused and measured Lucas’s reaction, but his eyes were as dull as his voice, and I couldn’t see anything in them but what I already knew. “Is he lying?”

For several seconds, Lucas didn’t reply. Then he looked up, right at my eyes, for a single beat of my heart. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know as in you’re not certain, or you don’t know as in you have no clue why Shay might say such a thing?”

Lucas retreated even further into himself, and when he replied, his voice was barely audible to my human ears.

“The first one.”

“So when Shay says there might be someone else after you, that’s not crazy talk, is it?” Lake kept her voice soft, and she didn’t make a single move toward him, but there was no way for him not to answer.

Lake Mitchell wasn’t the kind of person you just shrugged off.

“No. It’s not crazy talk.”

The air whooshed out of my lungs as I processed our visitor’s answer. Lucas didn’t know for sure if Shay was lying, but he knew that it was possible that his alpha was telling the truth.

That someone else was after him.

And he’d come here, to my land, and asked for my help, without so much as a word of warning.

“Assume that whoever might be coming after you is coming,” I told him sharply. “Who is it?”

Lucas didn’t answer. I took a step forward, pitching my voice low and staring directly into his eyes with an intensity none of my wolves could have denied. “Is it one of the other alphas?”

“No.”

“Is it a Rabid werewolf?”

“No.”

“Is it your family?”

“I don’t have a family.”

“Lucas, we can’t help you if we don’t know what we’re up against. Keeping this information to yourself is the same as lying, and if you lie to me, I will send you back.”

I felt, rather than saw, Maddy stirring, but she didn’t object to my words. If Lucas was a threat—if the people after him were a threat—we needed to know. She knew that. She trusted me.

Lucas turned to look at her and took a ragged breath, and then he answered my question, his words coming out in a rushed whisper. “They’re human, okay? The Snake Bend Pack has dealings with humans, and Shay … loaned me out.”

“He what?” Lake and I spoke at the same time. Maddy didn’t even blink.

“Shay gave me to some humans, okay? Not forever, just for a little while, to punish me for whatever he was punishing me for.” Lucas brought one hand to the scar on the back of his neck, and in that moment, I knew that Shay wasn’t the only one who’d left a mark on his body.

Whoever these humans were, whatever they wanted with a Were, they’d left their mark, too.

“Humans aren’t even supposed to know about us,” Lake said. “The Senate kills people when they find out.”

It was an ugly truth of our world that sometimes the secret of a pack’s existence took precedence over a single human life—even now. In all the time I’d known Callum, he had never lifted a lethal hand to a human, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the other alphas batted an eye at safeguarding our secret with that kind of force.