“How did Brody answer during the pre-interrogation? Cause I’ve heard it’s important to keep your answers straight.”
Ignoring me, she probed the muscle, then guided my arm up, testing for range of motion. “Did you let her call one of the pack doctors from Austin?”
“It was already closing. She put in stitches. Given that we have no idea what the vamps infected Lacey with, or who could be involved, we didn’t want to chance reaching out to another pack.”
My mother tossed me my shirt. “Naomi is an excellent veterinarian and has saved more than one life in this pack as a first line medic and EMT. But she’d be the first to tell you that some injuries are beyond her level of skill. The Austin packs both have surgeons. The last thing you need is to have an injury this serious heal up wrong and cause you problems down the line.”
“Dad never trusted doctors from outside the pack.”
“He was raised not to trust anyone. You weren’t.” A beat. “I guess there’s no need to ask if you and Lacey Blair are together.”
“Wow, Mom. Really?”
“Is it serious?”
“You and I talk every week. Pretty sure you already know the answer to that one.”
A ribbon of cloud passed ominously in front of the moon. “So end this stalemate with Ethan.”
“Okay. Good talk.”
“Shifters don’t like to share. The need to mark, to possess, goes against every instinct in our wolves, especially in males. But it’s creating division within our family and the pack. Brody said you didn’t even stand with the rest of your brothers at the ceremony today.”
“Glad to see Ethan has no shortage of people ready to make excuses for him yet again.”
Her eyes held mine. “If you think I’m proud of what your brother did, you’re wrong. But it’s done and he’s with Hayden now. And holding onto all this anger is only going to hurt you in the end.”
Here’s the thing. Ethan and I hadn’t always had it out for each other. At first, I’d even been excited about the idea of him coming to live with us. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how his being around all the time shifted the dynamic in the house. We began to get into squabbles. Stupid kid stuff, really. He’d take the last hotdog at dinner or I’d step on his drawing paper, which was always scattered all over the bunkroom we shared with West. And every time, my dad would come down twice as hard on me because apparently Ethan was too special to be punished.
I played football in the fall, baseball in the spring, and continued to pull in A’s. Ethan got into fights, failed classes, and glowered all through dinner. And each and every time he screwed up, our dad wrote him a pass. I began to resent him, resent the preferential treatment he always seemed to receive from our parents that I was never the recipient of. But most of all I resented that Ethan had managed to turn me into the black sheep in my own family.
Looking back on it now, I knew my parents had been trying to help my brother through a difficult transition from foster care into our family. I shouldn’t have been such a dick. I couldn’t even imagine what he’d been through in the years before he came to stay with us. If I could have gone back and shaken some sense into nine-year-old Dallas, hell yeah, I would have. But I’d been on a trajectory I couldn’t escape, feeling more isolated from my family with every day. And back then, I didn’t have anyone to turn to for help.
My mom listened, worry lines forming in her brow. “I will never forgive myself for not stepping in when your father took you out to the barn that night. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, there is no mistake I regret more than that one.”
I closed my eyes, that night roaring back, the pressure of my dad’s power forcing me to submit as everything in me screamed for it to stop—
“I don’t want to talk about that night.”
The thing with Lacey? It didn’t matter that transmitting the virus shouldn’t have been biologically possible. It didn’t matter that we’d used protection and that she was the last person on earth I would ever have dreamed of hurting. It didn’t matter that, contrary to everything my dad would later shout at me, I not only grasped the gravity of how badly I’d screwed up, I was sorrier than he would ever know. In the end, Lacey Blair had been forcibly changed at my hands. She would never get a second chance. And so I didn’t deserve one.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, I resented that had I been Ethan, it would have been granted anyway.
“I think we need to talk about it. You’re in pain. You’re still reliving that night somewhere in the back of your mind, even if on the surface it seems to everyone else like you’ve moved on.”
I clawed a hand through my hair, saying nothing.
Ethan thought he had it so bad? Try getting shipped off to Canada and not hearing from your dad for four years. Try arriving home at twenty-one to a town you barely recognized and a family that treated you like you were radioactive. Try finding out that even though you were the one who used to get up at dawn to make everyone in the family French toast drizzled in syrup, powdered sugar and fresh raspberries, your parents set up the kid they adopted from foster care to inherit their coffee shop the day he turned twenty-five. That once again, you were an afterthought.
Ethan thought he knew what it was to be an outcast. I was the one this family had thrown away.
But that wasn’t even the worst part.
“I busted my ass opening that food trailer. It took all the money I’d earned working up in Calgary. I barely slept that first year between running the smokers, showering at West’s and driving around to work sites. And I don’t care that I had to start over from nothing. I just wish even once Dad would have acknowledged I was trying. That I wanted to get back on the right track.”
“You know I was proud of you. Your father was, too.”
“He had a hell of a way of showing it.”
That second-hand food trailer sold out of brisket, chicken, and pork every day by 2 p.m. By the time I was twenty-four, I was able to get a construction loan to build The Rusty Spoke. My entire family showed up to opening day. Everyone that is, except for Ben Caldwell.
“He shipped me away two thousand miles from home, then wanted me to crawl back to the pack on my knees. And even that wasn’t good enough.”
“Ben didn’t react well. There are… factors in his past that caused him to be easily set off that night. When he discovered you’d been lying to us for two years—" She stared me down. “What your father did was inexcusable. But you have to understand that you changing a human against their will, even by accident, represented one of his greatest fears.”
My vision greyed out, hot visceral rage searing through my blood as the wolf clawed to get free. How many times had I apologized to all of them, in calls, letters, and later in person? How many times had I curled in the corner of the shower, having retched until my stomach was empty, sick with shame at the knowledge I’d destroyed Lacey’s life, that I could have forced my entire family to leave Blood Moon if we’d been exposed? All because I’d convinced myself that just this once it would be okay to bend the rules, that if Lacey and I didn’t let things go too far, no one would get hurt. Except they had gone too far. And she and my family had paid the price for my lack of judgment.