by Kamryn Hart
She wiped away a tear on her cheek. “I don’t believe anything happens by chance.” She grabbed the back of Ethan’s neck, pressed her forehead to his, and closed her eyes. “You completed Mason. He needed someone with a heart as big as yours, as soft as yours, because you were the one who broke through the last of the walls he built around his own heart. He let you in all the way. You saved him. Now it’s my turn to save you.”
Ethan made a ticking sound with his tongue behind his teeth. He rested his hands on Emily’s waist and squeezed lightly. That mark he made on her skin seemed to light up at his touch through the fabric of her hoodie.
“You and Mason always had a way of getting right to the center of everything, getting me like no one else. Mason loved you every bit as much as he did me. The three of us. It was always the three of us, connected somehow.”
Ethan winced again and moved away. Emily couldn’t understand what that wince was about and why his hand kept reflexively moving toward his cheek, but it made her blood run cold.
“I told you what you wanted to know,” Ethan said. “Now you have to go. I’m glad I got to see you one last time.”
Emily scowled. “I did promise to move on, but that has nothing to do with me leaving you. I’m staying here. We’re going to move on together. You and me. You have a lot more you need to tell me.”
Ethan shook his head wearily. “I never promised I’d say any more than I did.”
That same place where Ethan had somehow marked her waist started burning. Emily pulled up her shirt to look at it. Ethan did the same thing at the same time, checking his own mark. The moon glowed a bright blue and vanished from her skin. It just faded away. She snuck a peek and saw Ethan’s was gone too.
“What is that? What is that mark Ethan?” she asked.
Ethan hissed, jumped off the couch, and advanced several feet away from her in a flash. He pressed his hand to his left cheek and growled. She saw a blue glow burst from in between his fingers.
“What’s going on?” she asked, worried this time. She stood and walked toward him, hand outstretched.
“Don’t touch me!” he screamed.
Emily drew back. His words were like a slap across the face. “B-but you were just saying how the three of us are connected. Were connected? We’re not over, Ethan. We’re not over. I’m supposed to be here. I know it.”
“Mason doesn’t want you here with me,” Ethan said through gritted teeth. “He wants you safe, living your own life, living your dreams.”
“This is my life! Mason can’t tell me what to do. I’m older than you both by a year. I was your secret keeper. I covered for you both. No more. I’m taking charge. And safety? I feel safer right here, right now, than I have since Mason died and you left me! Why did you do it, Ethan? Did those shifters take you against your will? Tell me the truth.”
Ethan grimaced. “How did you find me? No matter how I try to wrap my brain around it, I can’t figure it out.”
“What are those Moon brands all over your skin?”
“Contracts. Moon voodoo. Magic. Now answer my question.”
Emily practically growled. She was angry and getting too worked up. She didn’t want to talk to Ethan like this. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I looked for five years, five fucking years, Ethan. I never found a trace of you. It’s like you said, no way I could have found you. Your new shifter family must have taken a fuck ton of precautions to cover your tracks.”
Ethan flinched, and Emily regretted the jab.
She quieted her tone and continued, “It was strange. I was almost ready to give up searching after all this time, but a shifter showed up out of nowhere and told me exactly where you were.”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed into gold slits. The apprehension Emily kept at bay when she first met Owen Barr and impulsively came out here came tumbling back because it was fucking weird. That shifter made her skin crawl. Maybe she should have told Ethan this first. Maybe it was important. Maybe it was dangerous and it wasn’t a blessing in questionable disguise at all like she desperately hoped.
“Who?” Ethan asked.
Emily cursed under her breath. “Owen Barr. He said his name was Owen Barr.”
Ethan nearly choked. He dropped his hand back to his side and that glow on his cheek was gone. There was nothing on his skin at all.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ethan growled. “I need to make a phone call.”
Chapter 9
MANEUVERING AROUND EMILY WASN’T too hard since Rogue was a shifter and she was not. It was cute she thought could steal his cell phone from his hands. Okay, she wasn’t trying that hard. It was more about her trying to get his attention.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, jumping again for the phone, which Rogue held to his ear. He turned his back to her to deflect her.
He already told her too much.
“Don’t ignore me, Ethan.”
God, she was stubborn, but he already knew that.
“I just want you to talk to me. Why is that so hard? We saw what keeping secrets did to us. It’s time to come clean.”
Rogue closed his eyes and pressed the thin glass-faced phone harder against his ear. It just started ringing, but he felt like he had been listening to that ringing for an entire minute. If Bruiser didn’t pick up in a few seconds, he was going to lose his shit.
“Rogue?” Bruiser’s gruff voice sounded through the speaker within just three rings.
“Bruiser! Why the fuck is your psychotic brother handing out free information about me?” Rogue glanced at Emily. “You didn’t pay him or anything, right?”
Emily scowled at him and shook her head. “I didn’t know a thing about him, and I didn’t pay him shit.”
“Yeah,” Rogue continued, “he freely handed out my location. How the fuck did he even know my location? I know he’s one hell of a tracker, but he doesn’t know how to use Terros beyond shifting does he? He couldn’t have found me with Terros Sight.”
“Rogue, calm the hell down. You’re firing off like a wild machine gun. That doesn’t sound anything like Owen’s MO.”
Right, right. He needed to calm down. He was practically in hysterics.
He looked at Emily again who had resigned herself to standing with her arms folded. They were both standing by the front door of “his” house because that was where Rogue ended up when he had escaped Emily’s touch earlier. He was no longer burning, her nearness wasn’t painful, but he had hurt her with that stunt. She wouldn’t touch him now. He wanted to apologize. He wanted to explain everything down to the smallest detail, but he stayed on track. This was important.
“You said he gave the name Owen Barr, but what did he look like?” Rogue asked her.
“Pale skin, blond hair just long enough to pull back into a ponytail, tons of scars on his face, hazel eyes, big as a boulder, intimidating, definitely a shifter of some sort,” she informed.
“Damn it.”
“Doesn’t sound like Owen,” Bruiser interjected. “Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on, cat?”
“What did he make you feel? You’re sure he was a shifter?” Rogue asked Emily, ignoring Bruiser, though he kept the phone smashed against his ear.
“I dunno, like I was a deer he was going to rip apart and eat or something. I’m positive he was a shifter, but I don’t know what kind.”
“But he didn’t touch you?”
Emily shook her head. “He knew you, and he knew me. He knew about how I’ve been searching for you all this time. He said you go by a different name now: Rogue. He told me to go to you. He broke into the motel room I was staying in and insisted on telling me all of that even though I had him at gunpoint.”
“He knew my real name?”
“Yeah, mine too. He said you’d know who he was if I gave you the name Owen Barr.”
“And you only thought to tell me this now?” Rogue asked frantically.
“It was stupid. It should have been the first thing I told y
ou because it was suspicious as hell. I thought about disregarding the maniac, but I chose to come anyway because I was desperate. I couldn’t pass up a chance to actually see you again. And when I did, nothing else mattered. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
How the fuck could she say that so calmly and take full responsibility like that? She always was the one with the cool head. Rogue envied that now more than ever.
“But if he knows your location and wants to hurt you, why hasn’t he done it already?” she asked. “What does this have to do with me?”
She was reading into Rogue’s stress, assessing that he felt some sort of legitimate threat and using her levelheadedness to try and get down to the bottom of it. And she had a point. Why hadn’t the guy come? Who was he? What was his play, telling Emily to come here? Rogue had no idea.
Wait a minute. Blond hair, ponytail length, hazel eyes, a major predator type, nasty scars…
“Did he have a scar that ran from his lip to his nose? Was a chunk of his lip gone?” Rogue asked.
Emily frowned. “Yes. He had a lot of scars, but that one was probably the most unique.”
How could this be? Rogue’s ghosts were coming back to haunt him big time.
“Rogue,” Bruiser growled through the phone.
“The description doesn’t match Owen, but it matches David Fletcher.” Rogue tried to swallow but his throat was dry. “Liam’s second.”
The brutal African lion shifter blessed by the sun was a recurring nightmare for Rogue long before the shifter bloodbath that got Mason killed. The guy always hated little Ethan. He hated what his father intended him to be. Instead of leaving Five Claws to David one day, he was going to leave it to flesh and blood, flesh and blood he tried to raise to be a clone of himself. David was part of that training, and he did everything short of killing Ethan. The only reason he never went all the way was because of his pledge to Liam. Lunas saved Ethan’s life back then. Sometimes he wished it hadn’t.
The pain of healing from even the smallest Solsis Burst was worse than any burn Rogue had ever had. It burned down into his bones. It made him feverish and demons played across his vision because a Solsis burn was also like a poison causing the afflicted to hallucinate. It was like the fires of Hell or what Rogue figured they must be like. David knew how to make someone suffer the worst physical pain. He was Liam’s muscle. The guy was practically a one-man army.
“I thought you killed everyone in Five Claws but me,” Rogue hissed into the phone.
“Nobody took a head count,” Bruiser replied. “As far as I know, yes, we did. All of them are dead but you.”
“That’s not good enough! You should have made sure. Just leaving one of them alive could mean so much trouble for you, for Trinity—especially if that someone really is David Fletcher. He’ll do his best to tear us all apart.”
Rogue’s heart was pounding a million miles a second. The thought of David being anywhere near Emily made him nauseous. He stared at her, pleading, looking into her dark brown eyes and wishing only for her safety. She reached for him, drew back, and then reached for him again. She wrapped her arm around his waist and simply held him like that.
“It’s going to be okay, Ethan,” she said. Her eyes were hardened now. She hated David for what he did to Mason. Ethan could see that clearly. “I’ll make sure of it.”
He would have laughed if circumstances had been different. And he felt like a piece of shit because he wanted her to make it so. He wanted her to keep him safe. He wanted to lean on her, to trust her, to give her everything. But he couldn’t. Just because his promise to Mason wasn’t stopping Emily from touching him now, didn’t mean it would ever allow them to be together. It would never allow Rogue to put her into the kind of trouble his weak heart would inevitably put her in. Rogue was never a good protector. Mason and Emily always protected him because he just didn’t have the fight most shifters had, but he had spent the last five years fixing that. He could protect people now, and he vowed to do just that for Emily. If David showed his fugly face here, Rogue would end him personally.
Maybe being soft was okay at times. Mason and Emily never thought there was anything wrong with him, but soft couldn’t help the people he loved when the rest of the world was as hard as diamonds. People used to cut right through him. Not anymore, not since he became Rogue.
“I left you alive, Ethan,” Bruiser said, and it made the skin on Rogue’s neck prickle. Bruiser never called him Ethan. “That was my choice. Trinity ordered me to kill everyone in Five Claws because negotiations went nowhere, and they were starting to do more than scare people into submission. Casualties like Mason’s were on the verge of becoming commonplace. They were going to out shifters to the world in the worst possible way. You know it’s bad when Trinity gives the kill order. I saw your scar. I knew you were Five Claws. But I also saw a victim.”
Rogue rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I was pathetic and weak, and you fucking pitied me. I get it, man.
“No, you don’t. We all have a choice even when we’ve pledged to something or someone bigger than us. I could have killed you and the job would have been done, but that kind of one-track mindset, to kill without asking questions, was what made me one of the best fucking mercenaries around. I left all that behind when I joined Trinity. I started seeing someone’s life as more than a target. And I stopped counting the numbers. I stopped seeing each kill as climbing the ranks. I asked questions. I saw you with Mason, making your own choice and not blindly following your Alpha. I saw your Alpha turn on you, and I thought mercy instead of death.”
“Tell that to everyone you’ve killed for Trinity. Maybe you should have interviewed them all first before you made your decision. You should have just left your fucking Trinity conscience behind and killed me too because if you had seen me with Five Claws in any other circumstance, you would have anyway,” Rogue shot back. Then he clicked his tongue behind his teeth and took a quick breath. “I’m sorry.” He knew that wasn’t fair to say to Bruiser. Those little mercies, what Trinity did for other shifters, was a step toward his redemption even when things got messy. It was the same for Rogue. Trinity wasn’t perfect, but it was good.
“Forget it.” Bruiser huffed.
“Emily’s here. She’s the woman with me right now. David sent Emily to me, and I don’t know why.”
There was a brief pause. “I’ll come out to Moonwatch and bring a squad ASAP. Will that make you feel better?”
“Much.”
Bruiser grunted. “Make me drop everything on a dime for you. Such a princess.”
“Thanks, Teddy.”
“Don’t fucking call me that if you want to keep your tail, cat,” Bruiser warned and hung up.
“You going to explain everything that just happened? I couldn’t hear your friend, but it seemed like a very interesting conversation. Trinity? Teddy? Is Trinity who you work for now? Do you actually like it there? Or do you hate it? And who’s Teddy? He sounds cute.” Emily said as she squeezed his waist just a little tighter. Maybe she was trying to keep him in place, hold him captive while getting answers.
Rogue slipped his phone back into one of his many pockets—one without a hole. He couldn’t stop the smile on his face, though. Bruiser was anything but cute, but his middle name was misleading. It did sound cute. A fucking teddy bear. Bruiser Teddy Barr. Rogue found out that little tidbit when he broke into Bruiser’s room at Trinity HQ one time. Bruiser nearly shaved him, and Rogue never did get an explanation for why his parents would name him something so embarrassing. Not that he needed one. Bruiser’s parents were psychopathic killers. Enough said.
“Emily,” Rogue began, steeling himself, “you’re staying here where it’s safe until I know what’s going on. When I’m sure you’re safe, you have to leave.”
“Are you trying to make me angry?”
“Maybe? If making you angry means you’ll leave, sure.” He felt that subtle burn in his cheek and knew it couldn’t be any other way. Even though he didn’t me
an those words, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how much he loved Emily. It didn’t matter how warm she was. It didn’t matter that she wanted to keep him safe. Rogue had a promise to keep. Her safety came first.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Emily said with fire in her eyes. “Kick me out of your house if you want to, but I’m staying in Moonwatch. I’ll become a servant to the wolves if I have to. You. Are. Mine. And I’m going to keep you.”
She really shouldn’t have said things like that. It made Rogue lose control, and lose control he did. He bent down and kissed her so fast, she let out a little peep of surprise. He drew back almost as quickly as their lips touched. It was the briefest brush of lips, the first time his lips had ever touched hers. The mark on his cheek roared to life, burning down to his jaw, reminding him that a stunt like that was fucking far out of the question, far from keeping his promise.
“Sorry,” Rogue said, flinching from the pain. “Dunno why I did that.”
Emily laced her fingers behind his neck. “I do.” She closed her pretty eyes and stepped into him, pressing her body against his.
Rogue’s heart stuttered. He felt her like this not long before, when they embraced back in the Alpha Den. He was ready to fall apart back there, too. He did his best to hide his desire, though he knew he couldn’t hide that from the wolves and their sensitive noses. He likely hadn’t hidden it from Emily either. He couldn’t hide it now. He was attracted to her, and his neglected dick was begging for some action.
“I haven’t let anyone touch me like this in years. No hugs, no nothing,” Emily whispered. Her voice had a sexy rasp that made him shiver. She was hinting at something more, much more. “Maybe two lonely people who love each other could give each other some company.”
She pressed into him harder, got on her tiptoes, and rolled her hips against him. She was shorter than him, but when she did that, she almost hit him just right, and from the little helpless gasp she made, she felt a similar jolt of electricity. He was in a strange state of pure pain and pleasure, and he didn’t know which one to listen to.