by Roxie Noir
“What happened to your brother?” Leah asked. “How did he die?”
Nathan laughed, and Leah jumped a little, pulling her finger away from his back. Nathan rolled back over, putting his arms behind his head, his whole torso exposed, his chiseled pecs and abs gleaming in the morning sun.
“Miles is fine,” he said. “He’s alpha of the pack in Montana.”
“Everyone talks about him like he’s dead,” Leah said, confused.
“He left,” Nathan said. “He really fucked some stuff up. I was angry with him for a long time, but we’ve been talking again lately. Brock doesn’t know.”
“What happened?”
“His mate happened,” Nathan said. “His high school sweetheart came back to town. The pack was really awful to her, and the former alpha tried to kidnap her, so Miles fought him for alpha, won, and then they drove off the next morning.”
Leah’s eyes went wide.
“He left the pack without an alpha?” she said, sounding incredulous.
That was nearly unforgivable — packs always had alphas. It was just the way things needed to be. A shifter pack was volatile and needed someone to be firmly in charge. Just leaving a pack like that was almost unthinkable.
“Well, first he challenged the alpha to a fight, which no one had done for fifty years, won, and then he split,” Nathan said. “He set the precedent that you won alpha by violence again. The former alpha was too hurt to be alpha again. There was a lot of fighting, and some bad shit went down, but then Brock won out and he’s been alpha since.”
“Wow,” breathed Leah.
“He did some crazy shit for his mate,” Nathan said, tugging on Leah’s arm, making her lie back down next to him. “You know, I think I get it now.”
Leah giggled and snuggled into his side, careful not to disturb the blanket covering his lower half.
Then, her stomach growled.
“Oops,” Leah said.
“Breakfast?” Nathan asked. “There’s a diner that’s supposed to be good.”
“Sounds perfect,” Leah answered.
Once they got there, Leah realized that she’d barely eaten in twenty-four hours — she’d been so busy making food for everyone else at the barbecue that she hadn’t eaten anything herself.
When they were finished wolfing down bacon and sausage and pancakes, they held hands on the table.
“You guys on your honeymoon?” the waitress asked as she left the check.
Leah laughed.
“Not yet,” she said.
This is what it feels like to be part of a couple in public, she realized. You can hold hands and everyone knows you’re together.
She sneaked a look at Nathan as he paid the check.
He’s mine, she reminded herself. Mine, not anybody else’s.
She wanted to shout it from the rooftops.
They walked back into the casino holding hands, Leah practically humming with happiness.
Then she saw him.
His back was to her, but she knew exactly who it was, facing away from the door, glowering at the casino room in a button-down long-sleeved shirt and slacks.
For a second, Leah’s heart froze in her chest.
But then, she was furious. How could he follow her here, after she’d left him? It was perfectly clear that she wasn’t interested in him. Or at least she’d thought it had been.
She left Nathan behind and walked up to Ian, her fury making her brave. Besides, he couldn’t do anything here in a room absolutely full of humans.
“What are you doing here?” she shouted, and he turned around.
Then he smiled a very unpleasant smile.
“There you are,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right,” she said. “How did you find us?”
His eyebrows went up in mock surprise.
“You’re my bride-to-be,” he said. “I would go to any lengths to find you when you’ve been stolen from me.”
Leah snorted and crossed her arms.
“You know perfectly well I haven’t been stolen,” she said. Nathan came up behind her and put one protective hand on her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she told him, taking a step toward Ian.
“I’m here because I want to be here,” she told Ian.
“You need to come home with me,” Ian said. He took a step forward and now he was towering over her, threateningly. “Your father is furious. I’m sure you’ve guessed that, though. But we could forgive some of what you’ve done if you just come back with me, right now, even though you’ve been—” he looked at Nathan, disgust on his face, “—spoiled.”
Leah slapped him. She didn’t mean to, but it just burst out of her.
“Don’t you dare,” she said. She felt dangerous and wild, her own bear tearing at her skin to be let out.
Stay down, she told herself. There’s humans everywhere.
“Nathan is twice the man you’ll ever be.”
“Carson,” Ian said. “Come over here.”
Suddenly someone else stepped forward, and Leah looked at him.
Then she gasped. It was her cousin, only his face was broken and bruised almost beyond recognition. Both his eyes were swollen nearly shut, his lip was puffy and cracked, and his nose was bent.
“Who did this to you, Carson?” Ian asked.
Carson didn’t speak, just pointed at Nathan.
By now, a small crowd of humans was gathering around the four of them.
“It’s not true,” Nathan said.
“You didn’t take him out into the woods yesterday morning to teach him a lesson on Brock’s order?” Ian said. His voice sounded slimy, somehow, and just listening to him made Leah’s skin crawl.
Nathan’s gaze flicked to Leah, uncertainly.
“I did,” he said. “But I didn’t beat him up. I’m done with that. I told Brock. We drove out there, but I couldn’t do it, so I drove him back toward town. I made him walk half a mile with a hangover is all.”
“So he beat himself up,” Ian said.
“I don’t know who beat him up,” Nathan said, holding his palms in the air. “I swear it wasn’t me.”
Leah turned and gave him a long, searching look.
He’s done a lot of bad things, she thought. What’s one more?
His eyes turned pleading, and something inside her snapped. He hadn’t done this.
“Get out,” she said to Ian. “I’m not coming with you, because Nathan and I are getting married. You probably beat Carson up yourself.”
“Don’t make me take you,” said Ian, his voice getting dangerously quiet. “If you don’t think I’ll shift right here and take you with me back to Fjords, you’re very wrong.”
Leah stepped forward until they were almost touching.
“I dare you to shift,” she said. “Shift in a room full of Alaskans. See what they do when there’s suddenly a grizzly bear in here. I can see three forty-fives just from where I’m standing, and that’s only the guns that would get through a grizzly’s skull. I’d bet good money that there’s a rifle behind the front desk, too.”
Ian paused, his face moving almost imperceptibly.
Then he glanced around nervously, as if trying to find the guns.
Finally, he snapped his head around.
“Carson, come on,” he said.
Then he stormed off the casino floor, headed to the big glass doors that led to the outside, but when he reached the final bank of slot machines, he turned around.
“Nathan,” he shouted, much louder this time. “You told her about Kaitlyn, right?”
“Keep walking,” Leah shouted, but as soon as he turned his back to her, she glanced nervously at Nathan.
Who was Kaitlyn?
Last night he’d told her that he’d been with dozens of women, but he’d also sworn up and down that those women didn’t mean anything to him. He hadn’t mentioned a Kaitlyn, though, and now Leah felt a stab of jealousy, right below her breastbone.
&
nbsp; The big doors open, and Ian and Carson finally left the casino.
Leah exhaled, and suddenly realized that her hands and knees were shaking, but Nathan caught her up in an embrace.
Around her, the humans started applauding, and Leah looked at them all, baffled.
“Why are they clapping?” she asked.
Nathan kissed the top of her head.
“I love you,” he murmured.
Even though she was in Nathan’s arms, she felt uneasy about him for the first time.
23
Nathan
Even as they walked away from the knot of humans on the casino floor, holding hands, Nathan could feel something wrong right away. Leah was suddenly distant, her mind somewhere else rather than wholly right there with him.
“I’m impressed that you spotted those guns,” he said, once they were in the elevator.
“I didn’t,” she said, her voice still sounding like it was coming from far away.
He had to bring up Kaitlyn, Nathan thought. God damn it, I was going to tell her.
He watched the light in the elevator click on for the third floor.
Maybe, he thought.
He didn’t want to tell Leah. He wanted to bury that part of himself forever, forget about the Nathan who could do something like that. A small, possibly stupid, part of himself thought that if he just never told anyone about Kaitlyn again then the nightmares would go away, and it would be like he’d never done it.
Of course not. Of course it couldn’t work that way, and of course that asshole Ian would use her to try to ruin the one truly good thing that Nathan had in his life right now. It was Kaitlyn who’d gotten him here, in a way; before her, he’d had morals, he thought, as questionable as they might have been.
It was only after Kaitlyn that he’d turned into someone who’d do whatever Brock wanted, no questions asked. It was only after Kaitlyn that the other members of the North Star pack started avoiding eye contact with him, started being extra-polite when they had to interact.
The elevator doors opened, and silently, Leah and Nathan walked to their hotel room. He opened the door and they both stepped inside, and then stopped, in the slight space between the beds and the TV.
Leah opened her mouth, but Nathan stopped her.
“Sit down,” he said. “It’s easier if you’re sitting down.”
Without a word, she sat in the arm chair in the room, but Nathan paced in front of her. Four steps and turn. Four steps and turn.
“Well?” Leah finally asked once she got tired enough of waiting. “Were you in love with her? Engaged? Married? Secret love child?”
Nathan just shook his head, then ran both hands through his hair. He took a deep breath.
“Worse,” he said.
Leah’s face didn’t move.
“It happened five years ago,” he said, slowly. “Well. Not really. It starts when Brock became alpha, after everything that happened. We’d always been best friends, and when he became alpha, I more or less became his enforcer.”
He rubbed his hands together and started pacing again.
“And, you know, at first it wasn’t a big deal. I’d go threaten people, tell them that they needed to step up, get their kids to stop dating humans, that sort of thing. It was just my job to look like I could hurt people, and since my brother had won alpha in a duel, I kind of got a reputation as someone you don’t fuck with. Plus, you know, I was this bachelor, I rode a motorcycle and got laid a bunch, so people weren’t really sure about me.”
He cracked his knuckles, not sure how to get into the next part.
“It got worse,” he said, slowly. “Brock started asking me to rough people up, threaten them with guns, that sort of thing. You ever wonder why that house is empty that your family is staying in?”
Leah didn’t answer, just looked at him with her big saucer eyes, waiting.
“I made the people who lived there move,” Nathan said. “Brock asked me to. There was this minor rebellion in the pack, and they wanted someone else to be the leader, so I got sent over there at midnight. I think I broke the father’s nose, but they left.”
Nathan sat on the bed, the flimsy mattress sinking under his weight.
“They had kids,” he said, shaking his head, talking to the floor. “The thing I remember is, as they were driving away, the little girl had her teddy bear in the back seat and she just looked right at me, and she was so sad.”
Leah swallowed, hard.
“Was that Kaitlyn?”
Nathan just shook his head. He didn’t even know where the start the story about Kaitlyn. There was no good part of it, no way to ease into the terrible thing he’d done.
“The thing that Brock hates the most is intermarriage,” he said. He was slumped, with his elbows on his knees, examining his hands. “Shifters marrying humans. He absolutely hates it, and he thinks that shifters who try to intermarry should be killed, the humans run off, the whole thing. He says it dilutes our blood, renders strong bears weak, you know.”
Leah just nodded.
“My father too,” she said.
“There was this kid in the pack named Boone,” Nathan said, slowly. “He was fifteen, and he was dating a human girl from town. Him and his friends thought that the pack didn’t know, but of course we did. He wasn’t very good at hiding it.”
He rubbed his palms together, desperately not wanting to say the next part.
You have to, he told himself. She deserves to know.
It would be easier to tell Leah that he’d been in love before, even been married. A thousand times easier.
“Brock wanted me to teach this kid a lesson,” he said. “One Friday night, we found out that him and this girl and two of his friends were going to the movies in town. So we followed them, and when they came out, we were going to talk to them. Give them a good scare, that kind of thing.”
Nathan felt almost nauseous, and he squeezed his eyes shut, wishing that he could just say it and not have to relive it at the same time.
“This human girl mouthed off to me,” he said. “Nobody did that. Not by then, when I had the reputation. And for a second, I just saw red. Who the fuck did she think she was, you know?”
He flexed his hands into fists.
“So I slapped her,” he said. “I backhanded her right across the face, but I’d forgotten how fragile humans are. She just crumpled, and as she fell her head hit the bumper of the car behind her with this awful crack and then she just stopped moving. I barely even noticed right then, I was so hopped up on nerves and adrenaline, and we grabbed the three shifter kids and took them to an empty lot to teach them a lesson.”
“What about her?”
“We left her.”
Nathan looked up and could only see Leah flex her jaw, siting rigidly in that chair, her mouth a hard line.
She must hate me, he thought. Why wouldn’t she?
“The three kids we beat up pretty bad,” he said. “Brock did, really. He said he just wanted to teach them a lesson, but he was really hard on them, and then we drove away. He swore up and down that they’d show up in town the next day, ready to toe the line, be better shifters and all that.”
Nathan swallowed. He couldn’t look at Leah. Unshed tears burned behind his eyes.
“The shifter kids disappeared. The girl was in a coma for a week.” Nathan’s chest tightened. “She never woke up.”
He took a deep, deep breath and forced himself to look up at Leah, bracing himself for what he might see. As far as he was concerned, she’d have every right to storm out of the hotel room and never see him again.
“That was Kaitlyn,” he said. “She was fifteen.”
Leah was crying, silently, tears running down her face. She looked out the window at the parking lot, and then finally at Nathan.
“What happened to the shifters?” she asked, quietly.
“They ran off into the woods,” said Nathan.
“Are they dead?”
Nathan paused.
“Maybe they went somewhere else,” Leah said.
“I wouldn’t blame them.”
“What were their names?”
“Jake was the oldest,” he said. “Boone had the girlfriend, and Coleman was just along for the ride.”
Leah was quiet for a long, long time, and Nathan felt all the words he wanted to say gnawing at him from the inside, until finally, he spoke.
“I have nightmares about it still,” he said. “But I feel like I’m broken, Leah, and the only thing that’s any good around here is you. I don’t want to be this person that I became, and I feel like, around you, I’m not. I’m the guy I was before Kaitlyn, before my brother left and Brock became alpha.”
When Leah finally spoke, she spoke slowly, her words deliberate.
“Could you give me twenty minutes?” she asked, very politely. “I need a little time to think.”
“Sure, of course,” Nathan said, standing quickly from the bed. He walked toward the door, Leah sitting still, and then turned when he was almost there.
“If you don’t want to marry me I understand,” he said, the words rushing out of him. “I’ll tell them that I kidnapped you or something, that it’s not your fault you’re here with me. Or I’ll give you money and put you on a bus to Seattle.”
He looked at her one more time, eyes pleading.
“Leah, I’m at your mercy,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”
Then he left the room.
He gave her half an hour, more time than she’d asked for. At first, he went downstairs and tried to play blackjack, but he couldn’t even concentrate enough to add two numbers together. Even the slot machines were too hard for him just then — all the big noises and bright lights, when all he wanted to do was crawl into a hole and freeze time for a little while.
Nathan ended up getting a club soda at the bar. What he really wanted was whiskey, but he made himself stay sober.
You can drink after she ends it, he told himself. He checked the time on his phone.
Just ten more minutes, and then you can get as drunk as you want. Hit on every woman in the place, fuck three of ‘em at once.