by Penny Alley
“I killed Jax,” Neoma said again, this time loud enough to carry over the burning fire, the wailing sirens and the panicked shouts of the bucket brigade struggling to keep the bonfire of the barracks from spreading.
“It’s okay,” Gabe said, bending to hook his arm around her. “I’ve got you.” It was the wounded leaning on the wounded, but using on the car, he still managed to pull her to her feet. “It’ll be okay.”
But it wouldn’t, and she knew that better than anyone. She’d seen what he was capable of. She’d lived it. She saw it every night in her dreams and she’d feared it, for so long now that she barely recognized herself. But no longer.
She disentangled herself from Gabe, clutching at her side as she felt her way down the car, her eyes, nose and throat all burning from the blackened plumes gushing into the garage. The fire within the house was roaring, licking at the kitchen door like a living thing. They couldn’t afford to linger much longer; it wasn’t safe, but Neoma kept going. One shaky step after another, she’d have walked right up to Deacon had Gabe not caught her shoulder, stopping her before she got too close. And perhaps that was best. There was something lurking in the back of those grandfatherly eyes, so angry, so deceptively gentle, that begged her come just a little closer still.
“Scotty’s alive,” she told him, the only knife she had to wield against him. “My son is still alive, but yours…I killed your son. His body is lying on your bedroom floor. I want you to know, I watched him bleed out until he couldn’t tell me how much he hated you, not one gasp more.”
If that upset him, Deacon didn’t show it.
“I did that,” Neoma growled. “Me. Your blood really is in me. But without Jax, now that means even more, doesn’t it?” She took careful aim before she stabbed, twisting her words in the hopes she might find a vein that hurt. “The boy you hate so much, the son of a ‘traitor’—” she spat, “—is now the last surviving male of your line. He’s going to grow up. I’m going to raise him to be the lion you most fear. And if it takes the rest of my life, I’m going to make sure he never forgives you for what you’ve done.”
Shaking, Neoma held his unblinking stare until Gabe took her arm, gently pulling her back to him. “But until the day you die,” he added, drawing Deacon’s icy gaze. “Then, I am going to make sure he never remembers one goddamned thing about you.”
They could fight about that part later. Her knees threatening to buckle as she turned, Neoma let Gabe put her into the back of Deacon’s car. All she wanted now was this man and this place so far in the rearview mirror that she never saw either of them again.
“Sounds good to me,” Colton added.
“Sounds like a colossal error in judgement,” Sebastian corrected, but nevertheless handed the keys of the car to his brother. “Fortunately, I’ve got my own little measure of security.” He reached across his brother to smack Joela’s jean-clad hip. “You’re a big believer in the old ways…at least when it suits you. So, I’m taking your daughter. Consider her collateral, ensuring your future good behavior. If you or any of your soldiers set foot anywhere near Hollow Hills, I will personally send her back to you one small piece at a time.”
“Your line is finished,” Colton told him. “Stay here. Squat behind the walls of your little fiefdom, surrounded by the chevolak you despise, or leave. I really don’t care. But don’t let me see you again, Alpha. I’ll not let you go a second time.”
The raging fire had consumed the first barrack, and despite the frantic efforts of the water brigade, the flames had spread to the roof of a nearby apartment. The wail of emergency vehicles was so close now she could see the glow of flashing lights coming up the street.
“Mind if we borrow your car?” Colton asked, though he didn’t bother waiting for an answer. With Colton driving and Angus riding shotgun, his brother’s rifle lying across his lap, Gabe sat in the back with Neoma and Sebastian, who dumped Joela on the floor and kept her there, kneeling in forced submission with his hand on the back of her neck and her furious defiance burning uselessly into the seat cushion beneath her nose.
They passed right by the guard shack just seconds before the first fire engine, followed by two first-response vehicles and a long line of police cars, arrived. Standing in his smoking garage, Deacon watched them go, unflinching while the chevolak invaded his compound, something no chevolak had ever been allowed to do before. He watched them and he never looked away once. And Neoma knew that, because for as long as she could see him through the rear window of the car, she refused to look away either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sebastian’s Subaru was gone by the time they made it back to the graffiti-stricken police station where they’d left it. All that remained of it was a dry patch of pavement where it had been parked.
“Son of a bitch,” Sebastian muttered. “I knew it. I fucking knew it. I hate this fucking town and everybody in it.”
“Want to file a police report?” Colton asked, ignoring the look he shot him through the rearview mirror as he gestured to the precinct across the street. “We’re right here.”
“Oh yeah,” Sebastian sarcastically replied. “‘Excuse me, officer. Pay no attention to the four naked men and one severely injured naked woman—’”
“Plus the one we kidnapped,” Gabe interrupted.
“Also in a car we don’t own,” Colton said helpfully. “Although it is registered to that compound which is on fire not two miles away.”
“We got a few sticks of dynamite left,” Angus added, digging into the black duffel bag at his feet.
“‘—I’d like to report my car stolen!’” Sebastian ended, half-shouting at all of them. He threw himself against the back of his seat, swearing under his breath. “Take me home, damn it.”
Laughing, Colton did.
They abandoned Deacon’s luxury car on the same off-road where they’d stashed Ian and Scotty. It was Sebastian’s idea to leave a lasting calling card, as it were, by pissing all over the interior. It was Gabe’s to shift the vehicle into neutral and roll it off the mountain road down into a shallow gully. It hit at least three trees on its way to the bottom, where the heavy vegetation instantly swallowed it from sight.
“Feel better?” Sebastian asked, as all five men stood watching the thin line of smoke from the final crash dissipate on the wind. It was the only visible clue to the car’s whereabouts and even that vanished.
Gabe shook his head. “Not really.” It was a serious flaw in his character, he suspected, but the only thing that would have made him feel better just then would have been if Deacon had been in the car while it was going down.
And maybe hit a few more trees…
Before exploding…
“We got them back,” Sebastian told him. “Both of them. They’re still alive and we’re all going home. That’s more than I thought we’d do, so what more can you ask for?”
He wanted to see Scotty doing something other than sitting in his mother’s lap and sucking his thumb. But Gabe didn’t say that.
He wanted to see Neoma without all those shallow gashes slicing down her back and around her left side. Gabe didn’t say that either. At least she was talking. Every few minutes, soft words of comfort whispered into her son’s ear as she rocked and stroked him. And those cuts could have been worse. They could have pierced between her ribs instead of glancing along the bone, or punctured internal organs instead of slicing skin and meat. She needed stitches. A first aid kit out of Angus’s black bag yielded duct tape. Camouflage patterned. Of course.
It could have been a whole lot worse. And in one particular way, it was.
Gabe turned, his gaze pulled against his will to where Neoma sat waiting, wrapped in bloody camouflage-colored duct tape on a moss-covered chunk of rotting tree trunk. Scotty asleep in her lap, she rocked him. She never once looked up at Gabe but, as if she knew he was watching, she dropped her eyes and eventually turned her face away. As if she were ashamed. As if she believed he should also be ashamed. Of her?
Because of Jax? Not a chance. As soon as he got her home, as soon as Scotty was put to bed and Neoma’s worst injuries were stitched, he’d hash it out with her. Nothing that had happened tonight was her fault, and he wasn’t about to let her shoulder the blame for it. Any of it. But if that wasn’t the reason behind this strange sense of shame he kept detecting, then he didn’t know what it could be. Because the only thing he could think of that might be causing it, was the one thing Neoma couldn’t possibly yet know. It would be another week at least before she’d detect the changes in herself.
It was so faint, Gabe had missed the subtleness of it back in Deacon’s garage. With all that smoke in the air, it wasn’t until they were all in the car, speeding past that long line of flashing police cars, ambulance and fire trucks, with Scotty cradled on her lap and Neoma on his, and with her blood seeping through his fingers because his hand was all that he had to staunch the flow…that was when he noticed her scent was different. She was pregnant. He knew it with all the same certainty that he also knew the volka pup growing inside her wasn’t his.
He thought back to the first moment when he’d seen her, on the Ridge before the Bridal Hunt. Her head bowed in what he’d once thought had been conspiracy with Wayman and Deacon, but which he now knew had been the negotiations for her rape. Neoma was a low wolf. She might not have uttered the words ‘no’, ‘stop’ or ‘I don’t want to’, but that didn’t matter. It had been rape just the same. Had Gabe known what he did now, the events of that night (not to mention the next morning, and every night and morning between then and now)—it would all have passed quite differently.
He had so many regrets. He wished he’d accepted his Claim with dignity and grace, and a lot less anger right from the start. He wished he’d made her feel as if she’d had an ally in Hollow Hills. He wished he knew what to do or say right now to take that look of shame off her face and ensure it never returned. But it would return. Just as soon as she realized she was pregnant and did the math, that look would come back with a vengeance and he would have to deal with it all over again.
“It’ll be dawn soon,” Colton observed, standing just to Gabe’s left. “We should get going.”
“I’ll drive,” Angus said, heading toward the vehicle. “It’ll be the only leg room I get in this tiny-ass clown car.”
“I’ll check on our…guest,” Ian volunteered, a wry twist of his mouth betraying his distaste.
Heaving a sigh, Colton nodded. “I’ll go with you. No time like the present to let her know the new rules.”
Gabe was so preoccupied with his own worries, before he knew it, it was just him and Sebastian standing at the edge of the gully, staring in at a car they couldn’t see long after the smoke was gone.
“Why her?” Gabe asked, suddenly so damned resentful of Joela’s existance that it was all he could do not to throw her into the gully after her father’s car. It felt a little déjà vu, this automatic dislike toward Deacon’s other daughter and for no more reason than because of who and what she was. It was definitely a serious character failing. One of these days, he probably ought to work on it. “What the hell are you going to do with her?”
“Insurance.” Shrugging, Sebastian glanced back, his disinterested gaze flicking over her before returning to Gabe. “An alpha has to have a Bride, right?”
“You’re not the alpha,” Gabe said, bristling on Colton’s behalf. “You keep saying you don’t want the job—”
“I don’t,” the eldest McQueen replied. “But it wouldn’t do to let you boys get too comfortable with yourselves, now would it?” Turning, he started to walk away, but then thought better of it. “All right. I answered your question, now you answer one of mine.” His head tipped in curiosity. “Does it matter?”
Gabe shook his head, not following. He glanced at Joela—having cut her from the tree, Colton and Ian were escorting her to the car. Though she wasn’t resisting, they held her arms the whole way.
“I’m not talking about her.” With a nod, Sebastian directed Gabe’s attention back to the log where Neoma still sat, rocking Scotty while he slept. “Does it matter…about her?”
Gabe’s chest tightened. So did his fists. He’d helped with the rescue, but that didn’t automatically make them best friends for life. He had no intention of talking to Sebastian Mc-fucking-Queen about something as deeply personal as his family.
His. Gabe felt the emotion of that thump inside his chest like a physical blow. He couldn’t breathe.
Edging closer, Sebastian looked at Gabe—looked into him—as if he were reading something inside of Gabe that he had no business being able to see. “You forget, Michaelson, I was at the Hunt, too. I can smell the difference between then and now.”
“Back off,” Gabe growled, but it wasn’t Sebastian’s close physical proximity that he was objecting to. Judging by that flicker of amused calculation dancing in the back of the eldest McQueen’s eyes, he knew it too.
“Obedience above all,” Sebastian pressed, softly goading, his knowing gaze boring so deep, Gabe almost couldn’t hold the stare. “That’s what her paints said. I remember that. I remember the way she smelled too, the scent that flavored each breath as we ran in the wind just behind her. It was in my nose for days.”
All Gabe could remember of that run was the way she’d felt, tense and trembling when he’d landed on her, when his teeth had snapped onto the scruff of her neck, the way it had felt so damned perfect and right in that instant before he realized he’d made a mistake. Before he’d realized Maya was lost to him. Before he’d realized he’d Claimed the enemy.
He’d thrown rocks at her.
“What’s it been, Michaelson?” Sebastian asked. “Seven days now? Eight? If it were me, Deacon’s daughter or not, I’d have plowed her belly the night I Claimed her, had I Claimed her. But you’re not me…are you? And where I would not waste so much as a second wondering the paternity of the reason behind the change in her scent, you just can’t help yourself. So think about it, and I’ll ask once more: Does it matter?”
Sebastian held him captive with his burrowing stare for only a minute before seeming to find his answer, either in the silence that followed or perhaps the surge of protectiveness that launched through Gabe’s gut, strangling his heart, choking up his throat until each hard breath felt as if it were being sucked through a filter of stones. It brought the brutality of his inner wolf shining bright into his eyes. He didn’t need a mirror to know it was there. After so many years, Gabe could feel it. The savage urge to shelter and defend, to keep those dearest to him safe at all costs. Gabe didn’t move; that maddeningly smug smirk curving his mouth, Sebastian turned and left him there without another word.
Refusing to get into the very back of the car, Joela had begun to fight her captors, jerking her bound arms out of Ian’s, spitting into Colton’s face before attempting to run. Sebastian had her within steps and when she bared her teeth at him, he fisted a handful of her long blonde hair and yanked her head back to expose the vulnerable lines of her pale throat. There was no gentleness in his hand. Gabe imagined there would be no gentleness in the choice he now growled against her ear, but he knew submission when he saw it—even when that submission was given as grudgingly and angrily as Joela did.
Knocking her feet out from under her, Sebastian shoved her to the ground and rubbed her nose in the humiliation of his authority. He made her crawl on all fours back to the car. Forcing her up into the narrow cargo space in the very back, he left her sitting against one wheel wall while he reclined against the other. What she said to him before Colton shut the door, Gabe couldn’t hear, but it was a brief exchange that ended when Sebastian put his foot on the side of her neck and stepped, forcing her face flat up against the window.
Gabe felt no pity for her. If she was responsible for even the smallest of Neoma’s injuries, then a little humiliation was the least that she deserved.
“Sun’s coming up!” Angus bellowed from the driver’s seat. “Let’s go!”
&nbs
p; Colton glanced back at Gabe before sliding into the front passenger seat.
In the mountain distance, the bright of impending daylight colored the horizon a soft shade of yellowish-orange. They couldn’t afford to linger here. If he didn’t die in his burning house and if he thought he could catch them in the mountains, Deacon would send soldiers scattering into the hills. They had to get out of Scullamy territory and back into their own before having Joela ceased to matter.
Though he knew she was aware of him, Neoma did not look up when Gabe approached her. He thought she flinched though, and he was surprised at how much that hurt. Maybe this wasn’t shame. Maybe she thought he was angry, or disappointed somehow? Did she think it diminished her in some way because she had killed?
Didn’t she know he’d have done as much, if not worse, to get her back again?
He had so much to make up for. He hardly knew the right way to begin, but he knew how he wanted to.
As if they had all the time in the world, Gabe straddled the fallen log and sat behind her. Careful of her injuries, he wrapped his arms around her and Scotty both, pulling her small, tense body back into the cradle of his and closing those canyon-wide inches that divided them.
Does it matter? Sebastian had asked.
He stroked his hand through Scotty’s hair and couldn’t have cared any less that they shared no bloodties. Some of that tension eased when he kissed the back of her nape.
Does it matter?
He splayed his fingers over her womb, and knew. In nine months’ time, she would birth a pup that was half-Scullamy and half-Scruff, and she would probably do it apologizing the whole damn time. But he also knew, male or female, when that babe gazed up at him, be it through Deacon-blue eyes or Wayman-gray, it would be his as well. To guide and to guard. To cherish and protect, the way Neoma was his. And if it took nine months or the rest of his life, he would find a way to make her believe that.
His tender nuzzle upon her neck and shoulder became a gentle nip. He let her feel his teeth, his unmistakable Claiming telling her without words just how much he wanted her. That it took the edge off her trembling said everything he needed to hear about how she felt toward him.