by Alison Paige
She held up a hand, as though she could ward off Gray’s outrage. “I turned him. I needed someone, Gray, and you were too busy running around the woods with little Red Riding Hood there to do the job.”
A menacing growl vibrated through Gray’s chest and he edged forward. It was an excuse and they both knew it. The guy was no good for her. He could feel it.
“He left his wife,” Lynn said in a rush.
“Before or after you made it impossible for him to stay with her?” Gray asked, teeth clenched.
“What difference does it make? He’s mine,” she said. “You told me to find a mate. He’s the one. He’s always been the one.”
“He’s a cheat. He’s weak willed. And he smells like betrayal.” Gray looked at his sister-in-law, a woman he’d sworn to protect—his family. “He’s not good enough, Lynn. He’ll hurt you and the pieces he’ll leave behind won’t be big enough to put back together.”
“No. It doesn’t always end that way, Gray.” Joy moved between him and Lynn. “I know Donna’s death destroyed a big part of you, but that doesn’t make it a foregone conclusion. Sometimes love feels good.”
Gray blanched at that, snapped his mouth shut. Did they really think his objections about Shawn were some sort of transference of his own hang-ups? They weren’t.
Gray exhaled. None of them understood. Love was a fleeting untrustworthy emotion, never the same from one day to the next, twisting into something unrecognizable from where it’d begun. He knew better than anyone you can’t base life decisions on love.
“It’s not like I’m a stranger.” Shawn edged forward, hand out as though he could wipe the tension and misunderstanding from the air. “I mean, I’ve known Lynn for years now, and the kids, well, I’m their father. She’s told me everything about your family. Explained how it works. I…I love her.”
Gray eyed the man. He looked older than Lynn by at least three decades, but Gray knew the difference was a lot less than that. “What about your other family? Your other kids?”
“When I learn enough control, I’ll work out a custody arrangement with my ex. I didn’t leave because Lynn made me one of you. I left because I realized I love her. I’ve been miserable without her all these years.”
Gray scoffed. What better proof did he need that the guy wasn’t good enough than a statement like that? “Made by a beta. He’ll never be strong enough to make a challenge.”
“I know,” Lynn said. “I don’t care. I just want…him.”
“If you love him, if you’d already gone and claimed him as your mate, why have you been pushing so hard for me to take up the role?”
Lynn blushed, her cheeks bright red, and looked away. She shrugged. “Habit maybe. I’ve been angry with you so long it’s hard to know how not to be. I don’t know. I didn’t want you to find out about Shawn too soon. I knew what you’d do, knew you’d kill him before he was strong enough to defend himself.”
“I still might.”
She looked at him, her expression hard. “And I wanted you to pay. All those years alone, all the heartache. I just…I just couldn’t let the anger go.”
“And now?” Gray asked.
“Obviously I’ve still got some things to work through where you’re concerned. It’s taking some time, but Shawn’s helping me put it behind me. With his help I’ll get there. I know it. Let me have him, please, Gray.”
Gray huffed, too close to a wolf’s snort. “It’s done. He’s pack or he dies. Show him his place, or I will.” He headed for the closest door, his hand tight around Maizie’s, tugging her away as fast as he could.
He didn’t care anymore, about Lynn and her poor taste in men, about Rick and his drive to lead the pack. He didn’t care about any of it.
All he cared about was getting Maizie away from any possible threat, getting her someplace safe. He led her up the stairs into the grand foyer, with its black marble floor and grand sweeping staircase. And no werewolves.
“Mr. Lupo.” Annette breezed in from his home office to the left, her legs carrying her petite body faster than a person twice as tall. “I didn’t realize you were back.”
She held her ever-present notepad with a letter clipped to its envelope on top. She pushed at her brown-framed glasses, too big for her small face, but somehow fitting with her upswept hair, buttoned-up shirt and fitted skirt. Her gaze shifted to Maizie. The corners of her thin lips swept to a pretty smile. “Ms. Hood. You’re here. How wonderful. Does this mean—”
“What is it, Annette?” He recognized that glint in her eye. She had an inconvenient tendency to romanticize things when it came to Gray. It wasn’t hard to imagine the leaps she’d make having seen him and Maizie walking hand-in-hand.
“Yes. Of course, Mr. Lupo. Sorry.” Annette stiffened, all business. She read from her notepad. “You received the information you’ve been waiting for from Judge Woodsmen.”
“Thank you. Leave it on your desk and I’ll get to it later.” Damn, he hoped he wouldn’t need that information.
“Yes, sir. Also, Ms. Pi called from the bakery, for Ms. Hood. She said, and I quote, ‘Smoky Joe finally kicked the bucket and took a chunk of firewall sheeting, the Pearlman bar-mitzvah cake and half the dirty-girl pastries for the Richmen bachelorette party with him.’”
Maizie whispered an oath then moved to Annette. She took her hands, leaning close. “Annette, is it? You have to get me out of…” She glanced back at Gray. “I mean, I need to get to my shop. Help me get out of here. Please. No. Wait. My shoes.”
“Thank you, Annette,” Gray said, stepping beside Maizie. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, jerked her close. “I’ll make sure Ms. Hood makes it out of the forest. Personally.”
Chapter Seven
“It belonged to Maizie’s mother,” Gray said.
“Lilly’s?”
“Found it a few weeks after the accident.” He placed the gold quarter-sized locket in Granny’s hand. “The clasp was broken. I had it cleaned and repaired.”
Granny’s sad blue eyes peered at him beneath the hood of her lids. “You kept it all this time?”
Gray shifted his focus out the glass doors to the open backyard of the Green Acres Nursing Home. His face warmed. “I’m not sure why I didn’t return it sooner. Maybe because there was nothing left of Donna’s to keep. Maybe because Riddly and Lilly had taken something of mine and I wanted to take something of theirs. Foolish. I don’t know.”
Granny reached her withered hand over to his. He could feel her tremors, age keeping her constantly off balance, unsteady. “You needed it more than us. Maizie was too young for a piece like this and I…I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.”
“Thank you, Ester.” It was a poor excuse, but he’d take it. “You have it now and I believe you’ll find the photos inside quite useful.”
Granny looked to the locket, her thin fingers working its tight seal. Her thumbnail wedged between the oval halves and the locket popped open. Seconds passed as her mind processed the images and a bright smile blossomed across her face.
Gray knew what she saw. He’d stared at the photo of the young Hood family and the one opposite of Riddly holding an infant Maizie a million times over the years. Such a photo didn’t exist of his family. He and Donna never discussed children. Ironically, he hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted a photo like that until the possibility of it was taken away beneath the crush of an SUV.
Gray forced his thoughts from old dreams and wishes. “Maizie mentioned you’d had a visitor. Someone pretending to be Riddly.”
Granny’s cheeks flushed apple red, a bashful smile flickering across her thin lips. “Oh, I know Riddly wouldn’t want me to sell my little cottage. Not without a good reason. It was all my imagination. My mind plays tricks on me sometimes, y’know.”
“I don’t believe it was your mind playing tricks this time, Ester. I think someone is trying to take advantage, using whatever tactics he can, to get his hands on your property. And I’m fairly confident I know
who’s behind it.”
The news brought a flash of relief to her eyes. An instant later resentment took its place. “Advantage, you say? Uhmph. We’ll see about that. The next time that ol’ dog comes around, I’ll…” Her pledge died on the air, her gaze flicking to Gray.
He knew her thoughts without hearing them. She’d been tricked once, believing her deceased son was visiting, issuing orders, how would she know differently next time?
Gray cupped his hands around hers, still holding the open locket. “This will help. Wear Lilly’s locket. Look at the pictures next time someone calls himself Riddly. Remember where it was found. That Riddly is gone. That Lilly and Donna are gone. Cadwick may resemble your son, but not enough to stand up to his photograph, or those kinds of potent memories.”
He couldn’t stay with Granny 24/7 and trying to ban Cadwick from the premises wouldn’t work any better than Maizie’s attempt had. Gray had used his werewolf-enhanced charm and familiarity with the staff to skirt around Maizie’s restricted-visitors list, but Cadwick was a master at zeroing in on a person’s pay-off point. He’d locate the weakest link in security and buy his way in.
No. Granny would have to use her mind and wits to protect herself. The locket would help.
“You never got to bury your wife, did you?”
Granny’s question caught him utterly by surprise. He stuttered. His mind shifting gears so fast he didn’t have time to throw up the barriers that would keep the most painful of the memories at bay.
“No. I…she… No. Donna died before she could shift back to human form. They disposed of her body as they would any roadkill.” He winced at the term, his heart pinching.
“You couldn’t request they leave her with you? The accident happened on your land.”
Gray shook his head. If only it’d been that easy. If only he’d been able to think clearly, quickly, maybe he could’ve come up with a way. “Taking the…carcass…is procedure. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t seem strange. I had to think of the pack. Protect the rest from curiosity or suspicion.”
Gray had given permission to the Hood family alone to use the shortcut through his forest from the housing subdivision on one side to the cottage on the other. He would never advance such trust again. The police arrived as fast as they did because Riddly and Lilly Hood had betrayed their agreement.
Another car, friends of the Hoods, was following behind when they’d hit his wife. Because of them, because of the police and ambulance and everyone else mulling around in his forest, he’d had to stand by, helpless as they thoughtlessly disengaged his wife’s body from the mangle of metal. They tossed it in the back of the tow truck like it was so much debris. Carted his wife away to be burned to ash in a city furnace. Or God forbid, something worse.
His only consolation was that nothing like it would ever happen again. He’d closed the single-lane gravel road, technically just two tire paths with weeds growing between, immediately after the accident. He planted trees, encouraged undergrowth, so that by now there was barely any sign the road had ever existed.
Granny shifted the locket to one hand and wrapped the other around Gray’s palm. “It was an accident, dear. I know you blame my Riddly, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wouldn’t have wished the kind of suffering you and Maizie have endured on his worst enemy.”
“I don’t blame him.” Gray was surprised how easily he said it. He’d been thinking it from the start, but never out loud. “It was my fault. Donna and I were arguing…fighting. I accused her of cheating and she ran out. I didn’t go after her.”
He remembered the smell of another man on his wife, a man he recognized. There was no suspicion, no guessing. He knew she’d been with someone else. The rub was he wasn’t as upset over her infidelity as he was with himself for not feeling more betrayed. He loved Donna, but there was something missing between them, something that only became truly perceptible after she’d turned him. Maybe children would’ve made a difference, filled that missing piece between them. He’d never know.
“I was happy for the distance between us,” he said. “Until…Jeezus, I can still hear that sound, that crash, like an explosion. I knew before I started running. I knew Donna was gone. I could feel it.”
“I heard it too.” Granny shuddered. “What an awful sound. I knew my boy was gone. I’m just thankful my Little Red survived. Lord knows how she did.”
Gray knew how she’d survived. He’d been the one rushing headlong down the hillside over the butchered swath of forest so fast no one saw him go by. With the family friends useless, gawking down at the ruin from the road through the rain and darkness, it was up to Gray to assess the damage.
The truck was on its roof. He’d recognized the unmistakable odor of death, a mix of bodily fluids and cold meat. The parents were dead. The smell told him before he’d reached in to check for a pulse. Neither had been wearing seatbelts. They were gone before the truck stopped.
Their little girl, Maizie, was buckled into the backseat, but the shoulder strap had slipped to strangle across her neck. She was unconscious, her little face turning blue. But she was alive—barely.
He tried to unbuckle her, but the lock had jammed in the roll. Breaking it was nothing for his enhanced strength. Her little body fell into his arms and for a strange moment, gazing down into her slowly pinking face, he could breathe. His mind didn’t allow him respite for long, though. The sound, the thunderous explosion of metal and glass, the hideous thud, and the instinctive knowledge Donna was gone all came crashing in on him anew.
He laid Maizie in a soft patch of ferns and slowly made his way to the front of the truck. He couldn’t see her at first, the way the truck was lying, the rain, the darkness, made seeing anything difficult. Then he crouched and peered under the front of the truck. Only her tail and hindquarters showed, soft brown fur, wet with rain, and blood.
Gray raced around the truck to the driver’s side front wheel. Donna lay at an angle, pinned between the fender and the tree, her front paws, chest and head spared the crushing weight of the truck. She was dead. She was dead before the truck had stopped—God willing.
How long had he stood there? How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Maybe if he’d snapped out of it quicker, reacted faster, maybe he could’ve gotten Donna’s body away before the police showed up. But once the first cop tripped and stumbled his way down the hill, it was too late. These people and their pretty little redheaded girl had altered his life irrevocably.
And now that pretty little redhead was poised to do it again.
***
“I’m not mad. I’m just curious.” Yeah. If she said it out loud a few more times maybe she’d actually believe it. After all, what other emotion would make her do something this stupid. And, Maizie had to admit, walking deep into the forest at dusk, full moon rising or not, was stupid. Really stupid.
But she had to talk to him. She wanted to know why Gray had waited twenty-one years to give Granny the locket. “Twenty-one years. That’s a long time to hold on to something that’s not yours. Not that I’m mad about it.”
She wasn’t—really. It was just an excuse. More than anything she wanted to know about where he’d found it. Granny told her Gray had been there at the accident. But she was so pleased with having the locket back she didn’t seem to care what his being there meant. He could answer questions no one else could.
What had he seen? What did he know? Had her parents said anything? Were they alive? Did he see the wolf that’d killed them? She had to know.
Anytime she’d asked those sorts of questions of Granny, or anyone else who might know, she’d gotten sad puppy-dog eyes staring back at her and no solid answers. “Just put it behind you, dear,” Granny would say. “It won’t bring them back. Consider yourself blessed that you can’t remember.”
This time she had a good excuse to broach the subject. She had a firsthand source to give her some answers. She wouldn’t settle for puppy-dog eyes and placating clichés. This
time she’d get her answers and that, more than anything else, pushed her into the forest to a place she hadn’t been in years.
Maizie shined her flashlight off to the left. The path was clear, dirt covered, with tall weeds and brush kept at a distance. A small turn of her wrist to the right and the beam exposed a swath of low weeds cutting through the forest eight feet wide. Beneath were the remnants of a long-forgotten path. She could still see the twin ruts like old tire tracks through the weed stalks, though as far as she remembered there’d never been an actual road.
This path would lead to the housing subdivision, the place she’d once called home. She hoped it would also bring her closer to Gray’s secret mansion in the forest. She had to find it again. She had to find him.
Maizie steeled her nerves and started walking. Her legs parted the weeds with each step. Green seeds and sticky leaves clung to her sweat pants and left dark stripes of dew along the gray fabric on her thighs and knees. Her mind raced, constantly analyzing sounds, shadows and strange movements.
This was a stupid risk considering she’d come face to face with the big silver wolf once already. And she was pretty sure he’d chased her and Gray from the lake the other day. The wolf had been anything but deadly though. Of course his patient demeanor might’ve been dumb luck.
If she could just remember the path Gray had taken from the lake she wouldn’t have to wander around trying to find the house by accident. She should’ve waited ’til morning. But she wanted answers and she didn’t even care that she’d have to deal with his strange family. She’d already waited long enough.
Maizie had checked every map of the area she could find. Not one of them showed roads beyond the gravel driveway to the Wild Game Preserve. The forest was like a blank spot, the Bermuda Triangle of Pennsylvania.
This way, a straight path on foot, Maizie was convinced was faster. At least if she got lost she’d be in the right part of the forest.