by Moira Rogers
“I’m not your therapist. I’m an empath, and you’re a shapeshifter. There aren’t rules and guidelines for this.” For the first time in months, Callum unbent enough to sigh and run a hand through his hair. “I know what you went through in January because I’ve seen Kat, and she felt it. Therefore, I’ve felt it. But feeling isn’t experiencing. So think about it, Julio. Think about if you want to talk about that experience. With me, with anyone. Just think.”
Think. It was the last thing he wanted to do, something that would undoubtedly bring up memories and all the unresolved shit people loved to hear about. Better to push it down, forget it ever happened. It wasn’t as if people didn’t survive worse every day.
But he couldn’t say any of that to Callum. “I will. I promise.”
“Good. I’ll get in touch with you before I fly back to England.” Rising, the empath offered his hand.
Julio shook it. “If you didn’t, my sister would call you and demand to know why not.”
Callum’s sudden laugh was warm, almost fond. “What your sister lacks in empathic power she more than makes up for in training and sheer will. She’s a formidable woman, and I’m just as happy without her chasing after me. So don’t get me in trouble.”
“Yeah.” Julio put the toy back on the corner of Callum’s desk. He’d screwed it up, but he wasn’t surprised.
That was what he did these days.
Friday night at Mahalia’s was the closest Sera came to cutting loose. It was the place she felt safe, surrounded by shapeshifters and spell casters, watched over by staff trained by Nicole Peyton, princess of rebel wolves.
With a beer in her hand and the promise of another waiting for her inside, it felt good to lean against the wall in front of the bar and indulge in a moment of feeling alone without being alone. Josh would have to be crazy to pick a fight with her here, where one shout would bring the half of the bar with shapeshifter hearing pouring into the street, ready to do violence.
Josh would have to be crazy, and she didn’t want to believe he was. Not in her mind, and not in her heart, where she’d loved him like a stupid, desperate girl.
Her gut knew, though. Her instincts knew, which was why she’d already tensed by the time she caught his scent. No one else smelled like him—cheap cologne and synthetic leather and engine grease and coyote, and that was the part that had tugged at her again and again, even when things were bad, even when they were careening toward terrible.
He was like her. They belonged together.
She sidled closer to the door, though she couldn’t see him yet. Just a shadow five feet to her left, a figure that hadn’t yet stepped into the circle of light spilling out of the entrance. “You can turn around and walk away now, and I won’t have to scream and get a dozen wolves out here to kick you bloody.”
He stared back at her—she could feel the weight of it—but he didn’t move. “You could have already done that.”
“I could have.” Julio was inside, and if he came charging out, Josh would be a speck on the sidewalk. “I don’t want you dead, Josh. I only want you away from me, okay? So go away.”
He took a single step forward. “I came to talk, Sera. Just talk.”
Even now, after everything, he sang to her blood. The human part of her knew the coyotes were dying. The coyote understood only enough to claw for a solution. A healthy male of her species—the only one she’d ever met who wasn’t related to her.
Together they’d make babies who would suffer as much as their parents and grandparents had. “I said everything I had to say when I divorced you.”
“You didn’t say jack shit,” he retorted. “You had your daddy’s girlfriend the fancy lawyer do your talking for you.”
“Yeah. That was me saying I didn’t want to talk to you again.”
“Except you did.” Josh ran a hand through his hair. “You still do, don’t try and deny it.”
She didn’t. But the longer she let him talk to her, the stupider she felt, like the horny blonde in a horror movie who ended up stuffed in a closet because she was hard up for a good lay. Except Sera wasn’t hard up—she was drunk on instinct.
It would get her kidnapped or killed. Instinct rooted her feet in place, but she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Julio Mendoza is inside that bar. If I raise my voice, he’s going to come out here and erase you from history. And he won’t care if I want to talk to you.”
His jaw tightened—and so did his fists. “Is that how you deal with life these days? Something bugs you, you throw a goddamn wolf at it?”
Bravado and bluster were all she had. “My KitchenAid mixer’s at home.”
“Which is where you should be.” He took another step. “With me.”
“Fuck you, Josh.” With him closing in, she had no trouble baring her teeth. A snarl followed, a low warning, and she clenched her hand around the neck of her beer bottle. “You lost me when you decided to hit me.”
“You—” He halted in his tracks. “It wasn’t like that, Sera.”
As if the damn day wasn’t branded in her memory. “I remember how it was. You found the birth control, you got pissed off and you hit me.”
“Because it’s selfish and stupid,” he hissed. “Is that what you want? We die and that’s it? No more coyotes? It’s not a fucking joke, it’s reality.”
“Your reality.” All she had to do was conjure her mother’s confused face and wild, crazy eyes to know that. “I’m not going to have daughters who’ll be chased by every male coyote out there as soon as they hit puberty. I’d rather fuck a wolf and have human babies.”
His face blanched and then reddened. “Then you’re not just selfish. You’re a fucking freak, like everyone said.”
“I’m a freak?” Her voice was rising, turning angry, and she didn’t care. “I’m not the one who had to go seduce some kid half my age and hide in the middle of the woods.”
“No, you’re the one who liked it,” he spat. “If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been some other asshole.”
There it was. He’d reached into her heart and dragged out her darkest fear. “Bullshit.”
“Yeah, your dad’s friend. What was his name? Jacobson.” A glimmer of satisfaction broke through Josh’s glower. “You had your eye on him, right? Does Julio Mendoza know about that?”
No one did. No one but Josh and Alec himself, who’d handled her teenage rebellion with a curt lack of amusement. The one time she’d come on to him, he’d smacked her into place with the disgusted pronouncement that he didn’t fuck kids—and a deadly serious promise to tell her father if she didn’t shape the hell up.
How many humiliating secrets did Josh know? Enough to guarantee she’d never want to look Julio in the face again.
It wasn’t worth going back to Josh. “Yeah, Julio knows,” she lied. Then she piled on the lies, wrapped them in steel-willed determination. “Julio knows and he doesn’t give a shit, because he’s man enough to not be threatened by things that don’t matter.”
Josh stepped even closer, close enough to loom over her. His voice lowered to a growl, and the hair on the back of her neck rose on end as his breath soughed over her face. “Liar.”
Then he spun and stalked away, around the corner and out of sight.
She was so high on the adrenaline of standing up to him that she didn’t realize she was shaking until her beer bottle rattled against the wall behind her.
That woke her up—and sparked fear inside her. She darted into Mahalia’s and leaned against the bar before her knees gave out. “Julio,” she managed, her voice weirdly calm in her ears. “I need to talk to Julio.”
Anna took one look at her and raised both eyebrows. “What happened to you?”
Sera fought back the urge to laugh hysterically. “Josh is out there. I don’t know if he’s there anymore, but he was.”
“What?” Anna tossed her hand towel behind the bar. “Where is he? I’ll rip his balls off.”
Pointing seemed stupid, but sh
e did it. “That way. I told him to fuck off, and you must be rubbing off on me, because he did.”
The blonde paled. “Go to the office and stay there,” she ordered, already rounding the bar.
Obeying Anna was instinct. Her roommate didn’t issue blunt orders often, but this time the power of the command washed over Sera and steadied her legs before setting them in motion. She moved in a daze, behind the bar and through the swinging doors to where Nicole’s old office sat, mostly taken over by Anna now.
Sera had stood up to Josh alone, but she didn’t have to be alone. That kept panic at bay as she sank into a chair.
When the door opened, it was Julio who came through it. “What’s wrong? Anna said you needed me.”
“I have to tell you.” She still felt giddy, but doubt was starting to scrape at her too. She should have ducked into Mahalia’s the moment she sensed Josh. She should have screamed for help like a good little submissive.
If Julio snarled at her over it, she might snap.
He knelt by her chair. “You have to tell me what?”
“Josh was outside. He tried to talk to me, and I told him I wasn’t interested.”
His hand closed around the arm of the chair with enough force to make the wood creak. “Jesus, that bastard’s here?”
Sera swallowed around the lump in her throat. Fear, exhilaration—she felt manic, jumpy. Insane. “I stood up to him. If I hadn’t been able to, I would have yelled for help, I promise.”
The door slammed open again. “Gone, but it can’t be far,” Anna fumed. “I’m going to hunt that asshole down and show him what happens around here to big men who like to pick on girls.”
Sera’s self-confidence withered. There was her entire life, put into sad perspective with one offhand comment from Anna. She was a silly girl whose greatest triumph was not wandering off with the ex-husband who’d smacked the hell out of her.
Julio rose. “Let him go—for now. With any luck, he’ll run on home and forget all about it.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Julio heaved a breath and glanced at Sera. “Then we’ll figure something out, Anna. Can the bar spare you for a few days?”
“I can arrange it,” she confirmed.
“All right, make it happen.”
Anna reached for the doorknob behind her but didn’t leave. “Sera? You okay?”
Smiling was her job. Gratitude and acceptance, because alphas like Anna needed it. “I’ll be fine. Thanks, Anna.”
She nodded and left, and Julio smacked his forehead against the door. “What a mess.”
Sera hated herself for withering. For apologizing, when she knew it wasn’t her fault. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? You didn’t go out of your way to make trouble.”
Like it mattered. “I was born trouble. I’ll always be trouble.”
He turned and hesitated before settling his hand on her shoulder. “You shouldn’t go back to your place alone, just in case. With the calls and now this…”
“I know.” She closed her eyes and inhaled, dragging the scent of him into her lungs, as if he could erase all trace of Josh. “He’s not a bastard, you know. I mean, not some random asshole. He’s like most of the coyotes. The survival of the species kicks in, and they get rabid. Dangerous.”
His fingers stroked over her collarbone through her shirt, raising goose bumps on her arms. “That’s why this is nothing to mess around with. It’s not ego, Sera, it’s instinct.”
“I know. But it makes it harder on him. He can’t get what he wants if he hurts me too much.”
Julio leaned over again, far enough to put himself on eye level with her. “All that means is that he’ll try to find other ways to get what he wants.”
She couldn’t hold his gaze. Literally couldn’t, not with instinct unsettled and her emotions scattered. She focused on his chin instead. “I’m not stupid. I’ll go somewhere safe. I just wanted…” To be strong. To believe, for one stupid second, that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life afraid of Josh, or of another coyote like him.
Julio nodded. “We’ll pick up some of your things and you can come home with me.”
That startled her into meeting his eyes. He stared back steadily.
Home. With Julio. The Southeast council’s headquarters encompassed a warehouse with plenty of spare rooms along with the apartments claimed by Julio and Andrew. It wasn’t nearly as intimate as it sounded.
Sera still shivered. “I’m a mess tonight. Do you really want to bring home a jumpy coyote who’s as likely to hide under the bed as sleep on it?”
“Sweetheart, you can sleep curled up in the bathtub, if that’s what makes you feel safe.”
If it hadn’t been a distinct possibility, she might have laughed.
Julio arched an eyebrow. “You’re going to sleep in the tub, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.” It came out a little sullen, and she had to laugh at herself after all. “No, probably not. I’m not traumatized. I’m just…really confused.”
He straightened, his hand still on her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
When she stood, her knees didn’t shake. She was steady. Grounded by the quiet, unobtrusive magic of an alpha’s touch. He could silence her fears as easily as she could soothe his rage, and sometimes it took nothing more than the slightest physical contact.
If she focused on that, on the fear and the comfort, maybe her traitorous body wouldn’t have its usual response to Julio’s proximity—mindless, heart-pounding lust. Sleeping curled up in the bathtub was a lot safer—for everyone—than sleeping curled around him.
Chapter Four
At one point, Julio had doubted that Sera would gladly suffer in silence rather than ask for help. Now, he knew it for the truth.
He watched as she hesitated in the doorway and peered into the guest bedroom. “Will this be okay?” he asked, just to be sure. Maybe she’d have preferred one of the apartments they kept empty but ready to accommodate visitors.
“It’s nice.” She clutched her half-full duffel bag, and she’d seemed pathetically grateful that he let her carry it up the stairs instead of plucking it out of her hands. “Perfect, really.”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The, uh, bathroom’s across the hall, and I’m at the end of it. My room, I mean.”
“All right.” She ventured across the threshold, then turned to look at him. Wry amusement filled her hazel eyes as she took a blind step back. “This isn’t how I usually go home with men.”
Of course it wasn’t. Men had been sniffing around her since her return to New Orleans, and she’d had no reason to deny herself. “Guess not.” He dragged his gaze from the pale curve of her neck. “We should figure out what to do about your ex.”
Both of her eyebrows shot up. “I thought I was staying with you because Anna’s going to go scare a few decades off his life.”
“Not quite.” He’d dispatched Anna to follow Josh and make sure he went home instead of hanging around New Orleans. If she scared him, all the better, but it wasn’t the goal. “As long as he’s out of town, he’s none of our concern. That’s the preferable solution all the way around.”
“He’s a coward.” Sera dropped to the edge of the bed with her bag next to her feet. “But he showed up this soon after my dad left…which means he’s been waiting. Watching.”
“Which is why you’re here. It’s not enough to have Anna trail Josh. Just in case.”
“And if he shows up?”
Her expression as she awaited his answer was oddly blank. “Shows up here, you mean?”
She nodded mutely.
“It might get ugly,” he admitted. If she’d wanted her ex dead, Franklin would have already found a way to make it happen, so Julio had to assume she wanted his life spared. “I’ll do what I have to do, Sera.”
“All right.” She rubbed at her arms as if she was cold, and her gaze fell from his to focus somewhere beneath his chin. “I’m supposed to m
eet Jackson tomorrow. He’s helping me get a permit so I can carry the gun Anna found for me.”
“Got to clock range hours?”
“I guess?” Her lips twitched. “Honestly, I’m more comfortable with a shotgun, but I’m not sure carrying one of those everywhere I go is entirely practical.”
He gave her a smile. “No, probably not. Jackson’ll get you fixed up, though you don’t have to carry if you don’t want. I have a permit.”
“You gonna follow me everywhere I go?” It sounded like a tease, a joke, one meant to cover up the desperate thread of yearning.
He didn’t know if his words would engender relief or wariness. “For now? Yeah.”
“At least you’re cuddlier than a shotgun.”
Despite her words, she looked deflated, like she had back in the office when Anna had stormed in, cussing and fussing about how she’d make Josh pay. “Hey, it’s temporary. Then you can get back to all your normal stuff.”
“This is my normal stuff.” She smoothed her fingers over the blanket beside her. “I’m genetically programmed to be a damsel in distress.”
“That’s bullshit. You can be whatever you want to be.”
“Maybe.” It came out too fast, and her laugh was forced. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to be upbeat. This night is…too much.”
Too much, and pulling her in too many different directions. “Sleep, then. We can talk more in the morning.”
“Can I…?” She swallowed. Peeked up at him. “Are you going to laugh if I ask for a hug?”
The question damn near broke his heart.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wrapped one arm around her. “I’m here. Not to run your life or tell you what to do, but to protect you. To keep you safe.”
She trembled, the shiver working through her in a wave as she squirmed closer. “I stood up to him,” she whispered. “I know it’s probably not impressive to the rest of you, but I was so proud.”
“You should be.” He stroked her hair and pressed his lips to her temple. “I’m proud of you.”
Her breath escaped on a rusty, tired laugh. “Living with Anna can make a girl feel…small.”