by Noir, Roxie
As he signaled and then exited, Trevor looked over at her, turning down the classic rock radio station.
“Listen,” he said. “It was supposed to be a surprise, but back at the house they’ve got a little party for you. Just the six of us, some cake, some sparkling apple cider. Lizzy and Tim made a banner and all that.”
Scarlet nodded, finally tearing her eyes away from the view outside, and tried to formulate the question that she had.
“Is everyone...” she started, then frowned. “Is everyone pissed?” she finally said, unable to do any better.
“Not everyone,” said Trevor. “You’re not popular, but they mostly have better things to worry about.”
He looked over at her for a moment, then back at the road.
“The die-hards are still inside, and I don’t think they’re getting out any time soon,” he said. “Plotting to overthrow the state government, no matter how inept, is still treated pretty seriously.”
“I sure found that out,” Scarlet said.
“Well, the parole board thinks you’ve turned over a new rock.”
“You mean a new leaf?”
“Sure.”
“They let me out because I flipped on Dad,” she said, guilt clogging her throat. “Because I couldn’t take being in prison any longer and I told them everything.”
Without warning, Trevor jerked the wheel to the right, pulling onto the road’s gravel shoulder. Scarlet gasped, her hands gripping the sides of her seat, the seatbelt restraining her as she lurched forward at the sudden stop.
“What the—”
“Dad’s an idiot,” Trevor growled. He sat bolt upright, turned toward her in his seat. “He’s a bigoted idiot who thinks that blood and violence are the solution to a problem that he invented, who’s so afraid of anything he doesn’t understand that he’s willing to kill thousands of people just to prove that wolves deserve respect.”
Scarlet stared.
“He just wanted—”
“He wanted to kill anyone who didn’t agree with him, and you know it.”
Trevor’s gray eyes blazed. Scarlet had never seen her brother this angry before.
“It was never going to work,” she said quietly.
“You didn’t know that. He didn’t know that.”
Scarlet closed her eyes and bowed her head for a moment, letting her neck muscles stretch. Trevor was right, of course; at her father’s trial, the prosecution had entered everything into evidence. The storage sheds full of illegal automatic weapons; the emails detailing his instructions to his pack underlings on how to set human, bear, and lion residences on fire to make sure they couldn’t be quenched; his “battle plan” for taking over Rustvale’s Town Hall, then Canyon City’s Courthouse. After that, the plan had been for Redding, the Cascadia state capitol.
“He was a bigoted idiot who couldn’t organize a hostile takeover of a preschool classroom,” Trevor went on. He released the brake and let the car start rolling forward, checking his mirror.
“You don’t owe him shit, Scarlet. Neither of us owes him shit.”
He’s still my father, she thought. It’s still my fault that he’ll never get out of prison now.
Trevor pulled back onto the highway, his outburst over.
“Was?” Scarlet asked, softly.
He can’t be dead, she thought, a germ of fear blossoming in the pit of her stomach. They would have told me if he were dead, right?
“Is,” Trevor said. “It doesn’t matter, we don’t have a relationship anymore.”
“Did you ever visit him?” she asked, staring straight ahead at the asphalt.
“Once,” Trevor said. “I walked into the visitation room, said hello, and he asked me if I was still letting that revolting bear give it to me up the ass, so I walked right back out. I never even sat down. Haven’t visited since.”
Sounds like Dad, Scarlet thought. Once, she would have been proud of him. Now she was just embarrassed.
Without speaking, she glanced down at the tattoo on her forearm: three crescent moons, stacked, the points of the bottom two moons touching the curve of the one above it. The thick black lines were uneven and already beginning to fade, even though the tattoo wasn’t even four years old yet.
It wasn’t like prison tattoos were very high quality.
Quietly, Scarlet covered it with her right hand and looked ahead. She’d gotten it not long after she’d gone in, back when she’d been young and dumb and still inspired by what she’d called the Lupine Cause. The triple moon marked her out as a purebred wolf, one moon for each lupine parent; wolves with a human parent were allowed to join the cause, but were considered second-class citizens.
She also had a snarling, slavering wolf just below her left collarbone. It was ugly too. She’d wanted it lower, on her breast over her heart, but the Cause didn’t like to give its women breast or stomach tattoos. Women were supposed to breed, and pregnancy might ruin a breast or belly tattoo.
The two of them sat in silence for a long time, driving toward a gray sky overhead. Tiny droplets began to fall on the windshield, and Trevor turned on the wipers.
“How is the revolting bear?” she asked.
Finally, a hint of a smile played around Trevor’s lips.
“He’s good,” he said. “Ask him about his garden when you get a chance, he’ll talk your ear off about tomatoes.”
“Sloane?”
“Practically running Triangle,” he said. “Had she gotten the promotion when we all visited two months ago?”
Every couple of months, Trevor packed up the whole household — his husband Austin, their wife Sloane, and his niece and nephew — and visited Scarlet in prison. They all wished they could come more often, but a four-hour-drive each way was no joke.
“Yeah, she was running the coding development team, I think? To be honest, when she tells me what she does, it’s barely English.”
Trevor chuckled.
“You and me both,” he said. “Don’t tell her that.”
As they drove up the driveway, Scarlet could see the lights flick off in the house.
“They tried really hard for this party,” Trevor said, navigating the car up the bumpy gravel road.
“I’ll act very surprised, I promise,” she said.
“Before I forget, I made you an appointment with a probation officer on Friday,” Trevor said. “Ten in the morning. You start at the bakery first thing Monday.”
Scarlet felt a familiar flicker of irritation at her older brother — Jeez, Trevor, I can make my own appointments — but quickly squashed it.
Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. He did a nice thing. Not everything has to get your hackles up.
That meant she had tomorrow free, and then the weekend to get her life together, somehow, before starting work.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I got you a phone and a car too,” he said. “Well, I got you a phone. The car is Dad’s old Bronco. Me and Austin managed to get it running okay.”
He doesn’t have to be this nice to me, Scarlet thought. The first time he’d visited, she’d snarled at him that he was never, ever to bring that bear to see her. That bear being Austin, of course.
Trevor parked and flipped the headlights off.
“Why’d you do this?” Scarlet asked, suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Take me in. Get me a job. Get me a phone, fix my car.”
She turned and looked at him, his gray eyes calm and relentlessly familiar.
“I know you didn’t have to,” she said, quietly. “You could have stopped visiting years ago.”
“Because you’re my little sister,” he said. “And because I thought you could still change.”
Did I, though? thought Scarlet, her eyes searching his. I don’t hate bears and lions and humans anymore, but I don’t think I’m a good person. Whatever that means.
“You did change,” he told her, as if he could read her mind.
“For the better?”
<
br /> “Mostly,” he said. “Though you still jiggle your leg when you’re nervous and it drives me up the fucking wall.”
Scarlet forced herself to stop jiggling her leg.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Ready?” Trevor asked.
“Ready,” Scarlet said, and she got out of the car, crunched across the gravel driveway, and walked up the steps to the wooden porch.
She took a deep breath, then pushed the door open and walked into the dark hallway.
A brief flash of memory: standing around the dining room table with her father, then men in helmets and body armor breaking through the door. The last time she’d been in the house.
Then she walked into the dark living room and paused, letting her eyes adjust, and the lights flipped on.
“SURPRISE!!” everyone yelled.
Scarlet’s wolf jumped up and growled at the sudden noise and light. It didn’t matter to her wolf that she’d been expecting it. The animal had been on high alert for years now, and it went into attack mode at the slightest provocation.
She held her breath for a moment, forcing it down.
Then she smiled as wide as she could, nearly feeling like her face would crack from the sheer force of it.
“You guys!” she said.
“Lizzy and Tim baked you a cake,” said Sloane, pointing to a clearly homemade baked confection on the coffee table. The two teenagers smiled, both looking a little embarrassed.
“It’s chocolate-chocolate-chocolate,” said Lizzy, her dark hair falling over her gray eyes.
“My favorite,” said Scarlet.
For a moment, she thought, I can’t believe they let that through, but then she quickly corrected herself.
You’re home. In a house. Where cakes are normal and delicious and not for smuggling contraband.
Not that anyone used cakes for that anymore, of course.
Then Sloane came up and hugged her, the other girl standing on tiptoe.
“Welcome home,” she said.
Get it now!
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About Roxie
I love writing sexy, take-charge alphas with a softer side. In fact, I love it so much that I always have two in my stories! Two's always better than one, isn't it?
In real life, I live in California with one husband (who might be a bear shifter) and two cats (who would be much too lazy to shift, even if they could).
I’m on the internet at RoxieNoir.com. You can also follow @RoxieNoir on Twitter, like my Facebook page, or just email me: [email protected].