We dozed for a little while, but I woke up when Delilah reentered the house. She stomped snow off her boots and looked incredibly disgruntled. When she caught me looking at her, though, she forced a smile. “The guys are headed out to deal with some ranch business, so they might be a while. Jack wanted me to stay here and help get started on Thanksgiving dinner.”
Hannah and Jen traded worried looks, and my stomach twisted with unease. There it was again, the undercurrent that something else was definitely going on in the family. But Hannah smiled widely and shoved to her feet, making her way around the couch to get a list of side dishes off the fridge. “Well, there’s a shit load of work to do before tomorrow, so we’d better get a move on.”
I got up, not willing to sit on the couch like an invalid, and even managed to convince them to let me help. I peeled potatoes, since I could do that sitting down, then helped chop veggies for stuffing and salad and the turkey. Jen and Delilah argued about the best way to prepare the turkey, since it had been brining for a few days, and Hannah debated whether to make regular mashed potatoes and garlic mashed potatoes, or just regular.
It felt normal and familiar and very cozy, enough I nearly started crying again. It had been a long damn time since I’d felt so accepted and welcomed. Every single thing they did or said or joked about made me want to cry in regret. I needed to get my shit together and put on my game face, otherwise there was no way I’d resist Max’s efforts to convince me to stay up north with him.
Something creaked outside, more than just the wind pulling at the screen door and the rocking chairs on the porch, and the three other women went still. It sounded like a distant howl accompanied the shuffling across the porch, and my heart jumped to my throat. Jen strode to the coat closet and retrieved a shotgun, checked that it was loaded, and stood ready near the door.
I pushed my chair back from the table, holding my belly. “Uh, what’s—”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Delilah said. She managed a tense smile and went to stand near Jen, both of them staring at the front door and the window next to it.
When a shadow moved behind the frosted glass, I almost shrieked. What the hell was going on? It was impossible to forget that we were miles and miles away from anyone else, that the men were all gone, that no one would reach us for hours with the roads blocked with snow.
Someone knocked on the door. Hannah started to shoo me toward the back of the house, murmuring something about hiding, but I couldn’t get my feet to un-stick from the floor. And I doubted my shaky legs would carry me more than two steps before I collapsed from the stress. The baby spun uneasily, not even punching my bladder, and I held my belly tighter.
Jen maneuvered into full view of the door and brought the shotgun up to her shoulder, completely calm and collected, and Delilah opened it a crack. She didn’t speak.
Jen did, though, her tone cold. “What the fuck do you want?”
A semi-familiar voice answered, laughing and completely unimpressed with a woman holding a 12-gauge on him. “Just checking in to be neighborly. With all the snow and work around here, I just wanted to make sure y’all were okay.”
It took me a second to recognize Jed’s voice and I tensed, backing up. He sounded different – angry and cruel and cold.
Something about it didn’t feel right. I needed to see, though. Hannah stared at the door with her eyes narrowed and moved toward another closet, and I wondered if she also knew how to handle a shotgun. Maybe I was the least useful out of all of them, since I didn’t think I could even pick up a shotgun.
Delilah said, “Get the fuck off our property,” and then someone growled and other men appeared behind Jed and the door was knocked all the way open.
“Okay, motherfuckers,” Jen said, and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun blast made my ears ring and everything wobble. One of the men behind Jed, his chest looking more like raw hamburger than anything human, fell to his knees and grunted. I screamed, clapping my hands over my ears, and tried to back up. Hannah raced for the closet and fumbled another shiny black gun, wrenching at a slide on the stock, and swung it around in time to fire a shot at Jed and another man as they knocked Jen down, seized the shotgun, and four more of them tackled Delilah.
I kept on screaming, since I didn’t know what else to do, as Jed walked toward me with his hands out. Hannah kept firing and the guy she kept hitting just walked toward her like there weren’t bullets in his chest.
Jed spoke but I couldn’t make sense of his words, not with the noise from the guns and Delilah growling and someone else cursing, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even think.
He smiled and it made my skin crawl. Why had he lied to me about Max? I held my hands up to fend him off but Jed didn’t do more than capture my shoulders and drag me forward. Up close, I could finally make out his words. “Just take it easy, girl. We’re going on a little trip.”
I shook as I looked over and saw the man who’d been shot with the shotgun also standing, walking around as if he hadn’t even been injured. I thought I might have hallucinated it all, but his shirt was shredded from the blast even though the skin of his chest was smooth and unmarked. I choked and set my heels. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”
“It’s nothing much to do with you, sweetheart,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders to drag me forward. “And everything to do with the asshole who knocked you up. You have terrible taste, dear Caroline.”
I stared at him, then froze as the four men who’d tackled Delilah finally stood back. They’d tied her up and knocked her unconscious; she bled from a giant wound in her head, the red snarling and knotting her hair. One of them kicked her for good measure and dragged her outside, dumping her in the snow.
I sucked in a breath to scream again, desperate to wake her, to save her from dying of cold in the snow, but Jed’s hand clamped over my mouth and he snapped, “Enough of that noise. She earned it by fucking my brother. She took him from the pack and changed his mind, twisting him all up with ideas about getting along with everyone.”
Pack? I shook my head and tried to elbow him away, clutching my stomach as a sharp cramp shot through me. “No, I can’t go. Please. My baby—”
“Little half-blood won’t matter,” he said, and kept dragging me to the door like I weighed nothing at all. “Better to lose it than curse it to a world like this.”
And that shit lit a fire in me. I pretended to stumble and pulled him off balance, then picked up a big-ass butcher knife from the kitchen to slash his fucking throat. No one said that about my baby. Even if I didn’t understand what he meant about “half blood” and packs and the rest of the nonsense.
When Jed yelped in surprise and pain, the blood gushing between his fingers as he held his shoulder, Jen and Hannah shouted in support and started fighting all over again. I ducked Jed’s grab and tried to fend off another man as he barreled toward me, not wanting to risk the baby, but it wasn’t enough.
Jed straightened and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, the wound healing right before my eyes, and he pulled a pistol from the back of his pants. He aimed it…right at my belly. Right at my sweet little peanut, who went completely still like she sensed the danger. “Do that again and I will make sure your offspring dies today. Got it?”
“It’s okay, Caroline,” Hannah said, suddenly calm. “Max and Wade and Henry are on their way back. They’ll find us.”
How did she know that? How could she possibly believe that this nightmare could be interrupted by anything as impossible as her husband and his brothers materializing out of thin air? They were out checking cattle somewhere out in the frozen wasteland around us. I just stared at her, and the knife fell from my numb fingers.
Jed put the gun away and grabbed my arm again, hauling me toward the door. “You’ll pay for that. Well, Max will pay for that.”
I stared at Hannah and Jen, just conscious enough to wonder why they looked mad instead of terrified, as we were dragged outside and shoved into the back seat of a battered Land Rover. I stared more as half a dozen wolves raced through the yard and around the house, more than one stopping to growl at Delilah, and held onto my belly and the little spark of life in my baby with all my strength.