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A second cabin door slammed opened, but it didn’t disgorge the female I’d been hoping for. Instead, Butch emerged, took one look at the scene, then shifted as he fell forward onto four rangy lupine paws.
The singlemindedness of Butch’s advance backed up my gut reaction that this fight wasn’t a fun tussle. It was deadly serious. The eruption of smoldering resentments from alpha males forced to spend too long in close proximity. No way would it end easily or well.
The thought alone pulled fur out of my human skin. I needed to protect Tank....
No, I needed to protect Harper. Swallowing down my wolf with every ounce of willpower I could muster, I peered out into the night with simple human eyes.
Tank and Ryder were too fast and it was too dark to tell who was winning. But I smelled blood. This fight was nearing its climax....
Time, which had slowed to the speed of molasses, sped back up. The final seconds between attack and dismemberment had run out.
Then Lupe was on her porch. I felt her rather than saw her. Like a weighted blanket dropping over my head, bearing me to the ground.
Her words struck a millisecond later. “Stand down.” The command was simple, yet I found myself unable to breathe. The air in my lungs had turned to ice.
“Athena!” Flip-flops slapped against the ground as my sister raced toward me. Of course she’d run to help when she saw me collapsing. She’d never before been privy to the dark side of werewolves. She wouldn’t understand how dangerous it was for a mere human to step into this mess....
I struggled against Lupe’s invisible compulsion, the gesture doing absolutely nothing. Then my ears popped and the thousand-pound weight lifted off me.
I gasped an inhale. Waved an arm at Harper as I struggled upright. “I’m fine,” I whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear from forty feet distant.
Lupe was closer. “Take care of your sister.”
Not an order. A reprieve.
And even though my inner wolf growled in fury, I took it. Didn’t glance back to make sure Tank was okay as I speedwalked across the campground to meet Harper. Ignored the empty hole in my stomach that said I needed to tend to his wounds, needed to make sure his temporary alpha understood Ryder had been the instigator.
Because I was a lone wolf with a human family. No matter what my inner beast told me, Tank wasn’t my problem.
Harper was.
***
MY SISTER’S EYES DARTED wildly. Just like when she’d been little and had woken as I brought her father home from yet another bar, his legs unsteady, mine nearly folding beneath his weight. If we were lucky, Nick would be sedated enough that the two of us could roll him into bed. If we weren’t lucky, he would be verbally abusive, yelling after Harper as I shoved her out of the room.
Now, as then, her voice quavered. “What’s going on?”
Then, as now, I lied to protect her tender heart. “It’s no big deal. The guys were wrestling.”
Because Tank, Ryder, and Butch had been flung back into humanity by Lupe’s order. I’d seen that much during the fleeting glance I’d allowed myself before returning to my true priority.
“They were wolves,” Harper countered. “They were fighting. Are they going to be alright?”
I turned her around and started her back toward the cabin where another human slept. One who’d never even heard of werewolves. One who, I hoped, had never dealt with a drunk father either.
“This was a bad idea.” The words tripped off my tongue before I had time to consider them. Although, bringing Harper and Clara here was a bad idea. The question became—where else could my sister spend her break?
Definitely not with Nick.
“Don’t make us leave.” Harper’s feet were no longer moving. She’d stopped stock still, within easy eyeshot of the wolf-tussle aftermath that I had a sinking suspicion was going to get worse before it got better. “Clara and Kira are having fun.”
“And you? Are you having fun?” I hated the fact that Harper wasn’t able to relax into this camp experience for her own sake. Hated the fact that I’d dragged her into yet another mess when all she’d wanted was a little simple human fun.
“Of course I am.”
The scent of my sister’s lie gutted me. But her continuation held the aroma of truth.
“Well, I was having fun. The marshmallows. The pillow fight.”
Harper peered at me out of the corner of her eye. As if I cared whether her bedding maintained its structural integrity. Her shoulders, I noted, were straighter than usual. When she stood up for herself a second time, her voice was firm.
“Please let us stay.”
I expected her to bargain with me. But she didn’t...and I liked that. I liked the hints of backbone I saw growing in her after less than a day spent in Kira and Tank’s company. I liked thinking of my sister enjoying herself.
So I nodded, deciding on the hard route, the route that would require more doing. “Then you’ll stay here for the rest of break,” I promised.
For my sister, I would make difficult work.
***
“A MOMENT, ATHENA.”
Lupe’s voice caught me as I stepped back out into the darkness after tucking Harper in. Well, not literally tucking her in. After all, my sister was sixteen. Way too old for that.
But she’d let me straighten her comforter. Had smiled when I told her I had a sewing kit and would show her how to mend the tear in one side of her pillow tomorrow. She’d almost looked like a normal kid when she asked whether she and her friends could take the canoe out onto the lake the next afternoon.
I’d said yes. I always said yes if Harper’s request wasn’t a safety risk. Whether I had to mortgage more of my soul to gain access to the canoe would be a problem to be dealt with at a later date.
Not tonight. Because, right now, Lupe was too grim to be asked about canoe borrowing. Her anger curled around me before I’d taken two steps off Harper’s porch. Like an unfriendly python, it slithered cold and scaly against my skin.
“I’d planned this for next week,” Lupe continued, speaking at a normal human tone even though I was still forty feet away. “But apparently we’ll be moving up our timeline. Because we can’t be a pack, but we must be a team.”
Her words slapped me as I stepped into the circle of shifters, sliding between Lupe and Tank. His nose, I noted, was bleeding. Ryder, across from us, looked similarly battered. No wonder Lupe was pissed.
Only, her anger didn’t strike the males who’d engaged in fisticuffs. It lashed out like a striking snake and bit me.
“Athena is a professional thief. She’s stolen millions of dollars worth of art to line her own pockets.”
Lupe’s blunt assertion of my darkest secret rocked me back on my heels. My fists, I found, were clenched. Fur tickled the back of my throat.
“A mercenary.” Butch’s reaction was exactly what I’d expected, but it hit me harder after the day we’d spent together. He was the only one present who appeared civilized, which gave his words additional weight. “Can we trust a team mate who’s in it for the money?”
Beside me, Tank growled so softly I hoped I was the only one to hear him. For my own part, I was glad the night was dark enough to hide the heat in my cheeks.
And, I mean, how could I argue? I was here for the money. The money...and the safe passage through Rowan’s territory while I figured something else out.
Swallowing down anger, I kept my tone level as I responded to Lupe rather than Butch. “Do you intend to air everyone’s dirty laundry?”
Our boss’s arms crossed as she waited out our various reactions. The night had settled back into silence by the time she replied. “Yes, that’s exactly what I intend to do. Secrets are a faster pathway to bonding than falling backwards into your team mates’ arms and hoping they won’t drop you.”
Okay, I could see her point. Tank, apparently could as well.
“I’ll tell my own secret then.” His voice seemed to stroke across my skin, never mind that he hadn’t looked at me since I entered the circle. I somehow knew that he’d volunteered in order to move the spotlight off of me.
“Is this about your face?” Ryder’s voice was grittier than it had been. As if he’d lost his sense of humor during the preceding battle. “Because that’s not a secret. It looks like the inside of a horse’s asshole.”
Tank didn’t take advantage of the obvious opening. Didn’t ask when Ryder had last spent time inside a horse’s asshole. Instead, he shrugged. “Yes. My secret is that I did the damage myself.”
I wasn’t the only one who gasped. I had so many questions...and I certainly wasn’t going to ask them in front of the others. Especially not in front of Ryder.
So I was grateful when Lupe interjected a secret of her own. “I was raised in a puppy mill. Sometimes, dealing with the stupidity of werewolves, I wish I was back there.”
A puppy mill? As in, she’d actually been a wolf pup locked in a cage for her entire childhood?
Ryder gave us no time to digest Lupe’s secret. He shrugged in a gesture that looked uncannily like Tank’s, voice gruffer than usual as he admitted: “I stabbed my alpha in the back. Literally.”
The night pressed in around us. So much darkness, and I didn’t mean the lack of moonlight either.
All eyes turned to Butch, waiting for his secret. And...he shook his head.
“You don’t want them to know?” Lupe asked. She, it appeared, was familiar with all of our dark spots.
“They haven’t earned that knowledge,” Butch answered. His tailored bathrobe spun out around him as he turned on his heel and stalked back toward his cabin, secret carried with him.
Which left me wondering, later when I was tucked in my own bed peering up through a grimy skylight, what could possibly be worse than stabbing your alpha in the back?