Page 24 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

"He paid off my loan shark. He bought me bookbinding tools. He bought me a phone to replace the phone he crushed — who does this? Who just — without asking — he didn't even ask me, Amaryllis! He just decided, the way he always just decides, and I'm supposed to be grateful while he runs my entire life by executive order—"

I'm doing laps of the porch now. I can hear myself, and I know I sound unhinged.

Amaryllis sits on the porch steps and waits.

That's what she does. She doesn't interrupt me, or agree with me, or tell me I'm overreacting. She just sits there, calm and patient, until I've burned through the first tank of outrage and come to a stop with my hands on the railing, breathing hard, staring at the trees.

"He drives me insane," I say finally.

"He drives everyone insane," Amaryllis says. "You should know, though, that he's not doing it for no reason."

I turn around. Something in her voice has shifted.

"Our mother was a healer," Amaryllis says. "The strongest in the pack, stronger than me. When we were nineteen, a stranger came to Shadowpine lands, mauled nearly to death. He wasn't pack. He wasn't anyone's. He was just dying, and she couldn't let it go.” She pauses. "She healed him. She poured everything she had into keeping him alive, and it worked, and he lived, and she'd used up so much of herself that her body couldn't recover. She died three days later."

"Our father lasted about four months after that. Fated mates don't do well alone — you probably know that. He just faded. Stopped eating, stopped shifting, stopped getting out of bed. Rose was seven. She doesn't remember him any other way."

Amaryllis looks at me steadily. "That's why he won't let me treat anyone outside of our pack without his approval. Not because he enjoys it, and not because he doesn't care about your brother. He watched our mother give everything she had to a stranger, and then he watched our father disappear because she was gone. He decided it would never happen again, and he has held that line every single day since, even when it makes him the villain, even when families come in screaming at him, even when his own sister tells him she hates it."

I don't say anything for a while. The brass press is gleaming in the last of the daylight, and the new phone is sitting in its box, and that crumpled piece of paper is still in my fist.

"He's still a bastard," I say.

"Oh, he absolutely is," Amaryllis agrees. "But he's not being a bastard for the sake of it. He's being a bastard because the last time someone he loved put a stranger's life above her own, it killed her and then it killed our father and he had to hold this pack together at nineteen with a seven-year-old sister who wouldn't stop crying." She stands up and brushes off her jeans. "Anyway. The phone is nice. You should keep the phone."

She heads off down the path, and I sit on the porch with my new bookbinding tools and my new phone and my sour old mistrust, and I think about a nineteen-year-old boy who lost both parents in four months and decided the only acceptable response was to build a wall so high that nobody he loved could ever climb over it to die for a stranger.

He's wrong.

But I understand now why the wall is there, and that's a much harder thing to fight than stubbornness.

I pick up the new phone. It's already set up, which means somebody in this pack has been given my number and carrier information.

I open a text to him and type.

Me: Thank you. I'm furious and you’re an arrogant jerk-face stupid son of a bitch.

His reply comes in nine seconds.

Kieran: You're welcome. I know.

Chapter 11

Kieran

She shows up at my door at nine o'clock. It’s a good thing, too, because my wolf is going insane. Keeping myself from shifting and running to her has been like wrestling a bear.

"I'm not here because I forgive you," she says, walking past me into the house. "I'm here because your sister spent the afternoon giving me a tour of the greenhouse and feeding me tea, and now I'm too relaxed to maintain a proper grudge, and I blame you for having hospitable relatives."

"Noted." I close the door behind her. "Can I get you something to drink, or would accepting a beverage compromise your position?"

"Coffee. Cream and sugar. And don't be smug about it."

I'm already smug about it. My mate is in my house, barefoot, smelling of whatever soap the guest cabin stocks, and her wolf has dragged her back here despite every instruction her human brain has issued to the contrary. I make the coffee and say nothing.

She takes the mug and settles onto the couch with her legs tucked under her, and I sit in the chair across from her.

"I want to talk to you about something," she says, "and I need you to actually listen instead of doing the wall thing."