Page 29 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

Well. My mother travelled to human towns a lot, more than most shifters, because she was obsessed with buying the latest fashions and visiting the hoity toity beauty salons. And as for my father, it was no love match. They acted more like business partners than husband and wife. She wanted his wealth and prestige, he wanted a beautiful woman on his arm. It would not actually shock me to hear that she cheated on my father.

I open my mouth. I close it. I open it again.

"How long have you known?"

"I suspected the day Stephen walked into our tent. His eyes are brown. Yours are blue. Your mother's were blue. Two blue-eyed parents very, very rarely would produce a brown-eyed child." He pauses. "I told Amaryllis to look for confirmation during her examination. She found it."

The day Stephen walked into the tent. That was the first day. Before any of this — before he kissed me or fed me prime rib or crushed my phone or filled a closet with my clothes. He has known this the entire time.

My voice comes out sharp and bitter. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I didn't have proof. I had a guess based on eye color and a healer's preliminary findings, and I was not going to blow up your family on a hunch."

I stare at him. He stands there and lets me stare, and he doesn't flinch, and he doesn't apologize, and he doesn't reach for me.

The terrible thing is that he's right. If he'd told me in the first week — "hey, I think your brother has a different father based on his eye color" — I would have laughed in his face, or maybe kicked him in the shin.

He had no proof. He had a guess. And the guess turned out to be correct, and my mother was willing to sacrifice her own child so she could keep running up my father’s credit cards, and the man who punished my brother for being broken was punishing someone else's son for a condition he didn't cause and couldn't have fixed.

I should be furious. Three weeks ago I would have been. I would have stormed out, slammed a door, stomped across the grass, and added it to the list of reasons Kieran Holt is an overbearing, secretive, impossible man.

But I've sat across from him on that couch and said hard things and watched him hear them, and he didn't throw me out or shut me down. He's not the same wall I met at the market. He's a wall with a door in it, and I'm the one he opened it for, and I can't pretend that doesn't matter.

So instead of fury, I just feel a deep sadness wash over me. I am incredibly relieved that my father can’t drag Stephen back home, but the rewriting of our entire history is a sharp blow.

"I need to tell Stephen," I say.

He nods sympathetically. "I know."

"He deserves to hear it from me, not from a healer's file."

"I know that too."

I put the bone folder down on the table, square to the edge. I walk past him, and he doesn't stop me.

I find Stephen at the training ground, sitting on one of the granite boulders with a water bottle, watching Rose practice forms in the clearing below.

I can do this.

He’s eighteen, and he's earned the truth, and carrying this for him isn't my job anymore. He's shown me that much in the last two weeks.

"Hey," I say, sitting down next to him. "I need to talk to you about something."

"That's never good." He takes a sip of water. "What did I do now?” His tone is half-joking, half-worried.

"It's not about Rose." I take a breath. "Dad called."

The softness disappears. His shoulders go back up where they've lived for most of his life, and I hate watching him do it.

"He says if you have a wolf, he has a pack-of-origin claim. He wants you back."

Stephen's jaw tightens. "He can't have me back. He doesn't get to throw me away and then pick me up when I'm worth something." His eyes widen. “He can’t make me, can he?”

"No, it turns out he can’t. Kieran says the claim doesn't hold up, because—" I stop. I look at my brother, his brown eyes in his tanned face, and I think about my mother, and the secret she kept for eighteen years, and the fact that the answer was right there the whole time, and nobody saw it except a stranger at a farmer's market. "Because Dad isn't your biological father, Stephen. Your biological father was human. That's why your wolf is faint — you’re half shifter, not full.”

He doesn't say anything for a long time.

Rose is still practicing below us, unaware, and the breeze moves through the oaks, and I sit next to my brother and let the silence be what it needs to be.