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“You expect me to believe you didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t know,” he hissed. “I didn’t know what she was when I met her. She was lost. Just like I was. Trying to get back to her family. Just like I was. I was just as foolish as Jarred.”
“Did you mark her against her will?” I asked.
Anson’s eyes glinted. “I’ve never marked anyone against their will. I’ve never marked anyone at all. And I never will.”
There was a challenge in his words. In his eyes. It was me he wanted to mark. Me who had craved it.
“Tell me all of it,” I said. “From the beginning. I’ll try to listen. I’ll try not to…judge. But I need to understand. Your blood. Anson, you healed Jarred. If you can heal the rest of them…”
“Then you’ll bleed me to death,” he said, but there was bitterness, no argument in his words.
“I’m not a murderer,” I said. “I’m not a monster either. But maybe Dr. Olivet…”
“She’s human,” he said.
I reached for him, struggling to control my anger. He would turn, I knew. Retreat into himself. Deny me the answers I had to have.
“Tell me,” I said.
Anson’s eyes flashed. “You don’t know how well protected you were. All of you. Here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve told you that before. And I want to believe you. I do. But all that time, Anson. You let me…you let me start to love you. You never showed me your true face.”
He closed his eyes. “I didn’t know.”
“What?”
“I didn’t know!” he shouted. “There were things. Episodes. I would lose time. Wake up covered in claw marks. In bruises. Smelling of blood that wasn’t my own. There were nightmares. He showed me things. But never enough that I could know who he was. Who I was.”
“You’re saying when you’re X?”
“Not until you attacked Lissa. When she died, that’s when I remembered it all. I swear on my life, for whatever that’s worth, I didn’t know I was both of them. Only now. And now…”
Was he telling the truth, or just another pretty lie? Something to make me feel sorry for him. A trick to let him back in.
“How?” I said.
“You have to understand,” he said. “I came from a strong pack, too. We had lands in northern Wisconsin. It wasn’t like Wild Lake. Not…peaceful like this. We had to fight. Over and over again.”
“We fought here too,” I said. “It took decades. We…”
“You said you were ready to listen.”
I took a seat on a fallen log just at the edge of the woods. Anson came to join me.
“During the thick of the fighting,” Anson said. “We tried to flee. The lands where my pack lived were overrun by agents of the Ring. The fae came, Tempest. Scores of them. They took over my father’s house in Copper Harbor as a base of operations. They…murdered him.”
I’d heard this story before. This and so many like it. Alpha wolves rounded up. Shot. Tortured. Forced into servitude.
“Every member of my father’s pack died that day,” he said. “All except my mother and me. She was human. Once they killed her mate, it broke her. She was vulnerable. She was still young enough to bear children.”
I took a breath. I knew exactly what kind of dangers Anson’s mother would have faced. A proven Alpha’s mate. She would have been sold and bred. A valuable commodity to the agents of the Ring.
“I bargained for her life,” he said. “Me in exchange for her. They agreed.”
His scars. The way they changed. Grew deeper. Made his face morph from day to day, minute to minute.
