Sixty-Six
SIXTY-SIX
Zalen
“NAT! GET LUCA AND TONY into the basement and lock the door!” I snapped, already in motion. Emiel and Byron were practically treading on my heels as all three of us skidded into the hallway and charged toward the front entryway.
Ahead of us, Mia let out an angry shriek, and red closed around the edges of my vision. Emiel let out a snarl and somehow managed to shoulder past me, moving faster than anyone that size should be able to move.
Let this asshole set one single foot past my threshold, I thought, all of my pent-up rage over Tony’s abuse rising in a hot wave. Let him have made it one single step inside the house .
Missouri employed the castle doctrine, allowing any means of defense necessary to resist an intruder inside a private residence—up to and including deadly force. For many years, the law hadn’t applied to properties owned by alphas, but as of 2008, it did .
“Get out of our house!” Mia was yelling. “ Get out !”
She was standing with her back to the entryway wall, hands outstretched for balance as though she’d been hurled there with force. David Scalise stood two steps inside the wide-open door. Four parallel scratch marks from Mia’s nails decorated his left cheek, and those sluggishly bleeding lines were almost as satisfying as the startled grunt he made when Emiel grabbed him by the throat and slammed him backward against the small table where we kept our keys, shattering its spindly legs into matchwood.
I grasped Mia’s hand and tugged her to safety, handing her off to Byron.
“ You ,” Emiel growled, one meaty hand pinning Tony’s tormenter to the wall by his neck.
“I’ll go call nine-one-one!” Mia said shakily, heading deeper into the house.
Toward safety , I thought, some of the hard tension in my shoulders easing. But then she met Luca coming the other way at a fast jog, his green eyes wide with alarm.
Byron grabbed Luca’s arm, pulling him to a stop. “No—stay back!”
My tension returned full force. “Luca! I thought I told you to get in the basement!”
Luca tugged his arm free, his mouth set in a grim line. “You did,” he said past clenched teeth. “But Emiel’s gonna kill this shithead unless someone stops him.”
On cue, rough choking noises penetrated my awareness.
Let him do it , whispered a little voice in my hindbrain—the one that craved some kind of justice for all the atrocities I hadn’t been able to prevent over the years. Luca slipped past me. He made a beeline for the huge alpha, who was crackling with anger as he strangled the life out of a pedophile in my front entryway.
“Emiel,” Luca murmured, wrapping his fingers fearlessly around his mate’s bulging bicep. “Enough. This won’t make it better... and you’re scaring me.”
Emiel instantly jerked his hand away, as though David Scalise’s skin had become red hot. He gasped as he took several stumbling steps back, with Luca still firmly attached to his side.
“Damn,” Byron said. “Just when I was starting to enjoy the show.”
Scalise staggered upright, coughing, with murder in his bloodshot eyes. The smell of whiskey surrounded him in a stale cloud. He took one threatening step forward, and I blocked him, feeling my molars grinding together so hard that I was going to need to schedule a dentist visit when this was done.
I honestly didn’t remember making the decision to clench my fingers closed and draw my arm back, but an instant later, pain was radiating from my split knuckles up through my wrist and elbow as my fist impacted with the asshole’s jaw.
He staggered, crashing to the floor with a groan.
Mia’s voice penetrated my awareness, growing louder as she approached. I turned to look at her.
“Yes, that’s right!” she said breathlessly into her phone. “He just forced his way in, and I ran to hide in my bedroom! I need the police here right away!”
Blankly, I took in the little black cylinder Mia was holding in her free hand. She toggled something on its top and came right up to stand next to me, before I could organize my thoughts well enough to tell her to stay back.
“Oh my god!” she said into the phone, mock hysterical. “He’s coming after me! I’m going to have to pepper spray him!”
With an ice-cold expression at odds with her high-pitched voice, she stepped up to the moaning figure on the floor. Orange spray shot out of the keyring pepper spray canister, hitting Scalise directly in the eyes. He screamed, clawing at his face as he descended into frantic hacking and retching.
“Oh, no!” Mia told the emergency services operator, not breaking expression. “It’s still not stopping him! Oh, wait. Never mind. My alphas are here. They’ll restrain him. Please hurry with those police cars, though.”
She thumbed the phone off and stuck it in her pocket, cutting off the voice on the other end. We all stared at her.
“Whoa,” Luca said, his expression awestruck.
At our feet, David Scalise coughed and dry-heaved, tears and snot streaming from his splotchy red face.
Much, much later, the seven of us stood around in the kitchen. Silence echoed in the house after the commotion of police officers taking statements and Scalise hoarsely cursing us up one side and down the other.
Thankfully, poor Tony already had a restraining order against his stepfather on file, processed at the same time his emancipated minor status had been. That order would further smooth the way for us legally. Not that Scalise had a leg to stand on, if he tried to argue he’d been assaulted. But with the restraining order in force, I doubted there was a lawyer anywhere in the county who would even agree to take his case.
“I can’t stay here.” Tony’s complexion was pasty, and he couldn’t seem to meet anyone’s gaze. “In St. Louis, I mean. I’m sorry... I know you’ve done a lot to help me get set up here. But... I can’t.”
Luca looked exhausted. He sat at the table, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the tabletop and his fingers laced tightly together. Emiel stood behind him, one hand clasped on his shoulder.
“Go someplace far away, Tony,” Luca said quietly. “Start over. Don’t give your past any more chances to catch up with you.”
With a pang, I wondered if Luca was regretting not having done exactly that, five years ago.
“Yeah.” The word emerged on a sigh. Tony took a deep breath and straightened his spine. “I’ve, um... I’ve always kind of wanted to live in Chicago. Maybe this is the universe telling me to do that.”
My brain immediately tried to dive into logistics, but I cut off that line of thought for now. It was Chicago , not Timbuktu. We’d figure it out.
“We’ll help you make that happen,” I promised. I shot a glance toward Byron, who nodded.
“Yeah, no problem. I’ll get us a pair of tickets,” he said. “We’ll go up together; find you a job and a place to stay.”
I tried to let my gratitude show through my eyes. Byron just flickered an eyebrow at me, managing a twisted shadow of a smile in acknowledgement.
The pair didn’t waste any time getting out of Dodge. They left the following evening, taking the train from the Amtrack station downtown, with all of Tony’s earthly belongings stuffed inside a single, battered suitcase.
The day after that, Mia and Luca ambushed me after dinner. They gave Nat and Emiel matching significant looks—in response to which, Nat cleared his throat and suggested he and Emiel go catch a college basketball game on TV.
Then I was alone with the omegas.
“Can we talk in your room?” Luca asked. “It’s about the mating.”
I nodded, knowing this discussion should have happened ages ago. As I led them upstairs, I tried to rehearse what I wanted to say... and failed utterly.
Once we were all inside with the door closed, Mia turned to me.
“I asked you once if you wanted a mated pack again, after losing Julie,” she said. “Do you remember? And you told me, only if it’s the right pack .”
I winced. “Not really my finest moment. I hope you both know that this is the right pack. For me, I mean.”
“We sort of figured,” Luca said. “Even if I still have to struggle to get my brain around it, sometimes.”
In the back of my head, my broken mating bond pulsed like a drum.
“I just...” I began, and then stopped. “I need you to understand that I’ll always hold space for Julie. In my heart... in my thoughts. And I worry that the space she takes up will make you believe you don’t matter.”
Luca winced; the movement small but noticeable.
Mia frowned. “I think I’d worry more if you’d been mated to someone, and were able to forget about them completely after they were gone.”
“No,” Luca said. “That was directed at me, not you.”
I couldn’t exactly deny it.
“There was a really long time when I didn’t understand,” I told him. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with Byron and me outside of your heats, because we were alphas—and alphas had done nothing but hurt you.”
Luca looked away. “Not really that simple, is it?”
“I get that now,” I said. “And I think Byron and I spent years making things worse instead of better. We withdrew from you because we thought it was what you wanted. But all that time...”
“I was pushing you away because I couldn’t stand thinking about how I always begged you to bite me during my heats. I thought I didn’t deserve a mating bond,” Luca finished.
“And the fact that we didn’t fight you on it just reinforced what was already in your head.” Even now, the knowledge made me sick.
“Yeah,” Luca admitted, deflating.
“But you do know now that it wasn’t like that?” I asked, hoping I was right about the answer. “Emiel showed you that, didn’t he?”
A sad little smile tipped up the corner of Luca’s full lips.
“Emiel and I are a bit of a special case,” Luca said.
“But?” I pressed.
“But he did show me that it could work. And I do believe you and Byron want it.” His green eyes bored into mine with sudden intensity. “Mia told me you freaked out a bit while you and she were talking about pups. Zalen, I don’t have to skip the birth control shot for this heat. Not if the idea bothers you.”
My heart ached in a way that had nothing to do with my broken bond. “Oh, Luca. No. No . It’s not that. It’s just... well, the same thing again, I suppose. There’s a hole inside me, in the shape of the pups I never had with Julie. Your pups— our pups—can’t fill it. They can only live next to it. I worry that’s not fair to you. Or them .”
And if we’re mated, you’ll always be able to feel that hole through our bond , I didn’t add.
Luca’s expression morphed through several emotions, Mia watching quietly from the sidelines as we both worked through whatever it was that we were working through. After a few moments, it cleared.
“I’m a basket case, and everyone here knows it. I can’t compete with the memory of the perfect mate you lost,” he said. “But I can exist alongside her in your heart, the same way I’ll be existing alongside Mia. I just need to know that I won’t have to live up to those perfect memories, because I can’t. I have to know that you’re mating me—mating us —for us .”
All the worry and tension drained out of me in a flood. Because that , I could answer without reservation.
“Stay with me tonight. Both of you. Let me show you exactly how much I want to be one of the alphas in your pack,” I said impulsively. “I can’t promise you the part of my heart that holds my love for Julie, and the life we might have had. But I can promise that there’s a hell of a lot more space in there that’s yours and yours alone.”
Mia caught Luca’s gaze, her expression soft. After a moment, they smiled at each other, uncomplicated and happy.
“Deal,” Luca said.
“Deal,” she echoed.