26. Haunted Mirror
TWENTY-SIX
HAUNTED MIRROR
Haunted Mirror
I stared at the small cabin at the end of the long, dirt driveway that looked like it was walked more than it was driven over, emotions swirling within me. While I’d come a long way since I’d started therapy, I wasn’t sure if I’d come a long enough way for this.
“What are ya doin’, man?” I asked myself as that surge of blood-red guilt and rage began to lap at my feet, eager to drag me back down into the depths.
Stop the spiral, I reminded myself, focusing on breathing in, holding it, and slowly exhaling.
That was a trick Giselle had taught me. But that wasn’t the only card up my sleeve.
One thing my therapist had taught me was to use my sense of touch to keep me from getting lost in a PTSD fugue state or negative dissociation.
Reaching into my pocket, I gripped the pain fidget Giselle had bought me and grasped it, alternating the pressure of my grip. It was such a little thing, essentially a tube with spikes on it, but the sharp little pricks of non-harmful sensation kept me grounded in the present.
I needed that since the cabin I was staring at belonged to none other than Melton.
What a stupid name. The pettiness was a balm to all the growing feelings within me. Even though I was dealing with them, they weren’t exactly comfortable.
I was choosing to be here. Sure, Melton had been the one to send the letter to my home, but I was the one who’d gotten into my car after a couple weeks of deliberation and driven to the address a state over.
It could be a trap. But something in me doubted that. Maybe it was foolish optimism, or maybe it was the words from the letters, which were still burned into my mind.
Alpha Poynter,
I did wrong by you.
My family owes you blood.
Here’s where you can find me to collect.
He’d scribbled his address. And that was it.
I knew the words of a man who had given up when I saw them, and they hit something deep within me. A sort of commiseration right along there with the hatred and the rage.
That was a confusing mix, to say the least, and even though I was a short walk from his home, I still had no idea what I was going to do.
The wolf and the wounded part within me wanted to rip. To tear. To get my family’s vengeance weighed in blood. But there were other parts of me that…
Weren’t quite sure.
It wasn’t too late for me to get back in my car and drive away. By being here, I was opening a door to a past trauma that I had been working really hard to heal from.
But then that option evaporated when a door opened in the distance, and I saw a man step out onto his porch.
Even with my enhanced senses, I couldn’t quite make out his features clearly, but I didn’t need to in order to know it was the man from the clearing.
I’d only seen him in his human form as he drove off in my car and when he was covered in blood with a medical bracelet stuck in his eye, but I could recognize him from miles away.
Shit. Retreating definitely wasn’t an option now.
I didn’t need to scent the air, but I did, confirming that it was the same wolf that had kidnapped Giselle.
Charles’s brother. The brother of the wolf who had taken away everything of mine.
Not that long ago, I would have ripped him limb from limb. Let him carry on his brother’s legacy even into death. But I was a different wolf now. A different alpha. I wasn’t healed, but I was heal ing.
I still didn’t know if I was doing the right thing by answering his letter, but it was too late to back out, so I strode towards the porch.
I stared at him the whole while, taking in more details as he came into sharper view.
The eye Giselle had stabbed was moving normally, and it seemed like he could see out of it, but the iris was milky in color, and his pupil was almost completely blown out compared to his other eye.
Not that I was surprised about that. Silver wounds took forever to heal and could temporarily scar us wolf shifters.
Maybe in another year, he would be fully back to normal, maybe a little less.
For some reason, I was struck by the idea that every day since that night, he’d had to see his altered reflection in the mirror.
A constant reminder of how he’d tried to come into my life and continue Charles’s relentless terror.
I had to admit, I’d been surprised when Giselle had said he’d left town after apologizing.
I’d expected it to be a trap, but the lone wolf’s change of heart had been genuine.
“You came,” he said finally, when I was close enough.
“I did,” I answered simply, because how did one start a conversation in our situation?
We stared at each other, and I got the feeling we were both deep within our own thoughts. Silence rang out almost audibly.
“Wanna take a walk?”
The whole idea seemed so absolutely absurd, but I shrugged. “Sure.”
He nodded, and fuck, some of his mannerisms were so like Charles’s that I had to firmly remind myself that my ex-beta was dead and this man had nothing to do with the attack on my pack and family.
I could tell he scented my sudden spike of alarm before he paused, his eyes flicking to my face. I saw apprehension there, but no fear. Whatever Melton thought was going to happen, he’d already come to terms with it.
But what surprised me was the pain in his eyes. The deep, abiding sadness. No end, no escape, just endless depths of hopelessness.
And in that, I saw myself.
Or at least, a version of me. A version I had been working on for a long while, but really only felt like I’d made progress with during the last year.
“You’re good,” I said, which was possibly the most woefully inadequate way I could have put it, but thankfully, it seemed that Melton wasn’t really in the mood to critique my word choice, because he nodded and moved right along, descending the three steps of his porch.
“I ain’t been good in a long time.”
Yeah, that checked out.
It was a bit strange, observing Melton in my peripheral vision as we walked. He was a stranger, and technically an enemy, but I felt as if I knew everything he was feeling. Thinking, even. It was a direct portal to how I’d been not that long ago, and man, seeing it from the outside was eye-opening.
I’d thought I was getting by then. That no one could really see the turmoil churning within me and eating me from the inside out. Boy, how fucking wrong I was, because it was basically written into Melton’s eyes, his posture, his scent.
I really hadn’t been fooling anyone, had I?
“Why Giselle?” I asked after the silence began to feel oppressive in nature. One would think that strolling through tall trees with the crisp air free of all those pollutants in the city would be relaxing, but that certainly wasn’t the case now.
“Hm?”
“Giselle. She was just some random human woman. Why did you take her?”
“To hurt you.”
While his rather curt answers were frustrating, they were also understandable. But still, I had questions and the least Melton could do was answer them.
“I figured that. But why? She was a stranger and it was our first date. It wasn’t like there was some deep connection between us to actually hurt me.”
Melton snorted. “Yeah, she said so. Can’t believe that tiny thing stabbed me in the eye for a guy she was on a first date with. I’m sorry about causing her medical emergency.”
Although the man’s permanently guilty scent had lessened a bit, it surged back in full force at the mention of Giselle’s medical issues.
Not that I blamed him. Sometimes, when I looked back on that fight, I was pretty damn ashamed too.
It had Giselle to pull me out of the bloodlust, and it had nearly sent her to the hospital again.
“I’d been watching you for a couple of weeks. Can’t say what finally motivated me to come ‘n’ get the revenge I thought my little brother deserved, all I can explain is that it just felt like there wasn’t a point to much else anymore.”
“You were watching me? I didn’t scent you at all.”
“I was careful. Kept my distance. The thing is, you don’t do much. You’re either in that house of yours or working a random gig, always with different people. You never have any real interactions with anyone outside of that crazy woman and your kids.”
That crazy woman was Natalie, no doubt, who had been the one to kick his door down and beat him with a baseball bat while he was still trying to recover from the wound Giselle had inflicted.
Actually, now that I thought about it, his only real injuries had come from two women.
Any hurt that we’d gotten in battle had no doubt healed within the hour. That was kind of humbling.
“So, when you randomly broke your routine to drive somewhere at night, I followed you. And once I saw you help a woman into your car and then sit there for fifteen minutes, I figured she had to be some sort of secret mate, or at least someone important to you.”
It felt invasive that somewhere, just out of the range of my senses, Melton had observed an intimate moment between Giselle and me. Not sexually of course, but deeply emotional, and I’d been quite vulnerable.
“You didn’t think it was weird that she was a human?”
“I didn’t really think about anything at all, if I’m being honest. Or at least anything outside of doing what I felt was my duty.
All my mind could focus on was the fact that you had killed my baby brother, and I had failed him.
Like I wouldn’t even be able to breathe or sleep if I didn’t make you hurt how I hurt.
“So, once I had the tiniest clue that there was a way to do that, I jumped on it. I took her away, and I fully intended to tear her throat out the moment I heard you were close enough so you’d arrive right as she took her last breaths.”
My wolf and I didn’t like that, and I nearly let out a snarl. I tamped that down, though, reminding myself that hadn’t happened. If I wanted to hear Melton’s answers, I shouldn’t discourage him from verbalizing what he had thought in the moment. Even if it was horrific.