Chapter Six
Preacher
After cleanup, the guys chilled around the fire pit, their voices a low murmur of conversation and occasional laughter. I spotted Trent stretched out on one of the chaise lounges, his face tilted toward the night sky. Grabbing two beers, I crossed the patio and eased into the empty seat beside him.
“Here.” I popped the cap and offered it over. “Full?”
“Comatose.” He took the bottle but just rested it against his thigh. “I appreciate it. Looking out for me today.”
Something in his voice told me people looking out for him was a rare occurrence. “You got caught up in shit you didn’t deserve.”
Trent made a sound between a laugh and a scoff, eyes still fixed on the night sky. “My life summed up in a single sentence.”
I let the silence stretch. Sometimes you got more out of a man by saying nothing than by asking. The fire popped. Drift threw another log on, sending a column of sparks up into the dark, the trees catching the light for a second before slipping back into shadow.
My wolf had settled the second I’d sat down. Not asleep. Just quiet, being close to the thing it had decided was ours.
Trent finally lifted the beer, took a small sip, and made a face.
“Not a fan?”
“I don’t drink much.” He set it back down on his thigh. “Bad genetics. My dad drank everything that wasn’t nailed down.”
I filed that away with the rest of what I knew about him then asked a question I already had an answer to. “He still in the picture?”
“Statesville.” His thumb worked at the corner of the label, peeling a strip back. “Fifteen years for armed robbery. He’s about halfway through.”
“You visit?”
“Just once.” Trent’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t a smile.
“He spent the whole forty minutes asking me if I’d put money on his books. Didn’t ask how I was or ask about Mike or Maria. Just commissary.”
He shrugged like it didn’t matter, but I watched the way his shoulders stayed too high after, riding up around his ears. “Haven’t been back.”
“Don’t blame you.”
“That’s the other sentence that sums up my life. Don’t blame you.”
I took a pull from my beer, watching him over the lip of the bottle.
He was talking. That was something. Earlier, he could barely get a sentence out without his voice cracking, and now he was laid out on my chaise picking at a label, telling me about the man who’d given him half his DNA and not much else.
“Your mother?”
“Cancer. I was thirteen.” He tilted his head sideways on the cushion to look at me, the firelight catching on his lashes.
“Maria was sixteen, Mike was nineteen. He got the house when Dad went in. Maria gave up caring, and I got”—he gestured vaguely at himself—“the couch, mostly. Until I got a job and could cover my share of the bills. Then I got the spare room.”
“Generous of him.”
“Saint Mike.”
I wanted to put my fist through something. Instead, I rested the bottle on my knee and kept my voice easy. “How long you been carrying him?”
Trent’s brow pinched. “What?”
“Bills. Mortgage. Groceries.” I jerked my chin toward him. “How long you been the one keeping the lights on?”
He blinked at me like the question had short-circuited something. Then he looked back at the sky, and I watched his throat work around a swallow.
“Since I was seventeen.”
Christ.
“That’s a long time, Trent.”
“It’s not that bad. Maria pitches in. She slips money in my drawer. She just—” He shrugged again, that same too-high motion. “She doesn’t talk to me. Hasn’t since Mom died. I think looking at me reminds her of stuff she’d rather forget. I look like our mom.”
There it was. Build the case, make it make sense, don’t let it hurt. I saw right through the excuse he’d probably repeated a million times to convince himself things were fine.
He said it without bitterness. Like he’d long since worked out a reason for everyone in his life that let him down. The human had a real talent for explaining away the people who’d failed him.
I wasn’t going to be one of them. He just didn’t know that yet.
“What about you?” Trent rolled his head toward me again. “Or is the interrogation a one-way street?”
“Wasn’t an interrogation.”
“Felt like one.”
“Felt like a conversation.”
“Same thing, with you.” He arched one eyebrow, and there was that flicker of fire Crowbar had clocked in the truck. “You’re asking things like a guy used to getting answers.”
I huffed. “Fair.”
“So.” He gestured lazily with the beer bottle. “Your turn. Family. Go.”
I considered how much to give him. Not the truth. Not yet. But enough he’d stop feeling like he was the only one bleeding at the table.
“My mother’s still alive. Lives about an hour north.” I tipped my beer toward the woods. “Quiet woman. Reads a lot. Calls me every Sunday and pretends she’s not checking up on me.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Don’t tell her I said that. She’s got a reputation to protect.”
The corner of Trent’s mouth twitched. The bruise pulled with it, and I had to look away from his jaw before my hand decided to reach over there on its own.
“Father?”
“Gone.” I took a sip. “Long time.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a good man. Lived a good life. Got more than most people get.” That was the truth, even if the rest of the picture wasn’t anything I could lay out for him under firelight with a beer in his hand.
“Siblings?”
“One sister. She’s down in South Carolina with a husband and two kids who climb me like a tree every time I show up.” I let the smile show. Damn pups made me feel like a superhero, visiting or just a call. “She’s the only person on the planet who can still make me eat my vegetables.”
Trent snorted. “I’d pay to see that.”
“Don’t tempt me. She’d have you set up at her dinner table inside an hour, you telling her every embarrassing thing about me you can come up with.”
He frowned. “I don’t know any embarrassing things about you.”
“Give it time.”
That landed somewhere it shouldn’t have. I watched his eyes drop to the bottle in his lap, saw the color climb up the side of his neck that wasn’t bruised. He took another sip he didn’t want, just to have something to do with his hands.
I let him have the moment, sipped my own beer, and listened to Crowbar lose at something on the other side of the fire, while Drift laughed loud enough to scare birds.
“Preacher.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you mean? In the diner.” Trent’s voice had gone quieter, careful, the way a person sounded when they were stepping onto ice they weren’t sure would hold. “When you said I was your problem?”
I’d been waiting for him to ask. I set my beer down on the slate between our chairs and turned toward him, one elbow on my knee.
“Means what it sounds like.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the start of one.” I held his gaze.
The firelight made the green of them deeper, almost gray in the middle.
“Means as long as you’re under my protection, nobody touches you. Means Hammer doesn’t get within a mile of you. Means Royce finds out real quick that your name isn’t currency anymore. Means your brother doesn’t get to hand you out the next time trouble comes knocking.”
“And in return?”
“In return you eat. You sleep. You let me figure out the rest.”
His brow furrowed. “That’s not a deal. That’s a fairy tale.”
It was a removal of burden. Trent’s whole life had been earning and carrying everything. That shit stopped tonight.
“Take it up with management.” I leaned back, content in a way I hadn’t been in so long.
I wanted to tell him the truth, wanted him to know why he felt so connected to me, but my mate was opening up, and I wanted to keep him talking.
Wanted to hear the softness in his voice.
Wanted those eyes focused on me, looking at me like I was something to him.
“You’re management.”
I smirked. “Then stop arguing.”
He laughed. It startled out of him, short and a little hoarse, and it was the first real one I’d heard from him. My wolf perked up at the sound and pressed against the inside of my chest like it wanted to climb out and lay at his feet.
“I don’t understand you,” Trent said after a moment, trying to map something that didn’t fit into every pattern he’d known. He’d gone back to studying me, head still tipped sideways on the cushion, eyes hooded with exhaustion. “Yesterday I thought you were going to kill me. Today you fed me ribs.”
“Both can be true.”
“Don’t say things like that. I’ll faint again.”
“Then I’ll catch you again.”
His brows shot up. I watched a swallow move down the long line of his throat and forced myself to look back at the fire before I did something the human wasn’t ready for.
“Why?” he asked, so soft I almost missed it under the crackle of the logs.
“Why what?”
“Why me?” Trent’s fingers tightened on the bottle. “I’m nobody. I’m a guy who pours coffee and pays his brother’s bills and got himself slammed into a wall because he was at the wrong corner store at the wrong time. There’s nothing here worth all this.”
I turned my head slowly, meeting his eyes, and held them.
“You let me decide what’s worth what.”
He didn’t answer. His mouth was open just slightly, and his pulse was visible under the skin of his neck, fluttering fast.
Pop, pop, pop. My hand was on Trent’s arm, yanking him out of his chair and slinging him toward Riot. “Get him inside, now!”
“Was that gunfire?” Trent shouted, face pale.
My pack were already on their feet, racing toward the woods. As soon as Riot slammed the door closed then lowered the steel shutters, I took off, shifting mid-run.
My clothes shredded against the force of the shift, fabric splitting at the seams as my bones rearranged themselves and fur poured down my spine.
Four paws hit the ground running, the world dropping into the sharp, low-slung view of my wolf.
The fire pit blurred past me, the deck planks vanished, and then the tree line swallowed me whole.
Drift broke left of me, Crowbar right, both of them on two legs with weapons drawn, while the rest of my pack was in wolf form.
The scent slammed into me about thirty yards in.