Safe at Home (Build-A-Pack #3)

Chapter One

Luca

“This is your last chance to back out,” Rian said, his kindness shining in his eyes that held more hesitation than I’d expected.

We were borrowing Rian’s partner Holden’s house, laying on his bed. It struck me that I hadn’t really considered what it would mean to him to kill me, even if he was going to bring me back immediately.

I opened my mouth to talk, but a vicious bout of coughing interrupted me. The intensity of the now-familiar pain in my chest made me grimace as I tried to breathe.

Rian made a sympathetic face, then cocked his head as he listened for something. He smiled and quietly said, “The boys are worried.”

Of course they were. They’d become friends like the rest of Rian’s best friend Brodie’s pack.

Holden had gotten a work-related call and he’d had to leave before we got going. The situation at the Luxton sheriff’s station was messy as fuck right now, and even though I would’ve preferred he was there for Ben and Max before, and Rian after, my turning, it couldn’t be helped.

Lifting my hand to cup Rian’s cheek, I asked, “Are you okay with this? I can ask Brodie—”

“No,” he cut me off. “I mean, I’m okay with this. I want… I want it to be me as long as you want the same. I know it would be different for you to be a wolf and we’ve gone through everything that comes with vampirism, but….” He glanced away.

Some part of me wondered if he longed for family.

He was around two hundred years old and had lost everyone in his family during the Great Famine in the mid-1800s in Ireland.

Sure, he had his chosen family, the people who loved him and he loved back, but turning someone was the closest a vampire could get to a blood family—pun intended.

I smiled and pulled back my hand. “Good. So let’s do this before the puppies wear a groove into the floor.”

I heard one thump from the other side of the bedroom door, which meant they’d heard me, not that I’d tried to keep quiet anyway.

I wished I could’ve taken one last deep breath, but I’d been unable to take one for more than a month now.

I was near dying, and even though only a couple of months ago I wouldn’t have minded, the McRae pack had given me a home, a family, and enough reason to go on until I figured out something other than their love to carry me.

Love was good and fine, but one needed more purpose than that.

Then I suddenly had a thought and I blurted out, “Wait!”

Rian leaned back minutely, looking at me questioningly.

“I just… Max? Ben? Can you come in for a moment?”

I heard shuffling, then the door opened and Max walked in, wearing some sweats and a T-shirt. Ben, however, had opted to stay in wolf form. I knew they’d shifted as soon as we went into the bedroom, mostly because their instincts to protect us made them feel more comfortable in their wolf skin.

I carefully rolled over to my other side so Max could sit on the edge of the bed. Ben stayed on the floor, but he placed his head next to his brother’s knee.

“How can we help, Luca?” Max asked, his blue eyes so damn filled with emotion that it made me a bit choked up.

“I just… I just realized I didn’t….” I swallowed hard and felt Rian’s cool hand settle over my ribs in support. “I didn’t say anything if… in case… I mean….” Why was it so damn hard to speak all of a sudden?

“In case you don’t make it?” Max made an educated guess, his eyes welling over immediately.

Ben whined, then nudged both his brother and my hand.

Out of the two, Max was a year younger, and much more sensitive than his brother.

They could’ve been twins with how in tune they were, and from what little I knew, I had guessed that they’d been largely taking care of each other for a very long time.

They weren’t quite thirty yet, and I could practically feel the weariness from them, Ben more than his brother.

They’d both been fans of mine for years. Back when I made music. It seemed like another lifetime now that I was—hopefully—stepping into a whole new one. I knew Max especially had used the music my band had made to cope with a lot of things in his life.

That had given him some feelings that were, by nature, parasocial, as he’d never met me before I arrived at the pack house. Now, though, we’d gotten to be friends, and I could see the heartbreak in his eyes when he considered that I might die here if my body was too weak for the turning.

“Yeah. I… I think I want to say that I’ve found some real friends in you.

” I looked at Ben and put one hand on the side of his neck as if he was just a big dog.

“Both of you.” I gave Max my other hand, which he squeezed carefully with his own.

“And if this is the end, I… I just wanted to say thank you.”

Ben whined again, and tears rolled down Max’s cheeks. He leaned over to hug me, and I squeezed him back as much as I could. Then another coughing fit interrupted our embrace, and Max pulled back reluctantly.

He glanced at his brother, then took a deep breath and made eye contact with me in a very pointed way.

“You know how we feel about you and your music. That’s never been a secret.

But we want you to know that however you come back to us—and we know you will—we’ll be by your side every step of the way.

You might not have known how much you meant to us, how much you saved us, but you did.

But even if you hadn’t, we’d still want to be there for you.

” He looked at me so earnestly I choked up.

Max was one of those men who had a gentleness about him. He made you want to protect him as soon as you got to know him even a little. Yet here he was telling me that they would help me with this thing I was going to go through. The aftermath of it. Because they knew I would make it.

They’d offered to be the first people I’d feed from after.

That would stabilize me quicker, because werewolf blood was slightly more potent, and there were two of them.

They were also much less breakable in case I turned…

wilder. I didn’t want to put anyone else in jeopardy, because there was no way to know how I would be once I woke up again.

There was no universe in which I would have done this at the pack house, where the three human members of the pack were.

I wasn’t going to put anyone that breakable in danger.

I started to cough again, feeling as if my lungs were squeezing even tighter than they had been just hours before. Maybe it was the promise of getting away from this… this thing ravaging my body that made it so, so much worse toward the end.

With some support from Rian and Max, I got the coughing to calm down. They distracted me while my body did its thing, and then, as I felt the tingling in my arms and pain in my torso, Rian cleared his throat behind me.

“I think it’s time.”

I nodded but reached my hand again to stop Ben from leaving. I looked into his eyes, hoping to convey that I wanted nothing but the best for him and Max, and for him to keep an eye on his brother.

He nodded his wolfy head and then nudged Max again to get him moving.

“See you in—” I wheezed and coughed before being able to continue. “Well, whenever I wake up.”

If I woke up.

They left the room and as Max closed the door behind them, I heard the clicking of Ben’s claws that told me he was going to pace. Then there was a thud and slight rattle as Max sat down with his back to the door on the other side.

“They’re loyal to you,” Rian whispered.

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I sighed and settled on my back again. “I’m as ready as I’m going to be.”

He cupped my face and pressed a platonic kiss on my lips. Then he looked at me, sadness in his gaze.

“I’m so, so sorry we need to do this,” he murmured.

I tilted my head, giving him room, and he leaned closer.

“I love you,” I told him in a whisper before I felt his fangs pierce my skin.

He made a sound of discontent at the same exact time I made one of pleasure. The biting was pleasurable to the one being bitten, but he’d told me that my blood would likely taste bad for him now, given how sick I had become.

I’d fed a vampire before, Rian too a couple of times when we first met a handful of years ago, so this part was familiar.

The way my heart started to rabbit as soon as he didn’t stop after the normal minute or so. It was as if my psyche realized I was in actual danger. The lizard brain, as it was called, knew that a predator was about to kill me.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through it. Then suddenly, my body seized and I was gone.

Later, I remembered snippets. Like the taste of something in my mouth—Rian’s blood he was feeding me.

An anxious, very loud whine—Ben behind the door, loud as if he was right next to me as my body adjusted to my new senses.

Murmured words of love and affection and promises of never leaving me behind—Rian as he tried to keep both of us calm.

Then I drew a breath. A deep one. I could smell everything. Rian. The wolves. Another wolf, Holden, because it was his bed I was in, but how did I know on such an instinctual level that it was a wolf I was smelling?

I could feel my heart beat sluggishly, as if the restarting had damaged something, instead of healing every ailment in my body.

I drew another breath. And another, and—I could breathe normally!

My eyes flew open, and only a hand on my chest kept me from throwing myself off the bed.

“Easy, Luca. You’re okay.” Rian. Except his voice was a bit more melodic now? I turned my head to look at him, and he smiled at me.

“There you are,” he murmured.

A gasp and a whine from behind the door. The wolves.

I swallowed, tasting… blood? Suddenly all I could hear were the two heartbeats in the hallway. I felt something cut my lower lip. My… my fangs?

Everything was a lot, suddenly. Sounds, smells, even the way my favorite butter soft henley felt on my skin. I started to panic, except my heart didn’t beat any faster. The pressure was there, though. This, I recognized.

Then another thing made my whole body jolt. The hunger.

“Boys, you better come here and be ready,” Rian said, sounding very far away despite being right there next to me.

The door opened and Ben, wearing only sweatpants, came in first. Max trailed after him, looking hesitant where his brother only seemed determined.

The scent of them was like nothing I’d ever smelled before.

Like the essence of the woods around the pack house wrapped in something wild and untamed and delicious.

Ben rounded the bed and came to my side, smiling slightly. His eyes, so similar to his brother’s, were determined and gently amused.

“The hunger’s hitting you?” he inferred.

Normally, I would’ve looked at him. I knew he was wiry, almost thin with corded muscles as his body still adjusted to being sober and having all the food he could eat. It barely registered now, because my gaze latched onto the pulse point on his neck.

Then strong arms—Rian’s—moved me on the bed to give room for Ben to climb onto my other side. I yelped, the sound rough and foreign.

“It’s okay,” Ben murmured. “I got you, sweetheart.”

I barely registered his words, guided by his tone, as he leaned closer and pulled me to his neck.

There was something new inside me. A predator, an instinct that knew exactly what to do as the part that hung onto my humanity was kind of horrified at what I was doing. What was flooding my mouth as my fangs sank into Ben’s neck.

Then all the hesitation was gone, as the best thing I’d ever tasted overwhelmed me. I could hear the sound Ben made and smelled something hotter, more potent, but all I could concentrate on was the blood flowing down my parched throat.

It made me want to climb inside him. To bathe in it. To suck him dry and—“That’s enough, Luca. Let him go.”

The hand on my shoulder pulling me back made my temper rise. I made a sound I didn’t recognize.

“Enough!” Rian snapped, his voice the loudest I’d ever heard it.

Yet still, I couldn’t let go.

There were words I couldn’t quite catch, let alone understand as my whole being concentrated on the primal urge roaring inside me.

Then another touch on my shoulder, another voice, right by my ear said, “Please don’t hurt him.”

It was like magic. My concentration went to that voice, the touch that was scorching even through my shirt. I pulled my fangs back, lifted my head and looked at… Max?

He smiled at me, his eyes filled with hesitation and the tiniest hint of fear. “There you are. Hi.”

I felt Ben slipping away, and Max took his place. I blinked, feeling confused for a moment. I licked my lips, managed to poke my tongue with a fang, and frowned.

Max chuckled. “You’re such a baby vampire.”

And that’s when it hit me: I was a vampire now.

Without another thought, I pushed into Max’s embrace, hiding my face against his chest and whimpered.

“It’s okay. We’ve got you,” he whispered, but I heard it loud and clear.

Want to see what happens for the boys when the lights go out? Click here