24. Loup Garou #2
About the first time he'd hit me. How I hadn't seen it coming, how I'd made excuses, how I'd told myself it was an isolated incident. How I'd ignored every red flag, every warning sign, every instinct that screamed at me to run.
I'd trusted my judgment then too. I'd thought I knew him.
I'd been wrong.
What if I was wrong again?
The Voss brothers had been keeping secrets since the day I arrived: the late-night disappearances, the evasive answers.
The way they moved, the way they watched, the way they seemed to communicate without words; I'd noticed all of it.
I'd filed it away under "eccentric" and "mysterious" and "charmingly strange. "
I'd made excuses for them the same way I'd made excuses for Marcus.
But they've never hurt you, a small voice whispered. They've protected you, fed you, cared for you.
Marcus had done all those things too. In the beginning. Before.
"I'm going to sit out here," Callum said through the door. His voice was flat, controlled, utterly unlike the growling monster I'd seen on the porch. "However long it takes. I'm not leaving."
That was a lot of words for Callum. I pressed my forehead to my knees and tried to stop shaking.
I don't know how long I sat there. An hour. Maybe two.
The shaking stopped eventually. The nausea faded to a dull churn. My mind, which had been spinning in useless circles, finally slowed enough for me to think.
Facts, I told myself. Focus on facts.
Fact: The Voss brothers were not human; the claws, the fangs, the transformation. Like something out of a horror movie, except horror movies didn't capture the sounds. The wet grinding of bones. The crack of joints relocating. The snarl that vibrated in your chest like a second heartbeat.
Fact: They had nearly killed something tonight; right in the front yard. To protect me. A thought I forced myself to acknowledge.
Fact: I was attracted to all three of them. Had been intimate with two of them. Three if you count the kiss with Eli. Which I did, there was no denying that had been an intimate moment.
Fact: I had no idea what any of this meant, what they wanted from me, or what they would do if they discovered I had shared moments with all of them. They know, fuck, they know! What had that freaky stranger said?
"She smells like all of you. Like she's been rolling in your scent."
How could I know if I was safe? I was too close to all of this.
I stood up. My legs were stiff, my feet crusted with dried blood. I walked to the sink and washed them, watching rust-colored water swirl down the drain, and tried to figure out what to do.
I could leave. Pack a bag, slip out the back, drive until Magnolia Creek was just another bad memory. I'd done it before. I was good at it. The running, the starting over, the disappearing into a new life. It was the only skill Marcus had ever given me.
But the thought of leaving, actually leaving, never seeing any of them again, made my chest clench until breathing became impossible.
That's how it started with Marcus too, I reminded myself. The inability to imagine life without him. The way he'd made himself essential.
Was this the same thing? Had I let myself get trapped again, seduced by attention, care and the illusion of safety?
Or was this something different?
I didn't know. How could I know? I couldn't tell anymore what was genuine feeling and what was the desperate need to belong somewhere, to someone. I'd spent the past year trying to learn to trust myself again, and now I didn't trust anything at all. I’m broken. I am so fucking fucked up.
I walked to the door. Put my hand on the deadbolt.
"I'm going to open the door," I said. "Don't—don't come in. Just... stay where you are."
"Okay." Callum's voice, rough with something I couldn't identify. "You have our word."
I opened the door.
He was sitting on the porch steps, exactly where he'd said he'd be.
His shirt was destroyed, torn to ribbons, stained dark with blood, and I could see the wounds on his chest. Three parallel gashes, deep enough that I'd seen bone earlier, but now...
healing. Visibly healing, the edges knitting together as I watched.
Jasper sat beside him, similarly bloody, similarly healing. Eli stood a few feet away, the cleanest of the three but still splattered with things I didn't want to think about.
They all looked at me with identical expressions. Hope. Fear. Desperate, aching need.
I'd seen that look before too. On Marcus's face, after the first time he hit me. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again, please don't leave me, I need you.
"What are you," I said. My voice came out flat. Dead.
"We’re known as Loup-Garou in this region," Eli said. “Though most human stories refer to us as werewolves.”
Werewolves. Fucking Werewolves. I pinched myself. It hurt.
"How long? Have you always been—"
"Born this way. All three of us. Our whole family."
Born. Not bitten, not cursed, not transformed by some accident or choice. They'd never been human. Not once. Not ever.
“Are you gonna bite me?”
“Do you want us to?” Jasper asked with a grin. Eli whacked him across the chest with his arm.
“There are laws,” Eli interjected.
"And the thing that attacked. What was that?"
"An abomination." Callum's jaw tightened.
"Filion Glenn was a natural-born loup-garou like us, but he delved too deep into his studies of the occult.” Eli paused. “He lost his way and began experimenting on himself.”
“Now he’s an eff’d-up bastard who does shady shit for the highest bidder. So why the hell was he here?” I found it interesting that Jasper posed this question to Callum and not Eli.
Callum tilted his head up to look at me. “What did he say to you, before we arrived?”
“He said he was here to deliver a message. He said the Voss boys can’t protect me from what’s coming.”
“So tonight was a warning."
"A warning about what?"
The three of them exchanged glances. That silent communication I'd noticed before, the wordless conversation I was never part of.
"Could be a number of things," Jasper said finally. "Doubtful your ex, but we can’t rule it out. More likely a rival flex. Everyone knows you're living here. Getting close to humans is tricky, like Eli said, there are laws."
“Then I should go.” My heart sank even before I had finished uttering the words.
Silence.
"Should I not go?" I repeated, and my voice cracked on the last word.
"We don't—" Jasper started.
"We're still figuring that out," Eli cut in smoothly. "But they see you as leverage. A weakness they can exploit."
A weakness. I was a weakness. Of course, I’m a fucking liability.
I thought about the creature's smile. The way it had looked at me. She smells like all of you.
"So I'm in danger," I said. "Because of you. OR you’re in danger because of me. Because I got involved with—" I stopped. Laughed, and it came out broken. "God. I really know how to pick them, don't I?"
"Serena—"
"No." I held up a hand. "I need a minute. I need—I need to think."
"Why didn't you?" The question burst out of me, sharp and accusatory. "Why didn't you tell me? Any of you? Before I—before we—"
Before I let your brother finger me on the kitchen floor while I was technically dating you, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Before I fell asleep in your arms night after night without knowing what you were.
"There are laws governing our exposure to humans, and honestly, we were afraid," Eli said quietly. "That you'd react exactly like this. That you'd run."
"BUT I SHOULD RUN." The words hung in the air. I hadn’t meant to shout.
"Isn’t that exactly what I should do. Pack my shit and drive until I find somewhere normal, somewhere safe, somewhere without—" I gestured at them, at the blood, at the carnage still visible in my yard. "Without whatever the fuck this is."
None of them tried to stop me. None of them argued, pleaded or made promises.
Callum just looked at me with those golden-brown eyes, human again, but I'd never be able to unsee what I had seen tonight, and said, "If that's what you need to do, we won't stop you. It’ll hurt like fucking hell, but we won’t stop you."
It was the exact wrong thing to say.
Or maybe the exact right thing.
"You won't stop me," I repeated.
"No. If you want to leave, you leave. We're not—" He stopped. Swallowed hard. "This is a family, not a prison. We're not going to trap you here, Serena. We're not going to make you stay."
Marcus had never said that. Marcus had made it clear, in a thousand small ways, that leaving wasn't an option. That I belonged to him. That trying to run would only make things worse.
The triplets were telling me I could go.
And somehow, impossibly, that made me want to stay.
"I'm not making any decisions tonight," I said finally. "I can't. My brain is—" I gestured vaguely at my head. "I need to sleep. I need to process. I need to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with any of this."
"Okay," Jasper said. "That's okay. We'll be here. Whenever you're ready to talk."
"I want you to leave," I said. "Not— Just tonight. I can't—I can't have you here right now. I need to be alone."
Something flickered across Callum's face. Pain, maybe. Or understanding.
"We'll be in the main house," he said. "If you need anything. Anything at all."
I nodded. Couldn't speak.
They stood. Walked down the porch steps. Paused at the edge of the yard, looking back at me with those matching expressions of desperate hope.
Then they were gone.
I closed the door. Walked to my bedroom and lay down on the bed without bothering to change my clothes or wash the blood from my feet.
I stared at the ceiling for hours.
Werewolves. I had been fucking around with werewolves. Literally.
Was I in love with them? Or was I just repeating the same pattern, falling for dangerous men who would eventually destroy me? Was my attraction to the Voss boys any different from my attraction to Marcus? Was the same broken part of me seeking out people who could hurt me?
I didn't know. I didn't know anything anymore. I checked the locks twice before climbing in the shower.