Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Hunter Cabin, Blue Valley Woods
“This is Baby Five.” Joker cradles the heavy Remington shotgun like it truly is his kid.
Then he pats it tenderly, before placing it down on the scarred oak kitchen table, where he has laid out his frankly impressive weapon collection this evening to show me.
Is this his method of courting?
It’s working.
Yet it was the secrets that he shared with me in desperation this morning that made me stay.
Did I make the right decision?
Joker places the Remington down next to his other ranks of guns, knives, and grenades.
“Is it your favorite?” I ask.
“She,” Joker corrects. Before bending down and stage whispering, “don’t worry, she’ll grow to love you too, baby. I’m not replacing you.”
I snort with laughter. “What about this one?”
Joker’s shoulder brushes against mine, as we stand side by side in the middle of the sparse timber kitchen, whose walls are blackened by woodsmoke.
The whiskey twilight falls over the forest outside the window and the light fall of snow.
I am dressed in a warm, woolen blue dress.
It turns out that Phantom, no matter that he looks like a giant scary Alpha, is in fact a teddy bear on the inside. On his way back from having the doctor tend to his injury, he also went shopping for us like we were already pack, rather than prisoners.
Who does that?
Phantom bought both Bird and me a range of warm clothes with disturbing accuracy on our sizes, which tells me how closely he has been watching us. He even bought new coats, socks, boots (and got the size right), as well as scarves and hats.
Bird appeared overwhelmed.
It seems that he is as unused to being bought things as I am.
It makes me want to buy him the world.
Bird and Joker sat next to each other, squealing and giggling as they pulled things out of the bags, while Phantom and I stood next to each other indulgently watching them.
I enjoy Phantom’s stoic silence.
I need it to balance out the other two hyper members of our newly formed pack.
When Joker discovered the chocolates shaped like bullets, he leaped up and kissed Phantom’s cheek. “You are the fucking best. My sweet, romantic Alpha.”
Phantom blushed, before he swept the much smaller Beta into his arms with a tenderness that surprised me.
Now, behind me, I can hear the bubbling of the pan on the small, propane stove. It is domestic in a way that I haven’t experienced before, even with weapons, rather than cutlery and plates being laid out on the table.
Maybe especially because of that.
I glance over my shoulder to watch Bird helping Phantom to cook, although Phantom is still remarkably efficient with his arm in a sling.
He stirs the pasta, while Bird dances around him in a brown sweater, joggers, and soft socks that made him purr with their sensory sensation when he pulled them on.
He is throwing herbs and chopped tomatoes in like he is brewing a potion.
“It needs more garlic,” Bird merrily suggests.
“I helped to grow a vegetable and herb garden with the other staff in the hotel where I lived. We only had this tiny outside space and little to eat. But we could grow some stuff for ourselves, you know, and that was special. I planted a sensory garden for my Omega niece, and she loved that. Hey, shall I add some more chopped tomatoes?”
I take a deep breath of the smell of cooking pasta, tomatoes, and olives.
I would stand as a kid outside the kitchens in Adonis Hall, while delicious pasta dishes, far fancier than this, were created. But only for the Adonis family’s plates.
Never mine.
I don’t care how this meal tastes or how plain it is. It’s being cooked for me by the pack I have decided to stay with for the moment.
I don’t know yet if that is a mistake.
Yet the Hunters are trying. Phantom is cooking with Bird, while Joker is sharing with me his hobby — weapons.
We have so much in common.
How can I doubt that I made the right decision this morning to stay?
I pick up a dark gray semi-automatic handgun. I feel the heft of it in my hand.
This is a serious weapon.
I turn it over, pointing it at an onion, which stands on the cutting board, imagining that it’s Mr. Baskerville’s head.
“She’s Baby One.” Joker’s voice is hushed. Why is he suddenly serious? “I’ve had her the longest. She’s seen me through some shit.”
I lower my arm. “This was your SIG when you were in the SEALs?”
He nods.
I place it back onto the table. “Why did you leave the military?”
Joker’s expression tightens. “It’s a long story.”
I lean closer, grabbing Joker by the hair. He lets out a gasp but doesn’t resist, as I bend him back over the table.
“It seems to me,” I murmur, against his lips, “that we’re alone hiding out in this tiny cabin. I have time to hear a long story.”
Joker’s gaze darts to my lips and then to my eyes. “My hand is on a Glock right now.”
“Never heard it called that before.”
Behind me, Bird laughs.
“Hey, where’s my fellow Hunter when I need him?” Joker tries to call over my shoulder, when I press him down harder. “Why aren’t you helping me, Skipper?”
“Perhaps,” I tighten my hold on Joker’s hair, “he enjoys watching you being put in your place?”
When I feel the barrel of a gun being pushed into my guts, I grin in delight.
“Checkmate.” Joker arches his brow.
I press the tip of the dagger that I picked up with a sleight of hand, which Joker hasn’t noticed, into his back right over his kidneys. “Or is it stalemate?”
Joker matches my grin. “Fighting you is becoming my new favorite hobby. As fun as your interrogations are, however, you already received your quota of secrets this morning.”
“You told me those to stop me leaving.”
“And it worked.”
Of course it did. I may be a stone-cold killer. But I don’t have a heart of stone.
I demanded why Bird and I should stay.
Then a desperate story spilled from Joker, as he threw himself in front of the doorway like he was challenging me to fight my way through him if I wanted to leave.
Yet after hearing what he had to say, fighting him was the last thing that I wanted to do.
Bird and I didn’t interrupt Joker’s rush of words that burst from him like blood from a sliced artery.
I had a feeling that he had never talked about any of this before. Yet he was finally opening up and allowing himself to be vulnerable because he wanted to hold onto Bird and me.
The happy liberal family that he’d told us about…?
One night, when Joker was sixteen, his Alpha dad was working on a new gadget late at night that exploded and burned down the house.
The first that Joker had known was waking up to smoke and flame and his sister’s cries from her cot. She was only a toddler.
Joker battled the fire, risking his life to save his sister.
The rest of his pack died in the fire.
Worse, when Joker was taken to the Institute, still in shock, it was his sister who switched from a Beta into an Omega.
She was a Rogue.
Back then, he had no idea that he was one too.
My heart broke because I knew what was coming next.
“They tore us apart.” Joker’s eyes looked glassy like he was trapped back in that moment.
He was shaking. “I fought, but three of those Alphaholes held me back. They called my sister a Rogue. I didn’t have a clue what it meant.
When Phantom’s dad came to claim me for his son as a Companion, I begged him on my knees to take my sister as a ward too.
But he looked at me with disgust. He told me that she was a mutant.
A freak. When I yelled at him not to call my sis that, he hit me.
He said that if I ever spoke about her again, then he’d give me back to the Institute and make sure that she was executed.
I was terrified. He was a powerful man, a General.
He could have made it happen. I never saw my sister again.
But I knew that no matter how long it took, I would find a way to save her. ”
Suddenly, I paled.
Honey eyes and hair.
A Rogue who had spent their life in the ABO Facility.
Wouldn’t his sister be college aged by now?
“Is your sister called Colette?” I demanded, marching to Joker and grabbing him by his arms.
Joker’s eyes widened. “Oh, fuck. Please tell me that you saw her? Is she okay? Please.”
“She’s fine.” A matter of opinion. But I wasn’t telling a distraught brother everything that went on in that place.
At least, not when Joker had just relived a house fire where he lost the rest of his pack.
I might not be emotional but I could understand that.
“She was a friend to me. She has worked herself up into a trusted role. She works for the facility. She’s kind, brave, and smart. She has the same eyes as you.”
Joker started to cry.
Startled, I glanced helplessly over my shoulder.
Immediately, Bird and Phantom joined me with their arms around Joker in a protective circle.
“We found her.” Joker leaned his head against Phantom’s chest. “It’s real. At last.”
Bird blinked. “Of course. This is your mission, saving your sister. It’s why you wouldn’t tell us. Why it was so important to you.”
Joker nodded. “Now you know. I wasn’t only being a dick.”
“Not only,” I conceded. “Except, if you’d trusted us earlier, then you’d have learned that we’re on the same mission.”
“You appear to be all about the blood and death and revenge shit. We took the contract because we thought that it would be a way into the notoriously hard to either find or break into Facility to rescue my sis. It’s taken us years to do that without Colette being put at risk.”
“Who says that the blood, death, and revenge shit and rescuing the Rogues aren’t the same thing? The whole reason that Bird and I had to leave, which we didn’t want to do, was because our mission was to also save the Rogues. I promised to break your sister out.”
Hearing that at least stopped Joker’s tears, and the kiss that followed from him was toe-curling enough to make up for the stress of the morning.
Then we’d shaken hands, making a deal to join our packs and take on the Facility together.
Why do I think, however, that there is more to this than Joker has yet told me?