Chapter Eleven #2
“It all feels like so damn much, especially with this pack bullshit. I’m worried about Ronan, I’m worried about all of you, and I’m worried I might turn into a gray-skinned, emotionless psychopath. Oh, and stupid Mason is missing. Holy shit. Could things get any worse?”
All four of us winced at the same time.
“Well, that was a dumb thing to put into the universe,” I said.
“Unwise, at least.” Ida nodded to herself. “The situation with Bronwyn must’ve hurt—her lying to you, I mean. I know you liked her.”
“Still do.” I scratched Fennel between the ears. “She had her reasons for keeping her secrets. Spelled reasons, among others. But when it came down to it, she protected me. Mason did, too.” I scowled. “Because of her.”
“Our world is a complicated one,” she said.
“What I wouldn’t give for a little simplicity,” I muttered.
“I hear you on that.”
Ronan came out of the house and called for me, and I kissed Fennel on the top of his head, hugged Ida, and nuzzled noses with Cecil. “I won’t turn off my phone again, I promise.”
“Keep your GPS on, too. I’m tracking you with my app.”
“I will. Anything’s better than Cecil’s bladder-emptying tracker spell.” I wagged a finger at him. “No more casting on me when I’m not paying attention, sir.”
He gave me a non-committal shrug. It was useless to argue. Cecil was gonna Cecil.
“Better scoot. That wolf isn’t going to wait forever.” Ida grinned. “Neither are those tacos.”
“Right.” I gave the room one last visual sweep. “Where’s Autry?”
“My place,” Ida said. “Meredith’s really taken to the little thing. Autry’s purring seems to calm her down. For her part, the kitten enjoys batting around Meredith’s leaf.”
“And she’s okay with it?”
“Only when Autry does it.”
Ronan and I took my Mini to El Rancho Grande, picked up the tacos, and headed to the pub. I let KLXX choose the songs, but they were all chill and didn’t feel targeted directly at me for once. Just some great seventies country hits by Crystal Gayle, Tanya Tucker, and Ronnie Milsap.
“I never thought of the seventies as being so musically diverse, but they really were,” Ronan said, as we pulled up in front of the pub. He’d shifted before putting on his pub T-shirt and was entirely human again.
In appearance, anyway.
“That’s part of why Mom and I loved them. Well, I mean, she loved them because they were the songs of her growing-up years, but there really was some good stuff out there. Progressive rock, disco, outlaw country—lots of good stuff.”
We locked up the Mini and took the food inside. Ronan greeted customers, handed tacos to a couple of the regulars, then motioned me into his office.
“Just need to grab my laptop, and we’ll head up to my place. It’s more comfortable to eat up there.”
“Sure,” I said, as if I hadn’t had lunch in his office several times already.
Just one more example of the weirdness between us. Ronan and I’d made small talk on the drive over, toeing the edges of sensitive subjects but not jumping in. Although not uncomfortable, it had felt insincere.
We needed to talk.
Ronan laid out the tacos, lime wedges, and a bowl of salsa fresca. He grabbed a couple of cold Coronas from the fridge and opened the bottles by hand—I’d have needed an opener.
“This is all I have up here—unless you want room-temperature water.”
“This is good,” I said, as we conversationally danced around each other. “I prefer a lighter beer with tacos. Don’t want to overpower the star player here.”
The tone of our conversation from that point on was flat and kind of irritated. Lightly offended. As if we were purposely reacting the wrong way to everything the other person said but keeping quiet about it.
Ronan ate eight tacos to my two. When we were finished, we took our beers to the sofa and sat facing each other. I unzipped my heeled boots and tossed them aside, drawing my feet up under me.
“I hate this distance between us. Fighting blows.”
“Yeah, it does,” he replied. “Want to talk about it?”
“What if we didn’t? Or what if we just acknowledged that neither of us meant to hurt the other and that we’re acting out because we’re worried?”
His head dipped in a short, decisive nod. “We are, but that’s not enough. You need to tell me what’s really going on with you, Betty. All of it.”
“That’s a great idea, Ronan. Let me burden you even more.
I mean, it’s not as if your birth father is trying to kill you or anything.
Not as if one of our people was just viciously attacked by his wolves.
I’m sure you have all kinds of emotional bandwidth right now, right?
More than enough to handle my bullshit on top of everything else. ”
My hands shook too badly to hold onto the beer, so I set it on the coffee table. Then I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I kept rubbing them on my thighs. If I didn’t settle down, my tacos were going to make a reappearance.
Ronan watched me fidget for a few seconds then set his beer beside mine and pulled me across his lap, where I buried my face in his neck. “It’s worse when you don’t tell me. I know there’s something wrong, and it’s eating at me. I want to know. Even if it sucks, and I hate it.”
“It sucks, and you’re going to hate it,” I said, voice muffled.
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay.” I rearranged myself astride him to better see his eyes.
He rested his hands on my thighs and waited for me to speak.
“Demon Betty almost killed Bronwyn Jonas today.”
Ronan nodded, a little too calmly in my opinion. “Margaux said the situation there had you upset.”
“Killed, Ronan. Not fumed at. Not yelled at. Not even slapped.” I threw up my hands. “You don’t get it.”
“Then help me understand,” he said.
I hadn’t wanted to dump anything else on Ronan’s plate, but even more than that, I didn’t want to deceive him. So, I told him. All of it. From Bronwyn to Sexton to my breakdown on the backroads of La Paloma.
His expression was thoughtful as he absorbed it all. One of his thumbs drew small circles on the sensitive skin of my inner knee, the other tapped the top of my thigh as if he were sending me a message in Morse code.
“Thanks for telling me. I wish I knew how to help,” he said finally.
“I’m not worried about you helping me figure this out. I’m worried about becoming a liability to you.”
He sped up the tapping on my thigh. “Does Demon Betty like me?”
“Like you?”
“Yeah? Does she like me?”
He didn’t look like he was kidding, so I gave it some thought. How did she feel about him?
“She’s protective of you.”
“How do you know that?”
“When she’s around, I feel what she feels—which isn’t much, so take that into consideration,” I said. “I assume she’s protective of you because she knows I love you.”
His smile was as quick as it was genuine. “And that you love Ida, Gladys, Fennel, and Cecil.”
“What’s your point?”
“That you might have more control over her than you think. After all, she’s only taken over when someone you love has been threatened.”
“She first appeared in the bathroom mirror right after we had sex, Ronan. I was basking in the afterglow, not feeling threatened.”
That smile again. There and gone. “Did she take over?”
“Well, no. She was just kind of there.” I frowned. “You think she only takes over when someone I care about is in trouble?”
“I don’t think it—it’s what she does.” Ronan reached for my hands, cradling them in his own. “Betty, you’re amazing.”
“I know, but why are you bringing it up now?”
That netted me a chuckle. “Do you know anyone else strong enough to be taken over by a demon and not only survive it with her soul intact, but also use the power to protect people?”
“But I care about Bronwyn, and I—”
“Didn’t kill her?”
“The point is, I wanted to. She looked into my eyes and believed I’d kill her.”
“Conveniently, what you needed to do to counter the secrecy spell threatening her life,” he said. “I know you want me to freak out about all this, but look at it from my point of view. You haven’t done a single damn thing wrong.”
“I’ve made some questionable choices,” I said.
“Yeah, you have. You told me you once spent an entire afternoon drinking spelled wine with Ida then made the only sober member of your group, Ms. Alvarado, take you to the drive-in, where you proceeded to pass out face first into a bag of buttered popcorn before the opening credits had finished, sustaining a first-degree burn on your eyelid.”
“Thankfully, Trini had an ice pack in her glove compartment.”
“Evidently, she’d partied with you and Ida before,” he drawled.
“So, you’re saying I have a history of behaving irresponsibly.”
“You’re in a relationship with me, aren’t you?” He pulled me in for a kiss. His lips were soft, and he tasted like lime and citrus hops. “I’m also saying that of all your less-than-wise choices, this might be the least dangerous.”
“You think the spelled-wine, drive-in movie escapade was the most dangerous? Ha.”
“No. I think falling in love with a lone wolf shifter about to usurp a powerful alpha leader who tried to assassinate him is the most dangerous thing you’ve done. And I worry that I didn’t give you enough of a choice—”
I covered his mouth with mine and slid up his lap.
He wrapped his arms around my back and hugged me like he had when I’d worried him earlier.
We melted into each other—soaked in the feeling of complete acceptance.
Of love. It was a deeply emotional moment, and I was wildly excited by the knowledge that it was only the beginning of our life together.
And if it was the true beginning then I needed to be honest.
I sat back and cradled his face, my thumbs stroking his earlobes. “There’s more.”
He blew out a long breath. “Lay it on me.”
“I think Floyd’s been following me around town—or having his people follow me.” I told him about the black SUV. “I can’t prove it was him.”
“But your gut tells you it was.”
“Yeah.”
“My gut says the same.” He stroked one palm down my side and up my thigh. “Thanks for being open. I know it’s not easy for you.”
“I should have told you sooner. You and I aren’t the kind of people who need to lie to protect each other. We don’t need pretty little feel-good half-truths.”
His expression softened. “We’re the kind of people who need complete and ugly honesty.”
“Yeah.” I swept my hands to his jaw and cradled his face. “I love you. It’s wild how much.”
“I know.” He put everything he felt for me in his gaze. The force of it had me trembling. “I love you, too. Uncontrollably.”
“To your earlier point, no one knows how deadly Floyd is better than I do, Ronan. I’ve got a literal blackmail file on him. Maybe loving you is dangerous, but you can’t say I went into it uninformed.”
“Speaking of, you ready to show me all the files?”
“Yeah.” It was past time to get this stuff out in the open.
“Access to the cloud files is on my phone. I’ll text you a link.
Rest assured, I have hard copies of some of this stuff, another cloud storage service not accessible through my phone, and USB drives with people who know to release them upon my demise. ”
“Whoa. You weren’t messing around.”
“This is Floyd Pallás we’re talking about,” I said drily.
“Betty, what the hell’s in those files?”
Nothing I wanted to ever see again. “Read them. It’s … dark.”
“Everything Floyd does is dark.”
“No,” I said. “Not like this.”
Ronan scrolled through the text files first—transcripts of conversations, receipts for the purchase of silver and smelting equipment, guns, and explosives. He murmured the words, “dirty bomb” at one point but didn’t look up. Not until he got to the photos.
“This is Zuri. Rory’s mom.”
“There’s, uh, a video in the next file. You should lower the volume.” No one would want to hear screams like that played at full blast. No one decent.
He tapped the play triangle.
When the video was over, he played it again. On mute this time.
“He killed her. His own wife.” Ronan’s voice shuddered with rage—or sorrow. Or a tragic mix of both. “What’s more, there are pack members who knew and did nothing. They filmed it, for gods’ sakes.”
“Yes. At least, that’s how it seems,” I said. “Although the person filming had to be the one who sent me the footage, so maybe that was their way of doing something.”
His chin rose and lowered an inch. “Who sent it?”
“No clue. Most of this stuff came in from anonymous sources. Once someone in the pack heard I was willing to use this stuff against Floyd, it started pouring in. I keep it in an encrypted cloud file, and I’ve always been careful to protect my sources.
For instance, this video. He doesn’t know I have it because the angle of the video might give away the position of the wolf who filmed it. ”
“He’d kill them if you showed him.”
“Yeah.” I took back my phone, closed the app. Ronan didn’t fight me on it. “I’m sorry for Rory, Ronan.”
“Me, too.” He fished his phone from his pocket. “Send everything to me. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it secure.”
“I wasn’t worried.” I reopened the app and did as he asked. “It’s time for this stuff to be released.”
“It won’t matter.” His words, though gentle, were edged in steel. “You know that, right? The only wolves who’d care about this don’t have any power. The rest are complicit, and power means more to them than justice.”
It took a solid twenty minutes to get it all transferred and uploaded. Once everything was finished on his end, he made to toss his phone on the coffee table, but whatever he saw on the screen froze him in place.
“What is it?”
“A text from the security I hired to watch Rory.”
The tacos turned to rock in my stomach. “What’s happened?”
He read the message and cursed. “The agent watching her is dead. They found him in his car with a silver bullet to the brain. Silver.” Under his breath, he added, “That bastard.”
“Ronan? Ronan, where’s Rory?”
He looked at me, his eyes weighted with sorrow. “Gone.”