“Because she’s a piece of shit.” When a snarl rattled his throat, he shook his head hard. The noise stopped.
“My dad is a beast. His wolf is as big as mine, and she picked him because she liked power. She pushed him into fights. Into Alpha Challenges. Back to back to back to back. I remember being six, maybe seven, and watching him fight every week. Fight, recover, fight, recover. He was always bleeding. Even when his wolf started getting addicted to the bloodlust, she didn’t care. All she wanted was for her mate to be king. And when he lost a fight to the Alpha, she shamed him in front of the entire Clan. Alienated him. Made him look worthless when she should’ve had his back instead. He nearly died, and I remember sitting on the stairs in our house, holding onto the railing, so worried about my dad living, watching him struggle for each breath. His arm was hanging off the couch, just…dripping blood. It wouldn’t stop. There was this huge puddle, and my mom was staring down at him with a look of …disgust. I tried to take care of him, but my Mom wouldn’t allow me in the living room. I remember her face when she told me, ‘He doesn’t deserve your care. He would’ve been better off dying in that fight.’ The next week, when my dad was well enough, he packed his suitcase and mine, and we left. My mom watched us leave like she didn’t have any feelings for us at all. When we left, she told my dad, ‘Don’t want no pup that’s as weak as you.’ And that was that. She never called, never wrote a birthday card, nothing.”
“Oh my gosh,” she murmured. “No wonder you didn’t want to be part of a Clan.”
“You’ll meet my dad.”
“What?”
He rolled his head on the bars and gave her a sad smile. “I want you to meet him. He’s who I wish I could’ve turned out to be.”
When Trina scooted a few feet closer, he watched her with a curious frown, and then he scooted closer to her cell, too.
“What happened after you left the Wintercast Clan?”
A faraway smile transformed his face. “We got an hour down the road, and my dad got this old, ratty map out of the glove box of his Chevelle. He slapped it on the hood, and I’ll never forget. It was hot, and we were out there sweatin’ in the sun. I mean hot, like the hurts-your-lungs-to-breathe kind of hot. And he told me to close my eyes and pick a spot on the map. I did, and we drove a couple states over and landed in Stevensville, Montana.”
“That’s close to here.”
“Yep.”
“You stayed all this time?”
A nod. “My dad said we needed to put down good, strong roots because his wolf was half crazy from all the fighting and from being shunned from a Clan. You were right. Being rogue is hard on an animal. For a long time, it was just me and him, total boy’s club, and then he met a quiet lady. A human. But she knew all about shifters because she’d been mated to one and had two crow boys. She’d lost them like my mom had lost me, but she was different. She was deeply hurt over their dad taking them. The kind of hurt that some women can’t recover from. When they met, she was half-crazy too, just like my dad. She was hurting from grief—the kind that brings people to their knees. But in that first year they were together, I got to watch them fix each other. That lady included me in everything she did. I was growing into a monster with a wolf that would never be in control, but she loved me like her own flesh and blood boy anyway.”
“Ethan and Rike’s mom?”
“Yep.”
Trina scooted all the way over and leaned her shoulder against the bars. “And that’s why you pledged fealty to Ethan as your Alpha?”
For a few moments, Kade sat there, arms draped over his bent knees, rubbing his thumbnail absently with his other hand. But then he scooted over and rested on the bars beside her. “At first I was so jealous of Ethan and Rike. Their mother never stopped loving them or thinking about them for even a minute. And I knew my mom wasn’t thinking of me at all. I thought I’d done something wrong. I couldn’t understand how they had gotten a mother to love them. I couldn’t figure it out. But one day, she asked me to go ride with her a few towns over on an errand. I was maybe eighteen at the time. Angry. Always angry. She took me to a post office with a big picture window up front. She sat next to me on a bench inside where we could see the hamburger joint across the street. I was sitting there, stomach growling, thinking about asking her if I could go get us a couple burgers, when two boys my age sauntered up to the front door. She sat up straight as if she’d been electrified. Her eyes filled with tears, and she didn’t relax back in her seat until they’d finished eating and rode away on these old beater Harleys. I knew who they were from the tears in her eyes, but I asked anyways. She told me they were her boys, but one didn’t remember his life with her, and the other was protecting him and didn’t want to come around her because she reminded him of bad stuff that had happened to him.” Kade swallowed hard and dropped his gaze to the floor in front of him.
Trina wanted to cry for him. This must’ve been very hard for a man like him to share. So she reached through the bars and squeezed his hand. When she moved to pull away, he flipped his hand over and squeezed hers back, then held it.
“After they left, she wrapped her arm around my shoulder and said, ‘I love you like I love them. As far as I’m concerned, you’re my boy. And those are your brothers.’ So from then on, we went to that post office every Thursday because Ethan and Rike ate there every week at the same time. When they stopped that tradition, I started following them to find other places my mom could see them because she wasn’t so sad when she got to see her other sons every week. And I taught myself how to watch them without getting caught.”
“They never saw you?”
Kade shocked her and pulled her knuckles up to his cheek, rubbed his rough whiskers against her skin there as he smiled. “They saw me plenty. They just never realized it. I would sit near them at the bar or walk past them in restaurants, anything to be close to my brothers without messing with the balance my mom said was important for them to be okay. I had to. Being around them was something I needed to feel close to them—my brothers who didn’t even know me. It taught me how to become invisible.”
“When did you finally meet them?”
Kade shrugged up a shoulder. “A few months back, my mom told me she wanted me to come home for dinner, and they walked in. I was in shock. They didn’t see me at first because I didn’t want them to. I just wanted to watch how they were with Mom. She was having a big moment with all of us there in the same room. When they saw me, and my mom and dad told them I was family, my heart was pounding out of my chest. I was trying to keep cool, but I’d watched them for so long, and then suddenly they were talking to me. I fucked it up. The wolf came out, and I didn’t get to stay for dinner. I had to go out the back door. So…the second I saw a chance to be in Ethan’s Clan, I took it. I thought maybe if he sees me all the time, he could help make me a better man. Like him. Because he was a total monster, like me, but he’s okay now. And sometimes I get dumb enough to think I can have that, too.”
“You can,” Trina said, intertwining her fingers with his. “If you want to, you can.”
He huffed a breath and pressed his lips against her hand, and then gently, he put her hand back through the bars and settled it onto her lap before he slid away from her. “You saw my wolf. He will never change.”
“Kade?” she murmured.
“Mmm?”
“I was wrong.”
“About what?”
She swallowed hard. She wished he was still close to the bars so she could reach through and touch him again. “You aren’t crazy at all.”
Chapter Six
Kade couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
Trina blew a wavy strand of blond hair out from in front of her face and leaned onto the bar top. This was the best time of day to watch her because the sun was just going down and the lights inside Trina’s bar, The GutShot, lit her up just right.