He purses his lips, smothering his smile.
He’s in his mid-twenties, and while I’m not sure why he left his pack in Indiana, when a shifter leaves everything he knows to start over in a new pack, it usually involves a woman.
I lower my voice, adding, “And I was jealous.”
His eyebrows shoot up.
“I keep fucking things up with Kat, and every time I turn around, everyone else is saying and doing the right thing.” I point at him. “Tell anyone that and I will rip your head off. Or growl at you.Loudly. I save the head-ripping for enemies.”
He nods, and I turn to leave.
“We were talking about you,” he calls out.
I stop with my back to him, my fingers inches from the doorknob, suddenly tense. “Something bad?”
“She was confused. You drive her crazy, but she must like you to have stayed. You have no reason to be jealous. Love is like that. Endlessly putting your foot in your mouth. I get it. And I’ll think about staying. I do like it here.”
I nod again and walk out, pulling the door closed behind me, and feeling lighter about finally having done something right.
5
KAT
“Carlie, put down that knife and come speak to your sister,” my dad says.
I yank my eyes from the beautiful, dark-haired girl flipping a dagger between her fingers.
My sister.
We look alike, with chestnut brown hair and a lean build. My eyes are light blue with flecks of brown, while hers are a beautiful, deep green. She smells of lavender and sweet vanilla, familiar, though I’ve never smelled her before or even met her.
The last time Dad was here, before he left to deal with responsibilities as Alpha of Pack Lake Prairie, he told me they learned they were pregnant with Carlie soon after they lost me. It must have been so hard for them. So bittersweet. Losing one daughter, and surprised by another when they were least expecting it.
Her eyes flick to me and away again just as quickly. “She doesn’t want me here.”
I have never felt so overwhelmed in my life, and I almost wish Aren would come back because I don’t know how to be a daughter, a sister…
I don’t know how to do any of this.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I ask my seventeen-year-old sister.
She shrugs, head down, back to flipping her dagger despite my dad’s grumble of complaint. “The internet.” She peeks at me through jade-green eyes. “No one would show me, so I had to teach myself.”
I’m five years older than her, but she seems more confident and assured at seventeen than I am at twenty-two.
Dad is sitting in the chair that Aren vacated, dragging it closer to the side of the bed I’m sitting on. Mom is perched near the foot of the bed beside him, and Carlie has been prowling around the room, examining everything from the dresser, to the view outside the window, and even poking her head in the bathroom.
“Because you were twelve when you asked,” the woman who has stayed mostly silent says. “No twelve-year-old needs to learn how to handle a knife.”
Her voice is husky, strong, and confident.
My mom.
I’m surrounded by a mom, a dad, and a sister, and I know so little about them that they could be strangers in the street.
But they feel familiar.
My wolf has been napping, her presence light in my mind, but she’s relaxed and doesn’t feel threatened. To her, these people feel like kin because that’s what they are, even if I don’t remember them.
