Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(17)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“Did you follow me here?” I asked.

Lake shrugged. “The word follow seems to suggest you got here first.”

I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t a race, Lake.”

“If it was, I would’ve given you a head start. Now, you want to tell me why the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack is sneaking out windows and putting herself in a potentially dangerous situation without backup?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to remind Lake that she’d scoffed at the idea of Lucas being a threat, but I bit the retort back. Just because Lake thought she could take someone with three paws tied behind her back didn’t mean that I’d stand a chance against him in a fair fight. The best I could hope for in a fight against a Were—any Were—was catching him off guard enough that I could take to higher ground and wait out the assault. With weapons, I might stand a chance at inflicting some damage, but I hadn’t exactly come here armed.

Rather than acknowledge that Lake might actually have a point, I met her eyes. “You breathe a word of this to Devon or Chase, and I will kill you.”

Lake smiled. “I’ll take that under advisement. Now, you care to clue me in to what we’re doing here, or should I start making educated guesses?”

I glanced at the door to Lucas’s room. If he was awake, he was hearing every word we said, and I didn’t want to give up the element of surprise.

I got an email from Shay, I told Lake silently. He said that I’m welcome to deal with Lucas’s trespassing as I see fit, but that he thought it fair to warn me that he wasn’t the only one with an interest in Lucas’s whereabouts.

Lake’s lips twitched, and though a normal person might have mistaken her for someone holding back laughter, I knew instinctively that she was holding back a growl.

Shay Macalister is a piece of work, Lake said. And if we can help it, neither one of us is breathing a word of this to Dev.

On that, Lake and I were in absolute agreement. The last—and only—time Shay and I had come face-to-face, Devon had come dangerously close to fighting him on my behalf. In size and brute power, the two were evenly matched, but Shay had at least a hundred years of experience on Devon, and I didn’t want to add any fuel whatsoever to that fire.

You ready to see what our visitor has to say? I asked Lake.

I was born ready, Bronwyn. Lake punctuated that statement by releasing the safety on a shotgun I hadn’t even realized she was holding.

Is that really necessary? I said, giving her a look. It’s not like you’re actually going to shoot him.

He doesn’t know that. Lake waggled her eyebrows. And for the record, I’m packing silver, just in case.

My gut twisted at the idea of using fear as leverage with someone who’d come here looking for protection, but as Lake had made abundantly clear, injured or not, Lucas was a Were, and he was healing. In a fight, Lake could take him, but she might not be able to get to him before he got to me. I didn’t think Lucas would attack either one of us, but in life-or-death situations, thinking wasn’t enough.

You needed to know.

The door to Lucas’s temporary room creaked as I opened it. It took my eyes a moment to find him, because Maddy was asleep on the bed. The covers were bunched up around her, and I knew that in her sleep, she’d burrowed into them, turning Lucas’s bed into her den.

The fact that he’d let her—and that he was sleeping on the floor so she could have the bed—did not go unnoticed. That Maddy had fallen asleep in his presence was even more staggering. She wasn’t the type to trust blindly, and whatever else Lucas was, he wasn’t Pack. She shouldn’t have felt that comfortable around him; he shouldn’t have been willing to sleep on the floor for her.

I felt a stab of possession spike through me—Maddy was ours; she trusted us—but that didn’t stop me from sending a silent message to Lake, asking her to put the shotgun down.

With a glance at Maddy and a sharp intake of breath, Lake complied. I heard the click of the safety, and she set the gun near the door, her eyes on Lucas’s as she crossed the room and put her body between his and mine.

“He’s coming for me, isn’t he?” Lucas was awake. His voice was dull, and on the bed, Maddy made a noise halfway between a whimper and a whine.

“No.” I wanted to kneel down next to Lucas, to put myself on his level, but I didn’t move, allowing Lake—long-limbed and lethal—to stay between us at all times. “Shay isn’t coming, at least not yet, but he said something, and I need to know if it’s true.”

Lucas pushed himself farther into the corner. Through the pack-bond, I caught a flash of an image from Maddy’s dream: the back of a hand connecting with a toddler’s chubby cheeks. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know who, but the fractured memory was enough for me to feel, just for a second, the intensity with which Maddy looked at Lucas and saw the life she and the others had lived with the Rabid. I glanced at Lake, and since I couldn’t kneel next to Lucas, she did.

“We’re not looking to hurt you,” she said. “Not unless you’re looking to hurt us.”

“I’ve never hurt anyone.” Lucas’s words rang with the kind of truth that I didn’t need a werewolf’s sense of smell to recognize as honest and bare. “I’m the one who gets hurt.”

His words twisted like a knife in my gut, but I soldiered on, softening my voice but delivering the message all the same.

“Shay says he’s not the only one after you.” I paused and measured Lucas’s reaction, but his eyes were as dull as his voice, and I couldn’t see anything in them but what I already knew. “Is he lying?”

For several seconds, Lucas didn’t reply. Then he looked up, right at my eyes, for a single beat of my heart. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know as in you’re not certain, or you don’t know as in you have no clue why Shay might say such a thing?”

Lucas retreated even further into himself, and when he replied, his voice was barely audible to my human ears.

“The first one.”

“So when Shay says there might be someone else after you, that’s not crazy talk, is it?” Lake kept her voice soft, and she didn’t make a single move toward him, but there was no way for him not to answer.

Lake Mitchell wasn’t the kind of person you just shrugged off.

“No. It’s not crazy talk.”

The air whooshed out of my lungs as I processed our visitor’s answer. Lucas didn’t know for sure if Shay was lying, but he knew that it was possible that his alpha was telling the truth.