Page 85 of Into the Fire: Before

Brea paced absently, chewing her lip as she thought. “What about Falcon Peak? Valley View? Do you know anyone there who could help?”

“No one I’d trust basically with our lives,” I said, wracking my brain. “We have family in Matamir and Hilledale, but we’d have to get on a plane, and I’d prefer there be as little of a paper trail where we’re going as possible.”

Taryn sat up. “We could ask Vikki?”

“No.” Caine’s reply was stern, unyielding.

She sat up further, gearing up for a face-off. “Vikki’s done nothing but help us. We’d have no clue we were still in trouble witho—”

“No.”

Taryn looked to her alpha, aCan you talk reason into this idiot?look in her eye.

I sat up with a jolt.

My family may be out of reach. Brooks’s too. Brea’s was clearly a nonstarter, and Taryn had no one to speak of.

ButCaine.

“I know where we can go.”

Caine

Lin’seyesstuckonme, a rare hesitance in his face.

Brooks darted over to him. “Where?”

Lin swallowed. “The Greysmoke cabin.”

My mind stuttered over the name, not having heard it or even thought about it in so long. The Greysmoke Mountains stretched for five hundred miles. Tons of cabins littered the area. He couldn’t meanthat cabin.

Except he still hadn’t dragged his attention off me.

No one else filled the suddenly tense silence, so Lin carried on. “It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s secluded. It’s on protected Greysmoke land, and only a handful of people ever got permission to build there before they discontinued the permits back in the fifties.”

“So there shouldn’t be anyone around for miles and miles,” Brea murmured, mostly to herself.

Lin gave a small nod. “Theoretically, anyway.”

“This sounds like a A-plus option to me,” Taryn said, her brow furrowed. “Why are you both shitting yourselves right now?”

My fists curled tightly enough for my knuckles to crack.

Lin swallowed. “Because Caine’s family used to own it. It…” He swallowed again. My knuckles cracked. “It fell out of the family.”

Everyone’s eyes slid to me. Decades-long shame and bitterness licked up the back of my neck like rising flames. My stomach churned as memories I’d spent most of my life pushing into the deepest corners of my mind pushed against the boundaries I’d put up against them. Old hurts, old angers boiling and bubbling closer to the surface.

My eyes met Brea’s, her bright green eyes looking at me with such…assurance. Acceptance. Encouragement. I hadn’t even talked about this with her. But at her side, I knew I could.

I kept her gaze. “When—”

My voice cracked. I swallowed. Tried again.

“My family used to go to that cabin in the fall when I was growing up. My great-granddad passed it to my granddad who passed it to my dad. Who was supposed to pass it to me.”

Green shimmers anchored me.

“Except when I was nine, he decided to blow my mother’s brains out instead. I went to my first foster home, he went into prison, and four years later had his own brains beaten out by some other inmate.” I gave a casual shrug that came nowhere close to how I actually felt in that moment. “Damn near poetic.”

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