Page 35 of Lost and Bound
Ian stared at me.
My breath came in quick, painful little bursts.
Of all the reunions I’d imagined, this wasn’t it.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” Ian finally choked out. “Nate! I need you, hurry the hell up!”
“Make up your fucking mind,” drifted around the side of the house. Nate. Bitching. Well, that hadn’t changed. I felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass. “First you tell me to stay in the car. Then you tell me to hide. Now you’re yelling at me for not—”
Nate appeared at Ian’s side, saw me, and stopped dead too.
“Don’t fucking move a muscle,” Ian said.
“Look, you told me to hurry—oh, you mean him,” Nate said. Our eyes met, and I wished I could sink down through the ground and disappear. Again. The look in those dark brown eyes could’ve chilled an ice cube, but behind that…hurt. And betrayal. He knew what I’d done. And he’d been perfectly happy not having me around. He shifted a step closer to Ian, and Ian’s arm shot out and wrapped tightly, protectively, around his shoulders.
Yep, no doubt about what those two were to each other. Nate had his jacket collar turned up against the damp chill of the early morning, so I couldn’t tell if he had a mating bite.
But their mingled scents, not to mention their body language, told their own story. If Ian and Nate weren’t mated, they were the next best thing.
I looked at Ian instead, and that wasn’t much better. Maybe there was something like hope in the depths of the chill pale-blue of his eyes, but mostly I just saw wariness, in his expression and the hard tension of his body. His sharp scent held nothing but mistrust.
“Ian,” I whispered, my throat too dry to really speak. I was trembling, and my hand shook visibly when I reached out to him. “Ian, it’s me. Please.”
“Sit down on the steps,” Ian said. “Hands out where I can see them. Nate’s going to figure out what the fuck you are.”
What the fuck I was?“I’m your cousin, Ian!” That came out a little stronger, but still pathetic and desperate. My eyes had gone all hot. I was going to break down crying, right here on these weathered steps, with their splinters digging into the soles of my feet and the mist off the sea sticking tendrils of my hair to my temples and making me shiver. With my own family looking at me like I was some kind of monster.
“No,” Ian said hoarsely. “My cousin’s dead. I buried him myself.”
He believed it. He really believed it, I could hear it in his voice and in the certainty of his strong, steady heartbeat, familiar enough to me that I could pick it out of the background noise.
I dropped down on the top step with a tailbone-bruising thump, my knees gone all watery, and buried my face in my hands. He didn’t even believe it was me. A long time ago, I’d have been embarrassed to have Ian see me cry.
Now I didn’t care about bullshit like that, but he thought I was a stranger. An imposter. Something, not someone. I didn’t want him looking at my face at all.
A commotion broke out somewhere in front of me, Matt’s tense anger and Calder’s low rumble, another voice arguing and explaining. I thought I heard that other voice saying something about a brother, and Calder, and it almost got through my head, but I didn’t fucking care anymore. I’d escaped, I’d made contact, I’d done my part to get home. All I’d needed was one little shred of welcome. Anything.
Ian had rejected me.
Matt had barely looked at me.
Calder, who’d said he’d take care of me, had forgotten I existed to cuddle some gorgeous blond.
And Ian’s words kept echoing in my mind, bouncing off my skull and growing louder and louder.
I buried him myself.
They hadn’t just assumed I was dead. They hadn’t given up on me without a reason.
There had been a body.
Mybody. And maybe they hadn’t had any forensics done, but they wouldn’t have needed to. Werewolves could identify their own, through scent and the low-level bond that formed between pack members, who spent so much time together that their inherent magic mingled. That magic left a trace.
Ian and Matt wouldn’t have been fooled by another person’s corpse under an illusion spell.
The body had been mine.
Somehow, the body had been mine, and that made me…my gorge rose up, bile sour and sharp on my tongue and searing my throat, and I leaned over the side of the steps and threw up, my eyes watering and my nose stinging, wave after wave, until I was wrung out. I hung there, panting and dry-heaving.
