Page 37 of A Bear's Secret

Chapter Ten

Trevor

Just beyond the tree line,still in wolf form, Trevor sat and watched. He dropped his clothes onto the ground, then laid down for a moment. He needed to catch his breath — he’d run all the way back to the Red Sky ranch — and think about what he was going to do.

The moment his father found out that he was mated to a bear, Trevor knew he’d get kicked out again. There was a slight chance that his father would give him the option to break it off and stay, but that was completely out of the question. Austin was his mate, and there was no breaking that tie.

They’d have to leave Cascadia. Even though Buck was pretty unpopular with his pack at the moment, he was still their leader, and wolves were loyal above all else. Buck might have gotten some of them killed, but it had been through idiocy, not malice.

I have to say goodbye to the kids first, Trevor thought. I have to tell them I’m sorry.

His heart felt like it was turning inside out, and if he’d been human, he might have almost cried.

How many adults can fail Lizzy and Tim?He thought.

First their parents had died in a terrible crash, then they’d gotten stuck with an alcoholic and an authoritarian maniac. Trevor’s sister was dedicated beyond reason to their father and the pack, and that left Trevor himself, the black sheep of the family, as the only one who was any sort of good influence on them.

Well, there goes that, he thought. I tried.

I hope I did enough.

Then he had to pack. He didn’t really want to rely on being a wolf again, even though it had gotten him through the tough first year when he was eighteen. It was hard to spend so much time as an animal without hearing that sweet but deceptive siren call of becoming feral, and he’d seen a feral shifter up close. He’d been able to sense how trapped she felt, both in his horrible father’s cage and in her bear.

Trevor shivered involuntarily.

Then he stood, shifting from his wolf form into his human one. He pulled his clothes back on and walked toward the house, feeling lost, like he had no idea where he was going or what he was walking into.

* * *

The house was very,very quiet, and Trevor felt like he was sneaking as he walked in through the kitchen door. No one was there.

In the living room, he found his mother asleep on a sofa. On the end table was a glass with half an inch of orange juice pulp in it. Trevor didn’t need to smell it to know that she’d just kept going after breakfast, and the glass probably reeked of vodka.

She drank vodka because she thought it was odorless. As if she could keep her drinking a secret from Lizzy and Tim. Lizzy was probably still upstairs, hopefully working on her book report for The Scarlet Letter, but where was everyone else? The cars were all there.

Trevor went out the side door and walked to the workshop. In the distance was the barn where his father had kept Olivia, and a shiver went down Trevor’s back, along with a pang of regret.

I should have helped her, he thought. Maybe someday I can apologize.

The workshop was massive, nearly the size of a barn itself. Trevor tried to avoid going out there, because frankly, the place made his skin crawl. The big, windowless, corrugated metal building was where his father held most of the pack meetings, and these days, it seemed to double as an armory.

Buck Reynolds, Trevor’s father, did a lot of talking about how the government of the U.S. was unfair to shifters. In his opinion, shifters had to stand up for their rights, and what they couldn’t take by asking nicely, they should take by force.

Trevor didn’t trust his father at all. As far as he knew, he’d never actually done anything with all those weapons, but he didn’t put it past the man.

The door was unlocked, and Trevor pushed it open, revealing the harsh fluorescent lighting inside.

To one side, a chair fell over, and Tim scrambled up off the floor. Then he stood there, guilty, his hands behind his back.

Trevor frowned.

“What’s going on, buddy?” he asked.

Tim shrugged. Trevor closed the door behind himself, then walked over to where the kid was standing, righting the chair as he did.

Tim had been sitting in front of a workbench, and he’d stood so fast that the chair tipped over.

On the workbench was a rifle.

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