Page 32 of Abandoned Oaths

But she didn’t.

She seemed to shrink just a little. “I’d just gotten my first period.”

Well, I was not expecting that.

Derek didn’t flinch but dropped his hand.

“I heard from older girls that once that happened, the Pack could make you have babies.”

“At thirteen?” I gasped. “Was that really happening?”

She shook her head. “Not as far as I know now, but the possibility was terrifying to me since it was technically possible. I didn’t want that, ever.”

Her eyes flashed to mine before looking at the water.

“I read birth control could stop you from having periods, so I was trying to get out of the community to get some from a human pharmacy,” she said.

“But you got caught?”

“Yeah, I didn’t tell the guard or my dad, but somehow, they knew. It was like they could read my thoughts, and looking back, maybe there was a wolf around that could. The cut was a reminder of what would happen if I tried again.”

“Did you?” Derek asked.

The corner of her lips twitched. “Four more times.”

“And?” I pressed.

“And I’m not telling you my whole life story.”

Fair enough. We hadn’t earned that yet. If we wanted her to open up, we had to first. “I was already in the boys’ home.”

Her brows pulled low. “What?”

“When I got the scars, I was already at the boys’ home where we all met.”

“I thought you said were brothers,” she sassed.

“We are,” I cut in. “In all the ways that matter.”

She stepped back and dropped her eyes to the water.

“We all ended up there for different reasons, and those are our stories to tell in our own time.” Derek waited for her to look at him. “My parents were killed a few months after they were kicked out of the Pack. An officer dropped me off the next day.”

“How old were you?” she asked him.

Her normal confident tone disappeared, replaced by a softness that filled me with the strange and unnatural urge to hug her and let her know we were all fine now. The unfamiliar longing tightened the answer in my throat.

“Five.”

Her eyes widened. “You were just a baby.”

Derek shrugged. “Javier was already there, so at least I wasn’t alone.”

“But he was?”

Damn, she looked seconds away from crying. The lethal woman who nearly killed me this morning had a heart? And it was breaking over the thought of what we’d been through? The pieces didn’t fit.

“The place had lots of boys, but they weren’t close. Not like the four of us became.”

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