Page 30 of Heartless

Trey Barakat was naked, and looked like the definition of the scáth deamhan. Stringy-haired, grim-faced, his body was a lean mess of deep scars and pulsing veins. The Irish called the cursed wolves the Demon Shadows, but now I knew there were other shifters out there, I had to assume this asshole was something else. A pissed-off something else, that was staring at Vail in a way that pushed a growl past the foot on my neck.

“None of that, wolf,” he said with a sneer, before his eyes fixed on my throat. I knew what he was looking at even before his claws clicked out, inches from my wind-pipe. “She bit you?”

“Claimed me.” Even the threat of a slit throat couldn’t keep the smug smile off my face. “Whatever fantasy you’ve been living in is over. Vail’s with me.”

Instead of going for my jugular, Trey eased back. “It’s destiny, not fantasy. And I always knew I’d be sharing her with a wolf.”

As soon as his weight came off me, I leaped to my feet, but he was already heading to Warren’s bedroom. It was the one space I’d been careful to stay the hell away from, but Trey had no qualms going straight to the dresser and pulling out the first thing he laid his hands on. The pants were too short, the shirt too loose, but he just hooked his lip when he saw me watching from the door. “Cats aren’t like wolves. We couldn’t give a shit about your suits and ties.”

I tried to hide my reaction, but his smirk told me I’d failed. “Yeah, working it out now, are you? I’m a panther shifter.” He tucked the shirt in and ran a hand through his long, wet hair, smoothing it behind his ears. His attempts at grooming aside, I could see why Vail had once called him a psychopath who’d never been put on a leash. “In case you’re flunking biology,” he went on, “that gives me an extra third of your body mass, and a bite force that’d crush your head like a peanut.”

Fuck, but I was regretting sending Liam down the mountain. “You could try,” I told him, folding my arms in an attempt to disguise my unease. “But don’t forget wolves hunt in packs.”

His eyes went as flat as slate. “You think any other shifter ever forgets that?” He pushed past me, and I hurried back into the front room, putting myself between him and Vail. One quick glance told me she was still asleep, so zonked out I wasn’t sure anything short of a full-blown brawl would wake her. But Trey had veered towards the table and was scowling down at Warren’s notebooks. “Where did you find these?”

Since he was already too fucking at home in Vail’s childhood cabin, I wasn’t about to mention the cellar’s secret room. “How about you tell me why you’re here?”

“Same reason as you.” He flicked through a few pages, then looked at the notes I’d been writing and gave a nasty chuckle. “I’m guessing this must have blown your little wolfy mind.”

“If this is news to me,” I said coldly, “it’s because you and your kind have been hiding under rocks for so long we forgot you existed.”

A black film bled across his eyes, and even with my muted senses, I could smell the violence lifting off his skin. But instead of leaping across the table like a feral nutcracker, he just grunted and waved me to a seat. “If that’s what you think, you better sit down.” When I gaped at him, he cocked his head, his eyes still black at the edges. “I could kill you,” he said slowly, like the idea was just coming to him. “Especially since we both know your wolf isn’t around to even things up. I’d toss your corpse, put Vail under my thrall, and give her a bite like that one on your neck. In time, she’d return the favor. I’d be hers, she’d be mine, and you’d be just another townie buried on this mountain. Or option two, you park your stupid ass and I tell you how things are going to go from here on out.”

“Or option three,” Vail said, her head appearing above the couch with a rifle pointed in his direction. “I bury you on this mountain, Trey Barakat, and no one will ever find your stupid ass.”

Chapter Sixteen – Vail

“Now, now, little V,” Trey smiled in my direction, despite the fact my finger was stroking the trigger. “Who’s going to welcome you into the claw if you blow my head off?”

I gritted my teeth. Everything about this guy made me bristle, but if I’d heard him right, we had more in common than I could bear thinking about. “Just leave, Trey. I’m not kidding about shooting you.”

He gave an easy shrug and kicked out a chair. “I’ll heal. But you gotta hear a few things, little V. Especially since you dragged this clueless pup into the mix.” He nodded in Jasper’s direction, and his indignant expression would have earned an eye-roll if I wasn’t feeling so homicidal. “What’s the harm in sitting for a few, and listening to what I have to say?”

“The harm,” I told him in a steely voice, not lowering the gun an inch, “is that I woke from a really nice nap to hear you threatening the guy I love.”

The smile slid off his face, which perked me up a bit. My mood only improved with the look Jasper gave me as he moved to my side. I’d already said I loved him – in a roundabout kind of way – but the softness in his eyes said this was different. A declaration, especially in present company, seemed as important to him as the tooth-marks on his neck. And when he dropped a lingering kiss on my lips, his hand circling between my shoulder blades, Trey grimaced like he’d bitten into something sour. “Fine,” he grunted, kicking his legs up onto the vacant chair. “But if you’re serious about this wolf, you should know your bite has put a price on his head.”

I sighed. I hadn’t been lying about the blissful dream I was having, but Trey was doing a good job of murdering the afterglow. “Just spit it out,” I told him and propping the butt of the gun on the couch, leaned back into Jasper’s arms. “What great revelation dragged you up the mountain in a blizzard?”

Trey watched us for a moment, all kinds of crazy flickering in his amber eyes, before he scowled at Jasper’s notes. “For starters, you got the whole void thing wrong. This isn’t just ancient history, or the shifter experiments your old man is so into.” He gestured at the picture of my parents I’d taken from their wedding album. “And if you’re trying to work out your bloodline, you got your panther from your mom.”

Jasper gave a barking laugh, his arms tightening around me. “There’s no way Alana Marrow, the daughter of the skin kings, was a cat.”

“I didn’t say she was just a panther,” Trey retorted, his eyes that same oily black I remembered from all the times he’d hunted me down on the Horn. But his dark look was fixed on Jasper. “That’s the thing about what you wolves calls voids. You think they’re cursed. Broken. But they’re the opposite of empty. In fact, sometimes they’re the perfect blend of two species.” He tapped his long, dirty finger on the picture. “Like Alana Marrow. A wolf princess, but she was also a queen of the claw.”

My heart was beating so hard, Jasper must have felt it, but he let me ease forward out of his arms. “What does that mean?”

“The claw is our version of a pack. Only we don’t go in for all that dominance and blood rules bullshit. No Clan Alphas, or meek, little omegas.” His lips quirked as I bristled, but he just looked back at the picture. “Your mom brought you up here to protect you from her pack. We’re more solitary than wolves, so the mountains suit us. And we’re good at keeping a low profile.”

I wanted to laugh in his face at that. The Barakats were notorious. A bunch of drug-dealing, moonshine-making hoodlums. They were about as subtle as the mafia, but I suppose the fact they’d never been exposed for being a pack of panthers proved they could keep some secrets. Which rankled more than I liked to admit. “So, she came here and hid me. But when I was sent off to a school of shifter wolves, no one thought to tell me that wasn’t a good idea?”

Jasper made a low sound behind me, but I crossed to the table, leaning down so I was a foot from Trey’s face. “You had plenty of chances to tell me, Trey. That party at your house, the Clan Caves, the night you took Jasper’s brothers… Why are you only telling me this now?”

“A combination of things. We don’t have many rules, but one is we don’t talk about what we are to outsiders. Even panthers raised in the claw don’t hear it all until they’re initiated.”

I slapped my hand on the table. “You’ve never given a fuck about rules, Trey Barakat! Try again.”

Trey scratched his chin and shrugged, unfazed by my anger. “This isn’t one we can really break. We’re under a thrall – a kind of binding – that stops us from doing certain things. And even if I wasn’t, your old man had an agreement with my old man. No letting the cat out of the bag until you were of age.”

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