Page 2 of Clawless

“What’s this have to do with Vail?”

“You think you know her.” He fixed me with those unhinged eyes, and I could see how people thought Vail came from feral blood. “But she’s not who she appears to be.”

I studied him as he gnawed his corn cob down to the root. Did he mean her bloodline? Her pack status? But before I could ask, he pushed his plate away and said, “You’re a tough guy. You took down the biggest wolf around, right? And your old man, to boot. Couldn’t have been easy. But the Marrows are different.”

So, this was about her bloodline. I let my annoyance pepper the air. If this guy was just going to tell me about the pups Alpha Marrow ate for breakfast, he was wasting my time. “We’ve heard the stories. Jonathan’s a hard case. His reputation is well known.”

He grunted and tossed his napkin on his plate. “He’s a psychopath. Documented as antisocial personality disorder, but takes manipulation and violation to an art-form. The public face is brutal, but what lies behind is much worse. And Vail might be his granddaughter, but she has no idea what he’s really like. Or how dangerous he can be, even to his own blood.”

“Whose fault is that?” I was over this guy, but I wasn’t going to leave until I’d given Michael Warren something else to chew over. “You made sure she has no idea who she is. And the one thing she was saddest about at the academy? How clueless she was. About our world, but mostly about herself. That’s all on you.”

His mouth twisted. “I could lecture you on ignorance and bliss, Alpha, but you’re too young to get it. Just know she was protected when she was a nobody. Now it’s on you to keep her safe.”

“Why?” I felt my skin itch with the urge to throw all the bullshit in his face – Vail’s nightmares from his lab, the shit she’d suffered as a dud, and the fact she’d stabbed me in the back to force a bond I’d been more than willing to make – but then I pictured her floating in the academy pool. Lost. Alone. Her gaze locked on the skylight, like the moon could somehow pluck her out of the hole she was drowning in. My chest ached, but it only took a heartbeat for that image to be replaced with her writhing on the rose cottage bed, the room drenched in her mating scent. “You’re wrong. She’s still a nobody. And she and I aren’t anything to each other.”

He reached across the table and slapped my cheek so fast, I didn’t see it until I felt the sting. Liam was at our table a second later, but the asshole just smirked and sat back with his arms folded. “Lie to yourself, Alpha, but you know what else you smell like? Her mate. And if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, she’ll be dead before she’s eighteen.”

Two – Vail

It was Friday night, but instead of an evening of puzzles and pizza, the Chance house was cold and empty. A single light burned in my bedroom window to give the illusion of someone being home, but that’s what it was. An illusion. Because Darkness was away at his new school and Driftwood had disappeared to the north cabin before I’d arrived. Which left me - Vail with the questionable surname - alone in a house full of memories and secrets.

So, naturally, I was up a tree.

But it wasn’t just the ghosts I was avoiding by perching in a ponderosa pine and freezing my ass off.

I was stalking a wolf.

I’d seen it twice in the week and a half since I’d been back from the academy. The first had been a few days after I arrived, just a glimmer of something sleek and fast-moving against the snow. Twilight wasn’t far off, and it could have just been another patch of sunlight fading into shadow. I’d told myself if it was an animal, it was most likely a mountain lion, or a large bobcat on the hunt for a rabbit. But then I’d seen it again last night, way too close to the Barakat house with its rifles and traps. This time it had turned and looked at me, as if it knew exactly where I was. Maybe even why I was sitting up a tree in the freezing cold.

It was definitely a wolf, not a cat. My heart had jumped, that jittery feeling under my skin nearly knocking me right off the branch. I’d wanted it to be a particular wolf, of course. One with sunshine fur and ice-blue eyes under the shifter silver. But when I went to check its prints by the fading moon, I saw they were too small to belong to the Arras Pack Alpha.

Because that was who Jasper was now. Not the alphason, but the Alpha of his whole pack. I didn’t know how it had happened, or why that cold man in the expensive suit had stood aside for his son. But I’d heard Trey and another guy talking about it the night I left. It hadn’t made much sense to me, but I’d been desperate for any mention of Jasper. Even while the Wolf Fire haze rode me hard all the way to the Horn.

I jammed down on that thought and rubbed my hands together, blowing on my numb fingertips. No more dwelling on that nightmare of the Hunter Moon Formal. I’d made that pledge to myself after I’d spent the first two days pacing holes in Driftwood’s floors, trying to work out how it had gone so wrong.

The academy was behind me. I was where I wanted to be, even if my chest hurt like it had been stabbed with a blood claw. I just had to find a way to make peace with my heartache. Although, if I was honest, the hardest part was living with the shame and regret. At letting down the girls who’d become my friends. And for what I’d done to Baron and Felix. But mostly for the alpha who’d left me floating in the pool without a backward glance.

I squirmed on the branch, almost welcoming the bite of bark through my jeans. Why should Jasper have looked backwards? In his mind, I’d betrayed him. I’d used some kind of wolf aphrodisiac to force a claiming bond, and nearly got his best friends killed in the process. I’d been too out of it to explain – and I still wasn’t sure what I could have said - and then Trey Barakat, the exact last person I expected to see, was scooping me out of the pool and taking me home.

Looking backwards was as pointless as looking to the sky for any kind of help. I’d spent a lot of time thinking on that. On the supposed message from my dad. And I’d finally remembered him saying it when I was little and missing my mom. She’d been gone less than a year, but it had felt like forever, and I’d asked him when I’d see her next. He’d hugged me and told me to look to the sky. For a while I’d imagined her up there, watching over me like an angel. But then he’d died, and I’d realized he was just telling me what I wanted to hear. That, really, we only looked to the sky when the world down here had gone to shit.

“You better come down from there, little V, or I’m gonna have to shake you off your perch.”

Trey hit the tree with the flat of his hand and I grabbed the trunk, my numb fingers scraping on the jagged bark. My heart was knocking harder than a woodpecker and I glowered down at him. “I told you to leave me alone, Trey.”

His eyes were narrowed points in the dark. “You gotta come down soon. You fall asleep up there, you’ll break your neck.”

I snorted. I wasn’t that far gone. Yet. “Where I sleep is none of your business.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say even before I saw the chainsaw in his hand. When he rested it against the trunk, I hugged the branch tight with my thighs. “You cut this tree down, and Driftwood will kick your ass. You know how much he loves it!”

“Old Drifty’s not around.” He tapped the metal teeth against the trunk. “And I’m getting tired of trying to tell you how things are now.”

I bit my lip and looked over to the snowy mound where I’d last seen the pink-gold wolf. “Driftwood will be back soon,” I told him. “You don’t need to keep coming around, Trey.”

He didn’t say anything for a while and I checked to see if he’d slunk off back home. But his eerie yellow eyes were still locked on me. “You come by my place tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. And dress pretty. We’re having a party.”

I didn’t bother answering, even as I felt those jitters under my skin harden into anger. Because unlike back at the academy, I was my own boss out here. With Driftwood away, it fell to me to finish getting the house ready for the winter. And when I wasn’t up the tree, I sure as hell wasn’t dressing up and going to parties. I was stocking the deep freeze and chopping wood and insulating pipes. All things that Trey knew, since when he wasn’t trying to shake me out of the tree, he was peering in my windows like a goddamn stalker.

I watched in silence as he tapped the trunk with his knuckles, before hefting the chainsaw and heading back to his house. He could stick his invitation in the nearest snowdrift. Pulling my stoned ass out of the academy pool didn’t give him the right to tell me what to do. Because out here I wasn’t a dud. And as much as he liked to act it, Trey Barakat was no alpha.

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