Page 28 of Resisted

“You didn’t even try to decorate!” she said, her voice sounding exasperated.

“Decorating isn’t my thing,” I supplied as I plated the first few eggs.

“I’ll figure it out. It’s just a matter of time.” She sighed. “When did you guys know you wanted to be poacher hunters?”

“The job picked us, we didn’t pick the job,” Vince supplied.

“Maybe that’s what I need to do—wait for the job to pick me.” Vince and I froze.

“No,” He finally said. “The only jobs that pick you are the ones no one else is willing to do. You’re worth more than that.”

He wasn’t wrong. Some people got jobs they loved. Happy, sunny, nonviolent careers. But jobs that no one wanted, the jobs that were blood and guts and gore, with no set hours and no shielding from the elements, those were the jobs that pick the people, and well, we were the people. We hadn’t gotten a choice, at least I hadn’t. My subpack’s job became my own, and I still remembered every gruesome detail, every painful moment of the bad, with only a tiny bit of light.

“I can’t work at the diner for the rest of my life,” she complained.

“You can if it keeps you safe.”

The timer for the bacon dinged, and I put it on the plate with the eggs, added some toast, and carried it toward the table. “There is nothing wrong with the dinner.” She sighed, the weight of it heavy in the room.

Vince groaned. “What is it, baby?”

She didn’t bother to argue his use of the endearment that she hated so much. Instead, she blurted out, “Have you ever tried to find them?”

“Them?” Vince asked.

“My pack.”

The words sat heavily in the air, nearly stifling us. Finally, when the heaviness became too much, Vince spoke. “We are your pack.”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean, Vincent.”

I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Bella, Silas has looked, you know that, but there was nothing to go on. The poachers had nothing on them.”

“There has to be something.”

“There wasn’t,” Vince answered before I could get the words out. But it was true—there had been nothing but a dead woman and a starving pup, chains, rope, and sorrow. We’d searched. We searched the cart, we searched the men, we searched so damn much, and we’d come up empty. Then, when we couldn’t search any anymore, we’d carried the most important cargo back to our truck and turned back toward home.

“It’s just—”

Vince’s hand came down on the table, shaking it. It hadn’t been his intention, I knew, but it didn’t stop the fact that he most definitely got her attention and stopped her argument before it could progress. “Baby, we checked. Twice. We’ve looked. Is it so damn bad to be a part of us?”

She blinked a few times. “I didn’t mean it like that, I’m just curious is all.”

I finished up Vince’s plate of food and placed it on the table in front of him as he said, “Well, haven’t you heard that curiosity killed the cat?”

“You don’t have to be that dramatic. It’s not like I’m making it my mission to personally become a private investigator and find out.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Keep it that way,” he mumbled before shoving a spoonful of food into his mouth. But he wasn’t being dramatic, he was being truthful. Going after poachers would only get her killed. Vince pointed his fork at Bella. “Eat, your food is getting cold.”

And like that, the subject of searching out her pack was closed, as it should’ve been. I might not have been in this profession for long, but what I’d learned in that short time was nothing good could ever come from seeking out poachers or revisiting the past.

Chapter 11

SILAS

Don’t do it.Do not do it. Don’t.

Inside of me, every cell screamed not to do it, not to send out this email, not to search into the darkness to solve a mystery that had plagued me for nearly twenty years.

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