Page 1 of The Butcher

PROLOGUE: BIRTH

Bramley

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

Ihave her eyes.

Crystal blue right around the pupil.

Most of the iris is aquamarine.

There’s a dark cobalt ring around the outer edge, a circle separating the color from the white.

Those are her eyes.

I have them.

We all do.

Pap said it’s a good thing, sharing something like that; it keeps her close, keeps heralive.

Rex couldn’t look at any of us for two days, almost three, without falling apart or losing his shit.

When he drank himself stupid and lost it in the form of hitting me in the face, it was a glaring reminder of their bond and how something inside of him died when she did. How it might not be so great for him to keep her that close.

My father felt awful as soon as he hit me. He’d never laid a hand on me before, not even when I was a kid, so punching mein a fit of liquor-fueled grief gutted him. I’m the one with the bruise, but he felt the pain one thousand times worse.

The loss was just too much for him to handle.

But we all lost a part of us when my mother died.

Ezekiel was grieving just as fiercely, especially now that they were the only two left, but when that happened, he stepped up as a father and checked Rex before rolling right into his position as a grieving mate. He took my dad and hid them both away in their cabin for a few days, far away from any unwanted reminders or obvious symbols of a love lost—a time of mourning in her space. Acooling offperiod alone, to process their feelings more appropriately, hoping they’d be able to pull it together for the four of us, for our little town, and those who’d suffered a tremendous amount of pain in such a short period of time.

So much goddamn loss.

I stare at the fading bruise, yellows and purples painted around my right eye like a fucking target. Emphasizing the shared trait, we won’t ever be able to forget. A feature I want to both cherish and carve out of the sockets, so no one has to see it anymore.

But I can’t.

None of us can and if we want to make it through the next few hours, let alone the rest of this new and fucked up reality, we’re all going to have to get our shit in check.

Sticking my fingers in the collar of my shirt, I pop the top button, then aggressively loosen my tie.

I feel like I’m suffocating.

The clothes, the people. It’s all too much, it’s overwhelming, and I feel like I can’t fucking breathe.

That phone call didn’t help, either.

We knew it was more. It was fucking obvious that it wasn’t some goddamn disease that wiped out all the omegas inObsidian Falls, but I wasn’t expecting Zeke to call me with the truth on his way back here.

Dumping the actual cause of death in my lap the same morning we have to bury our mother?

Unexpected is an understatement.

He wouldn’t leave it alone, though.

My brother knew in his bones the same way I did that this was foul play and, considering who his best friend is, Zeke was able to push, and he dug, and he found out exactly what we suspected all along.

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