Page 291 of Caelum

Not in this lifetime or the next.

“I don’t mean to,” he rasped, and his elbows plunked down on the silver rail beside me. He hunched his shoulders as he stared over at the same view that entranced me.

“But you still do. Today wasn’t the first time, but Dre, it will be the last because I won’t deal with that from you. Today was hard, and you were what I needed you to be until you weren’t?—”

“I was under pressure.”

“Bull,” I snapped. “The pressure had gone! We were safe. I’d just saved us!”

“How do you think that made me feel?” he ground out. “We’re supposed to protect you. If we don’t, then what the fuck is my purpose in this world?”

I spun around to gape at him, stacking my hands on my hips as I glowered at him. “What are you even talking about right now?”

“You’re my mate. My woman. I’m supposed to keep you safe. Instead, you had to save mine and six of my brothers’ asses? That’s not how this should work,querida.”

For a second, I could do no less than sputter at him. “Are you being serious right now? I mean, of all the sexist crap you could have spewed at me, you’re telling me you were pissy with me because I savedyou?”

He clenched his jaw. “It isn’t sexist,” he spat. “It’s what I… What is my purpose if it isn’t to protect you?”

“How about not to treat me like a piece of shit?” I countered, swearing at him even though he knew I didn’t use curses like the guys did.

“I didn’t mean to,” he insisted, his hands flaring out as his exasperation seemed to rattle inside him. “It just came out. You were worried about them and not yourself… It just…” He swallowed. “I wanted to do better by you, and I failed.”

The words hit home, and I stared at him, wondering what he meant.

I didn’t have to wait long because he turned away, bowed his head, andwhispered, “My parents left for America because of me. They wanted more for me, more for us. They went because I’d busted my knee in a car crash when I was ten, and then the year after, I was sick and they couldn’t help me, couldn’t get any medications for me. They thought, in America, it would be better. I was getting worse. I’d just turned eleven, and the souls were taking over me in a way that I couldn’t even…” He sucked in a sharp breath. “I started hitting out at them, slapping them if they tried to get me to calm down. It was bad. And for a long time, I thought they left to get away from me because I was a hideous son.”

“But they didn’t?”

He shook his head. “No. They were scared for me. America is the solution in some parts of this country. If you have no means of providing for your family, it’s like, let’s go there. It’s the land of opportunity for too many of us, and my parents were desperate. They let themselves go with this coyote, a man who takes people across the border, for too low a price.

“My grandmother shouted this at me one day. Told me her son had died because he was desperate to send money for me, desperate to get me what I needed because I was, in her words, a fuck-up. That day, when she was hurling abuse at me, I snapped. The Hell Hound was in charge, and, I admit, I just went for her.” He gulped. “She escaped, hid in her room, and had the local lawman come around and haul me to jail. It saved my butt though. That was where I was recruited.”

I thought about what he’d said, ignored the latter part because this wasn’t the first time I’d heard this story. But it was the first timehewas telling me it. “Why did it matter that the coyote was cheap?” I asked softly, not understanding what he meant.

He blew out a breath. “He was cheap because he was hiding his journey from the cartel he worked for. He undercut them, and then my parents and the others he was transporting paid the price when he learned the cartel was after him.

“If they’d found him with any hidden bodies on his truck, they’d have killed him. As it is, he lived to see another day by destroying the lives of those he was supposed to be transporting.”

My mouth tightened, and I stared at him for a second before looking over the view once more.

Humans had a lot to answer for.

They were starting to taint things for me, and that wasn’t useful considering I was actually, in a small way, their damn savior.

Scowling at the chaos ahead of me, the smoke that stained the air like a low-lying blanket, the frenetic sounds of cop cars and the toots of cars stillstuck in traffic, with a few neighborhoods in the city in the dark as though the electricity had been cut off in those areas, I mused, “If you could, would you kill that coyote?”

He didn’t even wait a second to think about it. “In a heartbeat. The cartel too. But they’re everywhere here. They’re like a spider’s web. It spreads all over, and we’re just the flies they want to eat.”

“Would you have enlisted in the cartel?”

“I’m not sure,” he said honestly. “I mean, I want to say no, but to get away from my grandmother, maybe. But she was sick and poor, so she might have died and left me her farm. If the farm had started doing well, then the cartel might have come to me and made me pay a kind of ‘protection’ money, but I wouldn’t have been actively involved with them, you know?”

I licked my lips and shuffled closer to him. “Is this why you’ve been a jerk to me all this time? Because you’re scared of caring for someone?”

“I’m a guy. We don’t talk about this shit,” he said blandly.

“If you ever want to be Claimed by me,” I retorted, “you’ll be talking about this stuff on a regular basis. I’m not having you treat me like trash because you have some boogeymen in your past, Dre. We all do. We all have things we shouldn’t have experienced.”

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