Page 42 of Brutal Alpha

“Already? You don’t think it’s too risky?”

“It is a little,” I admitted. “I doubt Arbor wants either of us to make it back to our own islands, but I’m needed on Ferris.”We couldn’t stay on Ensign forever, and whenever we crossed the bridges, we’d be at risk. I imagined Julia knew that, too.

“Can’t I just—” she started, but I cut her off.

“You can’t stay here, Julia. Xander doesn’t have time to—”

“To babysit me?” Her tone was bitter, as if she had known I would put my foot in my mouth before I even got there.

“Not the word I would have used, but sure,” I said. Whatever words I was going to use probably wouldn’t have been better, but I needed to retain a little bit of dignity.

Julia sighed.

“I guess this had to end sometime.”

“What, running for our lives?” I teased, but she didn’t rise to it. She looked thoughtful and a little sad.

“No. I don’t—I haven’t enjoyed being chased across half the islands,” she said, “but it has been kind of… freeing?”

“Freeing?” It had been intense and stressful, mostly. I’d felt unmoored and out of place, which—which was its own kind of freedom, in a way. I sat down next to her as I considered it. “I suppose so. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from Ferris, the longest I’ve ever left the island in someone else’s care.”

Julia nodded.

“It’s the longest I’ve ever been away from Lapine. I’m not the dead Alpha’s embarrassment of a daughter or the new Alpha’s curse of a sister here.” Hearing her talk about herself that way made me bristle, and she was wrong.

“You don’t think that has a little bit to do with the god-like powers you’ve come into recently?” I pointed out. “You’ll stillhave them when you get home. Think how excited Alyssa will be.”

“I guess,” she said, though she didn’t sound like she believed me. “I just—I don’t want to go back to being a burden.”

There was that word again, the one that had spilled, unthinking, from my mouth so many years ago, the one that had ruined everything between us.

“Julia—”

“That wasn’t a dig at you,” she said quickly. “You’re not the only person who’s made me feel that way.”

That didn’t make it better. In fact, it might have made it worse: to know that I was only one in the long line of people who had made Julia feel shitty about herself.

“No one should have—” I started, but she waved a hand at me.

“Don’t. I get it. You’re being nice to me now because you feel bad or whatever. But it doesn’t make any of it less true. I don’t want to go home and be reminded that I’m just the defective daughter who killed my own mom.”

It felt so wrong to hear her talk that way; Julia was confident, she didn’t care what people thought. Or had that only been a front to protect herself from assholes like me? I wanted to comfort her, to promise her that no one thought of her that way, that she was brave and strong and worthy, but I didn’t think she’d take that from me right now.

What would she say to someone else, I wondered? The answer came easily: make a joke.

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t talk about my wife like that.”

That won me a surprised, unguarded smile and a gentle shove.

“You’re so fucking stupid.”

“Yeah. I am.” As the words left my mouth, I realized how true they were. If I’d just kept my mouth shut back on Lapine that evening four years and a lifetime ago, I might have had so much more Julia in my life. Maybe I would even have allowed myself to admire the way the sun warmed her pale skin and the moonlight danced on her raven hair.

She still would have been forbidden. I didn’t want a mate, and even if I did, she was my best friend’s little sister. There was never any world in which I could have her, but in a kinder one, things between us might at least have been easy. We might have been friends.

“Did you mean what you said the other day?” Her voice, though soft, made me startle. When I looked over at her, confused, her plump lower lip was between her teeth, as if she was already regretting having spoken.

“Mean what?” I asked.

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