Page 104 of Fangs
“Ember?”
Both Wolf and I turned to see Scar appearing from the ladder. She held up a hairbrush and smiled slightly. “Would you mind if I braided your hair? I used to be good at braids, but Sable won’t let me braid his hair, so I’m out of practice.”
Wolf snorted.
I surprised myself by sitting up. My hair was a mess, tangled around my face, and my back ached—the muscles stiff from lack of movement.
Scar nudged Wolf with her leg, “You git. It’s girl time. If you stay, you gotta let me braid your hair, too.”
Wolf rolled his eyes, but a genuine smile crept over his face as he got to his feet. Scar plopped on the mattress behind me.
“Any requests?” she asked.
I shook my head slightly.
“Oh, dealer’s choice,” she mused as she gently brushed out the tangles. “Alright. Let’s hope I remember how to do this.”
We sat in silence for a few breaths. Below us, I could hear Wolf speaking to somebody, but I couldn’t hear the words.
“Did Wolf tell you how we met?” Scar asked quietly, and I shook my head again. “It was, gods, about ten years ago. He was so serious, so determined that he didn’t need any help from anybody. He had one goal, finding you, and he wasn’t interested in anythin’ else. At the time, Lee and I were working with a different group of bounty hunters, but we were hopin’ to leave and start our own group. We talked him into helping us with one mission, and in return, we’d help him with one mission.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Of course, he found the guy we’d been tryin’ to track down formonthsin just two days. So we parted ways but told him we’d fulfill our part of the deal when he had a lead.”
She hit a particularly tangled section of my hair and had to put the brush down to work the knot out carefully with her fingers. “A couple weeks later, he tracked us down and told us he had a lead in Moab. So we set out.” She moved on to parting my hair with her fingers and deftly beginning to braid.
Moab.Lee had mentioned Moab when he found me in the cemetery.
“The lead he had was a girl who’d been sold to a whorehouse, so he was already on edge at the idea of you bein’ in that situation, which of course, he hid by barely sayin’ a word for the three-day journey. And then, when we got there, the girl was gone. The owner said she ran away, but Wolf couldn’t let it go. He just kept saying it didn’t feel right. We finally spoke to some of the other girls and found out that a week prior, they’d heard the missing girl screaming and found blood in her room and down the hallway.
“Your brother was like a man possessed with that info. He broke into the records and found who had been with her that night. He tracked that asshole down, beat him bloody, and then told him he had two choices. He could talk, or he could die. Turns out the owner charged him triple and let him kill her. I thought for sure Wolf would end him, but he let him go. We were able to find the body based on the info we got. They’d dumped her in a shallow grave outside of town. Animals had gotten to her, so she wasn’t exactly recognizable, but she looked enough like you and was the right age and roughly the right size.
Scar’s fingers stilled in my hair, emotion clear in her voice. “Wolf stood there staring at the body for a long time. When he finally spoke, I knew shit was about to go south. He told us it was you and took off in our truck without us. By the time we got back to town, he’d killed the man he’d let goandthe owner of the brothel and told all the girls to run.”
I barely breathed as I listened, horrified and captivated at once.
“And Wolf didn’t stop there. Next, he got himself drunk off his ass and started a massive brawl at a bar.” She made a disapproving sound through her teeth. “Just about got himself killed. Lee and I found him bleeding out in an alley and got him out of there. The whole drive back to New Salt, he kept telling us to let him die, to leave him there, that he’d failed his mission, his family, andyou.He lost a lot of blood, and I thought he was a goner more than once.”
Emotion was welling up in my throat, and I struggled to swallow it down.
“We got him patched up, but he was a broken man. We technically didn’t owe each other anythin’, but Lee and I couldn’t just leave him like that, no matter how many times he told us to. Eventually, we started gettin’ through that hard head of his, and he started opening up. He told us all about you, what happened with your brother, and how he didn’t know what to do now, so we asked him to join us.”
She huffed a laugh as she began to braid the other side of my hair. “We had to ask Wolf about a hundred times before he finally said yes, and I still suspect he only agreed to get Lee to shut up. We were on another mission a year later when we ran into one of the girls from that brothel. She recognized us and wanted to say thank you. Wolf asked her about the girl and turns out they’d been friends. Lee asked if Wolf and you really had the same eyes, and she got real confused before finally tellin’ us her friend had brown eyes. I thought Wolf was gonna pass out. He barely made it through that conversation before breaking down.”
She shifted from behind me to sit on the floor by the mattress, apparently finished braiding my hair, and I studied her. Her light brown skin made me think of honey. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, and a single glance at her muscled arms would tell me she was a fighter. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in her usual short ponytail. I had to work to hold her gaze because her brown eyes had a warmth that reminded me of Trey.
“We thought he was hurt when he collapsed in an alley, but he just cried and kept saying, ‘She’s still alive.’ And I think that’s when I knew I’d stick with him and help him find you, ’cause it was so clear he still loved you so fiercely despite everything.”
My throat felt impossibly thick, and a tear escaped and rolled down my cheek.
“He never stopped lovin’ you, Ember,” she murmured. “He might not fully realize it yet; he’s still got a fuckin’ hard head, but to the rest of us, it’s always been clear as day. It’s why we all stuck with him.” She hesitated for a moment, searching my face forsomething.“None of us have ever seen you as just another bounty. Even when we thought you were guilty, you were still Wolf’s baby sister.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t know if that meant some of them believed me, and I was too scared to ask.
“Also, I think you broke that poor boy’s heart.”
I opened my eyes. “What boy?”
“Sam. He’s just been moping around the clinic.”
My shoulders slumped, and I wrapped my arms around myself, my mind replaying the angry words I shouted at him.
