Page 30 of Tossed into the Mob
What sort of grand gesture would have Brock swooning at my feet? It wasn’t as though we’d had a thing. My cousins’ mates had recognized and acknowledged their connections very soon after their kidnapping, but all Brock and I had was a budding friendship, though he reacted when we were skin to skin.
You could kidnap him. That’s a joke, Ranger texted.Don’t do that.
My dad left a message saying he had a confession to make, so I picked up the phone.
“If you want to see Brock, you could catch him at the local library.”
“How do you know that?” That wasn’t a confession.
Dad was a librarian there, but I refused to believe it was a coincidence that my mate just happened to wander into the library where Dad worked.
“Because he came into the library with his dad one day a week or so before you met him. Said he used to come there as a kid, but I didn’t work here then.”
“How am I just hearing about this?” I was screeching into the phone and had to apologize.
“I was the one that recognized him and told Papa, but I’d met his dad before.”
Everything about my family was so tangled and intertwined.
Dad added more to the story, explaining he’d been at work and chatting to a man last year about me being in the documentary.
“I was so proud of you.”
Dad would have been wearing a name tag, so Niles, who already had the letter for Brock in case something happened to him, added my name to it. That had to be how I got to be on the letter, though at that time, my dad didn’t know about Brock.
“But how did you know he looked like Emilio?”
He reminded me that he and his brother grew up in Grandpa’s house. “We were there in the bad times, during the assassinations.”
I shivered because he’d never told me and Madd much about those years.
“We knew Emilio well. He helped stitch the pack back together when Flint took over.”
“Okay.” The pieces were beginning to come together.
“Brock looked so much like Emilio that he had to be his son. I asked Papa if he was aware if Emilio had a child, because the guy we knew didn’t have a family.”
He explained that if Brock was Emilio’s son, he should have been under the protection of the family, despite what his father did, and Grandpa agreed.
Grandpa told Flint, and he sent Riggs to check it out.
My entire family had a) brought Brock and I together and b) had also been part of the chain of events that saw him and his dad shot. That was a lot, and I should let Brock know.
I leaped out of bed and showered. I was out the door ten minutes later and stopped at a stationery store on the way.
Dad said Brock was at the library now, but we should have this conversation in private. But not knowing how long he’d been in there, I scribbled words on the card I’d bought and hung out at a café across the street.
My wolf caught his scent when he pushed open the glass door and trotted down the stairs. But before I could dash across the street, he glanced up and looked straight at me.
I walked toward him with my cards and flashed the first one that read, “Hi.”
He stopped and smiled and mouthed, “Hello.”
This is silly, my beast huffed.
No, it happened in a movie and it’s cool.
I showed the next card that said, “Got something to tell you.”
