Page 105 of The Weakest Wolf

I sigh. Again. I feel like I’m going to be doing that a lot during this conversation. “Things with Melody were—”

“Different?”

“We’d always known we would be together. Things between us just… were. If that makes sense?”

“Easy? Simple?”

I nod. “I knew how she felt about me, and she knew how I felt about her. We never had to fight or even choose each other. We justwere. And we were young.”

“You were nineteen. That isn’t young.”

“Maybe immature would be a better word. You’re more mature at twenty-four than I am at twenty-nine. Imagine what I was like at nineteen.”

Her smile is sad. “The Stone pack forced me to grow up fast.”

I’d already guessed it, but hearing her admit it, I nod. I’m telling her things I’ve never told anyone, and I think she is too. It’s a new experience for both of us. This sharing. “Fighting to stay alive will make anyone grow up faster than they should.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, her gaze distant.

“This is hard for you,” I tell her. So we can stop talking about this, I tell her without saying the words. You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.

“Yes,” she admits, her voice almost a whisper, “it is, but my whole life has been hard. Harder because I stayed. Mom and Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to stay there.”

I wait for her to continue.

“Just before Bowen tried to burn my face off, it hit me that they would’ve wanted me to leave, to be free and be happy, not spend my life looking for revenge. But I just couldn’t let go. Icouldn’t.”

I smile. “Stubborn.”

“Too stubborn. Eden asked me to go with her,” she says, her eyes watchful as if waiting for me to demand to know where she is, “but I stayed.”

“When someone kills the person you love, walking away feels impossible.”

When her gaze settles on my ear, I know I’m about to hear something so painful she can’t look me in the eye and tell me.

I did the same thing when I told Dom about Melody and Eden, except I didn’t focus on his ear. I stared at a tree in the distance.

“I was never a Stone. My father was, but he left when he was young. Decided to be a lone wolf,” Sierra says.

“And then he met your mom?”

She nods, her eyes never moving from my ear. “And then he met my mom. Lira Bree. They fell in love, but her parents didn’t approve of him or them together, so she left her pack for him.”

The sadness in her voice is so tangible that I can feel her heartbreak. “Were they happy?”

As if surprised by my question, her eyes return to me and she stares at me without speaking for several seconds before she slowly nods. “Yes. When I was six or seven and we were living in a tiny apartment in Texas, we would laugh all the time. He always knew how to make her laugh.” She blinks and a tear slides down her cheek. “I’d forgotten that.”

My lips follow the path the tear took. “Could he make you laugh?”

A smile sweeps across her face. “Yes. In public, Dad was always so serious. You wouldn’t think he knew how to smile if you saw him, but when it was just us, he never stopped. We were happy.” Her joy fades. “But it didn’t last.”

“What happened?”

“We had to move. Again. No pack wanted an alpha and his family in their territory, so we could never stay anywhere for long. When Dad would come home with bruised knuckles or blood on his shirt, I knew it was time to move again. Most of the time, we never bothered unpacking. There didn’t seem any point.”

“So they took you to the Stone pack?” I can only imagine how desperate Sierra’s parents must’ve been for them to take her there.

She nods. “We had nowhere else to go, and there was no more money for motels or hotels. They tried to keep it from me, but I knew things were bad and only getting worse. We’d even tried going to Mom’s pack, but they refused to even see us. When I was fourteen, a pack in California nearly killed Dad. We had to leave everything behind and just run.”

---