Lying with Wolves

The pressure on his chest from the man’s knees was becoming unbearable. He felt a rib snap as the man pushed down, leaning forward, using his bulk, his weight, as a weapon. Pain screaming through his system, Malcolm jerked up, snapping his head forward, smacking it into the man’s cheekbone and nose with a dull, squishy thud.

The sound of crunching bone was immensely satisfying. He rolled quickly, jumped to his feet, then attacked the Abatu viciously with his feet, kicking him over and over until finally he had the upper hand. The demon lay on the ground, groaning in pain and clutching his middle. Knowing he wouldn’t be down for long, Malcolm turned and ran back down the hill and toward his truck. He glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t believe the Abatu was back on his feet, chasing after him. What the hell?

Malcolm reached his truck and unlocked the door, the Abatu almost on him. He could practically feel the big man’s hot breath rushing down his neck. Without looking, Malcolm jumped inside his truck, slammed and locked the door and turned over the engine. The Abatu slapped a meaty hand against the side of the truck with a loud thunk as Malcolm peeled off down the road.

He’d made it maybe a mile when he caught sight of his wrist. Staring in disbelief, he hit the brakes and the truck screeched to a stop. The string of crystals, his protection against the Gauliacho, was gone. Should he go back and try to find it? Would the Abatu still be there? Could he make it all the way home without it? No! Every Abatu for miles around would be coming for him, and if they didn’t get him, the Gauliacho would.

He would have to go back.

* * *

Like a bug trapped in a jar, Celia paced the small shop. She had to run. But where? This was her home. Her shop. Her new life. She wasn’t going to let Malcolm chase her out of it. Besides, she couldn’t disappear without rejuvenating his crystals. If she did...well, that was more than she wanted to be responsible for. She didn’t want anything to happen to him. She just wanted never to have to see him again. Why couldn’t he have just stayed where he was?

“It’s going to be all right,” Ruby said, patting Celia’s back.

“I know,” she whispered. But she didn’t know.

“You want us to stay?” Jade asked.

Celia shook her head, though part of her wanted to say yes. To have them as a buffer. But she had to face Malcolm on her own. They couldn’t hear that conversation. “No, thanks.” Celia watched her cousins walk out the door and was sorely tempted to call them back. But she didn’t. Instead she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and sat back down behind the counter to wait for Malcolm to arrive.

* * *

By the time Malcolm pulled to a stop in front of the shop, he was furious and hurt everywhere. He was still bleeding, and worse, he’d never found the stones. He was working on borrowed time. Time he couldn’t afford to lose. He jumped out of the truck, wincing at the arc of pain slicing through his ribs, and hurried toward the shop.

He pulled open the door, cringing as the bells pierced his throbbing brain. “Celia!” he bellowed.

Silence greeted him. He was about to call her again when the door to the back room opened and she stepped into the doorway. His breath caught in this throat, strangling the yell that had been perched on his tongue.

“Hello, Malcolm,” she said, her warm, brandy-laced voice washing over him. She walked into the room. As if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t covered in red dirt and blood.

“Celia,” he said, not trusting himself to say more.

She walked forward, her long, gorgeous legs hidden beneath a gauzy dark blue skirt. Graceful. Elegant. And yet, as her chocolate-brown eyes caught his, they were filled with wariness. He’d done that to her. Her eyes used to be wide-open and filled with joy. Now they were guarded and hard.

“It’s good to see you,” he said. She looked beautiful, her copper hair a wild mane bouncing around her shoulders. How he’d missed that hair tickling his skin. How he missed her.

“What are you doing here, Malcolm?” A note of coldness entered her voice, and she clasped her hands tightly in front of her.

“I needed to see you—”

“That’s not a good enough reason to intrude on my life. I don’t want to see you. To have anything to do with you. Not now. Not ever.” Fire flashed amber in her dark eyes as they took in the cut on his brow, the blood on his face. “I would have thought your little field trip into the canyons had made that clear.”

Anger fired like a .22 bullet ricocheting off his insides, bouncing within him. “You sent me there on purpose?”

“Of course.”

What had happened to her? The Celia he knew never... “You could have got me killed,” he said evenly.

“Oh, please, men like you don’t die, Malcolm. They live on to make everyone else suffer.”

Her sharp words cut him deep. “My protection is gone. I lost the bracelet of crystals in the canyon when I was attacked by an Abatu.”

“Then you’re in a helluva lot of trouble, aren’t you?”

He sucked in a quick breath, disbelief thick in his throat. “What are you saying?”

“Get out, Malcolm. And don’t ever come back.”

He stared at the hard, cold fury in her eyes and wondered what had happened to the soft, caring woman he loved.

He was what happened. He’d made her like this. “Do you really hate me that much?” he asked, his voice breaking over the words.

“Yes,” she said without missing a beat.

He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. She was being absurd. Childish. “I made some mistakes...some misjudgments—”

“Don’t kid yourself, Malcolm. You are a coldhearted, self-absorbed, power-hungry ass, and as far as I’m concerned, I don’t ever want to see you again. So I’ll tell you what. I will find your bracelet. I will rejuvenate your crystals. I will do whatever it takes to get you out of here. To go back to the Colony and never return. Is that clear?”

He took in the stiffness in her spine, the hardness in her jaw, the white knuckles of her clenched fingers, and knew there would be nothing he could say or do that would get through to her. And right then, he wished he could leave. Wished he could turn around and not have to face her, not have to break her heart any further. But he couldn’t. The Colony needed her. And they needed him to bring her to them.

“I’m sorry, Celia, but I can’t leave without you.” He took a step toward her, his hand outstretched.

She backed away. “Stay away from me,” she warned. “I will hurt you.”

“I know that I deserve your anger. I would leave you here in peace, if I could, but I can’t.”

Uncertainty and fear flashed through her eyes.

“I have to take you back to the Colony.”

“Why?” she asked, her voice rising in pitch. She could tell something was wrong; he could see it in the fear creeping into her face. But she didn’t want to face it. Didn’t want to know. And he wished like hell he didn’t have to tell her.

“The Colony needs you,” he said, his voice not much louder than a whisper.

She shook her head. “I won’t go back. I can’t,” she insisted, and turned away from him.

He took a deep steadying breath, steeling himself. “You have to, Celia. And not just for me, but for everyone. The stones surrounding the Colony need to be rejuvenated. There isn’t much time....”

She was still shaking her head. Her anger and bravado were gone now, replaced by something desperate. Something afraid. “Why can’t my mother—” She stopped midsentence as her eyes widened with a whisper of understanding.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out Jaya’s necklace, the long purple crystal hanging from a silver chain, and held it out to her. Guilt and shame burned through him. How would he say the words that would shatter her world? How could he confess the ugly truth of what he’d done?

He didn’t have to. He knew it was written all over his face.

Her head started swinging violently back and forth as a low keening wail broke free from somewhere deep inside her. The sound exploded into the air, filling the room. “Tell me!” she insisted, her hot, shimmering gaze glued to the purple stone dangling from his hand. “What happened to my mother?”

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, stepping toward her. “She’s...she’s dead, Celia.”

Her loud cry ripped his soul apart. Her knees buckled and she collapsed, slowly falling to the floor. He caught her in his arms and together they fell as she cried heart-wrenching sobs, her hands clutching his shirt as she tried desperately to hang on even as her grief overwhelmed her, pulling her under.

He had done this to her. To her mother, Jaya. To them all.

None of this should have happened. He’d still be Pack leader. Jason would still be his best friend and right-hand man. Jaya would still be alive and regenerating the Colony’s crystals and Celia would still be in his house. In his bed. He wouldn’t be sitting in a heap on the floor far from home holding the woman he loved while she broke into a million pieces, shattering in his arms. Knowing he’d broken her, and there was no way he’d be able to put it all back to together again. No matter how he wished he could.

Some mistakes could never be fixed.

Chapter 3

Celia’s sobs racked her chest, making each breath a painful gulp, as if she were trapped deep under the ocean, drowning on her tears. Wave after wave of debilitating pain crashed over her then, like the tide, rolling out, allowing denial to roll in.

This wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. Her mother couldn’t be dead.

Awareness hit her and she found herself on the floor, clutching Malcolm, her face pressed against his chest, his shirt clutched in her fists, his scent in her nose. Furious, she tried to push him away, but he held her even tighter as she beat against his chest.

“Get out!” she blurted, and tried to stand, to put as much distance between him and herself as she could. “Get away from me.”

“Celia—”

She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want him to see her like this. He released her and she pushed away from him, quickly getting to her feet. “Don’t start. Just leave. Now.”

“I can’t. I won’t leave you. Not like this.”

“I don’t believe anything you’re saying. You’re lying. Trying to manipulate me. Trying once more to maneuver everyone around you. I’m not falling for it, Malcolm. I’m over you.”

His dark eyes widened with shock. “Do you really think I’d lie about something like this? How could you think that about me? After all we’ve been through?” He took a step toward her, his hands outstretched.

She backed away from him, brushing up against the counter as her mind finally came to accept what her heart already knew to be true. A fresh wave of pain washed over her. She wrapped her hands around her middle, grasping for something, anything that could explain the unexplainable.

That could make sense of the nonsensical.

“How?” she asked.

“Accident,” he murmured. “In the woods.”

She heard his words but couldn’t fathom them. Couldn’t wrap her mind around the possibility. “What am I supposed to do now?” Her kind, their kind, lived a long time. They didn’t have accidents. They didn’t just die.

Unless the demons...

But that wasn’t possible. The Gauliacho couldn’t get into the Colony; they couldn’t get past the crystals. She started walking around the shop, pacing, moving faster and faster. “I have to get out of here.” She swept her hands through her hair. Moving round and round. Back and forth. Muttering to herself.

“We need to go back to the Colony,” Malcolm said, his voice calm. Authoritative.

“No. I won’t.”

“The crystals need to be rejuvenated. It’s already been four days since... We need you.”

She stopped pacing and looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “Go without me. I will be there when I can. I can’t just up and leave right now.”

“Celia. You can’t send me away.”

“Really? You mean like you did to me?”

He stilled, distress crumpling his face.

“Why can’t I?” she demanded, not wanting to hear his excuses, his denials.

“I told you. I lost my bracelet in the canyon when an Abatu attacked me.” He touched the wound on his head. “They’ve already got my scent. I’m afraid I led them right to you. There will be more coming soon. Coming here. We need to leave now or we’ll be trapped in this store.” He gestured toward the crystals, their protective force field shielding their presence the only thing keeping them safe at the moment.

What he said was true. Soon the Abatu would be congregating right outside the door, walking up and down the street, knowing they were close but not knowing where.

“You did this to me,” she said, her voice low and deadly. “They didn’t know I was here. They wouldn’t have known had you not come.”

He hesitated a brief moment as guilt flashed through his eyes. “How could I have not come? I wanted to be the one—”

“The one to break my heart all over again? You like seeing me in pain, Malcolm?” She heard the shrill tone to her voice and knew she was being unreasonable and impossibly unfair, but she didn’t care. Hot fury was burning a large path swiftly through her, and he made such a damned good target.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I wanted to be here for you.”

Her eyes narrowed at his audacity. “You don’t know what love is. You’re not capable of feeling love.”

He took a step back as if she’d physically hit him. “Fine. I guess I deserve that. But you’re wrong about me. I only hope one day I can prove it to you.”

She looked at him then, really looked at him. At the sincerity in his eyes and the heartbreak and desperation in his voice. Something inside her softened, cooling the anger that had been burning for so long. She turned away. “I can’t do this right now.”

“I get that. But we have to. We have no choice. You need to come back to the Colony and we need to go together. Now.”

There was no use fighting it. She couldn’t let everyone back home die at the hands of the Gauliacho just because she couldn’t stand the idea of spending the next three days trapped in a truck with the man. She looked around the shop that she’d worked so hard to create, that she was so damned proud of, and fresh tears filled her eyes.

“Don’t you see, Malcolm? I finally got away. I made my escape from the Colony. This shop—” she gestured wide “—you’re standing in is my new life. For the first time ever I’m on my own, discovering who I am, without you. Without the other shifters. Without my—”

She paused as the finality of her words set in. Without my mother.

Now she was forced to find her way alone. Without her guidance, no matter how overwhelming it had sometimes been. Fresh pain seared her insides.

“I like it here, Malcolm,” she said, pushing through the words. “No, I love it here. And here you’ve come, riding back into my life, trying to take it all away from me.”

“I don’t want to take anything from you. I wish I didn’t have to. But you don’t belong here in this dry desert. You belong at home.” With me.

He didn’t say the final words, but she heard them anyway. She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. What he was feeling.

“I know I hurt you,” he said. “I made you doubt who you are and drove you away. But it’s time to come home. I’m sorry about so many things, more than you’ll ever know. I just hope I will have the chance to make it up to you. To show you I’ve changed.”

“Malcolm, I don’t care if you’ve changed.” Finally her shoulders slumped and she exhaled a breath tasting of defeat and sorrow. As much as she hated to accept it, she would have to go. After a few minutes of silence, she turned back to him.

“I want to know what happened to my mother.”

He stilled.

“What kind of accident? We don’t have accidents.”

He just stood there, his face losing its color.

“Malcolm, what aren’t you telling me?”

She could see his pain visibly racking his face. It scared her. “What?”

“Your mom was shot.”

His words reverberated around the room.

“Shot? How? Who?”

“Scott. We think. We don’t know for sure.”

She faltered, leaning against the counter.

“It was an accident.”

“How do you accidently shoot someone? I didn’t even think... Why would he even have a gun?”

“He was aiming for someone else and missed.”

“Who? This is crazy.”

“I know.”

She looked up at him. “Who could he have wanted to kill so badly, Malcolm?”

And then she thought she knew. It was him. It had to be him. That was why he looked so damned guilty.

“Shay.”

She looked up sharply. “Who the hell is Shay?”

“Dean Mallory’s daughter.”

“You mean your wife?” she said. The caustic taste of her words burned her throat. He actually had the audacity to look confused. His stupidity enraged her all over again. “The woman you threw our lives away for? The woman you’d never met but insisted you must marry? The woman who was supposed to solidify your leadership of the Pack and to hell with everyone else?” She pushed her lips together, refusing to rehash the devastation he’d reaped on her life.

“I’m not married to her.”

The softly spoken words ricocheted through her mind. She stared at him as fury hardened her eyes and trapped her tongue.

“She fell in love with Jason before she ever got to the Colony. They’re probably married by now and leading the Pack together.”

Disbelief overcame her bitterness and broke something loose within her. “But you sacrificed everything, threw everything we had away, just so you could marry this woman and maintain your position of power leading the Pack. And you lost it all anyway?”

“I was an idiot. I know that.” His eyes locked on hers. “I am so full of regret and remorse, I doubt I’ll ever recover.”

“And my mother died because of this woman?”

“Your mother died because Scott or someone in his group wanted Shay dead. They fired, they missed. And now we’re all going to pay the price. But you’re right, I sent Jason to get Shay, I brought her to the Colony. My plans, my scheming set all this in motion. Help me make amends to you, and to the people of the Colony. Come home, Celia.”

She shook her head in disbelief. After all she’d been through, after all he’d put her through, now she had to go back and help him make amends. Every fiber within her rebelled bitterly at the thought. More than anything, she wanted to throw him out, to throw him to the Abatu, but she couldn’t. The other shifters needed her. If she didn’t go, if she didn’t rejuvenate the crystals around the Colony’s perimeter, then within days everyone she knew would be dead.

She couldn’t let that happen. She had to go back.

Even if she had to go back with him.

* * *

Malcolm’s stomach folded in on itself as he watched Celia fall apart and desperately try to pull herself back together again. He longed to reach out and hold her, to comfort her and somehow make it all better again. But there was no way he could do that.

No way he could fix this.

He was a man who got things done, who made things happen. Standing on the sidelines helpless was not something he knew how to do. All he did know was that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he’d been lost without her. She grounded him and kept him sane. Kept the shadows at bay. And he’d screwed that up, too. But he’d learned his lesson. Somehow he had to make her see that. And then maybe she just might be able to love him again.

A passerby stopped in front of the large picture window, looked in at them and then hesitated.

An Abatu.

“Celia, we really need to go. Now.”

Her gaze followed his. She saw the man, and then looked around the shop, her eyes desperately flitting this way and that. “I can’t just pick up and leave without notice. I have a business here. I have partners. My cousins.”

“You have to. There’s already one out there.”

“They can’t see us beyond the crystals.”

“Maybe not. But they know we’re around here somewhere. I was still bleeding when I got here. They can smell my blood. Soon there will be more. Then what will we do? Never leave again? Stay in this shop for the next year?”

“I still have my bracelet.”

He stared at her, then sat in a corner chair. “You’re right. You can leave. This isn’t your problem. I’ll move in until you’re ready to go. Do you have somewhere for me to sleep?”

Her gaze hardened. “Fine. I’ll call the twins.”

He smiled. “I thought you’d come around to my way of thinking.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Malcolm. I’m not doing this for you. I couldn’t care less what happens to you. I’m doing this for the others. And I will come back one way or another. My life is here.”

Was here. He’d make her see that, because if there was one thing Malcolm was good at, it was getting people to come around to his way of thinking.

* * *

Celia climbed the stairs to her bedroom above the shop. Unfortunately Malcolm was right on her heels.

“There is no reason for you to come up here,” she called behind her.

“Call it curiosity,” Malcolm said, suddenly too close for comfort.

“We both know what that did to the cat.”

He smiled at her. That wide, charming smile of his that had made her fall in love with him in the first place. She took a deeply annoyed breath and stepped into her small one-bedroom apartment.

“Wait here,” she muttered, and went into her bedroom and pulled down an overnight bag from the top of her closet.

“Nice place,” he called from the front room.

It wasn’t nice; it wasn’t not nice. It was convenient.

She stepped into the bathroom, collecting her makeup and toothbrush. When she walked back into the living room, Malcolm was standing by the window, his smile replaced with worry.

“There are three more.”

“Surely not hovering in front of the shop.”

“No. Walking up and down the street. They know I’m here, they just don’t know where.”

“It’s the blood on your clothes. Here, take that shirt off.”

“What will I wear?”

She hurried back into her closet and pulled his T-shirt down off the shelf.

“You kept one of my shirts?” he asked, surprise lifting his voice.

“It was an accident. Don’t read anything into it,” she said drily.

But he wasn’t buying it. A huge smile filled his face as he took the shirt. He stripped out of the dirty one and she couldn’t help staring. She’d always loved his chest, sculptured and bronzed. She knew every plane, every soft spot, intimately.

And dammit if a part of her didn’t still long to reach out and touch him once again. To run her fingers over the hard ridges of his muscles and feel them flex beneath her touch. He might be an ass, but he was a damned good lover. And they had been real good together.

She looked up and his eyes caught and held hers. He knew what she’d been thinking. He knew her that well. Too well. She might be a fool where Malcolm was concerned, but she wasn’t a pushover. “Just because things didn’t work out for you with that woman doesn’t mean you can come running back to me and I’ll take you back.”

“Never thought you would,” he said, then broke into that easy smile. “Though a man can hope.”

“Are you ready?” she asked, losing her patience.

“Baby, I was born ready.”

“Then let’s go.”

With his dirty shirt in her hand, they went back down the stairs and into the shop. Even more men were in the street. Malcolm hovered by the window. “Any chance you have another bracelet?”

“Nope. There weren’t a lot of them to begin with. Besides, honestly, with that many out there, I’m not sure how well the bracelet will work.”