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I could get tantalizing glimpses. Freedom. Protection. A child with dusky skin and laughing, deep-set eyes. One with red hair and a piercing, summer blue gaze, or wise brown eyes and sandy hair. But if I tried to focus on any of it, it made my chest ache.

Curran’s hand stilled. Then his fingers brushed my cheek, and I realized my face was wet.

“Why are you crying, sweetheart?” he asked.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Because I’m afraid to dream about a future with you,” I whispered, all my walls stripped away.

Silence settled in the wake of the words. Elijah’s arm tightened around my stomach.

“Oh, Emma,” Curran murmured.

Oakmoss and petrichor tickled my nose. A new hand cupped my cheek, urging me up from my hiding place against Curran’s thigh. Gabriel was kneeling in front of me. I hadn’t even heard him cross the room.

“Hey,” he said, lifting my chin until I met his gaze. “I can’t bring myself to think about the future either. It’s as though there’s a brick wall trapping me here in the present, and it has my sister’s name graffitied across it. I’ve spent so long chasing her traffickers that I can’t imagine what it would be likenotto chase them.”

Elijah had straightened away from me when Gabriel approached us.

“Gabriel, you can’t live your entire life for someone who isn’t here anymore,” he said. “Just like you can’t live your entire life based on fear of what might happen if you ever decided to make different choices, Emma. At some point, you both have to live for yourselves.”

“Rosebud is talking sense,” Onyx put in. “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Don’t recommend it as a retirement plan.Making different choices and living the way you want to live is a hell of a lot nicer, even if it’s hard at the beginning.”

I swallowed. “I don’t even know who I am. Not now.”

“I don’t know who I’m going to be, either,” Gabriel replied. “Not like these three knob-heads, who are so damned well-adjusted it’s making me want to vomit right now. So, what do you say to sticking around and trying to figure it out as we go along? Because in the end, I don’t know how else we can possibly find out, except by living it.”

I licked my lips, feeling like I was balanced on the cusp of something.

“I will if you will,” I said.

FORTY-ONE

Onyx

I’D ALWAYS BEEN a fairly laid-back individual, especially for an alpha. Or, at least, as laid back as it was possible to be when you regularly pummeled other people for money in front of a screaming, bloodthirsty crowd of gamblers.

But these last couple of days, I’d been starting to think we might be properly on the way to having a pack. Arealpack, with not just one, but two omegas. It was making me twitchy.

Mind you, it was making everyone else in the house twitchy, too.