Page 38 of Bloodbane

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Endure and Survive

{ R U B Y }

It has been a while, hell, it has been years, but I’ll never forget that face, or the way those thin lips would pull up into a cruel sneer, and cold brown eyes—now hidden under closed lids—would shine with amusement when a well-aimed backhand from Evander sent me sprawling to the floor.

I toss the phone onto the bed as if it is burning me. “His name is Rassa… or, well, Evander always made me call him Mister Rassa, I don’t know if that’s his real name.” I squeeze my eyes shut, my stomach clenching sickeningly. It has taken me years to overcome my life before —years of panic attacks and nightmares and waking up in a cold sweat, screaming. I thought I’d buried the past, but of course, I’ve been fooling myself. I thought all I had to do was endure and survive. I’d done both, but I hadn’t escaped… at least, not all of me.

“Who’s Evander?”

“Evander Draven. Evans’ legal guardian after her parents’ death,” Grayson murmurs.

Thayne’s eyes dart from me to Grayson and back again, a crease forming between his brows. “Did you grow up close to here? Is this Draven a local?”

“No. I ended up here because it’s as far as the money I had on me would take me.” The familiar feeling of my throat closing has a rash of heat itching over my skin—claws of a panic attack taking hold. “I don’t understand any of this. I can’t be a—a—” I take a shallow breath, blowing the rest of my words out along the edge of hysteria “—a shifter . I can’t—it’s not—whatever is wrong with me, it has to be something else, it has to—”

“Just breathe.” Grayson is suddenly kneeling on the floor beside the bed, rubbing cool, soothing thumbs over the inside of my wrists. “Everything is going to be fine. This is just another puzzle that needs to be solved, and we could use that clever brain of yours to help put the pieces together.”

The cool touch is a calming balm, and I draw in a steadying—though shaky—breath as Thayne starts rubbing a large, warm hand over my back. I know the words are nothing but an obvious attempt to distract me and thwart my impending meltdown, but I cling to them nonetheless. I turn the information around in my mind, willing logic to overpower emotion.

“Couldn’t this all be because of the transfusion—” My hand flies to my mouth. The pieces slot into place so quickly it leaves me reeling. The answer is in the blood, just not the blood I’d thought. Thayne is right. I had been born a shifter; I just hadn’t stayed one. “Oh, my god.”

“The accident.”

I nod, watching understanding dawn in Grayson’s eyes. “The transfusions. Is that possible?”

The rhythmic massaging motion of Grayson’s fingers stops, and they tighten around my wrists. “It may be.”

“What are you talking about?” Thayne’s eyes dart between Grayson and me as if trying to find the dots to join.

“My parents died in a car crash when I was young.”

Thayne doesn’t speak, but the warm hand on my back moves to my shoulder and squeezes gently.

“It was my fault.” Grayson releases my hands and starts to lift his own, but I catch them and pull them back down to the bed, keeping them clutched in mine.

“No, it wasn’t,” I counter, ignoring Grayson’s low grunt of disagreement. “It was an accident. Grayson saved me.” There are a million possibilities for what happened that night. Grayson was the only witness, and his guilt weighs heavily on his recollection. He may blame himself for what happened, but I can’t bring myself to. “He stopped me from bleeding out and carried me to the hospital. They were able to save me, but to do so, they practically gave me a whole new body’s worth of blood.”

“And you think all your wolf blood was replaced with human blood.” Thayne blows out a low breath. “I mean, it sounds possible. Whatever makes us us , is borne from blood. Maybe you didn’t have enough latent genes to activate when you came of age, or they went dormant from the trauma. Whatever it was, something about the bite must have stirred things up again—altering your blood like it would a human, only, it isn’t changing it, just reactivating it.” Thayne sighs. “It’s not exactly a bulletproof explanation. Are you sure there’s nothing about wolfkind you remember from your childhood? Maybe you just didn’t understand it at the time?”

The laugh that slips past my lips is hollow, scratching at my throat, trying to bleed into a scream. “There’s a lot about life with Evander that I’ll never understand. Like why he took me in if he hated me so much, how he used to go out of his way to break me down, to humiliate me, to beat me and chain me up like a—” my mind stutters to a halt before it starts unspooling, my whole childhood flashing back at me. For the first time, watching through a different lens, I finally understand.

“What’s—”

“Oh my god. Oh, god.” Tremors surge through my body, and Thayne wraps his arms around me as Grayson cups my face.

“Calm down. Slow, steady breaths,” Grayson instructs. “Tell us what’s going on.”

“He knew. He knew,” I choke out, blinking back the stinging wetness filling my eyes. “He knew what I was—what I am . He knew, and he never told me.”

Grayson’s thumb dances over the hinge of my jaw. “Why do you think that?”

“He used to lock me up every month. He’d beat me, call me a little bitch, and chain me up in the basement, screaming about my father’s blood and knowing my place, and I never—I didn’t—” Welled tears spill over, and I let myself be pulled against Thayne’s broad chest, not even trying to stop my tears. “Why wouldn’t he have told me what I am? He knew… but how?” The tears continue to flow silently, falling as I search old memories with fresh eyes. “He could have only known what I am if…”

“If he is a lycan himself,” Thayne finishes, tightening his hold around me and rocking gently. “You were too young to shift, he would have known that. He locked you up so you couldn’t escape while he shifted.” Thayne stills before pulling away enough to be able to stare down into my face. “I think Draven found you and sent Arlo to bring you back to him. When he couldn’t handle the job, he sent Rassa. Them both being able to shift at will can’t be a coincidence.”

“You think Evander was looking for me? Why?”

“Omegas are rare,” Thayne murmurs. “If Draven is an alpha, maybe he thought…”

“Ew, no. He wouldn’t. Besides, when Arlo found me, he tried to kill me, remember? If Evander wants me for… what you think he wants me for, I’d be no good to him dead.”

“I don’t think Arlo attacked you for Draven,” Thayne says. “I expect he tried to kill you at my place because he remembered you or your scent from the lake. The anger he felt toward you that day was personal. I think when Grayson saved you, Arlo decided you are just as responsible for his friend’s deaths as Grayson. If Draven did send Arlo to find you, he would have been looking for a wolf, not a human. You would have had the wrong scent. But if he attacks now, he’s going to know,” Thayne adds. “You smell like… well. There’s no mistaking it.”

“What do I smell like?” Surreptitiously, I drop my head low to try and sniff myself. If I smell like a wet dog…

“A wolf,” Thayne smiles.

“No,” Grayson counters grimly. “She smells like an omega.”

Thayne’s jaw sets, and something passes between the two men that I don’t understand. “What? Why does that matter? What am I missing?”

“It’s not about what you’re missing; it’s about what Arlo is,” Thayne grinds out. “He may not be interested in hauling you back to Draven now.”

“That sounds like a good thing, right?”

“Arlo has his own pack now,” Grayson says with a slow shake of his head. “The only thing he’s missing is a suitable bondmate.”

A shiver trembles down my spine. “Ah. And let me guess, that would be an omega?”

Grayson nods. “That would be you.”