Page 29

No one moves. No one breathes. Not until Gideon keeps going.

“Maybe then you’ll understand why I kept you—all of you—out of it. While you were in the schoolyard worrying about scraped knees and whether that cute boy liked you, I was learning how to cause the most pain with the least effort and enjoy it.”

His voice flattens, and the air fills with the sharp tang of petrichor as Gideon continues. “I killed my first person at seven. Three more followed on my birthdays until I was ten. And I wish that was the worst thing I’ve done. Death is often a blessing, no?”

He turns to Nix, whose jaw is clenched tight, but his omega nods, silently.

Grayson’s heart hurts for his mate, who suffered so badly as a child, and for the reminder of Nix’s torture at Hayes’s hands. Grayson can only imagine what Carnell did to Gideon as a child to teach him that it’s better to hurt than to be hurt.

Grayson pulls Leo close, needing the comfort for himself as much as he needs to provide it.

“I won’t bore you with the gruesome details, but I have tried to be better— to do better —since. But I will never forget those people, every minute of what I did willingly…happily…for Patrick Carnell. I am evil. I’m only good for you. Only good because of you, because you are safe. If you weren’t…”

Gideon’s voice breaks, his eyes pleading. “I’m afraid I could be just like him. Please, please, don’t let me—”

“Taxidermy!” Luca yells, his voice cutting through the room and halting Gideon’s tirade instantly. Grayson thinks it’s the first time Luca has ever used his safe word. “Please—stop, Gideon. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Luca. Sorry that you have to hear this, sorry that you’re tied to me. I’m sorry…all of you.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” Luca repeats, his hands tugging at his hair. “I safe-worded. You promised me you would always stop. You’re hurting me and…and I need—”

He’s moving before the words finish, slamming his fists into Gideon’s chest. The beta is small, but he’s still a Were, and Grayson knows those hits probably hurt.

His soulmate doesn’t stop him. It’s Jay who pulls him away. “Baby, stop.” Jay lets him slide to the floor before following him down.

Luca sobs in Jay’s arms while Gideon stands stone-still, his eyes staring straight ahead.

Nix gags suddenly, clutching his abdomen. Rowan is over the island in an instant.

Finn emerges from the kitchen with a dish basin, just in time for Nix to heave up his breakfast.

“Hurts,” Nix whispers.

“The babies?” Finn asks, his voice laced with concern.

“No, the bonds. Fuck. Gideon?”

The alpha snaps his attention to Nix, and their omega continues, “Luca isn’t angry at you. Right, Baby?”

Luca nods. “Wait. Do you think I’m mad at you? Well, I am about the trackers, but not about your past. I knew some of it already. You talk in your sleep, and sometimes those bad dreams I had in the beginning weren’t mine…you know?”

“You’re not?” He drops to his knees beside Luca. “You don’t hate me? For lying about it this whole time?”

Gideon’s gaze flickers to Leo’s, but he quickly looks away. Grayson doesn’t know what he sees in Leo’s face.

“No, I could never. But you can’t talk about yourself like that again. It hurts you, and if it hurts you, it hurts me. Fuck. You aren’t anything like Carnell. ”

“You could never,” Nix agrees, as he hands Rowan the dishpan. If it weren’t such an emotionally fraught moment, he might have laughed at his disgusted expression.

Finn lets a smile flash across his lips, too.

“I’ll just go…uh…dump this and then…yeah.” Rowan heads into the restroom and returns with a glass of water for his omega.

Nix finishes it and returns the glass. He then slides to the floor beside his distressed beta and alpha, taking both their hands and placing them in the center of his abdomen.

“Gideon, you are good. I know it. Luca knows it. The rest of us know it. But you have to start to believe it, too.”

“Kitten, it’s difficult to let that stuff go. It’s with me all the time. I can’t stop remembering what I did to survive—you don’t understand.”

Nix tilts his head. He’s pale, and his mouth is tight at the corners. He’s hurt at the unthinking comment.

Grayson’s own bond burns sharply, and he flops back so that his back finally hits the back of the couch. It’s Nix’s pain—and therefore his own—surging up in a column of agony.

What his soulmate has endured to make just those unintentionally callous words burn like the fires of hell, he can’t even bear to think about. He wishes he knew how to ease his pain.

As if his love and the perfectly joined soul they share can heal him.

Closing his eyes, he gathers all his strength and pours cooling energy over the pain.

Grayson has always had a visual-spatial way of thinking, so it’s easy to imagine columns of cooling, healing energy soothing his mate’s pain.

When he opens his eyes, he’s glad to see that the lines of pain around Nix’s mouth are fewer, and he’s breathing easier.

“Fuck, I shouldn’t have said that, Kitten. I’m sorry,” Gideon says softly.

“I accept your apology, but you were right.”

“I am?”

“Yes. It’s extra hard to let go of the things that you did to avoid being hurt yourself—things you might be ashamed of, yeah?”

Jay growls, his eyes flashing red at the allusion to his life with Hayes.

“Cool it, Jamie. I’m okay, I’m just making a point here. What I am trying to say is, we aren’t those things, because we didn’t have choices. Like Luca says, now that we’re free, we decide. Right, Baby?”

“Right,” Luca murmurs, kissing Nix on the mouth regardless of the vomit-breath, snot, and all. “I don’t want to do this chip thing. It feels wrong.”

“It does,” Nix agrees. “I already hate that I can’t go anywhere or do anything without you guys sending Sentinel after me to cafes or the grocery store.”

“We’re not talking about forever, Baby Boy. Just while we’re here in Clearwater.”

Until they take care of Carnell.

“Then you’ll take it out?” Luca asks.

Gideon nods. “There are instructions about how to extract it right here. I’m going to memorize and then destroy them so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Nix must see something in Gideon’s face because he straightens his spine, and the anxiety in the bond lightens even more.

“Don’t be mad, Luc, but I think we should do it.” He nods at Gideon’s box.

“What? For real?”

“For real. Can you trust me? We’ll do it together like we do everything else. You’ll never be alone in that room again. I promise you.”

Luca is quiet, processing the past and the present, and trying to get to a place where this is something he can live with to protect his future.

“I’m in,” Finn states emphatically. “Someone has been in our house; he tried to run Jay’s van off the road, and my phone is on its way to Jacksonville.

I don’t like it, but I’m not taking the risk that next time, I’ll be chasing after one of you in the back of a white van.

Or worse, I won’t see it coming, and I won’t know where to find you. At least this way, we have a chance.”

Nix stands up, pulling Gideon up with him.

“What he said. But Gideon, I don’t think this will be necessary. We know he’s here this time, and he’s not going to get the opportunity to do anything else but die. Okay? ”

“Exactly,” Finn agrees, offering his upper arm underneath the edge of Jay’s T-shirt. “Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”

Gideon finishes with Finn and quickly checks the app to confirm it’s working. He shows them the screen, where a tiny blue dot marks their location and the bio-active app displays “Doc” at the top. It refreshes—and there’s Finn’s health data, clear as day.

“How convenient. Gimme.”

“No, Dr. Merritt. This is for me. Just for me,” Gideon taunts.

Gideon has forgotten that Finn is on the tail end of his most dominant rut ever, because Finn has the phone in one hand, the back of his neck in the other hand, and Finn’s teeth in the side of Gideon’s neck in under five seconds.

“Okay, okay. Me next,” Jay says, but still has to break them apart with his hands on their shoulders.

Jay’s info shows just as easily, his enigma calibrations showing slightly hotter and—surprisingly—a red flashing spot that signifies a literal pain in his ass.

“You okay, Jaybird?” Finn asks with a smirk.

Jay’s cheeks are pink. “Oh, fuck you.”

Rowan laughs. “Uh, I think it was the other way around.”

Jay charges Rowan and tickles him until the other enigma squeals.

“Do me before I change my mind,” Luca whispers. “I trust you, Sugar.”

He still flinches when Gideon does this one himself.

Grayson climbs off the couch to offer his own shoulder afterward. Finn loads the fourth syringe with the vial marked GP , and it pinches a little bit going in but is otherwise unnoticeable.

When Finn loads his bio info on the app, he gasps.

“Holy fuck, Gray.”

“What?” Jay leaves Rowan to recover from the tickling and the kissing.

“His temperature is over 104°F. Look! That’s the highest it’s been.”

Sure enough, the entire humanoid shape is lit up with red lights, his core even warmer.

“Are you feeling okay?” Jay puts a hand on Grayson’s forehead, and it’s blissfully cool against his heated skin.

“I’m good, but that feels great.”

It’s the truth—he feels really good.

“But you can check me over when we’re done here, okay?”

Jay backs off then, a tiny frown between his eyes.

Rowan goes next, then Gideon, and Finn has such a deft hand that it’s truly uneventful—if you can get past the idea and why.

“Nix?” Finn asks their omega, who has been sitting with Leo on the sectional.

Their beta has been so quiet that Grayson couldn’t begin to guess where their normally enthusiastic mate sits on the idea of microchips.

Nix squeezes Leo’s hand and joins Grayson near the counter, where he’s been watching the proceedings.

The wolf likes the idea of Nix getting this done even less than himself.

“I don’t want it, Finn. Like at all. My wolf is worked up like his ass is on fire. But…I don’t want to meet Carnell without my express consent and not having a plan in play. I trust you, and I trust Lauren.”

He offers his shoulder, and Finn doesn’t hesitate, in case he changes his mind.

Nix flinches, but when the app shows Nix and two other heartbeats, his face breaks into the biggest grin.

He walks off with Gideon’s burner phone, and Rowan and Luca in tow.

“You’re not getting that back,” Grayson says, and considers following them over to the couch.

The wolf thinks that maybe they need one of the devices so that he can see his pregnant omega and babies every minute of the day.

Gideon reads his mind. “No, there isn’t one for everyone, although I wish there were.”

And then there was one.

“Leo?” Finn asks.

The doctor is sweating slightly, and his black currant scent is growing sweeter by the second. He’s settling in for what is hopefully his last wave. It means that maybe tomorrow, they can do what they came for .

Leo hesitates.

Gideon sighs and takes Leo’s hands in his. It looks like a weird human wedding custom, and while he doesn’t laugh, it makes Leo smile.

“You mad at me?”

His smile falls, and he nods. A single bob of his head.

“Because I did these terrible things?”

It hurts to hear Gideon ask this out loud, and with such pure vulnerability.

“Fuck, no. I’m mad because you’re holding yourself back from me. From us. ”

“I should have said this sooner, but I am sorry. Sorry, I haven’t always given you all of me. I will from now on—if you still want me?”

“Of course, I fucking do. That’s what this has been about since the beginning. I love you, Gideon, and I will forever. No matter what.”

Gideon’s mouth drops open, and Grayson is close enough that he can hear his tiny hitching breaths.

“I love you, too, Leo Costas. I’ll do better at showing you.”

“I pronounce you husband and wife. Now, Finn, microchip him so Gideon can kiss the bride,” Rowan jokes, guffawing as Leo’s cheeks flush a pretty pink.

Laughing, Leo kisses Gideon on the lips while Finn injects the tracker into his shoulder.

It’s not over; Grayson is sure there’ll be some more talking—and probably some fucking—if Finn’s wiggling in between them has anything to say (and do) about it.

It makes his wolf happy that everyone is safer going forward, or at least they’re prepared for Carnell in this small way.

When Finn drags Leo and Gideon off toward the stairs and the temporary nest, Nix gets up to follow.

That warm place from before tingles, and Nix sidles into his arms, tucking himself tightly around his waist with his nose pressed into the center of his chest, as if he knows it’s there.

“You are warm, Gray. Perfect though, and your new perfume is dreamy.”

He breathes in again. “Like you.” Snuffle. “And me.” Snuffle, snuffle. “ And Gideon’s shrine…like patchouli. Come on, let’s go ride the last wave with Finn. I’m a bit sad it’s over.”

Nix asks, picking up the orchid from the counter. He brings it to his nose and sighs. “What’s this?”

“It’s for you. Not quite as beautiful, but…here.”

He tucks it in behind one tiny ear and kisses his soft cheek.

“Really?” Nix checks his blurry reflection in the glass of the microwave and adds a sassy hand under his chin like they’ve seen Luca do a hundred times.

“I love it, thank you.”

“Very pretty. You two coming?” Jay asks.

Nix giggles before scampering off so as not to miss a minute, leaving Grayson to pull up his shirt for a quick sniff.

He’s not wearing perfume, but Nix is right; it’s that patchouli scent again.

The scent is aromatic and mysterious, blending so well with the basil-vanilla that it feels like it’s a part of him.

Rowan runs by him then, with a faux-growling Luca chasing him and shouting, “Grrr, alpha! Grrr, chase!”

Grayson can’t help but laugh, following them out.