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A s soon as she said the words, Rebecca wished she’d never brought it up at all. That the moment had never happened. That she could take the whole thing back.
Maxwell gazed at her so intensely, with so much pain and grief flooding out of him, she knew she’d taken it too far.
As if responding in any way to her revelatory statement would break the shifter entirely and leave him in a pile of fractured pieces on the forest floor.
How had she not seen this before?
Rebecca sucked in a sharp, hissing breath and looked away, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. That was…”
She started walking again. “I really shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t.” Maxwell caught her by the wrist, sending a flare of electrifying energy up her arm, and she froze.
This time, running away from what he felt and what he might tell her wasn’t an option.
She didn’t want to escape it, but she had no idea how he would handle whatever came next.
His grip on her wrist tightened—warm, solid, very much still there. A new gentleness crept into his voice, no matter how much sadness it carried with it. “Rebecca…”
She turned back toward him.
“We agreed this conversation was going to happen,” he added, releasing her wrist with visible effort while she tried to ignore the pain of him letting go and the stark coldness wrapping around her wrist in its place. “And I have already promised you more than once that I will tell you everything you wish to know. You need no apology for that. You never will.”
How was she supposed to argue with a declaration like that? Regardless of how much guilt tightened her chest and sank in her stomach at the thought.
He was about to tell her everything—or at least all the pertinent information, the way she’d shared hers.
But that same pack, the same cause of the shifter’s overwhelming pain, wasn’t just far back in Maxwell’s past or left behind in the aftermath of a battle hours ago. They were all still right there beyond the woods, on the other side of the property, nearly a stone’s throw away.
She had to force herself not to tell him to forget it entirely, even with her curiosity thoroughly piqued and desperate for more.
Maxwell started walking again first, and she walked with him. Silent. Waiting. Willing to give him as much time as he needed before he decided to begin.
That aspect of her incomplete patience was certainly new.
“You are correct,” he finally began. “They were my pack.”
“But not anymore,” she muttered.
“Not for many years,” he added, dipping his head. “The only thing I am to them now is outcast. A pariah. As far as they are concerned, I no longer exist.”
“Is that—” Rebecca instantly clammed up, not wanting to risk ruining his willingness to tell her anything at all.
He shot her a sidelong glance, which she thought came with another brief flicker of a smile. “Go ahead.”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“I can hardly fault you for engaging with my story as I did with yours. Ask.”
Again, she couldn’t argue with that logic.
She’d never been so aware of how her words might make anyone else feel. The hesitation she couldn’t quite release gripped her in an unfamiliar hold. Because she didn’t want to keep feeling those dangerously roiling emotions if she stoked all that anger and pain and rejection in him again.
No, it wasn’t self-preservation. She genuinely didn’t want to hurt him.
But he’d told her to ask, and now she couldn’t back away.
“Is that what shadow means?” she asked.
“One of its meanings. Yes. In my case, the shadow is unseen. Unheard. Has no scent or physical body. Shunned and cast out to wander alone. Forever.”
The deep rumble in his chest sounded like nothing else she’d heard from him. Anger, yes, but sorrow as well. A reluctant acceptance of it all.
He wasn’t just explaining Shifter customs to her; he was talking about himself for the first time in this way. Maybe the first time ever.
“And in my case,” he continued, “it applies everywhere and with every other pack. Even if I had tried to join another somewhere else, the consequences of accepting me are too great for anyone. A shadow has no need for a pack, does it?”
By the Blood, she never would have guessed a shifter punishment like this could reach so far, nor could she imagine what Maxwell might have done to deserve something like that.
It must have been awful.
She didn’t know much at all about shifters, true, but she did know their pack was everything.
Maxwell was the exception. But he always had been, hadn’t he?
“What happened?” she asked, unable to stop herself a second time from prompting him for more.
With a heavy sigh, he kicked at the underbrush with the toe of his boot, making noise with his steps for the first time since they’d entered the woods. Then he dipped his head back to gaze at the canopy above them. “Simply put, I was wrong.”
Rebecca gaped at him. “That’s hardly something to warrant being turned out.”
He swung his head back down to shoot her a sideways look and growled. “I was very wrong. The details of it do not matter nearly as much as their consequences. My Alpha gave an order with which I disagreed. I believed obeying that order was wrong because it did not match my own moral code at the time.
“So I defied it. I thought I was doing the right thing, but grave mistakes are not lessened by the intentions behind them.”
He paused again, swallowing thickly, and briefly closed his eyes. “More than a mistake. Shifters lost their lives because of it. In the end, it turned out I was wrong and had been all along. Not only in defying my Alpha but in my failure to understand the full scope of what he’d ordered and why.
“I learned exactly why a leader is rarely obligated to fully explain the reasoning behind their decisions. It was a mistake I will never be able to correct or make up for, with my pack or any other.
“But if I can, wherever possible, I will strive to make up for it in other ways until the day I die. With other people…”
Damn.
That certainly explained why Shade’s Head of Security was such a stickler for the rules. Breaking them just once had cost him everything.
“Your Alpha,” Rebecca began, unsure exactly how to phrase it. “Is he still…”
“Alpha now?” he finished for her. “Yes. It is still Jim.”
“The man who answered the farmhouse door?”
“The very same. I imagine he will remain Alpha for quite some time to come. He is a stern man, not unfair but strict where it matters. I imagine there are some who think he was too harsh when meting out my punishment. But he had to be. To set the right example. Not just for the Sparta pack but for all of them. And I can say, had he not been Alpha at the time, I likely would not have fought him so fiercely the way I did.”
“Bad blood between you two?” Rebecca asked.
Maxwell snorted. “Not at the time. Not before I forced his hand. Family has a tendency to make us push harder than we otherwise might dare.”
“Family?” she blurted.
“He’s my uncle.”
She didn’t know why it surprised her so much. She’d instantly noticed the resemblance between them the moment Jim had opened the farmhouse door to find them on his front porch.
Probably because she’d expected everyone else’s relationship with their own family to be vastly different from hers. Some utopian thing where blood ties and affectionate bonds were stronger than duty.
Apparently, the callous nature of Rebecca’s familial ties wasn’t as rare or as uncommon as she’d assumed.
Maxwell’s own uncle had decided to make an example of him, to shun him from not just one pack but every pack for breaking whatever constituted a shifter Chain of Command.
The way Maxwell had explained it, the fact that they were blood only seemed to have made the punishment that much more severe.
She cocked her head, frowning. “And Annie is…”
“My aunt,” he replied, shooting her another quick flicker of a smile. “They raised me. The closest thing I had to parents. Once, I believe, they really did think of me as a son.”
Rebecca had known from a very young age what it was like to have parents who treated her no more kindly than they treated any other valuable soldier. Who likely had been so much harder on her because they were her parents , though?
Not once had Bundros and Sha’alvali treated her as their own child after discovering the Bloodshadow Heir’s remarkable abilities had manifested in her. They’d all but sent her off to be raised by Theodil instead.
Her old trainer was the farthest thing from a parental figure as it could get.
She’d grown up convinced he meant to kill her in his attempts to make her stronger for all of Agn’a Tha’ros.
She couldn’t imagine Maxwell had been raised in the same way.
“You don’t think they still feel the same about you?” she asked.
Maxwell ran a hand through his hair and almost shrugged, though his deepening frown proved he was too focused on finding that answer to care. “Perhaps, in some way, they still do. But not enough for Jim to overturn his decision. Or for Annie to risk defying it herself. If the circumstances had been different, they would have killed me for returning today.”
She stopped dead and spun toward him. “ What ?”
“Another facet of pack law,” he replied dryly. “The only reason they did not is because I brought Shade with me. Because I was willing to stand for them myself when they had no other option. The Sparta pack never turns away those who are truly in need, shifter or otherwise. And I was willing—I am willing—to subject myself to everything to which the shadow is no longer entitled, if it gives every member of Shade what they need when they have nothing else.”
Rebecca stared at him.
Now it all made so much more sense.
Jim’s response to seeing Maxwell on his front porch and the terse way he’d treated his nephew while they hammered out the details for Shade’s benefit.
The whispers and looks of terrified disapproval from the shifter children, who were likely too young to have known Maxwell was part of the Sparta pack and who clearly hadn’t seen a shadow before.
The glaring disrespect every other shifter had shown him by their simple refusal to acknowledge his presence.
And it wasn’t really disrespect at all.
In fact, it was the opposite.
They’d merely been respecting their own pack laws and their Alpha’s decision, and in some disgustingly warped way, they’d been respecting Maxwell’s sacrifice in daring to show his face here again. Not for his own benefit but to help those in need.
The new motley pack of nearly every other race but shifters, who had accepted him and whom he’d accepted in turn when no one else would.
Rebecca’s eyes were open now, but the truth remained no less horrifying.
Nor did what she’d witnessed without any prior understanding of it.
“Do you really believe that?” she asked, no longer concerned about how the asking might make him react. All she wanted now was to understand as much as she possibly could about the most violently tense circumstances surrounding Shade’s stay with the Sparta pack.
Surrounding Maxwell.
“Believe what?” he asked, surprisingly calm for this conversation despite how utterly broken and empty he’d been just half an hour before, sitting on that log in his uncle’s back yard.
“That they would have killed you for coming back alone,” she said. “Just for yourself.”
His eyes flashed again as he regarded her with open curiosity. “It is no different than your own people wishing to use you for what you can do, regardless of how you feel about it. Politics, or dictates of the law, or duty… Call it what you will. I imagine they are much the same for both of us.”
He certainly wasn’t wrong there, either.
“What about your parents?”
“Dead,” he replied simply. “Killed in some skirmish with a rival pack out of St. Louis, I was told.”
“Oh.” It sounded so stupid coming out of her mouth, she had to follow it with something . “I’m—”
“No need.” Maxwell shook his head, chin lifted high as he gazed around the forest, hands once more clasped behind his back. “I was not even two years old when it happened. I remember nothing. Jim and Annie took me in afterward. The only next of kin I had. They never wanted their own children, nor did they have any, but they raised me as if I had always been theirs. They did their best.”
“But you weren’t born here.”
“I may as well have been. But no, I was not. And before you ask, I do not know where I was born. That information, apparently, was never shared.”
Interesting bit of mystery there too. Which didn’t exactly make any of the other mysteries they were dealing with easier to solve.
“And no,” Maxwell added, his silver gaze flickering toward her with another short-lived smirk twitching across his lips. “No one knows where the mark came from, either. Including Jim and Annie.”
His left hand rose absently toward the right side of his chest, as if that might help him remember something he’d never been able to recall before.
“I always assumed it was either an oddly detailed birthmark or something my parents chose for me before they died. I was never treated any differently for it. Never questioned about it. It drew no more attention than any other mark on any other shifter.”
Maxwell stopped in the underbrush and turned toward her again with another deep exhale through his nose. “I had no idea it was elven. Or that it could have been anything but a mark or tattoo. Until…”
“Until your wolf jumped in the line of fire for me and sparked off the whole thing?” Rebecca finished, raising an eyebrow.
His stony lack of expression didn’t change as he studied her, but his words betrayed it all. “I can see how my actions may have come across as particularly reckless, knowing what I know now.”
She snorted. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“Or, as you put it, I believe,” he said, reaching for her until his hands settled on her hips and he drew her closer, “irrational and incredibly stupid. Which very well may be the case.”
“Oh, now you agree with me,” she murmured, caught by his eyes again and their pulsing silver glow.
There was little else she could think of after that but the heat of his hands on her hips through Titus’s overlarge jacket, the electrifying flare of tingling energy fueled by a growing need in both of them as he held her against him, how easy it would be to pull his bowed head closer and press her lips against his…