Page 12

12

AREN

E ven with Tagge’s help, we take nearly two hours to build the bed frame.

The rumble of an unfamiliar car comes when I’m finishing up making the bed with new sheets after thanking Tagge and telling him I can do the rest on my own.

I don’t want his scent on the sheets. Just mine and Kat’s.

I frown as I push open the front door, my gaze bouncing between Kat and Patric, the Wolf Lord of Lake Prairie, another uninvited guest.

Tagge puffs out his chest, proudly announcing, “The Wolf Lord of Lake Prairie had a daughter. I knew I’d?—”

Kat slumps to the ground.

I leap off the decking, catching her before Patric and Finan can move.

“Say another word, and I will tear you apart,” I snarl at Tagge.

And I march into the house with Kat in my arms, my pack spilling out of the den, the living room, and the dining room, visibly concerned.

“Is she okay?” Marta calls out.

“She will be.” I take the stairs up to our room three at a time, holding Kat tight against my chest.

I heard what Tagge said downstairs, and I’ll deal with what it means for Kat—and us—when I know she’s okay.

Right now, the only thing that matters is ensuring she’s okay.

I close the door behind me, conscious it’s unlikely to stay closed for long if Patric is who Tagge said she is. Gently, I slide Kat into the freshly made bed and pull the covers over her.

Then I take a seat on the edge of the bed, looking down at her face, her long, dark lashes forming crescents on her pale cheeks.

I reach out to touch her, then halt, my fingers inches from her soft-looking skin.

Curling my hand into a fist, I lower it to my side.

Catching her when she fell was one thing. That was to stop her from hurting herself.

But touching her like this when I know she wouldn’t want me to is another thing entirely.

I’ll watch over her as she sleeps. That’s it.

It’s only when she’s asleep like this, still and quiet, that it hits me how small she is. How fragile. And how much I need her to be safe.

Her eyelashes flutter, and she stirs. “Aren?”

My hand is smoothing back the dark chestnut strands from her face before I knew I was going to touch her. “I’m here. You’re safe.”

She blinks her eyes open. They’re striking, that pale blue, almost icy, with chips of hazel. Every time she looks at me, it’s like being caught in a spell.

Right now, those eyes are clouded with confusion. “What happened? I had this dream about…” Her voice trails off as she searches my face. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

I shake my head. “Not a dream.”

“What happened?” Her voice is softer than usual.

“You fainted.”

“I don’t faint.” A line forms between her eyebrows.

“First time for everything.”

She looks around. “Where is everyone?”

“Outside.” Suddenly, I’m vibrating with rage. At Tagge for setting this in motion. At myself for not being with Kat when Tagge blindsided her like that. “Do you need water? I can?—”

“I think I saw my dad,” she says quietly. “I always thought…”

This vulnerable side is new, and I don’t know what to do, but it’s making me hesitant, afraid I’ll say something or do something that will hurt her. I’ve hurt her too fucking much already. I can’t do it again.

“Patric, the Wolf Lord of Lake Prairie.” It’s a battle to keep a tight rein on my anger. This is something I should have known or at least seen coming. Not Tagge. Kat is my mate, and in this, I have failed her. “You thought you had a different dad?”

She nods once, a tiny motion. “My name wasn’t Kat before. You said there was no record of me before college, and it’s because I had a different name. Rylie Cooper.” She eyes me for a beat, then adds, “This doesn’t mean I forgive you.”

I flash her a quick grin. “I know. How about we call a truce? You can go back to hating me tomorrow.”

“That sounds fair.”

I can’t help but smile as I card my fingers through her dark strands, wanting to comfort her. Her hair was in a braid before, but it must have fallen out and I like that it has. Kat, with her hair down, makes me think of rumpled sheets and morning sex.

She makes a soft hum of pleasure in the back of her throat as she leans into my touch. The sound makes my cock stir and my wolf craves the touch of her skin.

All shifters crave touch, and Kat is no different.

Caring for my mate is an entirely different experience than caring for my pack. It’s more intimate. I’d suspected it would be. But I hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much. And I do.

I want to strip the clothes from my body—from hers—and climb into this bed with her. Stay in this bed with her today, tomorrow, maybe even forever.

But that isn’t what she needs right now.

She needs answers.

I give them to her.

“He is a Wolf Lord, one of the strongest alphas. That’s what it means.” I explain something I should have told her before. There is so much I haven’t told her. I need to be better at that. “And a long time ago, his child died.”

Her fingers clench around the waistband of my sweatpants. Tight.

“But that child was me. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? That’s why when I saw him, I knew him.”

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she whispers. “There is so much I don’t know.”

“You’re from Nebraska. Patric’s pack takes their name from their surroundings, like most packs. They have a prairie with a lake and a field filled with?—”

“Sunflowers as tall as I am,” she whispers.

I study her. “Maybe not quite that tall. It’s been a while since he held a council.”

I have never held a council. It’s one of the responsibilities of the Wolf Lords to host it. The Wolf King never hosts. Thank fuck .

She holds her hand out to the side, about two feet off the ground. “They were this tall.” She stares at her palm for several seconds before lowering it. “He called me Kataleya.”

“Kataleya Prairie,” I explain, “The Alpha and Luna lost their only child over fifteen years ago. Everyone thought she had died.”

I was so sure she was dead that it never crossed my mind that she might still be alive.

“But we never stopped hoping we were wrong, Kata.”

The voice comes from over my shoulder. I’d heard the soft snick of the door opening. If it had been anyone else, I’d have snarled at them to fuck off.

But this isn’t anyone.

It’s Kat’s father. Her real father.

I don’t know if whoever was raising her before found her or stole her, but Gregor mentioned something in our last pack meeting about her being in a basement.

Alarm bells should have been ringing then. They are now.

“You liked to run in the sunflower fields,” Patric says, crossing the room and taking a seat on the edge of the bed. “They were taller than you were, but you never got lost. Not until the last time. No one could find you. We tracked you to a campsite. There were signs hikers had recently been there, but no one was there. We thought they might have taken you, so we kept looking. Then we picked up bear tracks.”

I stand as Patric clasps her hand and looks down at her as if he’s struggling to believe what he’s seeing.

I want to stay. My wolf needs to comfort my mate.

But right now, she’s not looking at me with tears in her eyes.

She’s looking at Patric, because she needs him more than she needs me.

I take a step back, silencing my wolf’s unhappy whines.

She has another pack; I tell him.

My wolf understands, but instincts are hard to silence, and my wolf doesn’t want to leave our mate. Neither do I.

There’s no missing the anguish on his face. He’s grieving the child he thought he lost.

Perhaps the shock of coming face-to-face with her was what prevented him from rushing upstairs right away.

Almost all shifters know his story. It was one of the rare occasions when Midwest packs came together to try to find the missing Prairie child.

Shifters are strong. We are resilient, but a pup against a bear?

No pup can survive an altercation with a bear.

“Everyone kept saying a bear had killed you, but in my heart, I knew you couldn’t be dead. Something in me wouldn’t let me believe you were gone forever.” His voice cracks as he speaks.

Kat blinks, and a tear slides down her cheek.

I force myself to turn around and walk out.

Kat needs her dad now. Not me.

I close the door behind me, but I can still hear them. Tagge is waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and the sound of Patric and Kat’s conversation is barely audible.

Finan is also standing nearby. The rest of the pack must have returned to whatever they were doing before, or Finan told them to stop hovering.

I had my bedroom soundproofed as much as I could, wanting at least a little privacy from the rest of my pack when I closed my door at the end of a long day. Now I’m regretting that decision because I’d give anything to know what they were talking about.

Is Kat going to pick up her duffel and walk out of my life to start the life she should have had all along with Pack Prairie?

Tagge grins at me, smug. “I knew I was right about her.”

I glower. “At any point, did you even think of telling me who she was?”

“Nope.”

I study him for a beat, then shake my head. “You weren’t sure, were you?”

He opens his mouth.

“You can’t bullshit me,” I warn him. “You didn’t know, did you?”

He shakes his head. “I thought she was dead, too. But something about her expression made me think I’d seen her before. I called Patric, and he didn’t believe it could be her until I described her, and he said he would come and check her out.” He scratches his jaw. “Then there was her name. Don’t know how you didn’t put two and two together, Aren.”

“It wasn’t her name before,” I explain. “Practically her whole past is a black hole. She changed her name to Kat Meadow. I think her subconscious was telling her who she was.”

He whistles between his teeth, shaking his head. “Crazy.”

“So she doesn’t know how she was lost?” Finan asks.

“Nothing. Maybe those memories will start returning now she’s met her father.”

“Maybe,” Finan says.

I was a teenager when Kataleya Prairie died. I think my parents, who were still alive when she disappeared, had tried to help find her.

Dad wasn’t Wolf King. He wasn’t even a Wolf Lord. Not because he couldn’t have fought his way to a position. He was never interested in pack politics. I can’t remember if it was him, my mother, or Gregor who told me about the missing pup.

“I should have put the pieces together,” I say.

It’s obvious now that I think about it.

She knew about the schoolroom when only someone who had grown up in a pack would know. Gregor had said she recognized the tale of the first shifter, something she would have learned in the schoolroom with other pups.

If Tagge hadn’t been here, would I have worked out who she was?

“We all thought she was dead. You are not at fault for this, Aren.” Gregor walks into the room with a mug of steaming tea and takes a seat in an armchair in front of the fire. “She has broken memories. Helping her recover them will prove more useful than blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have known.”

“Something happened to her. She left Pack Prairie, maybe she got into an accident and hit her head.” I look at the others as I speak. No one has an answer.

It’s just guesswork until Kat can remember what happened to her.

Had someone taken her from her pack?

What had happened to them?

She had been a toddler then, too young to care for herself. Someone else must have looked after her, at least until she could look after herself.

Footsteps thump down the staircase, and I twist, eager to find out what Patric has discovered. Or maybe something is wrong with Kat.

His lips are a flat line.

“What is it? Is Kat—” A fist flies toward me and I slam onto my back with a grunt, my head ringing and my jaw throbbing. The pain doesn’t last long. Shifters heal fast, alphas more so than others.

“You’re her dad.” I scrub the blood from my already healing split lip as I heave myself up. “So I get why you’d need to do that.”

Kat must have told her dad about me nearly killing her.

Patric takes a step toward me, fists flexing.

A growl rumbles from my throat as I meet his gaze. “One hit. That’s all you get. I am still the Wolf King.”

His eyes flash with rage. “You don’t deserve her. Not for one day do you deserve my Kata after what you did to her.”