Page 4 of Pack Kasen, Part 3 (Caught #3)

AREN

T he creek used to be where I found peace.

I would ponder the pack’s problems and tease out a solution to them. Today, no amount of staring into the slow-running water is doing a damn thing to calm me.

Deep down, I know I’ve lost her.

“I left it too late, Fin.”

Kat’s parents practically knocked me down when I got up off my knees and went to open the bedroom door.

Never in a million years did I ever believe I’d get on my knees for anyone.

Then I met Kat.

If only I’d let go of my stupid belief that sex or flirting would make Kat forget how much I’d hurt her. Maybe then I wouldn’t have lost my mate.

Her face was pale, her chestnut hair loosely braided because that’s the best I could do to keep it out of her face as she slept. Barely awake and on her feet, she’d been unsteady, but her beautiful, striking blue eyes, flecked with hazel, stayed determined.

Fate has tied us together, but she doesn’t want me.

Finan saw me standing at the bottom of the staircase, lost, and suggested that fresh air and sitting by the creek might help.

It hasn’t helped.

Someone cleaned Kat’s blood from the spot where Cristofer shot her. The blood is gone, but faint traces of her pain linger.

“She’ll forgive you.” Finan bumps his shoulder against mine.

“Is that wishful thinking or hope speaking?” I angle my head to face my beta.

He’s the only reason I didn’t kill Jasper for something he hadn’t done, or spend all night and day running the length and breadth of northern Montana looking for Kat.

We wouldn’t have found her if we hadn’t come back to the house and pored over maps of the old mines. After pairing up, we headed out in our cars, searching every single one in the area.

She was in the sixth mine, miles away from the road I had been running down.

He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “A little of both. She’ll come around.”

“Would you if I locked you in a silver cage that nearly killed you?”

The pause before he speaks is answer enough. Finan is one of the most patient, forgiving people I know. Fuck knows I’ve pushed every button he has and then some, yet he hasn’t run screaming from an Alpha who howls at the sky when things piss him off.

I would not be as patient, yet I’m asking Kat to take me as I am.

“It might take a while,” he eventually says. “She just needs time.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“You have to show her that her heart is safe with you.”

I twist around to peer up at my bedroom window. She’s probably back in bed now, and her parents aren’t going to be leaving her side in a hurry. “Do you see her parents leaving Burning Wood without the daughter they thought they lost over fifteen years ago?”

Kat is the lost Lake Prairie child, long thought dead until Tagge, the Wolf Lord of Starling’s Peak, and my closest neighbor, figured out who she was.

Before Cristofer abducted her, her memories of her parents were slowly returning. The moment they do, she’s gone.

I’ll be lucky if she says goodbye before she walks away.

Finan doesn’t respond. He doesn’t have to.

I don’t have long to convince her to stay with me.

Maybe she’ll stick around long enough to hunt Cristopher and rip out his throat. She likes the hunt too much to walk away now. At least, I hope she does.

But after?

I get to my feet.

“I need to speak to Gregor. Can you get her parents set up in the guest cabin?” I ask Fin.

The two-bedroom cabin, with its own bathroom and kitchen, is tucked behind the bunkhouse, where most of the pack live.

It’s almost always empty since we rarely have guests.

“Kat’s dad already punched me in the face before, and he blames me for Kat nearly dying.

The more distance I put between us, the better for everyone. ”

He'll try to fight me. I won’t let him, and the last thing I need is to be responsible for killing Kat’s dad.

On my way to the bunkhouse, Silas, one of my enforcers, steps out onto the deck of the log-cabin style main house, calling out, “Aren, can I talk to you?”

“Are you dying?”

His forehead wrinkles. “Uh, no.”

“Is someone else dying?”

He shakes his head.

“Find me later,” I tell him, continuing to the bunkhouse. “I have something to do first.”

Gregor, our pack healer, is straightening light green sheets on the infirmary’s three beds.

It’s rare for a shifter to need to stay in the infirmary for long. Bruises, scratches, and bites heal in seconds. Bigger injuries require a bandage and a stern talking to by Gregor.

Only the things that nearly kill us mean someone spends a night in one of those beds.

Kat has stayed here twice.

Once, when Marisa, my jealous ex-lover, hung her from the deck railing with a chain, intending to get her out of the way.

Kat spent her first day back in Burning Wood here. With fresh sheets and the windows open, airing out the smell of blood, there’s little sign she occupied one of those beds.

I perched on one of the hard wooden chairs that Gregor uses to encourage us to leave, and I didn’t move until Gregor told me Kat was out of the woods.

Gregor didn't order me out of his infirmary the way he usually does when someone has outstayed their welcome. He told me to get up so he could put a cushion on the chair, then he walked out and came back with a tray of food, telling me to eat. That cushion is now missing, so I guess I’m back to being unwelcome.

I was ten when a feral persuaded my mother to open a silver cage, and she paid for that decision with her life. The feral escaped, killing her, my dad, and three of his enforcers.

I was fifteen when I first entered the Wolf King Trials, winning it so I could do more to protect other shifters from ferals than I could as Alpha of a small pack in rural Montana. Now, at twenty-nine, I have fought and earned the right to be Wolf King in the trials every three years since.

It’s moments like these that I miss my parents the most.

My dad would have cleared his office and beckoned me over to stand at the window overlooking the creek, and I’d tell him about whatever problem I had. We’d break it down and come to a resolution together.

My mom would be outside helping someone with something. She always seemed to be in a million places at once, helping, listening, laughing. She would wrap me in a deep hug and tell me that I needed to listen to my heart.

And even though I’d shrug off her sappy advice, I’d walk away feeling a little lighter than I had been before.

Life has never been the same after a feral took them from me, and it never will be.

“Gregor, what did my dad do when he fucked up and pissed off my mom?” I ask.

Gregor straightens a sheet. “Didn’t happen.”

I frown. “Not even once?”

“Not that I can remember.” He moves on to the next bed. “You’re hovering,” he says, not looking at me. “You know how I feel about that.”

Hates it.

When he’s working, he likes to be left alone to think and heal without someone standing over his shoulder, distracting him with their loud mouth breathing—his words, not mine.

It probably has to do with the fact that he teaches the pups several times a week.

Every time I pass the schoolroom, there’s more noise spilling out of the one-story squat building with a handful of kids under twelve than there is in the bunkhouse and main house combined.

I think he values silence more than anyone in Pack Kasen since he gets precious little of it in the schoolroom.

“I apologized.”

He hums, nodding his head slightly. “About time.”

My lips flatten. “That’s not helpful.”

“Oh.” He looks up at me, eyes wide. “Was it guidance you were after?”

Growling, I swing around to leave.

And I stop.

Gregor is the best damn healer in the country. He’s also a teacher, endlessly patient when you’re not standing over his shoulder and pissing him off.

“There’s a lesson in there, isn’t there?” I ask, my back to him.

Nearly thirty, I have a feeling that Gregor will still be teaching me important life lessons in another twenty or thirty years. My dad went to him for advice, and he was the Alpha of Pack Kasen, the one everyone went to for guidance.

“An apology is just step one,” he says.

I turn to face him.

He’s still straightening the pale green sheets on the beds, though they look perfect to me. “The bigger the wrong, the more time it takes for a person to decide if they want to forgive.” He looks at me. “And if they can forgive.”

“Patience,” I say slowly. “That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”

“Might be,” he says vaguely.

My eyes narrow. He doesn’t like people hovering over him as he works. I don’t like vague. Give me blunt honesty every fucking day of the week.

A hint of amusement warms his gaze, and he scratches his short, salt-and-pepper beard. “Give her time, Aren.”

I rake a hand through my hair. “I don’t have time. Her parents are here. They’re going to want to take her back to Nebraska.”

“So, why did you call to tell them Kat was hurt, knowing what their reaction would be?”

Calling her dad, who has made it clear he hates me already, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And not only because I did it while I was sitting beside Kat’s bed and she was unconscious.

“She needs them, and they need her.”

He nods approvingly. “Love means putting someone else first. It’s good that you’re thinking of someone other than yourself. You were quite selfish as a pup.”

I glare at him.

His lip twitches. “You’re also getting better at controlling that temper of yours. You’d have been howling or growling not that long ago. Your father would be proud. Your mother, too. I’d tell you I was proud, but you’ve a big enough head as it is.”

And just like that, I go from wanting to choke Gregor for pressing my buttons to wanting to hug him for being the father figure I sometimes need. No one else has such a powerful effect on me.

Only Kat.

She twists me up more than I thought anyone ever could, and the thought of losing her is making me desperate enough to lock her up. But I caged her before. I won’t do it again, even if it means losing her.