Page 35

35

Dakota

“W hat do you mean with this, the negotiations are over ?” were the first words my mind processed. They were high and almost shrill, too loud in the quiet room. I thought it might be Igarashi Minori, but it was too loud, the reverberations of it distorting inside my ears. “We aren’t half finished, and the lawyers—what the hell happened in here?”

“What the hell happened in here,” came a voice that was definitely Jillian, softer, dry as dust and deeply unimpressed, “was your brother.”

“My... Jiro?”

“Jiro,” Jillian agreed. “He came here and attacked our CEO and my assistant, tried to murder them. You remember my assistant, Dakota? The adorable kid who figured out how to get us to work together? Your brother burned him down. He burned half this office.”

“Burned... I don’t understand.” This time, I was sure the voice was Minori, since her volume had lowered enough that it wasn’t ringing through my whole head. “Why would Jiro do this?”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? The other night at karaoke? Dakota looks just like your dead uncle? Well apparently that’s because he’s your long lost cousin, and your brother wanted him dead.” There was a sudden breeze on my cheek, and it made me think someone had turned a fan on me. Perhaps more importantly, it didn’t hurt.

In fact... nothing hurt.

When last I’d been awake, every touch, every movement, even the air against my face, had been excruciating. Now, I felt like I was floating on a cushioned cloud. There was warmth around me, but I knew instinctively that it wasn’t anything like the fire that had burned me. It wasn’t even a blanket wrapped around a man they’d thought was dying.

It was Jax, his arms tight around me, holding me as close as he could get me, but at the same time, somehow soft in his grip. Not putting pressure on anything Jiro had burned to a crisp.

More than the simple awareness of his presence, I could feel him. Yes, yes, his arms around me, but more than that, his gentle presence inside my head. His quiet misery at the events of the night. His ongoing fear for my life.

It had worked.

That should have been obvious from the mere fact that I was still alive and even more, free of pain, but this entirely new sense of Jax was something else. Something completely fucking wonderful, if it hadn’t been so sad in the moment.

On the other side of me, I realized, I could feel Jillian as well. Irritated and worried and just a little territorial because Crescent was theirs, and Minori was allied with someone who had attacked the pack.

Mage.

Monster.

My cousin.

Come to think of it, Minori was my cousin as well.

“You’re... you have to be wrong... that cannot...” Minori tried, but couldn’t seem to complete a thought.

It was up to me, I realized. Jillian was protecting the pack, and would not—could not—give an inch. Jax was wallowing in the pain of—well, even being able to feel it, I wasn’t entirely sure. They had to know by now that the bite had taken. That I had survived.

What else mattered?

I was alive, and now we could have what he’d wanted before.

I was pack.

It was fucking glorious. I could feel Jax, sad as he was in the moment. I could feel Jillian, proxy alpha while Jax wasn’t able to fulfill his role. Seth, prowling the room, ready to attack and sink his teeth into any threat to the pack. Maia watching him, her inner wolf pacing right beside him even as she stood stock-still, waiting and watching rather than restless. There were others as well, all there in the back of my mind. Some I knew and some I hadn’t met yet, but all there. All family.

For the first time in my life, I had a family.

And it wasn’t the only blood relative I had standing in the room.

Pressing up, I expected my body to protest, but there was nothing. It was just like getting up in the morning, my body no more irritated than if I’d been laying still for eight hours.

“She’s right,” I told Minori. “Your brother said so when he came here to murder me. He called me Kosuke, and said he killed my parents.” I stretched my body, and it was just as satisfying as if I’d had that eight hours of sleep, my back popping and muscles luxuriating in the sheer movement. Then I met Minori’s eye. “He also said he murdered your father when he found out and insisted he had to do something about it.”

She gave a little sound like a whimper and fell against one of the desks in the room, clearly horrified.

Behind me, I felt Jax sit up, but his misery didn’t abate. What was going on? Was there something wrong with me? Was I a bad wolf? Were the burns still terrible? Maybe I was hideous now, and Jax wouldn’t want me anymore.

But that didn’t seem like Jax at all.

“But you—you’re fine,” Minori said, as though that made me wrong about everything. “If he came to kill you, he wouldn’t have simply left you like this.”

Jillian scowled at her as though her words were an implicit acceptance of her brother’s behavior. It wasn’t, though; I was sure it wasn’t. With hardly a thought, I sent reassurance down my brand-new bond with Jillian.

To Minori, I said, “You’re right. He didn’t.” I motioned around the room. “I should think it was obvious, what he did. He burned the office badly. We’re lucky it didn’t catch fire and kill even more people. He burned Jax too. And me.”

I held my hand out in front of me, and it wasn’t scarred. It looked exactly as it had the previous morning. Actually, it didn’t. My paper cut was gone. I lifted it closer to my face and inspected the skin. The scar I’d gotten when I fell off my bike ten years earlier was gone too.

My skin was a blank canvas, completely untouched by life.

Minori seemed to finally understand what I was saying, and she started shaking her head, over and over. “Oh no. No.”

I raised a brow at her. “Is it bad that I’m alive?”

“But your magic,” she said, her voice almost a whimper. “You’re... Kosuke. You’re the heir to the family. You own the Igarashi Corporation. But you—you can’t, if you’re not a mage.”

I scoffed at her. As if I had ever wanted any fucking thing to do with Igarashi. Hell, I had suggested from the start that Crescent shouldn’t be making a deal with them at all, given their shitty, bigoted ideas.

Sure, I’d been starting to enjoy being a mage, but I’d had that for such a short amount of time. I would learn to live without it.

So much more important, I would never again have to try to live without having a family. Without people I trusted at my side. If turning instead of dying had been a certainty, I’d have chosen it from the start.

Suddenly, though, it was hard to breathe. The misery that welled up inside me was like a fountain of sludge threatening to break through and spew forth onto everything, and?—

Jillian made a pained noise, and I turned to look at her. She looked how I felt.

No, she felt how I felt.

It was the bond. I wasn’t miserable.

With complete clarity, I realized where the misery was coming from. I whipped around, staring at Jax, who was sitting up on the couch looking as though the whole building had burned down with his pack inside.

Because I might not give a single fuck about Igarashi or my family legacy, but it seemed that he did.