23

23
ALICIA
“So are you with him now?” Kayla asks.
Brandon’s just left, and Emmy’s playing happily with a stuffed bear and a picture book. Dad, thankfully, is still asleep, having missed the whole thing. Now Kayla’s pulled me back into my room to deconstruct everything that just happened.
“No, I’m not with him,” I say.
“I mean, I think it’s great if you are,” Kayla says. “I’d support it. You know I’ve always thought you two would make a good couple.”
I can’t help laughing. “Yeah, I know that,” I say. “You’ve made that abundantly clear over the years.”
“Well, good!” she says. “You ought to know how I feel about it. But seriously, with him coming around all the time, and now you introducing him to Emmy…”
“He doesn’t know she’s his,” I say. “You know that.”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” she agrees. “But you still wanted him to meet her.
You wanted to include him in her life. Why?”
“He asked to meet her.”
“There’s got to be more to it than that,” she insists. “You’ve kept her to yourself for two years, and now you bring Brandon over to meet her just because he asks?”
I sigh. “All right,” I admit. “We’re getting…close. I don’t know.” “So you are with him?”
“No! I’m not with him. We’re just friends.” “You’ve been sleeping together, though.” “What makes you say that?”
She looks pointedly at Emmy.
“That was two years ago. It could have been a one-time thing!” “Okay, so was it a one-time thing?”
I really can’t lie to my sister. “Well, okay, fine, so we have,” I say. “What’s wrong with that? Friends can fuck around. You sleep with lots of people, and that doesn’t mean you’re together.”
“I know that,” Kayla says earnestly. “And I’m not judging you, Alicia, I promise. If that’s what’s going on, and if it’s what you want, then I’m happy for you.”
“I don’t mean to be defensive,” I tell her. “I just don’t understand. Why the questions? What are you trying to find out?”
“I just want to make sure you’re being smart about this,” she says. “What do you mean?”
She takes a deep breath. “Lonnie.” I close my eyes. “Yeah, I know.”
“If he gets wind of this-I mean, if he even thinks there’s a possibility you might take a mate-”
“He’d hate it.”
“He’d do more than hate it,” she says. “He’d try to stop it. I don’t know if you understand how bad he’s gotten. You knew him as a teenager. You don’t know the adult Lonnie. Not really.”
“What’s different about him?”
“It’s hard to explain. He was always an asshole, but he’s gotten really power-hungry. He’s almost obsessive about it. It’s like he’s always watching out for potential threats to his eventual rise to alpha. A few years ago, I was having a regular thing with a guy. It wasn’t serious, and it definitely wasn’t anything like a mate bond, but Lonnie got so threatened that he organized a group of men to beat him up.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It was really ugly. The guy wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that, and about six months later, he left the pack for good. He’s just not around anymore, because Lonnie and his goons scared him off.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Exactly. And I’m just saying, if he sees you hanging around with Brandon too much, he could decide that Brandon’s a threat to him.”
“You think he’d beat up Brandon like that?” Brandon’s a lot bigger than Lonnie, so in a fair fight I don’t think Lonnie would have a chance. But I also have no reason in the world to believe that my brother would ever fight fair.
“Lonnie likes Brandon,” Kayla says. “He’s a good fighter, a strong member of the pack. I think if he felt like he needed to get rid of one of you to preserve his claim to power, you might be the one he’d choose.”
I nod. “I definitely wouldn’t put it past him to try to get me out of here. I know he hates that I’m back.” And I also know that he’s threatened by Emmy, and that’s even with the official story that her father is some human
guy. If he knew Brandon was her father, things would get ugly-and dangerous-in a hurry.
“I just think you should brace yourself for that,” Kayla says. “I like you with Brandon, you know I do. In a perfect world, I’d want to see the two of you get together. Hell, I do want to see that. In that world, Brandon could just challenge Lonnie for alpha, and we’d kill two birds with one stone.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I say.
“If he accepted you, would you accept him?” Kayla asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “In another set of circumstances, honestly, I think I could see it. He’s really sweet. A lot sweeter than I thought. And he’s easy to talk to, and I love the way I feel when I’m with him.”
“And sexy, too, right?” Kayla says.
I grin. “Well, yeah, but I always knew that about him.” “But you can’t be with him.”
“I can’t let anyone find out that Emmy’s his,” I say. “If that gets back to Lonnie and Deidre, they might try to hurt her. Nothing is worth that.”
I knew what I had to do. I had to find Lonnie.