Dark Wolf Rising (Heart of the Shifter) (6 page)

Cash swore under his breath. "You don't want to know, Bryn."

She looked over at him, studying his face as he scanned the road. His jaw was hard, his face lined with tension. His long fingers were wrapped tight around the steering wheel, and she noticed scars on his knuckles. She could easily believe he was a mercenary, but whenever he spoke, she saw only the man she trusted. "I think I do," she said quietly.

He glanced over at her. "You don't."

She sighed. "Cash, I was there the day you put that boy in the hospital after he cornered me behind the school. I saw the cuts on your knuckles after you hit your foster dad when he tried to beat up that other boy in the house. I put salve on the bruises on your back from when he found you the next day. I've seen you cry when you were too scared to go back to whatever hellhole you'd been assigned to. I helped you break into your files to try to find out anything about your past or where you came from. I know that you have a dark past. I know that you're not perfect. I've always known that, but I've always loved you anyway. Why would it be different now? Just tell me. I need to know, because right now, I saw a woman get torn apart by a wolf that you appear to be trying to save. I need to understand more, Cash." She touched his arm, his biceps contracting under her fingers. "It's me, Cash. Talk to me."

He didn't look at her, but his jaw tightened. "Shit, Bryn." He sighed. "You're a pain in the ass." He sounded both irritated, and affectionate, a tone she was so familiar with from him.

"I know. That's why you love me."

"Love? Who says I love you?" He glanced over at her, and for a moment, tension hung in the air between them, a sizzling connection that hadn't been there when they were kids. Suddenly, the word "love" felt different from all the times they'd bandied it around as kids.

Then he grinned, breaking the tension. "Fine, all right, I love you, babe. You know that. Even when you make me crazy."

She smiled, settling back against the seat. Maybe love wasn't the wrong word to use for them after all. It could still mean what it had meant so long ago, that they were best friends and accepted each other's eccentricities completely, and that they'd never betray the other. As for the other kind of love, the grown-up, romantic kind...that wasn't the kind of love they shared. Was it?

He sighed, and she recognized the furrow of Cash's brow, and she knew he'd decided to tell her the truth...and that it was going to be ugly.

Anticipation laced with fear rippled through her. Did she really want to know what he was doing with a pack of wolf shifters? Did she really want to know what the boy who had once been her best friend had become? He was different now. Darker. Dangerous. Possessive. And yes, sexy beyond comprehension. She'd never responded to a man the way she had when Cash had kissed her. When his kiss had turned carnal and possessive, she knew that she should have been afraid, but she wasn't. His kiss had ignited a fierce need in her, a burning, sensual need that had stripped her of all thoughts, except those of him.

She had wanted him to make love to her right then, on the side of the road, with a pack of werewolves hunting her. It was so unlike her, and yet, at the same time, it had felt like she'd finally found where she was meant to be. Sitting beside him, still tasting his kisses on her lips, still feeling his hand on her breast, was torment. She was restless and needy, consumed by him. The instinct to reach out and touch him, even to simply brush her hand along his jaw was almost overwhelming.

She'd been without him for over a decade, and yet, within minutes of finding him again, every part of her soul had lunged for him, dragging him back into her heart with relentless fury. She'd loved him as a boy, and then she'd had to let him go. Could she really trust him again? And could she believe that the trust from so long ago was still the truth?

"What do you want to know?" he asked.

The truth. She needed it all. No matter how horrific the truth was, she needed to know who he was and what he'd become. She needed to have an answer for the burning ache inside her that he'd ignited with his kisses. "Are you one of them?" she asked. "Are you a wolf shifter? Have you...killed anyone?" The moment she asked the questions, she regretted it. If his answers were yes, what was she going to do? Run away screaming? Hug him and tell him it was okay? Because it wasn't. Killing someone was never okay. And Jace had made her terrified of werewolves. Could she really see him the same way if she knew he was a wolf, one who'd preyed upon the innocent? She needed to be able to trust him. He was her only chance at survival. Maybe it
was
better not to know. Maybe.

He answered. "Yes."

Her stomach dropped. She looked at him sharply, but he wasn't looking at her. His hands were tight around the steering wheel, his face dipping into shadows and darkness as the SUV sped along, the tires humming on the asphalt like they were being carried by a thousand bees. "Yes, to which question?"

"Both. I'm a wolf shifter, and I've killed more than one person in my life."

"Oh." She swallowed, a chill creeping down her spine. He was a
werewolf.
Visions of the horrible slaughter she'd witnessed filled her mind, of the snarling, the blood, and the screams of the woman. He'd
killed
someone. More than one person. Sweat broke out on her skin, and she wrapped her fingers around the door handle, her stomach churning as she fought to remember that this was
Cash
, her best friend, not some stranger. There had to be more information that would explain it for her. "How did you become a...werewolf?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know who my parents are. You know that." His voice was hard and cold, as it always was when he was hiding emotions he didn't want to face.

Instinctively, she looked over at him. His lips were pressed tight together. Tiny lines creased the corners of his mouth, the lines that she knew appeared only when he was exercising intense control to crush his emotions. Her heart softened, and she touched his arm. He might be a werewolf, but he was also the boy who'd stood by her, never betraying her, never letting her down. She knew what his life had been like in foster care. She'd lived through that hell with him. She was the only one he'd shown his true self to, and she knew that he was doing it again. This was
her
Cash, not some random werewolf. Whatever he'd endured, whatever he'd done, she knew that he'd done everything he could to live with the honor that had been a part of him his whole life, despite everything he'd been through.

He looked over at her, and she saw the pain in his eyes. Guilt. Self-hate. The same things she'd seen when she'd first met him. Her heart ached for him, and her fear dissolved. "I know," she said softly, running her hand down his arm. "I know you have no idea where you come from. We tried so hard to find out, but you'll never know, will you?"

He shook his head. "There's no trail," he said quietly. "I kept trying for a long time. There will never be answers."

"So, forge your own path, then, just like always." She'd met him when he was hiding from his foster parents, who used to get drunk and violent in the evenings. He'd been ten years old then, skinny and lost, concealed beneath the bleachers in the football stadium at the high school. She'd been hiding from an older boy who'd been harassing her, leering at her body in a way that she had no understanding of, except to know that it felt wrong. Cash had punched the boy on her behalf, and they'd been fast friends from then on. He'd slept in her room many times, climbing in through the window when her mom was asleep. He'd gorge himself on the food she'd snuck from the kitchen for him, using her room as a respite from the hell that was his life. Her mom hadn't approved of her friendship with a trouble-making foster kid, so they'd kept it a secret, a friendship just for them for a long time, until her mom finally began to understand the true nature of Cash's beautiful heart. Then her mom had joined his support team, offering what help she could, through food, shelter, and acceptance…though she'd never allowed him to spend the night in Bryn's bed. That had been their secret.

How many times had they shared a bed over the years? Hundreds, probably, and she'd never felt safer than when he was sleeping beside her. They'd only kissed once, not because she hadn't wanted to kiss him again, but because he'd vanished two days later, never reappearing until tonight.

She brushed her fingers through his ragged hair, reverting to the casual intimacy that had once been so natural between them. "When did you know you were a werewolf?"

"The day I left town." He angled his head slightly, leaning into her touch as he drove, as if he needed the casual connection as much as she did. "Jack, my foster dad, started wailing on one of the new kids. I got pissed and went after him. He was ready for me, and he came after me with a fireplace poker. The fight got bad, and I was losing...and I turned into a fucking wolf." His jaw tightened. "I had no idea what had just happened, but suddenly I had him by the throat, a fraction of an inch from ripping his throat out. I nearly killed him."

She stared at him, trying to imagine how shocking and surreal it must have been for Cash to turn into a wolf like that, to attack someone else. How could he even have understood what was happening to him? "That must have been terrifying."

"Scared the mother-fucking-hell out of all of us. I ran, and he let me go. Never reported me as missing because he didn't want anyone to bring me back." He still wasn't looking at her, but she could feel the tension radiating off him. "I thought I was crazy," he said softly. "Shifters weren't real, right? But it kept happening again and again. I was ready to kill myself, and then I met Drake one night. He was a shifter too, another homeless kid scared shitless. When we realized there was someone else like us, we both realized we weren't insane. So, then we got serious about figuring out what the hell was going on. We found a pack."

She could imagine the horror he'd felt. Shifters hadn't been a part of societal consciousness back then. At that time, they'd been mostly legend, the stuff of fantasy and imagination. Even now, they were on the fringe of society, with most people trying to pretend they didn't exist, and most shifters wanting to stay below the radar. No one would even have known that Melissa had been murdered by a shifter if Bryn hadn't seen the whole thing, including the shifting, and recognized the man who'd done it.

Her testimony was going to change everything. After she testified, no one was going to be able to hide behind the delusions that shifters weren't real anymore. The shifters would be exposed, and society would have to deal with it, and Jace would have to face the repercussions of what he'd done.

"The pack you're with now?" she asked. "Is that the one you and Drake hooked up with?

He looked over at her, his face softening as he nodded. "It's a good group," he said. "Jace doesn't kill for sport. It's not how we do business."

Jace Donovan was a prominent Internet mogul who had more money than most countries, and he had his eye on moving into politics, as everyone knew. Being exposed as a murderer and a shifter would destroy his career and his life, and it would bring everyone he was close to under suspicion. Fear of shifters ran high, and anyone associated with them in any way would be hunted down. "You're defending him?"

"I'm not defending what he did, but I'm defending him as a human being. It's not his style." He sped up an on-ramp onto the highway and hit the gas.

Her stomach turned. "Cash, what he did—"

"I know what he did," he said sharply. "But it doesn't make sense."

She suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the fact that it was Cash's pack whose exposure was at stake if she testified. It was his friend, Jace, who would go to prison. Cash had a personal stake in it. That was why he'd been there tonight. Because he cared about Jace. Not about her. It would affect Cash if she testified as well. Her heart suddenly sank. Was his plan to keep her from testifying? Was he really there to stop her, not rescue her? Were his kisses designed to win her loyalty so that she would decide on her own not to testify? She swallowed, choosing her next question carefully, afraid to ask too much when she was alone in a car with him, when she had no chance to escape him if he decided that things weren't going to end as he needed them to end. "Why didn't you kill me?"

He shot her a look of disbelief. "What kind of question is that? I'd never kill you."

His shock was so genuine that she let out a breath of relief. Okay, then, still the Cash she knew. He definitely wasn't going to kill her. But that left Jace and the pack's future undetermined. "Then what's going on?"

"Damien, the interim pack leader, decided that the only way to keep Jace in the clear was if there were no witnesses. He set up a strike team to silently take you out." His jaw tightened. "It was supposed to be in and out, silent and clean, with you being the only casualty. When I found out it was you, I claimed the lead role. I don't know what shit Damien pulled while I was in there with you. Those police officers protecting you should not have been harmed."

The genuine concern in his voice caught her attention. He believed in his pack, and the wolves had violated that trust. But as long as he still believed in them, her testimony against his friends would be unwelcome. She sighed, chewing her lower lip, trying to figure out what to do.

"Don't look so worried." He looked over at her. "You're under my protection, Bryn. You always were, and you always will be."

She let out a breath of relief, knowing he was speaking the truth. His loyalty to his pack was strong, but so was his loyalty to her. "Thanks."

"No thanks necessary. I owe you."

"You did this because you owe me?" She didn't like that. It felt too good to be with him, good on a personal level, like her soul had needed him to heal it. She didn't want to be an obligation. "That's why?"