Little Wolf (64 page)

Silas lowered his brows. “I don’t know how our pack looked to you—”

“From the outside, you mean?” Tim had never been a part of it. “Maybe your pack isn’t all full of Lucas, but I was never in it.”

“You were meant to lead them,” Silas corrected. “Not join them.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “That isn’t how it’s supposed to work and you know it!” A week in this town and Tim had seen that. Nathaniel was special, but he was still one of them. “You just thought I couldn’t!”

Silas moved with quiet determination until he was directly in front of Tim. “I knew you could. You were born to it. You breathe the name Dirus.”

For a full minute, maybe two, Tim looked up at him and couldn’t make his mouth work.
Silas
was telling Tim this. He could be lying, but this close Tim didn’t think so, and even if he was, he was scowling so hard, as though he wanted to frown Tim into submission.

Tim had never been less frightened of him.

“But I don’t look Dirus,” Tim argued at last. “And you were worried what wolves like that would think of me.” He was glad and disappointed when Silas didn’t interrupt him to deny it. He sighed. “I can’t believe you would have anything to do with someone like Luca no matter how desperate you were. He sullied our name.” Tim didn’t have Silas’s eyebrows, but he could scowl too. “And you let him.”

Since he was already judging Silas, he saw no need to stop. “You aren’t as sharp as I thought if you didn’t notice. If you honestly thought ignorance would protect me.” He focused his glare. “You stink of weakness. Hiding away, hiding me away, surrounding yourself with weres like Luca, concealing your real reason for seeking me out. You’re weak and you know it.” Tim sucked in air and had a revelation. “You
do
. You’re too weak to even risk this in front of witnesses.”

Tim’s scowl faded. “You realize Nathaniel let me claim him in front of the entire café and they loved him more for it. You expected me to challenge you, and I could. I
am
. Shit.” Tim gulped, lowered his head, then raised it again. “Everything you’ve done has undermined our name further.” He was aware of Silas’s low, constant growl, but he couldn’t seem to shut up. “You want us to be strong, but you drove me away all by yourself.”

He blinked and wondered if his eyes were reflective. He felt bigger than his skin, itching with the brink of change, and Silas wasn’t saying a damn word. “I could destroy you.” Tim’s voice was rough. “I have Luca. I can drag the Dirus name through the mud if I want. Not that it matters, because there’s only you and me and some cousins now. None of them are going to say anything if I go after you. I could take everything from you, name, reputation, then the pack itself, if I wanted it. If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t even have to do it myself. I have a town already. A pack. Nathaniel. I could bring the name Dirus back to what it used to be.” Tim was very still. Silas was watching him without flinching, but there was no show of teeth. His growling had stopped. Tim wet his lips. “You trained me to do all of that. Fuck, Silas, do you realize how fucked that is? You could have just hugged me! Instead you trained me to depose you. Talk about old ways.”

Tim didn’t especially care how much feeling he was giving away. “We don’t do that here,” he added softly, although he didn’t think Silas would understand. “I mean,
they
don’t, and I don’t know how I feel about orchestrating an attack to kill you. Aside from the very real fear that an attempt might fail and your revenge would be awful, you’re”—Tim wrinkled his nose—“you’re the one who taught me to play chess. I suppose that makes me vulnerable. Because I don’t really want to kill you, even if I’m furious with you for not teaching me anything
but
chess.”

“Timothy.” Silas had closed himself off again, but it said a lot that he hadn’t contested a single point Tim had made. “I didn’t want you to know this weakness.”

“Ignorance is no defense for the worl—weakness?” There was no way that meant what Tim thought, except that it did. Tim and Nathaniel had both smelled Silas’s loss, and
still
Silas was burying it. “Silas.” Tim’s face burned as he reached out. He stopped short of actually touching his uncle and waited until the ache in his chest was manageable. “Silas, if I’d known you missed me, I might have contacted you. I might not have left. I might have trusted you with Luca. We would have been stronger if I’d known.”

He swallowed, but it didn’t make his breathing any easier. He glanced up, and Silas looked away to the window.

“Nathaniel is the town’s leader?” Silas asked after a long silence. “He has my gratitude for Luca.”

“No retribution?” Tim demanded, the words crackling through the air between them. Just because he didn’t want to hurt Silas didn’t mean he wouldn’t if he threatened Nathaniel.

“You thought I’d take his reputation over your word?” Silas stopped staring out the damn window at least. “You are a Dirus. The Dirus, once I am gone.” His eyes were glowing, deadly intent as he made his pronouncement.

Tim flailed a little despite himself. “
The
… I thought I was an embarrassment?”

Silas must have seen something in that study of the town that Tim hadn’t seen. “You seem to be doing well here. Better than you did in the cities, those shared, cramped apartments we found. Although from my detectives’ report, you have not been here long.”

“A few months,” Tim answered, uncomfortable to think of how much Silas knew about his life the last few years. “It will probably be time to go soon.”

Silas’s surprise was so intense Tim inhaled it and froze. Inclining his head, Silas studied Tim from a closer angle. “You’re planning to leave?” He had no reason to be so shocked by the news. Then again, Tim had no reason to run anymore, which was strange to think about. Stranger that Silas had realized it before Tim had. Tim blinked, and Silas seemed to read something in it. “Will you go on to another city, or would you like to return with me?”

Returning, voluntarily, was something else Tim hadn’t considered. He was a little dizzy at the thought. He could go anywhere. He could try school, or use his name and get a real job, return home as the prodigal nephew.

“The company could use you,” Silas pressed. “You’re still a trustee, and I had already begun training you. It’s only a matter of experience. And of course your mother’s fund is still there as well. You never touched it.”

Tim hadn’t forgotten about the money, but he’d known using it would attract attention. But that was almost nothing now. Money was good, but Tim had gotten used to not having it. “I made it on my own,” he commented, mostly to himself. Silas glanced beyond Tim to the door, as if he could hear something Tim couldn’t. Maybe Carl and Albert were causing a scene. Maybe Nathaniel was there.

But no one burst through the door, and Tim could not imagine Nathaniel cooling his heels in the hallway.

“My money,” Tim spoke again. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” The funds were his personal accounts. It didn’t include the money from his shares in the company. He really should have considered this the way Silas had. “I don’t need it. Not how….” He paused and glanced toward the door too. Still no Nathaniel. He was off doing sheriff business and likely ignoring Tim because Tim did nothing but hurt him. “Not how they could. This town could use some funding,” Tim remarked, only half-serious until he remembered the brochures found in the gift shop. “Something to make it less reliant on tourism… since it is so reliant on tourism now. Thanks to you.”

If Nathaniel didn’t have to pimp himself out so much, he might find his mate faster. Someone who wouldn’t take a crumpled brochure picture of him and stow it away in his bags so he’d have something to remember Nathaniel by when he left town.

“This town deserves better.” Tim turned away from the door.

“If you leave”—Silas did not seem to think that a possibility—“will you vanish again?”

“You’ll miss me?” Tim interpreted, savagely pleased at how Silas stiffened. “I’m not going back with you. I don’t completely trust you not to try to keep me locked up again.” That hurt both of them to say out loud. Tim rubbed at his nose until the wounded scent was gone, then went on. “But there’s… no reason to vanish now. People know who I am here. I told them.” He raised his chin and considered the last half hour. “Anyway, I… I missed our afternoon talks. I realized that, being here. There’s not a lot of people I can talk to. And you…. It’s difficult to be in charge. Without anyone who knows you to tell you otherwise, you might become isolated, make shitty decisions on how to raise your heir.”

“Being among the masses has done wonders for your vocabulary.” Silas was cool.

Tim made a face at him. “I see the sarcasm is genetic.”

“So you don’t know what you will do.” Silas evidently chose to ignore Tim’s smart mouth for the present. “You truly never thought about confronting me.” He gave a small shake of his head, despairing of Tim’s lack of foresight, and Tim scowled. “You now have no reason to run.” Silas met Tim’s glare head-on. His eyes remained fierce. “You never did. If you had told me about Luca, I would have ended it. If you wish, I will still do so.”

A lesson or two would have been more helpful than an offer for justice now. Tim kept quiet.

Silas regarded him evenly, as if he weren’t repressing a storm of feelings. “When reminded of your fortune, you suggest giving it away.” Silas wasn’t asking. He was spelling something out for Tim, not that Tim knew what it was. “It’s a worthy cause, the care of others of our kind.”

“Oh yeah.” Tim got louder to banish his sudden chills. “So worthy you cut their funding in a fit of spite. Just because Nathaniel told you no.”

One lifted eyebrow from Silas hardly denied the situation. “A young wolf challenged me and had to be taught a lesson. I thought the old sheriff would control him. He did not.” Silas’s gaze drifted to Tim’s stomach and then up to his throat before returning to Tim’s face. “When I heard that, I expected that young wolf to replace the sheriff, and he did. I waited to see what he would make of one of the last surviving were refuges, and he turned it into a sex resort.” Tim opened his mouth to argue that the town was more than a sex resort, and Silas raised a hand to cut him off and allow the point. “But a profitable one.” His tone was grudging. “One that weres themselves flock to.”

Silas was implying he would have stepped in if the town had truly needed him. Tim was less sure, but were tradition
was
important to him. He might have, if Nathaniel had humbled himself enough to ask. But the town would never have been in that situation in the first place if he hadn’t denied them money.

“The town survived.” Tim felt the need to keep pointing this out.

Silas acknowledged that by not acknowledging he was at fault. “Yes, by propagating stories about weres.”

“The matings aren’t stories. Those are real.” Tim realized he was blushing and felt silly. He was an adult, and matings were about more than sex. But Silas raised his eyebrows, and Tim’s face was on fire.

Silas once again studied the view out the window. The evening sky had him riveted for some reason. “It’s been a while since this refuge has dealt with donors and financial matters on a large scale,” he announced after a while. “They will need help.”

“I don’t think they’re going to accept help from you, considering everything.” After Tim said it, he realized that might not have been what his uncle meant. He watched Silas go back to his original window in order to better survey the town and ignore Tim’s moment of idiocy. “Oh.” Someday, maybe tomorrow, when Tim had taken some time to process everything about today, he was going to call Silas and ask him what game he was playing. But now Tim’s mind was racing at the idea of staying in Wolf’s Paw. He could stay. There was no pressure on him to go. It was entirely a matter of his choice. “I don’t know yet what I want to do,” he admitted at last.

“If not me, then who else would you consult on the matter?”
A leader chooses his advisors with care
. Silas’s unspoken messages were much more complex than Nathaniel’s. “The two outside?”

“Maybe.” Tim stuck out his jaw in case Silas was mocking Carl and Albert again, but it appeared Silas was serious, so he settled down. “Maybe someone else.”

“There is only one in this town fit for you, even if I take into account your apparent fondness for humans.” Silas was issuing a lot of decrees for someone who had zero say in Tim’s life.

Tim glared at his back. “I’m part human, remember?”

As always when Tim’s less-than-pure-were ancestry came up, Silas acted as though Tim hadn’t spoken. “The new sheriff took care of you?” Silas could not possibly be sure of that fact, but Tim could hardly argue. Silas waited a beat and then carried on. “Then he has my gratitude for that as well.”

Tim spent a minute or so trying to parse that. Silas undoubtedly meant it, in his way, but Tim didn’t see his point in sharing it with him now. “You’re mentioning him a lot.”

Silas arched one eyebrow but barely glanced at Tim. Tim’s face went hot all over again. So Tim had mentioned Nathaniel a few times as well.

“This one thing I will confess to keeping from you.” Silas stared at Tim and then let out a breath. “I have always seen it as a weakness. I still do. You could lead a pack to legend, but the risk is too great. Yet you found it. You might even say I drove you toward it. Toward him, it seems.”

“I’ve had a long day,” Tim reminded him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nathaniel.” Silas pronounced the name carefully. “Your mate.”

The words were issued in a clear voice, if not a calm one, as if Silas was unhappy with the state of affairs but couldn’t deny them.

Tim sort of gaped at him—dumb, embarrassed, totally confused. Then he shut his mouth and made himself blink. He swallowed to wet his tongue. His heart was pounding in his ears. The edges of his vision went black, as if he wasn’t breathing enough, but that was a problem for another time.

He thought distantly, but with real and growing panic, that Silas was going to smell this on him, and freaked out as he tried to redirect the screaming nerves inside him to someplace useful. He took a step back, and that was good. Motion was good. If he kept it up, he could be out the door in seconds.