Uncaging Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 4) (10 page)

“It looks wonderful,” she said. “I can wear tank tops again.”

Sam nodded, and Scarlet saw the smile around his eyes, satisfaction in a job well done.

“You should probably come back in about a month for a touch-up,” he said. “Once it heals fully, I can see anything I missed.”

“Right,” said Scarlet. She traced the outline of the flower with one finger very carefully, the skin around it red and angry.

The door to the shop opened, bells chiming. Scarlet looked over her shoulder in the mirror.

Just inside the door, the man stopped. He stared at her, reflected in the mirror, Scarlet’s shirt still off her shoulder.

It was Gavin.
 

They both froze, staring into the mirror, Scarlet’s finger still on the outline of the tattoo, like she was pointing to it.

“Hey,” said Sam, carefully putting inks away and cleaning up. “How’s it going?”

“It’s good,” said Gavin. He was still looking at Scarlet in the mirror. Sam didn’t notice.

“You’re just here for a touchup, right?” Sam asked.

“Right,” said Gavin. “I had an appointment.”

“Yeah, the book’s in the office,” Sam said. “I’m just going off memory, and it’s faulty.”

He finally looked up and noticed that Scarlet and Gavin were staring at each other in the mirror, both frozen. Looking over her shoulder, he met Scarlet’s eyes, then nodded once.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked into the back room. Both of them watched him go.

“Hi,” Gavin said.

“Hi,” Scarlet said.

She broke eye contact in the mirror and went back to the chair she’d been sitting in, grabbed the long-sleeve shirt she’d been wearing over her tank top and started to pull it on.

“Wait,” said Gavin, and he stepped around the partition that separated the waiting area from the tattooing area. “Can I see it?”

“It’s a marigold,” Scarlet said, turning her head away so he could see the flower. Gently, he brushed a strand of her hair away.

“There’s still a couple of spots where you can see the wolf,” she said. She felt like her whole body was a heartbeat.

“I never saw this tattoo, just the moons on your arm,” he said softly. “You kept your shirt on, remember?”

“That’s probably for the best,” Scarlet said. “It was pretty ugly, and you’d have known where I got it.”

“Why a marigold?”

“I think they’re pretty,” Scarlet said. “And they’ve got lots of black lines and petals, so it was a good choice for covering up the wolf.”

She paused for a moment.

“I should come up with a better answer,” she said. “Do they symbolize anything? Renewal, or victory, or something?”

“I’m not the guy to ask,” said Gavin. “I barely know a rose from a dandelion.”

“Me either,” said Scarlet. “I’m just pretty sure anything’s better than that wolf.”

“It could have been worse. It could have been a swastika,” Gavin said. “I’ve seen plenty of those.”

“From when you were a prison guard?” Scarlet asked.

Gavin nodded.

“Chase told me how you met,” she said.

Finally, he looked into her eyes, and Scarlet’s mouth went dry for moment, like she was staring into a blue abyss. Then he looked away.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Did you not want another ex con?” she said. “Is that it?”

Now Scarlet was holding back tears, doing her best not to cry.

I thought I was getting over them
, she thought.
I really, really did
.

The door chimed again. Chase walked in, saw Scarlet and Gavin, and paused for a minute in the doorway.

Sam emerged from the back, saw who it was, nodded at Chase, then retreated. Scarlet had never felt more fondly toward him than she did at that moment.

“Scarlet,” Chase said, clearly at a loss. “Nice tattoo,” he said at last.

“Thanks,” she said, sniffling. “It’s a coverup of my prison tattoo.”

His eyes flicked to Gavin, then back to Scarlet, and he walked over as well.

“It wasn’t that,” Gavin said, answering Scarlet’s question from before.

Chase frowned, but Gavin went on before his mate could ask what it wasn’t.

“Every single day, people sit in my office and swear to me that they’ve changed, that they’re turning over a new leaf, that they’re totally different people than they were when they went into prison.”

He exhaled hard, then ran a hand through his dark hair.

“And they almost never
do
change. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone swear they were going straight only to hear that they were in jail the next week, I’d be retired by now.”

Chase frowned.

“You’d
maybe
have an extra thousand dollars,” he said. “How many parolees are there in eastern Cascadia?”

“Okay, okay,” Gavin said, shooting his mate a look. “But a thousand times is a
lot
, and a good seventy, eighty percent of the people I see never change. They go back to what’s familiar, to their comfortable old habits and usually, they wind up back on the inside.”

“And you didn’t think I’d change.”

“I didn’t know if you could,” Gavin said, softly.

She looked at Chase, who stood there, hands in pockets, looking a little guilty.

“What about you?” she asked.

Chase looked at the floor for a few long seconds, then met Scarlet’s eyes.

“I remember getting out,” he said. “And I had Gavin by then, we had a plan, I had a job. And it was still hard. I still knew more people who were moving huge amounts of pot all over the state than I knew people who could get me a real job with an hourly paycheck.”

By now, Scarlet was crying quietly, the tears just dripping down her face, and she didn’t do anything to wipe them away.

“For a while, going back in seemed like it would be easier,” Chase said. “I got used to being in jail, to having my days all planned out for me, to doing what I was told.”

“It was a long time before he could sleep with the lights off,” Gavin said. He reached out and took Chase’s hand, lacing their fingers together.

Scarlet sat heavily on the tattooing chair, heaving deep breaths. Anything to keep from sobbing.

“He used to wake up shouting,” Gavin went on. “There was a whole month where I was sure that we weren’t going to work out, because I loved him, but that’s not always enough, you know?”

What else could there possibly be
, Scarlet thought.

Then she thought about watching Trevor and Austin and Sloane, and how sometimes they got into arguments over the dishes or Tim and Liz’s grades, or sometimes nothing at all. She thought about how she heard Trevor, who had once stayed perfectly silent for three days rather than apologize to her, tell them he was sorry.

Right
, she thought.
I guess there’s also work.

“I didn’t know that I could handle getting you and then losing you,” Chase said, kneeling on the tile floor next to her.

“I’m not who I used to be,” she whispered.

Gavin sat next to his mate, and reached out to touch Scarlet’s face, wiping away a tear with his thumb.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know if I was right or wrong to push you away. I’m never going to know.”

He paused for a second, a hitch in his voice.

“But we fucking
missed
you, Scarlet.”

“You did?” she whispered.

Both of them nodded, and for some reason, she remembered the baby birds that had flown away from her windowsill and out into the world, forging their own lives.

“We did,” Chase said.

Scarlet swallowed hard and knotted her hands together, feeling them shake.

“I missed you too,” she said.
 

They both smiled. In the back room, something clanged, and Scarlet remembered that they were in the middle of Sam’s tattoo shop.

“Okay,” she said, sniffling and smearing tears all over her face. “What now?”

“I really want ice cream,” Chase said, his face totally straight. Gavin gave him an
are you crazy?
look, but Chase just shrugged. “I do,” he said.

Scarlet laughed, still rubbing away tears with the back of her hand.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go get ice cream.”

Sam reappeared, casually carrying something in, and Scarlet realized that he had probably been able to hear the whole thing.

“Would you mind if I rescheduled the touchup?” Gavin asked.

A flicker of a smile danced around Sam’s eyes, making him look somewhere between benevolent and wistful.

“No problem,” he said, then looked down at Scarlet, still sitting on the edge of the tattoo chair.

“Let me wrap you up and you can get out of here,” he said.

Chapter Eleven

Gavin

What the hell do we do now?
Gavin wondered. He walked behind Scarlet and Chase, the sidewalks in downtown Rustvale only wide enough for two people.

It was fine that she was walking next to Chase. If one of them was good at talking to someone who’d just been crying, it was his mate, not him. After all, Gavin had spent years training himself to ignore tears from people opposite him, and sometimes, the training could kick in at the wrong time.

Up ahead, Scarlet laughed, and he could see half of Chase’s easy grin.

It’ll be fine
, Gavin told himself.
Just because most people you see fuck up doesn’t mean that she will
.

Still, a little voice in the back of his head wouldn’t stop asking how many people really turned their lives around.

Gavin tried to reason with it. After all, she’d been living with a bear shifter and a human for almost four months, the whole time she’d been out of jail. For someone who’d grown up in a hate group, that was no small feat.

Plus, her boss Annika was a human. Even though Gavin wasn’t her parole officer anymore, every so often he checked in with the new one on how Scarlet was doing. He’d have heard about it if she and Annika weren’t doing well together, but by all accounts, everything was going swimmingly.

And finally, there were the tattoos. It didn’t take a big commitment to get a nice tattoo covering up an ugly one, but Gavin knew first hand that Sam didn’t work cheap. She must have saved up for months to pay for the two tattoos he’d seen — besides the marigold on her chest, there was a colorful Sailor Jerry - style owl on her forearm, the triple moon turned into feathers.

Gavin let himself hope.

At the ice cream shop, Scarlet got chocolate, Gavin got mint chocolate chip, and Chase sampled nearly every flavor that they had, the twenty-something girl behind the counter handing over tiny spoon after tiny spoon of ice cream.

“Come on,” said Gavin. “We’re gonna finish by the time you get yours.”

Chase stuck a spoonful of Peaches and Cream into his mouth, considered it carefully, swallowed, and then stuck his tongue out at Gavin.

“Is he usually like this?” Scarlet asked in a low voice.

“Only sometimes,” Gavin said, matching her tone. “But we don’t go to buffets. He has to sample
everything
before he can decide on a ‘plan of attack,’ and by the time he’s got his meal planned out, you’re finished eating.”

“I can hear you talking about me,” Chase said.

“Hurry up,” called Gavin. “Stop making that poor woman waste her tiny spoons.”

At last, he sauntered over to them with a double scoop: one cherry, one chocolate.

“We went through all that just for you to get cherry and chocolate?” Gavin asked.

Chase shrugged.

They sat at a wooden table outside, watching cars and people pass by on Main Street. Downtown Rustvale still had a lot of its Gold Rush charm, and it was a beautiful, warm day.

“So,” Chase asked, between bites of ice cream. “How is everything?”

Scarlet looked down at her cone, like she was trying to think of the right thing to say.

“It’s good,” she said, almost sounding surprised at the verdict.

Then she looked up at them, her face somewhere between puzzled and smiling.

“Yeah, everything is good,” she said, and then started laughing.

The laughter had a slight edge to it, but Gavin ignored that.

“I was starting to feel like the world was moving on without me,” she said, holding her half-cone. “It’s so silly, but there are — there
were
— these baby birds on my windowsill, and I watched them hatch, and then grow, and a little while ago they all left the nest. And then right around the same time, Tim — my nephew — shifted for the first time, and then my sister-in-law told me she was pregnant.”

She paused, her gaze flicking from Gavin to Chase, but neither of them wanted to stop her. In that moment, she wasn’t anything like the snarling woman who’d tried to fight him at The Den, or the angry woman who’d come into his office.

But this is the bravest version
, he thought. Chase’s hand found his knee, and Gavin smiled.

“I was really worried that I couldn’t change,” she said, her voice quiet now. “I mean, I know I’m different now — I can’t believe the things I did and said — but I was worried that there was something in me, something deeper, that would always pull me back down to the worst version of myself.”

“Everyone is afraid of that,” Chase said. He’d already finished his ice cream cone.

“You are?” she asked, brows knitting together.

“Absolutely,” Gavin said. “Not everyone has to get their hate group tattoos covered, but everyone’s a little afraid of who they could turn out to be if everything went wrong.”

“And everything did go wrong for you,” Chase offered.
 

“You know what made me finally quit being a prison guard and go back to school?” Gavin asked. He took a bite from his cone, chewing it slowly.

Scarlet shook her head.

For a second, he hesitated.

You don’t have to tell her
, he thought.
You could make something else up.

“I nearly killed a prisoner,” he said, forging ahead anyway. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her, or at Chase, so he studied the crater of mint chocolate chip ice cream in his cone, dark brown flecks in the bright green.

“What happened?” Scarlet said. Her voice was even. Of course she’d seen guards be cruel to prisoners,
especially
shifter prisoners, he realized. She’d probably even seen a prisoner killed.