Chapter Three
I pulled into my brother’s stable and parked in the shade of an oak tree. Whispering Pines Farm was home to twenty-six head of horses. Adam always had a way with the gentle beasts. While I followed in our father’s footsteps toward business investments, Adam wanted to be outdoors, working with animals.
The animals I worked with were the human variety.
“Hey, Aren.” My brother’s wife, Lana, grinned as she propped a chubby baby on each hip.
“I’ll come to you.” I hustled toward her before she could try to muscle the infants over to my car.
Babies were a new phenomenon for our Pack. Other than the elders of the Pack, most of us were pretty close in age. We’d never watched a younger generation grow up before our eyes. Malcolm, named after my father, stretched his pudgy hands out toward me, opening and closing his fingers like that would draw me to him.
It worked.
I slid my hands under his arms and lifted him up into the air, pulling at the new stitches in my side. He squealed with laughter as I brought him closer to my face, doing my best not to wince in pain.
Concern lined Lana’s face. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, placing my nephew on my hip opposite of the wound. “They’re getting so big already. I was only gone a week.”
Her dark eyes searched mine, but I waited her out and she finally let it go. “You’ve been out of town a lot lately.”
“I’ve had a few deals going down in Vegas.” I nipped at Malcolm’s fingers, enjoying the sound of his laughter.
He and Madeleine were fraternal twins, sharing the same coloring, dark hair, and olive skin. But the similarities stopped there. For one, there’d never been a set of twins born to the Pack that weren’t both male. Females are never born with the shifter gene, and yet from the moment they were born, their scents revealed that while Malcolm was a werewolf like his father, Madeleine was a jaguar like her mother.
And like Lana, somehow Madeleine carried the shifter gene from birth.
Another reason Nero would never leave us alone.
Until a few months ago, we hadn’t known Nero even existed, but once they invaded our territory chasing after Lana, we lost one of our own, Gabe, and also discovered Nero had been cooking up more than just selling out jaguar shifters as high-priced assassins. They’d also been experimenting on human women with psychic abilities to produce female offspring born as shifters. Lies and betrayal were all that Nero stood for as far as I was concerned, and we were ready for them. They’d never touch my brother’s new family.
I rubbed noses with the little boy, soaking in his smiles. Malcolm had my father’s light green, almost grey, eyes. Sometimes when I watched him playing on the floor, he would look at me and my heart would clench; he looked so much like our dad. And someday we’d tell him that his grandfather gave his life for him and his sister.
Malcolm wriggled and reached for his mother. How such a tiny woman lugged around and kept up with two active six-month-olds with their added animal instincts was beyond me.
“Have you heard a word I just said?” Lana took Malcolm from me and shook her head. “You seem far away.”
“Sorry about that. I guess I’m a little preoccupied.” I shrugged. “Did I miss anything important?”
Lana laughed. “Not really, I was just trying to catch you up on baby milestones. Sometimes I forget that other people might not be as interested in the new baby foods Madeleine has tried and Malcolm has spit out.”
“He’s a picky eater, huh?” I grinned. “Already taking after his dad. Speaking of…” I glanced over toward the barn. “Is Adam here?”
“Yep. He and Luke are just re-bedding the stalls.”
“Great.” I leaned in to kiss her cheek and then the foreheads of my niece and nephew. “I’ll go find him.”
“You’re welcome to stay for dinner.”
“I might take you up on that.”
I turned for the barn, but Adam met me halfway.
“Good to see you, bro.” He clasped my forearms in our Pack’s traditional greeting. “Where have you been hiding?”
I did my best not to react. I hadn’t been
Adam was my older brother by a few minutes, so when our father sacrificed himself to protect Adam’s mate during the fight with Nero, the mantle of Alpha fell onto his shoulders and with it… Well, I wasn’t exactly sure, but my brother knew things instinctively now. The same way our father, our Alpha, had. Maybe it was a sixth sense? It was hard to tell. We used to complain when our father seemed to sense when there was a problem. It was tough to hide anything from him.
Now I saw those same traits in my twin brother. Like looking into a mirror where my reflection could see more of me than I could. Unsettling.
“I haven’t been hiding. Just…working.”
Adam raised a brow. “Awful lot of out-of-town work lately.”
I nodded, following him back into the barn. “I guess, but there’s more money in Vegas than here in Reno, so it’s not really surprising.”
Luke, our youngest Pack member at twenty, carried an empty bag of wood shavings out of a stall and grinned. “Hey, Aren.”
He tossed the bag aside, and I clasped his dusty forearms. “Good to see you. How’s my brother treating you? Need me to renegotiate your contract?”
Luke laughed and shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay.”
Adam smiled and picked up the empty bag, folding it up to put it in the trash barrel. “Why don’t you call it a day, Luke?”
He grinned. “You sure? We’re almost done bedding the stalls.”
“Yeah, Aren can help me.” Adam glanced my way. “Right?”
My brother definitely sensed something. Shit.
I nodded. “Happy to help.”
“Thanks.” Luke headed out of the barn toward Adam’s ranch house and left me alone with my brother.
My Alpha.
Adam lowered his voice. “Aren, we’re all watching for Nero. You can’t keep going off on your own to even the score. I need you here.”
I felt like I just got sucker punched in the gut. How could he possibly know that’s what I was doing?
My brow furrowed, but I did my best to hide my surprise. “Why would you think it had anything to do with Nero?”
Adam pulled open the last stall door and dragged in a fresh bag of shavings. “Because Sasha attacked us in Las Vegas. She knew the area, and if she survived the fight at Lake Tahoe, then it’s logical she’d lay low there, right? Then you suddenly have business in the same place. Did you find her?”
I closed the door before the bay mare could make a break for freedom. “That’s a stretch isn’t it? There are a lot more people in Las Vegas than the bitch who shot me.”
“True, but the last couple times you’ve gone to Vegas on
I pulled my hair back from my face. “Are you spying on me, Adam?”
