edged in dangerous blankness.
Sera’s father stood a few steps past the sliding glass door, his arms crossed over his chest.
Sera flushed pink, but she still untangled herself from Julio and climbed to her feet. “Hey, Dad.”
“Sera.” Franklin’s face softened as he held out his arms, and Sera hurried to hug him. He eyed Julio over his daughter’s shoulder. “Are you going to let me talk to your gentleman?”
“Depends. Are you going to give him hell?”
“Depends. Should I?” He released Sera, but he was smiling, like it was a common joke.
“Carmen would love to see you, if you’ll indulge me with a few moments as an overprotective father.”
Sera turned and looked at Julio, both eyebrows raised in silent question. He shrugged in equally silent answer, then gestured to the opposite bench at the picnic table.
Franklin walked past Sera and slid onto the bench. When she hovered near the door, he shooed her. “Scoot.”
With a sigh and a mouthed, “I’m sorry,” Sera capitulated. She tugged open the sliding glass door and gave her father one last look. “Be nice, or I’ll call your girlfriend.”
The door slid shut behind her, and Franklin smiled a little. “Lily keeps the peace by pointing out when I’ve crossed the line between doting father and well-meaning but unreasonable asshole.”
Something, Julio suspected, only Lily could get away with. “Want some coffee?”
Franklin waved the offer away and met Julio’s gaze squarely. “You saved my life. I’m never going to forget that. But you are half again her age, and she’s my baby girl.”
“I’m nine years older than Sera. That’s hardly the biggest age gap I’ve seen lately, though I’ll concede your last point. She’ll always be your baby girl.”
“Yeah, she will.” Franklin spread one hand on the table and stared down at it, as if he was struggling to choose his words. “She seems happy. The last time Josh contacted her, she was rattled for weeks.”
A father’s concern, and yet a question lurked somewhere in the words. “I didn’t run him off.
Sera did that all by herself.”
“Did she?” His brief smile faded all too quickly. “I want him dead. Not just because he hurt her, but because I’ve seen coyotes who let the mating madness take them, and they don’t get better. They stalk and they take until someone ends them.”
“I get it.” Josh’s continued survival wasn’t particularly important to Julio, either, but he wasn’t ready to step up to being judge, jury and executioner for anyone. Not unless his hand was forced. “He won’t stop.”
“Probably not. I need to know you know that, and that you won’t let anything happen to her.”
It brought Wesley’s words—and his dire but vague prediction—crashing back. “I won’t, and neither will she.”
Franklin studied Julio in silence for a good thirty seconds before he sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re serious about her, aren’t you.”
It barely sounded like a question, and Julio couldn’t tell if Franklin was relieved, or if that odd note in his voice was something else entirely. Something like dread. “I’m not messing around,” he said finally. “The rest is up to Sera.”
A short nod. “Mendoza, don’t take this the wrong way. I trust and depend on your sister, and I respect what you’ve done for New Orleans in general and me in particular. You pulled my dying ass out of a burning building…”
It didn’t take a genius to see where he was going. “But my uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” Julio finished.
Franklin opened his eyes, and there was sympathy there. “Your uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” he agreed mildly. “I don’t blame you any more than I blame Carmen, but I worry about what a man who was willing to kill me would do to my daughter to keep her away from his nephew and his fortune.”
Julio leaned forward, unsure how Sera’s father would take the truth. “My uncle is still alive because he’s family. But the moment he puts her in danger is the moment I forget that.
Completely.”
“Killing your own kin is no small thing.” Franklin held Julio’s gaze as he lowered his voice.
“When Alec challenged your uncle last spring, he was hoping to spare you that. It’s a choice he looks at damn near every day. It’s a choice I’ve made, which my daughter does
Neither did Julio. “What do you mean?”
“Sera’s mother…” He hesitated. “Callum called me and said you’d seen Kelly.”
But had Callum told him everything? “We did.”
Franklin stared at his hand where it rested on the picnic table. “When I was in my last year of medical school, my brother found Kelly’s family. They were in hiding because a bastard from Oregon kidnapped Kelly’s older sister, and their father died in the challenge that followed. Kelly was all of eleven years old, but Iris was eighteen and had a healthy baby girl. My brother saw that little coyote baby and he lost it. Lost his mind, his humanity, every goddamn thing that made him human.”
Coyote babies were rare, surely rare enough to inspire fascination. “He wanted one of his own. A family.”
“So bad he didn’t care that Iris was an eighteen-year-old girl who’d been brutalized.”
Franklin’s voice had gone numb. “I wanted to think he’d come back from it, but he turned feral when Iris wouldn’t warm up to him. So I put him down before he could destroy what was left of that girl’s life.”
He’d killed his own brother, his blood. Done the thing Julio always promised himself he could do if he had to. “Doesn’t sound like you had a choice.”
“My family didn’t agree.” Franklin met Julio’s gaze again. “Sera doesn’t know. I don’t want her to, because she doesn’t need more reasons to feel like instinct is inevitable. Not before she gets a chance to prove it to herself.”
“To prove what? That it isn’t as inevitable as she thinks, or that it is?”
He smiled. “That it’s not, unless we want it to be. I saw that coyote baby too, you know, and I wanted one more than hell burns. But I walked away, straight to the army to start my surgical residency and service. Not a backward glance, and that might have been that if Kelly hadn’t grown up a little and decided to chase me.”
But she had. And then, somehow, tragedy had struck again. “Sera’s mom—Kelly—she didn’t want me anywhere near her. You deserve the truth about that.”
It didn’t seem to surprise Franklin, though his smile slipped away. “Of course not. You’re male, and you’re a shifter. I haven’t seen Kelly more than a handful of times in fifteen years because it upsets her too much. The only man who can go within five feet of Sera without getting his ass chewed is Callum Tyler.”
“Because he’s not a shifter?”
“More likely because he’s an empath, a powerful one.” Franklin raised an eyebrow. “I heard you got to experience one of his tricks firsthand. Alec was pissed that he taught Kat how to jack a shifter up on adrenaline.”
If she did it to the wrong shifter, she or someone else could wind up dead. But Kat was smarter than that, something Callum knew. “It was a last resort. Kat knows better than to do it if she doesn’t have to.”
“That’s what I told Alec. Your sister probably did too. She’s still the only damn person he actually listens to.”
Alec’s voice drifted to them as the man appeared around the side of the house with Sydney at his side. “That’s because Carmen’s smart. And could kill me in my sleep if I pissed her off.”
Julio rose. “She wouldn’t. Not in your sleep, anyway.”
“No, maybe not.” Alec stopped short of the table, looking like he was trying not to laugh.
“Well. You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
With Sydney listening, not to mention Franklin, there wasn’t much he could say. “I guess it really is true—I get more work done on vacation than the rest of you bastards do all year round.”
“Better not tell me that, Mendoza, or I’ll have you visiting every pack in the region. Judging by what Syd here tells me—and my own painful experience—most of them won’t trust us enough to ask for help until we show up
