Cole couldn’t say one way or another what he would have done. He’d been hurt and angry at the time. Maybe he would have taken Everett back with open arms, or he might’ve cursed the man out and sent him on his way. There was no use thinking about it now.
“And your new boyfriend? I mean, do you still have a boyfriend waiting for you?” He asked the last part quietly, afraid of what he would hear.
The absolute shock on Everett’s face was very telling. “Boyfriend? I never…I mean…” He kept right on sputtering, hardly able to speak at all. He must’ve put together that Cole had seen him around town with another man, because his eyes fell shut. “Fuck.”
“Okay, was that your brother I saw you holding hands with in town?” Cole asked, not knowing any brothers who were close enough to be doing that, but willing to believe anything at this point.
“Christ, he wasn’t my boyfriend, and I don’t have any brothers. Dylan and I worked together.” Everett bit his lips together, and the fearful look he gave Cole let him know that the two hadn’t been strictly friends.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
“It was after you and I ended,” Everett promised. “I was lonely without you, and Dylan understood. He was there for me when I nearly quit my job, and then when I came back with my tail between my legs. He knew what I’d lost, and we hung out a lot afterwards, and we slept together, but I didn’t love him. Not the way I love you,” he added, looking hopefully at Cole.
He’d be a fool to say he didn’t understand, but still. “I really wish things had turned out differently.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Everett said.
“So, no boyfriend?”
Everett shook his head, still carrying that defeated look with a small mix of hope underneath. “No boyfriend.”
Cole couldn’t punish him anymore than he was punishing himself. He reached out and grabbed his hand. “Rhett.”
Cole counted it as a small victory when the light returned to his eyes.
“We won’t be able to sleep for very long tonight. A couple of hours at most, and then we should get up before dawn.”
Everett nodded, back to his planning mode. “Agreed. It’s not going to be fun sleeping without a fire, but those boys I worked with will have the equipment to locate us just from that alone.”
They could share body heat for that, but it wouldn’t be in the fun way.
“Well, I did get knocked out pretty early in that last attack,” Cole said, noting the way Everett kept his eyes firmly on the fire. “You didn’t happen to see if any of your hunter friends were, uh, killed in battle, did you?”
He shook his head. “No. I bailed too early. Owen’s the only one dead as far as I know.”
“How many more are there?”
“Including myself and Owen, there were five of us, so there will be at least three others on their way. They probably already found Owen’s body by now.”
This was bothering Cole way too much. “Were you and that hunter, Owen, friends?” He really hoped they weren’t. Cole hadn’t been personally involved in any hunter killings before that, and he didn’t like the idea that the first person he was involved in killing might’ve been someone Everett was close to.
Again, Everett shook his head, only this time he actually looked at Cole when he did it. “It’s strange, but for a bunch of men all fighting for the same thing, they all kind of work against each other. Everyone has their own revenge agenda. They’re all suspicious of each other at least most of the time. There was no clear leader in our group, and half the time we were fighting with each other on the best way to proceed.”
He rubbed his face with his palm. “I’d already been thinking about leaving before I found you.”
“But you stayed with them,” Cole said.
Everett frowned. “Yeah, I did. I guess I kept on thinking that they might be a little crazy, but I also thought it was for the right reasons. I thought werewolves were more dangerous.”
Cole tried to remember back to their earlier conversations that they’d had in the last couple of days. “You said, or I think you did, I was a little angry at the time to be paying too much attention.”
Everett snorted a laugh.
“You said that you weren’t involved in any werewolf killings?” He wanted to tread lightly here. He needed this confirmation. He needed Everett to tell him once and for all that he hadn’t killed anyone.
If it had been in self-defense, like how Cole suspected, and what had happened with that hunter, then Cole could easily forgive him. Even if that was the case, however, he wasn’t too sure about the forgiveness that his pack would offer to him.
There was a former hunter in his pack, and while most of the pack members didn’t have any sort of problem with Isaac, the newer members tended to steer clear of the man, and more than once, James DeWitt, their pack leader, had been forced to wrestle an angry alpha or disrespectful omega onto their backs to put them back in line.
“No, I told you that. But there were things I did do,” Everett said.
Cole’s heart thumped loudly. The fire was dying in front of them due to lack of attention, but all his focus was on Everett. “Like what?”
Everett’s eyes sank shut, as though he were attempting to hide from the memory. “I was a hunter, Cole. I helped them track down werewolves. I set up traps, I prepared the tables they used
