maybe could have seen how this could go wrong.”
I shook my head. “They aren’t going to care about that. I’m the failure to my species, apparently,” I mumbled, walking back toward my bar. “My own brother…”
“Brother?” He perked up quickly, and I mentally began a string of cusses that weren’t appropriate for the public.
“Nothing.”
“You said brother,” he pressed. “You have family?”
“Drop it.”
“No.”
I growled, looking up from my bar to stare into his grey-blue eyes. He and Carey both had this stubbornness to them, and it was in their eyes.
“Yes, I have a…werecat family. I don’t talk to them that often, and there are reasons I live out here alone. Drop it.”
“How do they feel about everything?” He leaned on the bar, all his heat gone. I sighed, watching him. It wasn’t over yet. I had made the foolish decision to open up, and he was going to find whatever scraps of information he could about me.
“It doesn’t matter. They can’t protect me from myself, and I have to take full responsibility for the can of worms I’ve opened. I just need to figure out what I’m going to do about all of this, which meant I wanted some space away from everyone. I need time to think.” I touched my phone, where I left it on the counter. Still no word from Hasan or anyone else from the family. “Lani says I should throw you out,” I said softly, feeling guilty even if they weren’t my words.
“That…I would have to move Carey into another new school. Landon and I—”
“I told her that wasn’t an option,” I cut in before he started going off about how bad that would be for him. I tried not to think of him as selfish, jumping straight to how bad that would be for him. Well, not straight to him specifically. His first worry had been Carey and school. “I’ll figure out something else. Some way for me to calm the werecats down about this. A lot of them, roughly half, are survivors of the war, so it’s a tough battle, but I’m not going to toss you all out. I made a promise, and I plan on keeping it.”
“So many?” Heath frowned. “Really?”
“Werecats grow older far easier than werewolves, mostly because we don’t have as much infighting. Rogue werecats roam, looking for a territory of their own, answer to other werecats, or just don’t want to settle down yet. I’ve fought a few of those when they got curious about someone’s territory and needed to be chased out. Those were never fatal, though. Territory fights are nearly never fatal. It’s frowned upon.” I was rambling again now.
“Have you gotten into any fights since we’ve been here?”
“No. I would have told you there was trouble just so you wouldn’t go near the border.”
“So, to recap, you’ve been avoiding my daughter, which hurts her, because you are…busy considering how to stop any possible wars that may have started thanks to our actions.”
“And how to keep out of trouble with other werecats. Or, I don’t know, make them see I don’t mean anyone harm, and neither do you. You better not mean my kind harm. If you do, you won’t make it out of my territory alive.”
“Understandable. No, I don’t mean any of your kind harm. Most of the time, I’m curious. Vampires, fae, werewolves, and werecats. Nagas, kitsunes, and more. I like to meet others from different species and get their perspective. You give me a close eye into the world of werecats. I don’t plan on using it against you, and I’m not spying under false pretenses.”
“You say that now, but if I threw you out or a werecat attacked, you would use everything you could to protect yourself and Carey,” I pointed out. “I’m not stupid.”
“Like you don’t know more than you let on about werewolves,” he reminded me with a small smile. “Some were very surprised by how much you knew about us, me included.”
“Touché.” And I was willing to use it all to survive, even if the urge to survive surprised me because before I met Carey, I didn’t have all that much to live for.
“Can I admit something since we’re doing this sharing thing tonight?” he asked, looking down at his hands, considering them. My thoughts wandered to the memory of how warm and calloused they were when he helped clean and re-bandage my injuries in that warehouse in Dallas. They were nice hands.
“You can say whatever you want.”
“I was mad