Head Hunter (City Shifters the Pack #3) - Layla Nash Page 0,30

but it had been a fucked up day. “All they needed to what?”

His jaw clenched and the muscles ticked until I feared for his teeth. “To get all the paperwork together so they could take me away. They had her found incompetent and unfit as a mother. Planted drugs on her, had other people file false claims about her beating me, lined up all kinds of character witnesses to show that they were the only people who could take custody of me. They put themselves out there as my saviors, since they hadn’t saved their son from my mother’s claws.”

His fingers dug in as his anger heated, and I sucked in a breath. Dodge immediately gentled his grip and smoothed his hands over where he’d squeezed, muttering something like an apology as his lips brushed my forehead. I concentrated on breathing. “Surely they didn’t...”

“They did. They won. They had money. Lawyers. The judge was in their pocket.” Dodge took a deep breath and I rose up on his chest. “They took me away from her. Her pack fought, or tried to. It didn’t matter. My father’s parents locked me away in their mansion. I was their do-over, their second chance. They thought they’d failed their son by letting him marry my mother, so they would... correct the mistake with me. They wanted me to be the perfect heir – go to the right schools, take the right job, marry the right woman.”

When he fell silent again, my fingertips walked down his chest to a hideous scar just under the collar of his t-shirt; the ridges felt like an awful stab wound or something terrible that had probably almost killed him. I murmured, “I’m guessing you didn’t get this at some hoity-toity boarding school, though?’

The corner of his mouth turned up and his hazel gaze found me even in the dim light. “You’d be right. I still went to the hoity-toity boarding school. I did everything they wanted me to. I played along. I tried to help my mother when I could, but the grandparents were very controlling. When she died...”

His voice trailed off and he took another deep breath. I waited, working my fingers into the hair at the back of his neck. He rotated his head so I could reach a particular spot, and I smiled against his chest as I obliged. And I waited.

The silence stretched until I feared he wouldn’t go on, that he would just let it end there.

Dodge’s eyes closed and his voice went rusty once more. “When my mother died, none of it really mattered. I wasn’t there with her. I wasn’t able to protect her from their hatred and their money. I vowed I would live and escape from their clutches, that I would find some way to – make it up to her.”

He shrugged, irritated, and I stilled. Dodge shook his head and stared past me at the ceiling. “Walking into the first boarding school as a ten year old wolf shifter who’d grown up in a city neighborhood that was still up-and-coming turned my world on its fucking head. I’d just lost my father. I didn’t know why everyone thought my mother was a criminal, and I didn’t know why the fuck my grandparents claimed they wanted me but immediately sent me to England to some fucking hotbed of abuse and inbred elitist classist bullshit. And I hated the uniforms. That turned my universe around, Persephone. I thought I was lost. I thought I wouldn’t survive, that I wouldn’t be able to control myself or be myself ever again.”

I couldn’t imagine him as a lost ten year old kid, missing his mother and grieving his father, thrown into a foreign environment. My chest ached for him and my throat tightened. “It must have – sucked.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “That was one word for it.” He still watched me as he tugged on my hair once again, making sure my attention was all the way on him. “But the point of this, Persephone, was not to induce you to rub all over me and play with my hair.”

My cheeks heated but I refused to react more than a simple aggravated huff. He knew that wasn’t what happened, and even though I’d certainly been tempted to... grind when he’d lifted his hips in invitation, I’d restrained myself. It damn near took a year off my life to resist the urge.

Dodge smiled more. “The point is that I survived. I was