Mark had.
They’d been busy building their business, or playing with Kandy, the girly-girl of the two sisters who liked to dress up, and didn’t get dirty and didn’t beg to go hunting with her beloved brother.
It had been Mark who had taught her how to ride her bike, to roller skate, to hunt, and to race dirt bikes over the desert. He’d taught her how to spy while making it a game, how to be quiet, how to slip out of the house and how to pick a lock.
He had been teaching her how to know what he was thinking with just a look . . .
Her eyes met Rule’s as she felt that paralyzing fear she’d felt nine years before, the first time she’d seen his eyes go feral like that. All blue with no whites, the pupil retracting with rage.
He’d been there then, she realized, her eyes locked with the naked rage and pain in the brilliant, too-sharp blue of his eyes. With the same look in that oddly colored gaze, the same wild fury she could see there now.
And the same warning.
The same warning that had been in Mark’s eyes just before he had died.
“ Don’t cry. Be brave, Peanut.” His lips moved slowly, making certain she knew what he wanted her to see, staring at her, his gaze locked on hers, intent, warning. A message she couldn’t read no matter how hard she tried. “Don’t cry. Be brave, Peanut.”
She was rarely called Peanut, she realized in that second, and never by Mark. He had never given her pet names. She was his Gypsy Rum, baby sister or baby girl. Never, ever had he called her Peanut.
And baby sisters didn’t have to be brave, he’d told her over and over again, that was a big brother’s job. He could be brave for both of them, and she could cry all she needed to.
And still, she couldn’t cry. She was brave, foolhardy even. She had taken on her brother’s work, protected her sister as she had been told over and over again that Mark would have wanted her to.
Mark died for you . . . How many times had that accusation been leveled at her in the form of a chastisement?
It wasn’t your fault, Gypsy, they knew Mark’s weakness . . .
She was his sister, but everyone had remarked as she grew older how Mark had always treated her more as his child than a sister.
“I’m supposed to be brave,” she whispered, nine years of unshed agonizing pain scraping over her throat.
Rule shook his head slowly as a tormented grimace tightened his face. “You’ve been brave enough for all of us, for far too many years.”
Slashing, agonizing, the wave of pain that swept through her, jerked her head to the side as she closed her eyes against the stone-cold reality of choices she couldn’t control, nearly had her losing control of that inner scream of denial she wanted to let free.
When her eyes opened, it was to meet the tormented features of Jonas Wyatt’s expression. The pain he shared with her, she imagined. Choices and decisions that had perhaps not gone as planned, lives that were lost because he hadn’t been Superman that day. She could see it all in his face.
The director who had fought for more than ten years to build Breed awareness and ensure the survival of his people. The friend who had watched over the Breeds under his command and who grieved as no one but his mate could understand when he lost one.
And the father.
The father forced to stand by and watch as his child possibly died in front of his eyes.
These Breeds together had saved her life. Jonas, Lawe, her mate Rule, Flint and perhaps even Loki. She now knew he had been there that night. They had been there, and without them she wouldn’t have lived. Mark’s sacrifice, no matter how undeserving she was, would have been in vain, just as her mother believed.
“As his mate, I refuse to accept his demand for Self-Warrant and ask that you do the same.” The words left her lips before she was even aware she intended to say them. “The crime isn’t his, and the punishment would be not only undeserving but also lacking in gratitude.”
Her mother would never understand Rule’s sacrifice. But Gypsy did. He wasn’t making the sacrifice for them, but for her. He was doing what everyone had imagined Mark had done. Giving his life for her.
“Dammit, Gypsy,” Rule growled as she swore she heard Lawe mutter, “Thank God.”
“And,” she continued. “I request leniency for the crime committed by my parents until an explanation is given and possible exoneration based upon circumstance is heard by the Breed Ruling Cabinet.”
Jonas’s eyes widened. She had just given herself away and she knew it. She shouldn’t have known about this law, any more than she had known about the one Brannigan had informed her of.
Jonas nodded slowly as she watched Rule moving from the corner of her eyes, prowling, stalking closer to her as though she would bolt at any second.
And God knew, she wanted nothing more than to bolt.