Page 18 of Resisted

“How. Long?” I growled out. I should have felt guilty for the shortness with her. She was my mother and only doing what she felt was best, but it didn’t help matters.

“Since she was twelve and her mark appeared,” she confessed.

“Where is it?” I fought the urge to burst in there and see for myself. To strip away all barriers and find out where she was hiding the mark of ownership.

“On her back,” she whispered. “She doesn’t know. I never told her.”

Fuck. This was such a fucking clusterfuck. I never wanted this. I hated that our life had come to such a fucking situation. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I had absolutely no guidance. I’d had a mate. She was dead. I’d carried her lifeless body myself. I’d smelled the copper of her blood in the air and felt it ooze onto my skin. I’d listened to her voice in my head daily, repeating the same verse over and over again, and I’d done what she asked. I saved her. I saved Bella. But now, the haunting reality was that my biggest nightmare, my most devastating mistake, had come full circle to taunt me.

I loved Bella. I’d loved her from the very second I held her little furry body in my hands. But this? This was never something I wanted. Never something I could predict. How could the fates be so cruel as to taunt me with my past mistakes? Flaunt them in my face and expect me to live with the consequences? I—no,wecouldn’t do it. We couldn’t be anything more to Bella.

“She’s like my sister.” I spoke more to myself than my mother.

“Not by blood.”

“She’s a child,” I said on a growl.

“You and I both know shifters are held to a different standard.” Her brows pulled together. “You three need to leave. If you get a full scent, you cannot resist, and she’s too young. She doesn’t know. They don’t know. No one will understand.”

I looked back at my subpack. “I refuse to tell them.”

“You think you can stop the hands of fate, Silas? I would dare you to try,” she hissed.

“I—” Shit. My hands were shaking. “I do not accept this.”

She sighed. “Silas.” Another sigh. “The longer you fight it, the harder it will be on everyone.”

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be.” My voice sounded weak, even to my own ears.

“Take them home, and get some rest. This will pass,” she instructed, then she turned her back on me after dropping this bomb of information. I didn’t know what to do with it, not when I was the only other soul who knew. I couldn’t tell her, couldn’t tell them.You think you can stop the hands of fate?I sure as fuck was willing to try.

I struggled to turn my body toward Boyce and Vince. Damn, if it was this painful for us, I couldn’t even imagine how she was feeling.You will not turn back.I had to repeat it more than once as I stepped out the door. “Bella’s sick, we need to leave.”

“Can we just—” Boyce began, and I cut him off.

“Get your fucking ass in the truck.” It was an order. A demand. A furious growl. Maybe I was a little harsh. Maybe. But I couldn’t deal with the information I’d been given while babying grown ass men.

They didn’t argue as they stumbled to the vehicle, though I could tell that each step was becoming increasingly harder to take. I knew the feeling. I felt it too. The tug and pull of the universe was trying to bring us toward Bella, while we were doing the exact opposite. We were pulling away, stretching a rubber band in such a way that the tension we created was already becoming unbearable. But we would have to learn to live with it. There was absolutely no other choice, and what Boyce and Vince didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. As far as they were concerned, they’ve been food poisoned, and I would not tell them otherwise.

The doors slammed on the truck, and I wasted no time starting the engine and pulling out. I wanted to go back. But it wasn’t me. It was the fuckery that fate installed in my life, urging me toward her. I resisted. I sucked up the pain, gripped the steering wheel, and moved forward, putting miles between us. Painfully excruciating miles.

“I think…” Boyce moaned. “I think we might actually die.”

“You’ll live,” I mumbled as I took the right toward our home. “Apparently, there’s a flu going around that’s gotten some shifters. Bella is just as bad off.”

I was a fucking liar, and I hated it. I hated lying to them, hated deceiving the men that had become my family, my friends, my very own pack. But the truth was so much worse. The truth was there, so painfully obvious yet so utterly ignored over all these fucking years. It would ruin them to know—at least that was what I kept telling myself. It would crush their souls with the weight of the fate’s betrayal to know that we had been gifted one more chance, one single chance, and it was my sister, the girl my family had raised for the last sixteen years, that would bring us all crashing down.

Chapter 7

VINCE

PRESENT DAY

I shouldn’t bethis fucking excited about a BBQ, but I was thrilled. It had been so fucking long since Silas had allowed any of us to go to his parents’ house, and I missed Mama Margret’s good ole home cooking. It wasn’t like he was even allowing us to go now, but Margret had invited us behind his back and what he didn’t know…well, it wasn’t going to fucking hurt him.

It had been three years since he’d allowed us to step foot on the property with no solid explanation why. It was the oddest fucking thing, not that I expected anything less than odd from Silas, but it wasn’t even that he was mad at his parents. No, they still talked, still exchanged gifts on holiday and birthdays, still loved each other just as hard as they always had. But things were different now. So fucking different.