Deceiving the Protector (26 page)

“Tate!” In her shock, it took Lia a second to wonder why a blind woman would concern herself with facing them, but by then she’d obediently taken the seat as ordered.

“Bears get stronger bones with age, honey. She’s not arthritic. She’s a tank.”

“And you’re impertinent.”

“Yes ma’am,” Tate replied and to Lia’s further shock, the lined corners of Aurelia’s mouth tipped upward.

“Jensen Tate, did I hear that right?” Aurelia tapped her forefinger on her chin. “You wouldn’t be one of those California Wolves I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Finally, Tate looked surprised. “You’ve heard about Wolves in California?”

“Mmm, heard they were out mining in the mountains, looking for a miracle.”

The hair on the back of her neck rose subtly, but Aurelia was certainly no threat. Tate’s smooth mask of calm wasn’t as reassuring. His apprehension tightened in her heart like a sharp stone. “What miracle?” she asked him.

“According to the old stories,” her namesake answered instead, “there’s a cavern in those mountains, one of the seven sacred wells hidden all over the world. The wells are where the ancient ones went to worship. They’re supposed to be filled with a living essence that’s the source of all magic.”

“It’s a crock,” Tate interjected harshly.

“Probably,” Aurelia agreed easily enough, letting the conversation lapse into silence for a few brief seconds. “My grandmother used to tell me that essence was what kept us safe from human fear.”

“If that were true, it’s not working anymore.” Lia traced her finger over the indentation that had once been a five-inch scar in her arm. They’d cut away part of the bone to test how the fertility injections they forced on her affected her regeneration. Her skin was smooth, but the dip remained. Which meant Jade hadn’t been able to repair what wasn’t there to fix. Just went to show, some wounds could never be healed, some wrongs could never be fixed. “Or maybe it’s simply that they don’t fear us at all.”

Aurelia’s face smoothed. Her hand took hold of Lia’s again, this time the grip almost painful. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you that night. I couldn’t get there. I heard the screams, but I couldn’t get there.”

“No, Aurelia.” Lia capped her hand over the older woman’s fingers, then pressed her cheek to the papery skin. “They’d have just taken you too. Or worse.” She didn’t want to imagine worse. It was bad enough having heard the shot that killed her parents, ending them so quickly there wasn’t enough time even to gasp.

“I took care of Laurel, though,” Aurelia’s voice sounded as if she had to reassure herself. Her heavy hand landed on Lia’s head, petting back her hair the way she’d done when Lia was small. “I went to her when she called me. I took care of her, just like I promised your parents I would.”

Lia sat up, fearful hope bubbling in her chest. “Laurel called you? She’s alive?”

“Yes, she’s alive—”

“Wh-where is she?” Lia stood up, the chair almost falling behind her as she turned to Tate. “Can I see her? Is she here?”

“Lia, sit down,” Aurelia said but Lia couldn’t quite do it.

Instead she grabbed onto Tate, torn between crying and laughing and maybe even passing out from sheer relief. She pressed kisses on his face, not sure why he wasn’t jumping up and down with her. “She’s alive, Tate.”

“I know, baby, but I think your Bear-lady has more to tell you.” If his voice wasn’t so grim, his jaw tight as he stared at Aurelia like she’d done something wrong, Lia wasn’t sure she’d have been able to see past her own euphoria.

“What else could there be?” she asked, finally noticing how still Aurelia was sitting. How stiffly. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s safe, Lia.” But the finality in Aurelia’s tone didn’t bode well.

Lia swallowed despite her suddenly dry mouth. “Tell me.”

“About two years ago, she called me from a truck stop down in Pocatello. She’d been on the road for weeks from the look of her. Sneaking into storage trucks and animal transports to get place to place. It’s a miracle she made it that far without being caught, but one of the drivers turned out to be shifter and he got her in touch with me. I fetched her myself, though my fool grandson insisted on driving. When we got to her, she was close to feral. It was clear she’d begun shifting, probably to survive.”

Lia closed her eyes, sinking back into her chair. Laurel had been too young back then. Shifting was part of puberty. Doing it too soon caused damage, not just physically, but to the mind sometimes as well.

“She’s with my Ursa, our leader. She’s been taken in as part of our tribe. She’s safe, I promise you she’s safe.” Aurelia’s voice was nearly pleading.

“Why do you keep saying that? If she’s safe, why can’t I see her?” But Lia wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She felt Tate surround her long before he stood up next to her, laying his hand over her shoulder.

“Because she doesn’t know who you are,” Aurelia finally whispered. “She doesn’t know who she is, or maybe I should say, who she used to be. The reason she called me was because mine was the first number she said that they could reach. All she would say, over and over, was a list of information. Words that didn’t seem to have meaning to her anymore. Her name, her address, her phone number. My name, my phone number. The school she went to. The colors she liked. Her favorite book.”

God!
Lia shook off Tate’s hand, bolting from the chair to find some kind of escape, but the tent was small. Only enough space to walk back and forth a few times, trying to find some kind of grip on what she was being told.

“That was my list,” she ground out. “The things I would tell her every night to make her feel safe. So she’d be able to focus on who she was. So she wouldn’t forget.”

Instead she’d brainwashed her.

Abandoned her.

“Lia.”

She couldn’t let herself hear Tate’s voice right then. He’d only tell her she hadn’t done anything wrong. Tell her it wasn’t her fault.

“Lia.” Tate was more insistent this time, his big body now in the way of her pacing. His hands snaked around her waist, pulling her against him. She struggled, but he held her in place with seemingly no effort at all. Finally, she gave in, laying her head on his chest.

“This is what a mate is for.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, another to the side of her face. “We share our pain, remember? You don’t have to hold it back from me.”

She sighed, her body sagging against him another little bit. He was right. And his hold felt so good. She sank in even more, letting the hurt fade.

“How much does she remember?” he asked, loud enough that his words could only be for Aurelia.

It said something to Lia that Aurelia didn’t take offense at the command to answer. “Only the phrases we found her saying. It took a long time for her to find peace enough to let go of the past she couldn’t remember. The Ursa is good to her. They live deep in the forests, where she can shift and run and no one thinks anything of it.”

“There’s a place like that here?” Tate asked, though Lia picked up a thread of something she couldn’t quite identify in his tone.

“You think you Wolves are the only shifters trying to save lives?”

His entire body tightened under her hands.

“Until you and that arrogant Alpha prove yourselves, you’ll not get another word from me about that, Wolf.” The rumble garbling her words clearly warned that he was talking to a woman who would have little compunction picking her teeth with his bones. “As for your sister, I check in on her often, but I think even that upsets her. Reminds her that there was a life she had before. She’s made something of herself and I don’t like to interfere. She goes by Laura now. She paints, makes jewelry that goes toward the tribe’s income, goes to school, lives as normal a life as a shifter can. She’s…happy.”

But something was missing. Lia picked that up from Aurelia’s pause. She knew the feeling. Even her own happiness with Tate was shadowed by that missing piece. The hole that only her sister could fill. It had to be the same for Laurel, she felt that in every part of her being. “I want to see her, Aurelia.”

The older woman’s lined face was resolute.

“She needs me.”

“What if you unlock her memories?” Aurelia asked, her tone as much a warning as worry. “What if she can’t handle it?”

For a second, Lia faltered. The last thing she wanted was to bring her sister pain. Her entire life, it seemed, had been about trying to keep her from it. Was she selfish to insist on seeing her? On satisfying her own desperate need for her family?

Tate’s hand fit into hers, his hold as much a reassurance as the feel of his strength surrounding her. “Those memories could come back at any time. How are
you
going to handle it? Lia knows where they come from. Lia’s the only one in the world who could possibly understand what that girl’s been through. The only one who can help her overcome it.”

Lia looked up at him, her heart clenched, throat too tight to swallow much less speak.
I love you so much…

“They belong together.” His fingers constricted hers for a brief second of acknowledgement. His gaze, however, never left Aurelia’s face. “I promise you on my soul, they’ll be safe.”

Aurelia’s mouth pursed. “You’d give your blood for them both, Wolf?”

“After I took anyone else’s who tries to hurt them.”

She seemed to mull that a moment before she suddenly rapped the side of the table with her cane. Before she’d finished the second loud clack, her great-grandson had dipped under the flap. “Fetch me Laura.”

His dark gaze darted from Tate to Lia and back again, but he didn’t say a word before ducking out the way he’d come.

“The two of you sit down and wait. I don’t want you scaring her the second she walks in.” Aurelia’s cane knocked on the chair next to her. “You sit here,” she said to Lia.

Lia was glad Aurelia couldn’t see her lack of a smile as she settled next to her, letting the old woman envelop her hand in a knobby grip. Tate stood behind her chair, his hand a warm assurance on her shoulder.

“Your man isn’t sitting.”

“Her man doesn’t
want
to sit,” Tate replied before Lia could say anything.

“You’re a stubborn cuss, aren’t you, Wolf?”

“As a rusty bear-trap.”

Lia closed her eyes, trying not to wince at that last response. She ignored the banter continuing around her, concentrating instead on anything she could use to slow the rampaging beat of her heart.
What if she remembers me? What if she doesn’t? What if she’s scared of me? What if this is the wrong thing to do?

She couldn’t still the blurring questions in her mind or the ever-widening scope of her senses as she waited for any sound, any sign at all of her sister’s arrival.

Remember me, Laurel. Please, please…remember me.

Suddenly, she caught a scent, one she’d thought never to breathe again. Cinnamon and a brisk, cool flavor, like the first rain of winter.
Laurel
.

The flap lifted again, only this time a young girl stepped through. Lean and long-limbed, her dark brown hair pulled from her face with a slim braid on either side, joining into one at the back of her head. She wore a simple summer dress, sleeveless, blue and white with buttons up the front. Her skin a sun-loved dark gold, which only made the brilliant green of her eyes stand out more. She walked confidently, almost too smoothly for a thirteen-year-old. She didn’t startle at the sight of them, but her nostrils flared slightly once she realized they were in the tent. Testing their scents. Truly a shifter, though still so painfully young.

It took a second for Lia to realize Tate’s hold on her shoulder was actually keeping her in her seat. She forced her legs to relax, watching Laurel come closer and gripping the sides of her seat so as to keep her hands from reaching out to make sure the girl wasn’t an illusion.

Laurel’s steps slowed, apprehension clear on her face. “You asked for me, Nana?”

A warm voice, deeper than the piping chime she’d had as a little girl. Raspier.

“I have some guests who’d like to meet you.” Aurelia waved her closer with her cane in hand. “Come on, they don’t bite.”

Laurel took another step, the second even slower, her gaze studying Tate as if he were possibly dangerous. “You’re not a Bear.”

“One of my better qualities,” he agreed, and damn if he didn’t make the remark sound charming.

Laurel turned out to be no more susceptible to his wiles than Lia herself. Her gaze turned suspicious and she came no closer. “Who are you?”

He sighed. “Is it just this family or does no one in Iowa appreciate humor?”

“Guess we’ll decide if you ever manage to say something funny,” Aurelia said, which did earn a quirk of Laurel’s full lips. Aurelia’s hand reached out and Laurel hurried to take it. Once in hand, she drew Laurel closer to the table. To Lia.

Finally, finally, Laurel’s gaze found hers. The room shrank, narrowing to the two of them in a single instant Something in Lia pulled taut, a connection snapping like two magnets drawn inexorably together. Their bond, she realized. Like the one between her and Tate, it was forged in their hearts, not in their memories. Unlike the one with Tate, there was no open pathway directly to the girl’s emotions or thoughts. Only the ringing recognition of one soul to the other.

Laurel blinked, a flutter of her lashes as dual creases formed between her slim brows. “I know you.”

Lia nodded, slowly. It was growing almost impossible not to push the table out of the way and throw her arms around her sister. “Yes, you did. Once.”

Laurel stepped forward, just a step, her head tilting as she inspected Lia’s face. Her eyes closed and she drew in a deeper breath. When they opened again, the frown was deeper. “I don’t know your scent.”

“She’s bonded,” Tate murmured. “Her scent has changed because of it.”

Lia nodded, almost feeling like a bobble-head when she couldn’t stop. “I used to hold you every night, when you were little.”
When you were someone else,
she couldn’t help thinking, her heart growing heavy at the lack of true recognition. “I understand if you don’t remember.”