Excerpt from Chapter 1

Hotel Accademia, Verona

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This wasn’t Dustin. The women, the drinking, none of it was like him. The devil-may-care attitude remained a permanent fixture amongst his many notable, but exasperating qualities. But this was a new extreme that Darren hadn’t seen before. There was a time he wouldn’t even pay a woman a second glance. The death of his bride, Cassandra, was still too fresh to allow him to love or think about loving another woman. Then again, what he was doing in that room in the brothel couldn’t be considered love.

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Their nearness to his former beta had rekindled the pack bond, feeding a new sensation that Darren hadn’t felt in centuries. Now he had Dustin and Logan. Together, they made a trio that gave him a sense of completeness. He was the alpha, Dustin the beta, and Logan was too callow in his loup-garou skin to have a rank. Yet, they felt more like a pack, despite their initial tensions.

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One of which they were still working to unwind in their hotel room.

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“Just tell me his name,” Darren firmly requested, his arms folded. Dustin reclined on the sofa in their suite, looking more like an adolescent who had been caught in some devious act, but didn’t care about the judgement he faced.

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“Why?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter. He’s probably fine by now and it won’t make a bit of difference.”

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Darren still marveled how well Dustin had managed to hide his Irish roots. No slang, no accent, nothing. To any untrained ear, he was as American as Logan. His deep-seated abhorrence for his home country surprised him.

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“It matters, because Devia… Devia’s not there anymore.” He couldn’t keep the pain from this admission, even if the disaster was fourteen years old. “If the man you turned had come to us as you told him to, I want the assurance of knowing he escaped or not.”

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The recalcitrant loup-garou looked up, a hint of fear in his stare. “Isn’t there anymore? Escaped? What’re you talking about?”

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It was difficult to think of, let alone speak aloud. Even with Logan in the next room, it wasn’t easy to bring up the faces of those they had lost and left behind. “It was hunters,” he said. “That’s all I know. Many didn’t make it out alive. Robert Croxen being one of them.”

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Dustin knew the founder of Devia. He might have left the town to roam and do as he pleased, but he had made friends that were now dead and gone. Darren hoped the Irishman felt some repentance for leaving and tried to not be so satisfied upon seeing the look of heartbreak transform his face.

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“His name was Ben Myers. I don’t know if he would have gone to Devia. He was so… damn mulish. That’s why we parted ways. He wouldn’t learn, and I got tired of teaching him.”

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A melding of relief and disappointment surged in Darren. He knew most of the loups-garous in Devia. Some better than others. He would have known if a man by that name came to them with curses on his tongue reserved for Dustin Keith. It was likely Ben Myers had evaded the disaster and moved on, but that should have never happened to begin with. Dustin should have stayed on and trained him, worked harder to reach him.

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“I taught you better than that,” Darren scolded. “I taught you that turning a human was a weighty responsibility. You shouldn’t have taken it so lightly, nor should you have left him so soon. Just one year? I have never met a man that could match you for stubbornness.”

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Dustin began to laugh as he pulled a cigarette case from his inner vest pocket. “You haven’t met Ben Myers. I suppose something of me passed on through the bite and it was magnified in that Georgia farm boy.”

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“Smoking too?” Darren wrinkled his nose as Dustin lit up the end of the perfectly rolled, white cigarette with his lit match.

“Just for the flavor,” Dustin mumbled as the tobacco stick dangled from his lips. “Cigars are bangers too, but a little out of my price range.”

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“Yet you can afford five whores?”

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He shot his alpha a devilish look. “Prioritize.”

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Darren’s brows furrowed as he shook his head in dismay. When Dustin had left Devia, he felt as if one of his arms had been severed. A part of him had left for good. Now that he had recovered that piece, he found it mangled and unrecognizable from what he once knew. It was enough to turn his stomach. “What the bloody hell happened to you?”

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“Not a damn thing,” Dustin replied before blowing a thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I’m just taking advantage of the freedom you gave me.”

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“Freedom to start your own pack and live a simple life. Not galivant across Europe, sleeping in whorehouses, wasting your money on beer that won’t do anything to you, and smoking those damn things.” He snatched the cigarette from Dustin’s lips when he was in mid-drag and crushed it in his fist. The sting of the glowing embers hurt only for a moment. The scorched patch of his skin would recover quickly, but his trust in Dustin would take much longer to heal.

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The eyes of his former beta flitted from the clenched hand to his alpha’s angry glare as if he didn’t understand. “You lost the right to lecture me long ago, Darren.”

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“I’ll lecture you until I’m blue in the face if it’ll make you understand the gravity of what you’ve done.”

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Dustin threw up his hands. “I did nothing!”

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“That’s the problem!” Darren roared in return. “You left a loup-garou without a pack, without any guidance, without any means of protection all because of your bloody pride!”

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He sat up straighter on the sofa and jabbed a finger toward the window that overlooked the darkened streets of Verona. “Ben wanted to leave! He didn’t want my help, didn’t want to go to Devia, didn’t want to be part of a pack. The gòrach pìos de cac tried to kill himself, because he couldn’t stand to be away from his precious family, but he signed up to fight on the losing side of a feckin’ useless war! I was done trying to convince him to save his own arse and he was done hearing about it from me.”

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There was the volatile Irishman he knew. Hearing a bit of Dustin’s native tongue, whether in cursing or not, soothed Darren in unexpected ways. It assured him that a piece of his beta was still inside there somewhere.

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Without his notice, a subtle strain of dominance had been slowly leaking during their argument. Darren forced himself to take a breath and calm before asking his next question. “Did you form a pack bond with Ben?”

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For a moment, Dustin didn’t know how to respond. His mouth opened and closed, jaw slackening and tightening as he tried to find his answer.

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Darren repeated his question more deliberately. “Do you and Ben have a pack bond?”

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“I don’t know,” Dustin nettled. “Maybe. I never did it before, so how should I – “

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“When you left him, did you feel a pull to look back.”

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Again, he received nothing but a dumbfound expression and Darren began to lose his patience again.

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“Did you feel the pull?” he demanded.

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Dustin couldn’t answer. His face drawn, he looked to the carpet between his feet.

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It was settled.

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Darren turned to see Logan standing in the doorway, watching the whole affair from a safe, but obvious distance. This wasn’t his intention. Darren wanted to take this reunion gradually, to allow them time to get to know one another, but there would be time for that on the next leg of their journey.

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“We’re leaving in the morning,” he told the young loup-garou.

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At this, both of his packmates started.

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“Leaving?” asked Dustin. “I’m not leaving.”

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Darren whipped back around and glared with dark eyes that threatened to lighten into the fierce wolfish gold. “Yes, you are. We’re going back to America on the next available ship. We’re going to repair the damage you’ve done. You left your pack. What was my one principle that I always wanted you to know?”

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Logan, uninvited into the conversation replied with, “Your pack is your family.”

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Dustin would look at neither of them as he pursed his lips.

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“Pack is family,” Darren parroted. “And you don’t leave your family when they need you most. We’re going back to America and we’re going to find Ben, just like we found you.”

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(End of Excerpt)