Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
He looks different in sleep. Younger. Less threatening. Whatever storm lives in that man, it goes quiet when his wife is protected in his embrace. Even unconscious, his hand splays over her baby bump, guarding the fragile life within.
“Look at them.” I nudge Wolf with my knee.
He follows my gaze. “Leo just finished an insane accelerated program for his ATP license.”
“He needs that license to run private aviation tours in Alaska?”
“Nope. This is Leo being Leo. He doesn’t do anything halfway.”
None of them do, including their pregnant wife. Monty mentioned that Frankie worked a brutal shift at the hospital before he dragged us all out here. Sounds like she and Leo needed this break the most.
Inside the open cabin, Monty sits at the polished bar while Kody teaches him how to make cocktails I’ve never heard of.
“Don’t bruise the basil.” Kody slices herbs with assassin precision.
“I don’t care about the basil,” Monty mutters.
“You should. It’s the whole point of the drink.”
“Vodka is the whole point.”
“It’s gin, you overpaid lightweight. Try to keep up.”
They continue to bicker like lifelong friends. Like husbands. Definitely like brothers.
The resemblance between them is ridiculous. Same dark hair, same athletic build, same controlled intensity beneath their broody moods. Monty is the older, smoother version, Kody the rougher, colder one. They carry themselves with the same squared shoulders and stony expressions, ready to protect and defend that which they hold most dear.
Family.
The word lands in my chest like a pebble in deep water.
“What is it?” Wolf tucks his voice beneath the wind, ensuring no one else can hear.
“It’s… I don’t know.” I stare past him, watching Monty steal a taste of the drink, and Kody smacking his hand away. “They’re so comfortable with each other. Like they’ve been doing this their whole lives.”
“They didn’t start that easy. But now? Yeah, the four of them are annoyingly made for one another.” He sounds entirely too happy about it to be annoyed. “Next question is mine.”
“Okay.”
We’ve been trading questions for days. Questions that started as nothing but turned into… Whatever this is. Honest. Disarming. Sometimes absurd. Sometimes bold enough to stop my heart.
“Your mother Celeste…” His fingers graze my wrist. “Tell me about her.”
“I don’t remember much. Just flashes here and there. She was very pretty. And young. But always tired. Always scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“No idea.”
“Was her murder premeditated?”
“They said it was a random burglary gone sideways.”
“What do you think?”
“I was only eight, so everything is jumbled. I remember David and Celeste fighting off the intruder, probably guarding what little we owned.”
He nods, listening the way only Wolf can, ears perked, eyes locked, endless patience.
“And Jag?” He keeps his voice low, safely inside our private pocket of sound. “What does he think?”
“Who knows? He never talked about it, no matter how much I pressed.”
“Where’s his bio mom?”
“She died when he was a baby. David married my mom when Jag was nine. Celeste is the only mother he ever knew.”
Wolf presses closer, brushing his cheek against my temple, encouraging me to continue.
“Jag was close to his dad and my mom. Really close. I remember that much.” My chest constricts. “But he never talks about them, not about their lives or their deaths.”
“Why not?”
“Losing them messed him up. When he pulled me out of the pantry after he stabbed that man…” My voice thins. “The way he looked at me, it was like the world was dead, and I was the last thing he had to drag through it.”
“He shouldn’t have put that on you.”
“It wasn’t his choice. But it became his curse. He was wanted for murder, so everything we did was about survival. Running. Hiding. More murder. He turned himself into a death-dealing fortress, and I was the stray locked inside.”
“What about your bio dad?” His thumb traces the bones in my hand. “Did you try to find him?”
“No. My mom never told me his name or why she left him. Only that he didn’t deserve our love and wasn’t worth the space in our heads.” I loosen a breath. “The concept of family died with David and Celeste. I don’t remember what being part of a family feels like.”
“You do now.”
My throat stings.
“That’s not just my family.” He nods toward Monty and Kody. “It’s yours now, too. If you want.”
I look at the two men inside the cabin, one lecturing about muddling mint, the other pretending not to care. Then at Leo and Frankie asleep on the lounger, curled around each other in perfect tranquility.
It feels unreal, like stepping into someone else’s dreamy life.
Except their lives have been anything but dreamy.
I read the journals and can’t help but think about the hell they lived through. So many harrowing moments plague my mind. Like the wolf attack that shredded Kody’s body, and Frankie’s quick reflexes with the blood transfusion that saved his life. The scar across Leo’s abdomen, and eight-year-old Wolf’s revenge against his mother. Monty’s year-long hunt for his missing wife, and the discovery that his depraved brother had taken her.