“No. Not exactly. Well, in a way…” He reached into the shower and turned on the water. “Let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll talk about it, but over breakfast. You need something to eat and so do I.”

When he had the water adjusted, Richard stepped into the shower and held out a hand. Kevin hesitated for only a second before he stepped over and took his hand. Richard rewarded him with a beautiful smile and pulled him inside under the warm spray. Tenderly, Richard washed away all traces of the blood, and held Kevin close to his body, stroking his back when he began to tremble.

Both the warmth of the water and Richard’s closeness finally stopped the chills that had been shaking his body, and he was able to get out of the shower and stand still while Richard dried him off.

Richard stood up beside him and took him by the shoulders. “Better?” he asked softly.

Kevin nodded and they went back to the bedroom for Kevin to get dressed. Richard looked down at himself sheepishly. “We’ll have to stop by my room for me to dress. I was naked last night at the ceremony.”

Kevin felt his cheeks get hot, but he nodded and followed him out, hoping no one was in the hall. Richard was casual about his nudity, and now Kevin could see why. The big ones—the wolves, he made himself think—must be naked around each other all the time.

Richard’s room was just down about three rooms from his. Kevin wondered why he hadn’t realized how close he was. Hesitating at the door, he waited for Richard to wave him inside the room. It was larger than his, and sparsely furnished. It reminded Kevin of a suite in a hotel, with a small kitchen of sorts. It was no more than a microwave on a counter next to a sink and a small refrigerator under the counter.

A dark brown leather sofa stood in the middle of the room with a matching chair, and over on the side of the large room was a big king-sized bed and some dressers. Everything was Spartan and neat, as Kevin had thought it would be. There was something so organized and controlled about Richard.

He pulled on a pair of underwear, well-worn jeans and a T-shirt, slipped into some scuffed loafers and came back over to him. He dropped a quick kiss on Kevin’s lips. “Ready, babe?”

It must have been later than Kevin thought, because almost no one was around downstairs. A different woman came out to take their order, and Kevin wondered where Emily was. Her husband was part of the so-called guard. Was he being questioned? Richard ordered for both of them and then sat back, seeming to read Kevin’s thoughts.

“Emily must be with Christian this morning. I imagine he’s taking it hard. Todd was his best friend.” Tucker shifted his gaze down at his hands and Richard covered one of them with his. “No, don’t feel bad about it. If you hadn’t protected both you and Tucker, you’d be dead. I’d have killed him myself if I could have gotten to him before you acted.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “Still, it’s hard. I’ve killed someone before in the line of duty once a robbery at a quick stop store I rolled up on when I was still on patrol. The guy pulled a gun on me, and I had no choice, but it messes you up, no matter how justifiable it might have been. This time, it was so much more personal, you know?” He passed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry. I guess the reaction is finally starting to set in. My hands are shaking.”

Richard put a hand over his as the woman brought their breakfast. Kevin took a big sip of his coffee, and the bitter brew strengthened him somewhat. They both ate quietly for a few minutes, and Kevin could feel it bringing him strength.

Gavin showed up beside them, coming in from the side entrance where neither of them had noticed his approach. “How’s Tucker?” Richard asked, before Kevin got a chance.

Gavin smiled. “Much better. Almost completely recovered, and spitting mad because I made him stay in bed this morning.”

“Wait…what?” Kevin broke in, laying down his fork. “How is that possible? I admit my memory is fuzzy, but I saw that thing ripping his throat open.”

Gavin and Richard looked at each other and Richard gripped his hand a little tighter, like he was afraid he might bolt again. “Gavin gave him his blood, Kevin. Not only mate’s blood, but alpha’s blood. It’s the strongest of all.”

“And this healed him somehow?”

“Yes,” Richard said patiently. “Just like my blood healed your ribs.”

Kevin moaned and closed his eyes. “I’ve got to be dreaming all this. Or else I’ve totally lost my mind.”

Gavin spoke up gently. “Just take your time. It took Tucker a while to get used to it too. You see now why he couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t have believed him. Tucker wanted to put me in a mental hospital up until the time I shifted in front of him.”

Kevin nodded. “I remember he told me. About the hospital, anyway.”

“There’s something else you need to know, Kevin,” Richard said. “Tucker and I…we have a close relationship.”

“I know,” Kevin said sharply. “Don’t tell me I was right all along, and you’re in some kind of three-way.”

“No,” Richard said firmly. “Don’t be silly. Tucker is…Tucker is my son.”

Kevin cocked his head to one side, a smile tilting up the corners of his mouth. “Your what? Come on, Richard, you can’t be much more than five or six years older than Tucker. How is that even possible?”

“I’m a wolf-shifter, Kevin. We stop aging around thirty and don’t age again until we get really, really old. Some don’t even live that long, though we…we live a very long time.”

“H-how long?”

“Around two hundred years, give or take.”

Kevin laughed. Out of all the craziness he’d witnessed in the last few hours, he didn’t know why he should even think this was odd at all. “And you? How old are you, Richard?”

A little smile appeared on Richard’s face. “I’m seventy-four.”

Kevin opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. Richard took him by the shoulders and shook him gently. “Kevin, take a breath.”

He inhaled sharply and his sight began to clear a bit, as the little black stars stopped dancing in his peripheral vision. “I-I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why that should surprise me so much, or hit me so hard.”

“You’ve had a lot to take in,” Gavin said. “Give it all some time. In the meantime, Richard, I need to talk to you about what we found when we searched Todd’s room.” He glanced over at Kevin and hesitated, but Kevin sat forward.

“No, go ahead. I want to hear this. I think I have a right.”

Gavin nodded. “First, let me tell you two of the other members of my personal guard are missing this morning, Marissa and Benjamin.”

“What?” Richard hissed in a breath sharply. “And Christian?”

“Christian has been cooperating. He seems pretty scared, and rightly so. He knew their plans but he claims he had no part in any of it, and he was too frightened of the others to come to me.”

“Do you believe him?” Richard’s voice had turned hard and grim.

“I’m not sure yet. There’s no excuse for his disloyalty. He’s being held downstairs until I can question him further.” Kevin remembered Tucker telling him the basement held prison cells. He remembered something else Tucker had told him.

“Tucker had a bad feeling about the guard. Especially that one woman, Marissa.”

“I know,” Gavin said, his voice sounding tired. Kevin wondered if he’d been awake all night and figured he had been. “Tucker has been right about Marissa all along, it seems. I should have listened to him.”

“Tucker has good instincts,” Kevin said. “What did you find in Todd’s room?”

“Crazy ramblings, mostly, in a book he was writing, a kind of manual for what looks like a military style coup.”

“A coup? Like a takeover?” Richard’s voice was unbelieving. “Are any of them alpha?”

“No, and that makes it even more strange. It looks like his father put a lot of this in his head from what I read.” He turned toward Kevin. “Todd’s father was alpha and our previous alpha’s battle commander for many years. He was killed a few years ago fighting the Hunters. Todd’s writings implied that in his opinion, all the natural pets, like Tucker, for example, are defectives, every one of them, both physically and mentally. At puberty, when the change came over the rest of the pack, turning them into wolf shifters, the ones who weren’t able to shift should be, in his opinion, put out of their misery. They should be mercifully destroyed, and not left to suck the life out of the rest of the pack, their useless lives a drain on the pack’s resources…his words, by the way, not mine.”

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Richard interrupted, his face furious.

“Apparently, Todd’s grandfather before him had been of similar mind, and you realize, this is going way back, hundreds of years. When one of his father’s own siblings had failed to develop naturally into a shifter, she was simply smothered in her sleep. His grandfather felt it was his duty and his responsibility as her parent. In his opinion, one he had passed on to his family, so-called natural pets had failed to develop normally. Failure to deal with such aberrations was a weakness. In the wild, defective offspring simply didn’t survive. It was the natural way.”

“This is complete drivel! The fucking bastard was insane,” Richard’s face was even darker red by now, and Gavin was nodding.

“In Todd’s mind,” he continued, “and that of his brothers and cousins, too much fraternization with the weaker humans and pets was the reason the Hunters had been able to pose such a threat to our race for so long. His grandfather’s teachings had told them that in centuries past, the wolves were the most powerful species on the planet. Humans were for subjugation and existed only to serve the wolves in whatever capacity they were granted. Somewhere along the line, a grievous mistake was made by allowing humans and so-called natural pets to breed with the wolves, thus weakening the wolf blood line. It had become so mixed and so thin over time, in fact, that wolves no longer had the bloodmatch with each other, or at least only rarely. Now routinely wolves had a bloodmatch with a defective pet or a human. Even his own alpha,” Gavin paused with a grim smile. “That would be me, of course, what he called the strongest wolf in the pack, and I succumbed to one of the abnormal creatures. The other alphas of the Mountain packs had taken humans, all except one, and Todd pinned his hopes on that alpha’s strength and the strength of his blood.”