this idea that he’s going to get everyone all riled up and head over there.”
“It’s going to be a bloody massacre is what it’s going to be,” Ryder adds.
“You have to stop him,” Scarlett places her hand on my wrist and looks up with pleading eyes. “You can’t let him do this.” She’s insistent, and both Ryder and Thorn look at her.
“Uh, by the way, guys, she’s the Alpha’s little sister.”
Ryder and Thorn both start talking at once, both to each other and to me. One of them makes a move to grab Red, but I punch him in the face. It’s Thorn, and he goes straight down.
“What the fuck, Nash?” Ryder says angrily. “When were you going to tell us this? Why the fuck are you hanging out with the enemy?”
“Fuck me,” Thorn mumbles, climbing back to his feet, rubbing his nose, which is bleeding angrily. I shrug as I look at him, not really feeling as bad as I should. He was about to touch my girl, and nobody touches my girl but me.
“I just found out he had a sister,” I tell them, which is sort of true.
“Don’t worry,” Scarlett tells them, crossing her arms over her chest. “We aren’t close.”
“No offense, kid,” Thorn says, still wiping at his face. “Do you expect us to just take your word for it? How do we know you aren’t going to try to screw us over.”
I glare at him and he shrugs again.
“I said, ‘no offense.’”
“He killed my grandmother in front of me,” she says, and I’m so proud of her for being bold and blunt. That’s my girl. She’s been through hell, but she keeps moving forward. “And he wants me dead for money.”
“How much money?” Ryder says with a smirk, and Scarlett slaps him in the face. “Hey!” He rubs his cheek. “That hurt.”
“Good,” she says with a little growl. Oh yeah, that’s my girl. “Don’t be a dickwad.”
“That’s not a real word.” Thorn looks proud of himself for that one.
“We don’t have much time,” Scarlett turns back to me. “We need to stop him before he hurts that other pack, Nash. We need to beat him before he can hurt anyone else.”
She seems desperate, and I don’t blame her. Not one bit. Jeffrey has hurt a lot of people and now there’s the chance that he’ll hurt even more. She’s right. We have to take him down before it’s too late, but now I have something to lose, and I desperately don’t want to.
Scarlett is perfect and I won’t let anything happen to her. Jeffrey has already taken everything else important to me. I won’t let him take her, too.
I won’t.
18.
Red
Nash and his friends have a plan. I know they’ve been waiting for the right time, but I also know that Nash was putting off dealing with his pain. Now he doesn’t have a choice. This accelerated timeline means he has to face his cousin’s killer and it’s not going to be pretty.
Is he going to be able to cope with that? I don’t know.
We’ve both lost so much, come so far, hurt so deeply. It pains me to know that the man I love has been hurt just as much as I have, if not more.
Unfortunately for both of us, the time for mourning has come and gone. We don’t have the luxury of continuing to feel sad or wounded. We have to fight and we have to do it now.
We travel with Ryder and Thorn through the forest.
“There aren’t any paths over here,” I comment. “How do you find your way around?”
“There aren’t any paths at all in the forest,” Thorn mutters.
“Yes, there are,” I say. “The stones.”