Several people in the crowd gasped as Sawyer described the nature of the bear’s wounds. I’d seen some of the still-healing injuries myself on the traumatized animal, though I hadn’t realized what they’d been from.
God, humans really could be sick fucks.
“You’ve been working around Loki, right?” Maddox asked Sawyer.
“I have. For a couple of weeks now.”
I noticed my brother and Loki were both on the floor and Newt was playing with the animal’s ears.
I listened as Maddox went on to ask Sawyer about the behavior of wolves and whether or not Loki acted more like a dog or a wolf. But it didn’t become clear to me what my brother’s role in all this was until Maddox asked, “Wolves have a high prey drive, don’t they? They’ll pursue things that are smaller or weaker than them and kill them, correct?”
“Correct,” Sawyer said. I swallowed hard. There was no doubt an animal of Loki’s size could kill a child like Newt with one bite. The animal hadn’t even shown the slightest bit of aggression toward my brother, but if Maddox was going to do what I thought he was going to do, it would change the game entirely.
I felt myself tense up as Maddox looked at Dallas and said, “Dallas, do you trust Loki? Do you trust him with this boy’s life?”
I managed to keep my mouth shut at the ominous question, but I felt like I was going to be sick as Maddox’s eyes met mine after Dallas nodded. I knew what he was going to ask me long before he did.
“Do you trust me not to let anything happen to your brother?”
I wanted to do a million things in that moment, including googling anything and everything I could about wolf hybrids, ask Sawyer a gazillion questions about Loki specifically, and most importantly, grab Newt and hightail it out of there. I knew I could say no and that would be the end of it.
I knew that.
No one would judge me for it, either. I mean, was I really supposed to put the animal’s life above my brother’s?
I opened my mouth to ask that very question, but when my eyes met Maddox’s green ones and they softened just the tiniest bit, I knew that he knew what he was asking of me. And I also knew if he had any other way of saving his brother’s beloved pet, he’d have done it.
But more than anything, I knew, just knew, he wouldn’t let anything happen to Newt.
Don’t ask me how I knew that last part, because I was clueless.
Completely and utterly clueless.
But the same instinct that’d had me sidling closer to Maddox the day before when the sheriff had pulled into the sanctuary’s driveway was the same instinct that had me nodding my head. For his part, Newt hadn’t even seemed to notice that the discussion revolved around him.
I watched nervously as Maddox knelt down by Newt and explained to the little boy that he was supposed to run to me as fast as he could, and that Loki would chase him, but to not be scared. I almost smiled when Newt looked at Maddox with what could only be classified as a duh expression and then said, “I’m not scared. Loki likes me.”
I barely had time to hold my breath before Newt jumped to his feet and raced toward me. Loki jumped up after him and caught up to him in a few strides. I heard people gasp as the big animal reached the little boy, but he didn’t do anything more than run beside him for the final steps it took to get to me.
Relief slammed into me as Newt wrapped his arms around me. See? his eyes seemed to say. I patted his head and then he was gone again, running back to Maddox as ordered.
I sucked in a deep breath as Maddox asked the committee to let Dallas take his pet home and they readily agreed. I thought that was the end of it, but when Jeb ordered the deputy to look into the sheriff’s conduct, more chaos erupted, and the truth came spilling out faster than I could make sense of.
It was a painstaking process to piece together that at some point in the past, Dallas had been accused of driving drunk and causing an accident that had killed his and Maddox’s mother and left their father in a wheelchair. From everything I was hearing, Dallas’s own father had pointed the finger at his son as the driver when, in fact, it had been Dallas and Maddox’s mother who’d been driving the car. Sheriff Tulley had somehow covered up the truth that would have exonerated Dallas even after his father died a couple of years later, and the entire town had been allowed to believe the lie. I didn’t really understand the impact of why the whole town seemed so invested in the drama, but one thing was clear.