Impulse

Chapter Eleven

“I don’t want this last one,” Julio murmured in Sera’s ear. “You still hungry?”

“Maybe.” But her lips found his throat instead, and she kissed her way down to his shoulder with complete disregard for the remains of their late breakfast.

The pancakes were cold anyway, so he pressed a hand to the back of her head and guided her mouth to his with a pleased growl.

With most of the pack gone for their own day-to-day business, Sera seemed to have no problem squirming into his lap. Not that she’d skimped on the possessive touches while they’d been around the other wolves, but now she bumped the picnic table back to give them more room and tangled her arms around his neck.

“Well, I guess Carmen didn’t warn you,” a male voice drawled from the direction of the house, a low voice edged in dangerous blankness.

Oh shit. Her father’s voice. Julio held Sera tight as she tried to spring back out of his lap, then released his hold on her slowly. They had nothing to be guilty about, damn it, and they didn’t need to jump apart like a couple of teenagers. “Franklin. Welcome to Florida.”

Sera’s father stood a few steps past the sliding glass door, his arms crossed over his chest.

Sera flushed pink, but she still untangled herself from Julio and climbed to her feet. “Hey, Dad.”

“Sera.” Franklin’s face softened as he held out his arms, and Sera hurried to hug him. He eyed Julio over his daughter’s shoulder. “Are you going to let me talk to your gentleman?”

“Depends. Are you going to give him hell?”

“Depends. Should I?” He released Sera, but he was smiling, like it was a common joke.

“Carmen would love to see you, if you’ll indulge me with a few moments as an overprotective father.”

Sera turned and looked at Julio, both eyebrows raised in silent question. He shrugged in equally silent answer, then gestured to the opposite bench at the picnic table.

Franklin walked past Sera and slid onto the bench. When she hovered near the door, he shooed her. “Scoot.”

With a sigh and a mouthed, “I’m sorry,” Sera capitulated. She tugged open the sliding glass door and gave her father one last look. “Be nice, or I’ll call your girlfriend.”

The door slid shut behind her, and Franklin smiled a little. “Lily keeps the peace by pointing out when I’ve crossed the line between doting father and well-meaning but unreasonable asshole.”

Something, Julio suspected, only Lily could get away with. “Want some coffee?”

Franklin waved the offer away and met Julio’s gaze squarely. “You saved my life. I’m never going to forget that. But you are half again her age, and she’s my baby girl.”

“I’m nine years older than Sera. That’s hardly the biggest age gap I’ve seen lately, though I’ll concede your last point. She’ll always be your baby girl.”

“Yeah, she will.” Franklin spread one hand on the table and stared down at it, as if he was struggling to choose his words. “She seems happy. The last time Josh contacted her, she was rattled for weeks.”

A father’s concern, and yet a question lurked somewhere in the words. “I didn’t run him off.

Sera did that all by herself.”

“Did she?” His brief smile faded all too quickly. “I want him dead. Not just because he hurt her, but because I’ve seen coyotes who let the mating madness take them, and they don’t get better. They stalk and they take until someone ends them.”

“I get it.” Josh’s continued survival wasn’t particularly important to Julio, either, but he wasn’t ready to step up to being judge, jury and executioner for anyone. Not unless his hand was forced. “He won’t stop.”

“Probably not. I need to know you know that, and that you won’t let anything happen to her.”

It brought Wesley’s words—and his dire but vague prediction—crashing back. “I won’t, and neither will she.”

Franklin studied Julio in silence for a good thirty seconds before he sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re serious about her, aren’t you.”

It barely sounded like a question, and Julio couldn’t tell if Franklin was relieved, or if that odd note in his voice was something else entirely. Something like dread. “I’m not messing around,” he said finally. “The rest is up to Sera.”

A short nod. “Mendoza, don’t take this the wrong way. I trust and depend on your sister, and I respect what you’ve done for New Orleans in general and me in particular. You pulled my dying ass out of a burning building…”

It didn’t take a genius to see where he was going. “But my uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” Julio finished.

Franklin opened his eyes, and there was sympathy there. “Your uncle is the one who blew it up in the first place,” he agreed mildly. “I don’t blame you any more than I blame Carmen, but I worry about what a man who was willing to kill me would do to my daughter to keep her away from his nephew and his fortune.”

Julio leaned forward, unsure how Sera’s father would take the truth. “My uncle is still alive because he’s family. But the moment he puts her in danger is the moment I forget that.

Completely.”

“Killing your own kin is no small thing.” Franklin held Julio’s gaze as he lowered his voice.

“When Alec challenged your uncle last spring, he was hoping to spare you that. It’s a choice he looks at damn near every day. It’s a choice I’ve made, which my daughter does not know.”

Neither did Julio. “What do you mean?”

“Sera’s mother…” He hesitated. “Callum called me and said you’d seen Kelly.”

But had Callum told him everything? “We did.”

Franklin stared at his hand where it rested on the picnic table. “When I was in my last year of medical school, my brother found Kelly’s family. They were in hiding because a bastard from Oregon kidnapped Kelly’s older sister, and their father died in the challenge that followed. Kelly was all of eleven years old, but Iris was eighteen and had a healthy baby girl. My brother saw that little coyote baby and he lost it. Lost his mind, his humanity, every goddamn thing that made him human.”

Coyote babies were rare, surely rare enough to inspire fascination. “He wanted one of his own. A family.”

“So bad he didn’t care that Iris was an eighteen-year-old girl who’d been brutalized.”

Franklin’s voice had gone numb. “I wanted to think he’d come back from it, but he turned feral when Iris wouldn’t warm up to him. So I put him down before he could destroy what was left of that girl’s life.”

He’d killed his own brother, his blood. Done the thing Julio always promised himself he could do if he had to. “Doesn’t sound like you had a choice.”

“My family didn’t agree.” Franklin met Julio’s gaze again. “Sera doesn’t know. I don’t want her to, because she doesn’t need more reasons to feel like instinct is inevitable. Not before she gets a chance to prove it to herself.”

“To prove what? That it isn’t as inevitable as she thinks, or that it is?”

He smiled. “That it’s not, unless we want it to be. I saw that coyote baby too, you know, and I wanted one more than hell burns. But I walked away, straight to the army to start my surgical residency and service. Not a backward glance, and that might have been that if Kelly hadn’t grown up a little and decided to chase me.”

But she had. And then, somehow, tragedy had struck again. “Sera’s mom—Kelly—she didn’t want me anywhere near her. You deserve the truth about that.”

It didn’t seem to surprise Franklin, though his smile slipped away. “Of course not. You’re male, and you’re a shifter. I haven’t seen Kelly more than a handful of times in fifteen years because it upsets her too much. The only man who can go within five feet of Sera without getting his ass chewed is Callum Tyler.”

“Because he’s not a shifter?”

“More likely because he’s an empath, a powerful one.” Franklin raised an eyebrow. “I heard you got to experience one of his tricks firsthand. Alec was pissed that he taught Kat how to jack a shifter up on adrenaline.”

If she did it to the wrong shifter, she or someone else could wind up dead. But Kat was smarter than that, something Callum knew. “It was a last resort. Kat knows better than to do it if she doesn’t have to.”

“That’s what I told Alec. Your sister probably did too. She’s still the only damn person he actually listens to.”

Alec’s voice drifted to them as the man appeared around the side of the house with Sydney at his side. “That’s because Carmen’s smart. And could kill me in my sleep if I pissed her off.”

Julio rose. “She wouldn’t. Not in your sleep, anyway.”

“No, maybe not.” Alec stopped short of the table, looking like he was trying not to laugh.

“Well. You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”

With Sydney listening, not to mention Franklin, there wasn’t much he could say. “I guess it really is true—I get more work done on vacation than the rest of you bastards do all year round.”

“Better not tell me that, Mendoza, or I’ll have you visiting every pack in the region. Judging by what Syd here tells me—and my own painful experience—most of them won’t trust us enough to ask for help until we show up and hand it to them.”

And who could blame them? “Heard from my uncle lately, Alec?”

“Not a damn peep, which means I’ll be paying him a visit soon enough.” Alec’s expression turned stern. “You leave him to me, Julio. Not because you can’t handle him, but because you shouldn’t have to. For Carmen’s sake, if not your own.”

He’d done that once before, but maybe it was time to learn a lesson from Franklin—take care of your own, good or bad. “We’ll see.”

“We will.” Alec jerked his head toward Sydney. “Our new friend was going to show me the trailer camp he’s got set up for his people. Why don’t we all take a walk and see what we can do to help these folks out?”

“All right.” Eventually, he’d have to rescue Sera from his sister. For now, he had work to do.

Patty, the unbelievable traitor, had abandoned her.

Sera sat in Patty’s well-worn living room and studied the empath sitting across from her. The first time she’d met Julio’s sister had been the night Carmen had called with the news that Franklin had been injured in an explosion. The night Sera had rolled into New Orleans in a stolen truck with her face on fire from the force of Josh’s rage.

Not an empowering start…and now Sera felt every bit of the pressure. Carmen was the family that mattered to Julio, the one who could look at her and judge her unworthy, or even unready. Too young, too battered, too-“Would you like some tea?” Carmen held up a tall glass clinking with ice.

It broke through her brain’s nervous rambling successfully, and Sera laughed and shook her head. “No, I’ve had enough to last me a month. Patty and Syd have been great hosts.”

“Yes, they have.” Carmen set down the glass. “You’re nervous. Don’t be, please.”

It probably hadn’t taken empathy to guess. Sera shrugged and tried to smile. “You probably know how I’m feeling better than most.”

“Perhaps. Or you could tell me.”

“I care about your brother.” That came out almost confrontational. A challenge, as if she was braced for Carmen to try to snarl her into submission, and she tried to moderate her voice. “I want to be with him.”

The woman’s dark gaze softened. “And you expect me, at the least, to think it’s a bad idea.”

There was no sense in lying. “I can come up with a half-dozen reasons why it could be, so I can’t really blame you if you do.”

“That would be hypocritical of me, considering how many wolves think Alec should have known better than to debase his legacy and lineage by marrying me.”

“And you’re at least from an important wolf family. You could have shapeshifter babies. No one knows what sort of children Julio and I could have because it isn’t done. It’s taboo.”

“That’s all true,” Carmen allowed. “But my brother has never been one to stand on tradition.”

Sera swallowed and voiced the fear she hadn’t been able to press with Julio. “And your uncle and father?”

“What about them?”

She stared at her hands and struggled for the right words. Her left hand still had a bit of stubborn dirt wedged under the nails, from when she’d buried her fingers in the grass and sobbed through the pleasure of Julio fucking her. Claiming her.

He’d never let his relatives harm her, but one thing scared her more. “I don’t want him to get hurt, and I don’t want him to have to hurt his family because he’s protecting me.”

Carmen’s sudden expression of sadness lasted only a moment, though it lingered in her eyes. “Sera, if there’s one thing I can tell you with confidence, it’s this. The time may come when Julio has to fight his own blood, but it’s been a long time coming. It wouldn’t be your fault.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t even know what she was apologizing for. Maybe just because it felt like the world owed Julio and Carmen and even Miguel an apology for the shit it had dragged them through.

“Don’t be sorry.” Carmen stirred a sprig of mint into her tea. “Be sure.”

How long had it been since she’d been sure of anything? Probably at seventeen, when she’d been sure about everything with the recklessness of any super-healing teenager. Had it only been five years ago?

God, she felt ancient.

Ancient, but not confused. She wasn’t sure—not that she and Julio could make it, or that the attempt would be worth the pain it could bring. She wasn’t certain if she was ready to face a relationship with a possessive shifter, if he was ready to live beyond being tortured, or that their combined scars wouldn’t be more than lust or affection or even love could overcome.

But she was confident of one thing—she couldn’t live the rest of her life knowing she’d been too scared to try. “I’m sure.”

Carmen smiled then, slow but bright. “I’m glad. And Sera?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Not in the slightest.”

In that moment, Sera loved her a little. “Good. Talk my dad off the ledge, would you? Lily might not be able to handle this one on her own.”

Carmen laughed. “You’d be surprised what Lily can handle, I think. But I’ll work on it.”

“Thank you. I mean it.”

“You’re welcome.” Carmen tapped her fingernails against the side of her glass. “It means a lot that you’ve been with Julio through this trip, you know. Taking care of business. It’s about to become a lot more important.”

Sera couldn’t tell if Carmen wanted her to ask or not, so she settled on a middle ground.

“He’s good at it. He’s honest in a way you can’t fake. It’s not about being nice or loved or telling them what they want to hear, and they know it. The wolves here are starting to trust him.”

She exhaled slowly. “I hope so. We need for them to trust someone. No one came close to being this open with me and Alec when we travelled through last year.”

“They’ll trust him. It’s about…” Sera groped for the perfect moment to sum up the past two days. There had been plenty of awkward interactions as wary men tried to keep Julio away from exhausted women with bruised eyes.

Most had been through too much to trust, even when they hoped so hard it hurt to see. Sera had stared at those same eyes reflected in her own mirror, the tight set and the dark circles and brittle weariness that came with not knowing if you’d ever feel safe again.

One man couldn’t erase that look, not even Julio. Not even for her, and certainly not for a group of strangers. But he hadn’t tried. “Football,” she blurted out, then answered Carmen’s confused look by telling her about the way Julio had perplexed the adults by engaging the fifteen-year-old wolf who’d first approached her in a spirited discussion of football that had turned into an impromptu game all the children had rushed to join.

Most of them hadn’t been any good, but the older children had been gentle with the younger ones. By the time Sydney had waded in to captain the opposing team, it had turned into a jumble of shapeshifter kids laughing so hard their parents managed to smile.

Not trust. Not from one night or one game. But everything they did would build on it, and she found herself telling Carmen that too, unable to completely leash her own excitement. “I’m not making it worse here. The people who need us the most, they’re the ones the Conclave and councils have been hurting. Those people don’t trust the ruling wolves, but no one can look at me and say I’m a part of that world.”

Carmen’s eyes glistened, but she covered the tears with a smile and a quick nod. “Then I hope we can help you and Julio help them.”

The tears weren’t precisely the reaction Sera had been hoping for, but Alec stepped through the front door before she could comment. “Good, you’re both still here. Syd and Patty are introducing Franklin to the wolves who needed a doctor. Carmen, you’re right. It’s time to bring Julio and Andrew into the loop and get this done.”

The cryptic words meant nothing to Sera, but Carmen breathed a sigh of relief as Julio walked inside too. “I don’t like that we had to keep it from them in the first place.”

He dropped to sit beside Sera. “Keep what from us?”

“The end of the world,” Alec said gruffly, and Sera tensed before she realized Alec was smiling under that fake scowl, and it couldn’t have been a reference to Wesley’s tense warning.

If Wesley had told Alec at all.

Julio paused with a cookie halfway to his mouth. “You seem awful chipper about it. Care to elaborate?”

Alec and Carmen exchanged a look, and she spoke. “The Conclave is dissolving—on a trial basis for now. The members are heading to their home districts to take care of business.”

Shock made Sera blurt out the first thing that bubbled up. “What did you do to them?”

Alec huffed. “Good to see you’re still a brat.”

But Julio narrowed his eyes and stared at them both. “You told them people were getting ready to revolt, didn’t you?”

“Among other things.” Alec sat down, held up a hand and ticked the points off on his fingers.

“Without having to maintain homes in New York, they have considerably more resources. If they’re back at home, they can keep an eye on the troublemaking wolves and the members of their councils who might be thinking about replacing them. And, most importantly, we have immunity within our own territories. No more getting permission from everyone else before they can make changes in their region.”

Carmen laid her hand on his arm. “It’s the first step. It didn’t come easy, but it’s a big one.”

“A huge one.” Alec leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “It was a hard choice. Because life’s going to get a lot better in the Southeast…”

Sera squeezed Julio’s hand as she finished the sentence. “But it could get worse other places.”

“What happens then?” Julio asked. “If someone goes home and decides that making the peasants dance is fun entertainment?”

“Then the rest of us declare this a failed experiment and go after them.” Alec shrugged. “It’s a calculated risk, but Ochoa in the Southwest is happy to play nice based on my mother’s relation to him, and Enrica can’t cause too much trouble in the Northwest now that her son’s married to the Alpha’s daughter. The only person not allied with us through blood or marriage is Hoffman in the Midwest, but he’s one of the more moderate leaders.”

Every time he mentioned a region his gaze flicked to Sera, and she got the impression he was explaining so blatantly so she could follow the conversation without feeling stupid about her ignorance of wolf politics. Coming from Alec—someone who’d been friends with her father longer than she’d been alive—the tiny gesture might as well have been a ringing endorsement.

“So we’ll be on our own,” Julio mused. “That sounds good.”

Alec smiled. “Damn right it does. And all that money that’s been wasted on Conclave business? I’m funneling it right back into places like this. Which is why you’re going to be busy.

They won’t talk to me, so it’s your job to hit every wolf settlement in the Southeast. I want to know how many there are in each pack, how much has been taken from them, and what they need to live without desperation. Because desperation is dangerous to all of us.”

“Forget dangerous,” Carmen murmured, frowning. “It’s heartbreaking, not to mention unnecessary.”

“I know, honey.” Alec covered Carmen’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ll take care of it because it’s wrong, but we’ll get away with it because it’s smart.”

“Because it won’t look weak,” Sera said softly. The one thing she understood about survival among wolves. “They’ll trust you more easily if there’s something in it for you. If a strange wolf wanted to give me something that wasn’t in their best interest, I’d think they were trying to trick me. Or buy me.”

It seemed to mollify Carmen. “The money is the most urgent need. After we’ve taken care of setting up the packs for financial self-sufficiency, we can do things like open more clinics.”

“Carmen and I have to go back up to New York for one final Conclave meeting,” Alec said, looking to Julio. “I’ll talk to Andrew and Kat on the way. There are a few packs I want to send them to, ones made up entirely of turned wolves. And I have a couple towns I’d like you to visit before you head back to New Orleans, if Sera doesn’t mind.”

Sera glanced at Julio, unsure what to say, especially in the face of Wesley Dade’s vision. But he only nodded. “Wherever you need us to go.”

Us. She twined her fingers with his and turned back to Alec. “Teri has been wanting to take on more shifts at Dixie John’s. I can call and tell him I need more time. And I’d already decided to take summer semester off from school.”

Alec nodded. “Anna told me she got Josh pinned down long enough to have a witch she knows put a magical tag on him. If he strays more than a hundred miles away from his trailer, she’ll know.”

Julio’s jaw tightened. “Does she have standing orders on how to deal with that?”

“Anna doesn’t take orders from me.” Alec’s gaze shifted to Sera, and her stomach flip-flopped at the coldness in those brown eyes. This was the wolf who had taken vengeance for his first wife’s death with such unrelenting brutality that people still spoke of it in whispers.

His words now were brutal too. “No orders, but Anna agrees with me, and I had her deliver a message so there won’t be any misunderstandings. If he makes a move toward New Orleans, or any place you happen to be, his life is forfeit.”

Sera wanted to feel relief, or even nothing. God, she wanted to feel numb. Not this sick, twisted tangle of grief and confusion and fierce satisfaction. “I understand.”

“Then we can hope he’ll know better.” Julio rose. “Let’s take a walk, huh?”

Alec and Carmen didn’t seem surprised by the abrupt offer, leaving Sera to wonder how green she’d turned. Or maybe pale, the sickly white pallor that made her freckles stand out like a cartoon version of the measles.

She let Julio tug her to her feet and out the door and caught only a glimpse of her own reflection.

Pale and spotty. Great.

Julio rubbed her arm. “Anna will do what she has to do, but only what she has to do. You know that.”

“I don’t have feelings for Josh.” She winced as the words came out, wanted to cringe at how defensive they sounded. But she felt defensive, not to mention humiliated. “I know you know that. A lot of me wants him dead, because I don’t want to spend my whole life waiting for him.”

“A lot of me wants Josh dead too,” he confessed. “And not necessarily for the right reasons.

So I get not being able to separate the rational reasons from the rest of it, from the selfish shit.

Trust me, I get it.”

She clung to his hand, because his touch—his power—made her brave. “I’ll tell you my selfish reasons if you tell me yours.”

“Mine are easy. He hurt you.” Julio exhaled sharply. “No, that’s one of the good ones. The selfish one is that wolves don’t like competition.”

“No competition.” But that was a blunted truth, and he’d been honest. “None that matters,” she corrected softly. “You’ll never be a coyote, and I’ll never be a wolf. But the mating urge isn’t all that magical. It’s just another way of not having control.”

“It doesn’t change the facts. I can’t kill the guy unless I have to, and I can’t because it would be too pat and convenient for me.”

Sera ducked under his arm and pressed close to his side. “Another part of me wants him alive, not dead. I don’t want to have to face the possibility that he was always a crazy, dangerous bastard, and I was a stupid, gullible kid. I don’t want to be that dumb.”

“It wasn’t stupidity, honey. It was…” He shrugged. “Instinct. We’re all at the mercy of it, except when we’re not. That’s about as simple as it gets, and it’s still pretty fucking complicated.”

“It was a little bit stupid.” She sighed and rubbed her cheek against his chest. “Maybe the part I need to remember is that all teenagers are stupid. At least I survived to get smarter, right?”

“Arguable, I guess, since you’re with me now.”

“Good point. You’re a dumbass.” She bumped her hip against his as they followed the path toward the woods where the pack had run the first night. In the distance she could pick up the faint sounds of the trailer campground where entire families were packed into spaces that should have been claustrophobic for one or two.

It would be better soon. Because of Julio—because of both of them. “Do you really want me to travel with you? I’d understand if it’s too much, or too fast.”

“Hey, you started this with me.” He wrapped an arm around her waist. “Now you have to help finish it.”

“All right, I’ll be your first lady. On one condition.”

He squinted at her. “Which is?”

She tugged him around and stretched up to whisper the words against his lips. “On our way to each town, we get to spend one night in a hotel doing nothing but screwing each other silly and sleeping late the next day.”

“Deal.” He kissed her, quick and soft. “A day off between stops. It’s the least we deserve.”

I love you. The words came to her lips, but she bit them back. It was too soon.

Even if it already felt true.