Last Wolf Standing (22 page)

Brody rubbed his chin. “I think he’s a recruiter. Who better to lure kids like this Elliot than someone who is willing to get them what they want? Women. Drugs. Name your vice, and Simmons can supply it.”

“So you think he’s just one arm of a bigger monster?” Mason grunted.

“Yeah. But then the question becomes how many arms are we looking at?”

Mason nodded, a deadly look of intent in his dark eyes. “And who’s at the head?”

“Who knows?” Jeremy muttered. “The walls holding the pack together are crumbling down around us, and here we are, left in the goddamn dark.”

“Maybe the boy can shed some more light on things,” Cian murmured, linking his muscular arms behind his head.

“We’ve tried to get him to talk.” Jeremy sighed. “He’s definitely hiding something, but we can’t get any more out of him.”

“I bet Cian could,” Brody suggested, but Jeremy shook his head.

“Scaring him shitless isn’t going to help,” the blond snorted.

Torrance didn’t know what he meant by that, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The irreverent Irishman was giving her another smoldering stare, and putting Mason in a royal snit, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

“That’s enough, Hennessey,” he growled in the next moment, obviously losing his patience.

“Not nearly,” the other man drawled lightly, earning a low, sinister snarl for his taunting response.

“No fighting until we get this solved,” Brody warned, glaring at both men.

Hating feeling useless and wanting to be able to help, Torrance cleared her throat and spoke up. “Why don’t you let me talk to Elliot?”

“What?” The word blasted from Mason’s grim mouth, as harsh as the cracking sound of his coffee mug slamming onto the kitchen counter.

“No offense,” she told him, gesturing toward the others, “but you’re all a pretty intimidating lot. He might feel more comfortable spilling something personal to me than he would to one of you.”

Cian nodded thoughtfully, studying her with a piercing gaze. “She has a point. He’d probably find it easier to talk to a woman, and whatever he’s hiding has likely been bottled up for so long, it’s just waiting to bust out.”

“No way,” Mason growled.

“Why not?” she asked, her instincts telling her it was the right thing to do, even though she was nervous at the prospect. After all, the kid was a werewolf—but then so were all these men, and she felt perfectly safe with them. Torrance couldn’t explain it, but she wasn’t going to bother denying it either. She did feel safe with them. And Elliot had saved her life.

“Why?” Mason repeated, running one hand through his hair in a blatant act of frustration. “Because I don’t want you anywhere near him!”

“He already helped save my life,” she argued gently. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

He remained silent, glaring, but she didn’t back down. “Please, Mason. Just let me talk to him. I’d like to be able to help.”

“No way in hell,” he muttered, shaking his head…but now that she’d set her mind to it, Torrance wasn’t about to give up.

Moments later, Mason was grudgingly taking her down the stairs, the others waiting in the kitchen. Torrance shoved her trembling hands in her front pockets, not wanting to look nervous in front of the young Lycan, but when she walked into the warm, soothing room and he turned a pair of deep brown eyes on her, she couldn’t control the small gasp that rushed past her lips. She knew that he was, in essence, one of the bad guys, one of the creatures from her nightmares, but the sight of him broke her heart.

He was…beautiful; a fallen-angel kind of beautiful. Thick, caramel-colored hair fell to his shoulders, framing a face saved from being too pretty by a hawk nose and square chin. Those brown eyes studied her from beneath heavy lashes, and there was too much pain in that solemn, watchful gaze. Too much grief and regret…too much worry and fear.

He still had the youthful lankiness of his age, hovering there on the cusp of adulthood. No longer really a boy, and yet, not quite a man. But he was obviously carrying a man’s guilt, and she wanted to help him, the same way that he’d helped her. There was just something about him that drew her to him.

“Hi, Elliot,” she said softly, sitting down at the end of his bed. “My name is Torrance.”

“Hey.” His voice was quiet, his expression guarded, haunted gaze flicking nervously from her to Mason and back again.

“I wanted to thank you for saving me yesterday. It was an extremely brave thing for you to do.”

“Torrance—”

“Be quiet, Mason,” she said, cutting him off, “or you can go back upstairs.”

He made a low growling noise in response, which she ignored, keeping her attention on the teenager. “I know what it’s like to find yourself in the middle of something that overwhelms you, Elliot. Until a few days ago, I thought I had a good grasp on everything—and then in the blink of an eye, all of it changed. Life has a way of doing that to people.”

“Yeah,” he rasped, the look in his dark eyes so full of pain, she wanted to cry for him—for whatever horror it was that was tearing him apart.

“I know you talked a bit to Mason and Jeremy about Simmons, but I think there’s something you’re keeping to yourself. There’s something more, isn’t there?”

He swallowed, his gaze glassy. But he didn’t say no.

“Did something happen?” she asked gently. He did a kind of full-body tremor, but kept quiet, huddling back into the corner, where the bed had been pressed up against the wall. “To someone you care about?”

“No,” he said thickly. “I…I didn’t even know her.”

Torrance curled her leg under her body, folding her hands in her lap. “It might make you feel better, Elliot. To talk about it.”

“I can’t.” His eyes screwed shut, voice full of anguish…and regret. “It was…I can’t.”

“If you don’t let it out and ask for help, how do you know that it won’t happen again?”

He lowered his head, cradling it between his palms, his fingers digging into his scalp so hard that she winced. “I don’t want to think about it. I…I didn’t mean to do it, but he told me that I might end up hurting Marly if I didn’t learn control first.”

He was talking, which they’d wanted. And yet Torrance knew that she didn’t want to hear this—that it was going to tear her up inside. But it had to be done.

Taking a deep breath, she asked, “Who’s Marly? Is she a girl you like, Elliot?”

“Yeah. She’s—God, what does it matter?” he muttered, looking away, staring at the wall. “She’ll never have anything to do with me now.”

“Is she part of your pack?”

He swallowed so hard, she could see the movement in his throat. “I don’t have a pack anymore.”

Torrance waited, giving him time to work it out, watching him fiddle with a hole in the knee of the jeans Jeremy had given him. “She’s human. I met her at a concert. She’s small, like you,” he added, flicking a quick look up at her, before cutting his gaze back to the torn fabric on his knee. “But her hair is blond, almost white, and she has big blue eyes. She’s so perfect and tiny, like a little doll. God, I was so afraid of what would happen when I tried to…you know. Afraid that I might want to change in the middle of it.” He blew out a rough, shaky breath, and Torrance cast a quick look over at Mason, who was watching them with a closed expression that gave nothing away. She wondered if, like her, he felt the same sense of dread twisting his insides, but turned her attention back to Elliot.

Pulling at one of the frayed edges, he started unraveling the coarsely woven denim. “I didn’t know anyone to ask about how to, you know…be with a human girl. So a friend of mine said he knew this guy who could help me.” He swallowed, rubbing both palms over his knees, then crossed his arms, hunching deeper into the corner as he muttered, “So I went with him.”

Keeping her voice gentle, she asked, “Did he take you to Simmons?”

“Yeah. At this warehouse down in Covington. There were other Lycans there, kids I recognized from both my pack and some of the nearby ones. And this Simmons guy is there, telling us that if we trust him, he can show us how to control our beasts. That he can teach us enough control to take human girls without hurting them—even how to dayshift. All of it. So I went back a few times, and then one night, after we met, he asked me to go with him, told me that he had a surprise for me.”

“Where did you go?”

“I don’t even know where they took me,” he rasped, shaking now. “I can’t remember anything about that night except for what happened later.”

“It’s okay, Elliot. You can tell us, and we’ll try to help you through it.”

“Simmons had told me that if I joined up with him, he could teach me how to control myself, so that I could be with a girl like Marly. Like an idiot, I’d told him about her, telling him why I wanted to learn more. He said he’d help me, but that I first had to learn how to have sex with a more experienced woman while in control of my wolf.”

“And so you tried?”

His cheeks were flushed a brilliant crimson within the ghostly pallor of his face, his breathing rapid and shallow. “Yeah, only…”

The room went silent, nothing but the slow, inexorable ticking of the clock on the wall to mark the passage of time. “What happened?”

He shook his head, his body beginning to rock in a gentle back-and-forth motion. “I can’t tell you. You’ll think I’m a monster.”

“Whatever it is, it isn’t your fault. I think you were set up by this Simmons jerk. Manipulated by him, Elliot, because he wanted you on his side. If you tell me, it might make you feel better.”

“Yeah?” he snorted. “You won’t think so after I tell you.”

“Try me,” she offered.

“I killed her.”

The three words blasted into the room with the force of a bullet, jolting her.

“Why?” Torrance kept her voice soft and easy, even while dread twisted her stomach into a painful, churning knot.

He took a deep, trembling breath, and then the words just tumbled out of his mouth, ragged and hoarse with emotion. “She wasn’t experienced, like Simmons said. I thought I had all this control, after what he’d shown me. I thought I could keep my wolf under wraps if I wanted, right? I think they must have given her something, because she was really coming on to me. She didn’t act innocent. She acted like…like she knew what she was doing. But, she…she bled when I went in…and it was—I don’t…I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that I lost it and I changed. There was blood everywhere. On the bed, the walls, in my mouth. And she was…Oh, Jesus, it was a nightmare. I totally freaked, and someone knocked me out. Some guy named Curry, I think. When I came to, they told me that I’d killed her and I couldn’t go back to the pack. That Simmons had turned rogue and I’d have to join up with them.”

Reaching out to him, Torrance took his hand, his fingers cold and damp as they clutched on to her like a lifeline. “Elliot, I’m so sorry.”

He flinched at the words, staring at her through red, desolate eyes. “Why are you sorry?”

“Because they used you as much as they used that girl,” she told him. And then, as gently as possible, she said, “Where’s Marly now?”

His eyes slid closed, fingers pulling away from her hold as he wrapped his arms around his middle. “I don’t know. I think they told her something bad about me, because she stopped taking my calls and never called me back.”

“Do you think you were in the mountains?” Mason asked. “Or still down in the city?”

“I don’t know.” He opened his eyes, his gaze haunted as he looked toward Mason. “I don’t want to remember.”

“So you’ve been staying with them,” she murmured, “because you thought you had no choice.”

“They told me I was one of them now. That I’d killed and had to face the consequences. The laws…”

Mason spoke quietly from his place against the wall. “Just forget the laws right now, Elliot.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

He made a sharp sound of disgust. “We don’t murder children.”

The boy’s chin lifted, his jaw hard. “I’m not a child.”

“What happened, it will take time for you to get over—but it wasn’t your fault, Elliot. Simmons played you, and got exactly what he wanted.”

“I killed her,” Elliot grated, the words raw with anger and loathing. “I murdered her. For that, I should die.”

“That’s not true,” Torrance said with firm conviction. “No matter what they did, it didn’t change you, Elliot. You’re still a good person. You didn’t let them hurt me, did you?”

“I couldn’t,” he groaned, his voice cracking with emotion as he moved his gaze to her face. He stared at her, the look in his eyes making her shiver, and quietly said, “You…You reminded me of Marly.”

They came up the stairs a few moments later, understanding that Elliot needed some time alone. Mason had hoped to get her aside so that they could talk, but Torrance immediately headed for the bedroom, murmuring that she wanted a shower. Not that he could blame her. Elliot’s horrifying story left an ugly coat of disgust on your skin that made you want to scrub yourself clean. Mason hadn’t thought he had any sympathy to give to someone who’d fallen into Simmons’s clutches, but something in his gut hurt for the young man who’d been so obviously traumatized by what had happened to him. The guilt was eating Elliot inside out. It was tragic and infuriating—and it made Mason want to get his hands on Simmons and wipe the earth clean of his filth once and for all.