The room went silent as Elain tried to digest all of that. Eventually, she found her voice again. “Cail, is that what you and Brodey were talking about that day in the truck?” A sudden flash hit her. “You two didn’t tell me everything, did you? You said stuff hadn’t happened for a couple of decades.”
The men looked at each other. Ain, looking far from happy, stepped in with Prime tone.
“Tell us what you said, guys.”
Brodey scrubbed his face with his hands. “Crap.” He looked at Ain. “We didn’t tell her all the shit about the cockatrice, okay? We were only talking about wolves.”
“The stuff with the cockatrice was right after everything in Yellowstone a couple of years ago,” Ain said with a frown. “Not a couple of decades ago.”
“What?” Elain interrupted. “What’s a cockatrice?”
Cail shook his head, addressing his comments to Ain. “I was specifically talking wolf Clan politics. We were—”
“Whoa, stop right there!” Elain said, silencing her men. She glared at Brodey and Cail. “Did you two lie to me?”
“No!” Brodey and Cail said together. Cail took over. “Babe, we can’t lie to you. We told you that. We were trying not to heap more on top of you than you could take.”
“Then what the fuck is a cockatrice?”
Ain blew out an aggravated breath at her dropping the F-bomb, but apparently under the circumstances he was going to overlook her swearing since he let her off with nothing more than a dirty look.
Brodey snorted. “They’re a really fucked-up-looking chicken.”
“We’re getting off topic,” Ain said. “Let’s cover the story of Liam and our parents first before we start in on the cockatrice situation and the story about Yellowstone.”
“What cockatrice situation?” Elain yelled. “What the hell does Yellowstone have to do with anything?”
Ain calmly took her hand in his. “It’s okay, babe. I promise you, we’ll get to that really quick. Let’s handle one thing at a time. Please? We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. I’m not even sure we can figure it all out tonight anyway.”
Grumbling, she finally nodded. “Fine.”
Ain looked at Carla. “So let me get this straight. Liam and Maureen showed up at your place late one day. Liam said he was meeting with our parents. Then the next day, our parents died and he disappeared after his phone call to Maureen.”
Carla nodded.
Ain chewed on that for a moment. “Do you think he had anything to do with our parents’ death?”
Carla firmly shook her head. “No. I’d be willing to bet he did not. He was a nice man. A good man. I knew them both before I left Spokane. He adored Maureen. I could see how much it hurt him to have to leave her, even though I was really mad at him for doing it at the time. He might have killed to protect her or the baby, but he wouldn’t hurt someone maliciously. I can’t believe that about him.”
“That’s not what you said about him all these years,” Elain groused. “You said he was a jerk for leaving after they found out I was a girl. You painted him to be a deadbeat and that my mom was a saint for ever marrying him in the first place.”
Carla took a gulp of her drink. “I know. I’m sorry I did that. Honey, I convinced myself the shape-shifter stuff wasn’t real. I did what I had to do to keep Maureen and you safe. You mother was dying, and I never expected to have a baby of my own. I loved your mom like a sister, and I love you more than anything. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before. Would you really have believed me if I told you all this before you met Ain, Brodey, and Cail, and saw what they could do?”
“I—” She stopped and thought about it. Would she have believed her? Honestly?
I would have taken her to the doctor and gotten her evaluated for Alzheimer’s. “No, I guess I wouldn’t have believed it,” Elain softly admitted.
Ain gently squeezed Elain’s hand to silence her again. “Carla, what else did Liam and Maureen say? When you saw we were triplets, you reacted.”
“Maureen made me promise that if Elain ever started to, you know, to do the wolf stuff, that I would find you three. That you and your brothers lived in Arcadia. That if I asked around, someone would know you or know of you and be able to find you for me. She insisted you would be able to protect her. I just…”
Carla took another drink with trembling hands. “I honestly put your names out of my head. I spent a lot of years convincing myself that what Maureen and Liam showed me was some sort of daydream or nightmare. Maureen got sick when Liam left. I was too busy working and trying to take care of her to think about anything else. Not to mention all the adoption paperwork. She had me adopt Elain immediately after her birth. Maureen knew she was dying, even though doctors couldn’t tell us why. Once Elain was born, she didn’t even try to keep herself alive. I was suddenly a single mom with a baby to raise. The last thing I wanted to think about was that wolf craziness.”
Carla’s hands still trembled as she emptied her glass. Without comment, Cail stood, walked over to her and took her glass, and went to the kitchen to make her a fresh drink.
Carla’s eyes looked bright with tears. “I’m sorry,” she continued. “I did the best I could. Maureen got to the point where she refused medical treatment and wasted away. As the years passed and Elain grew older, like any other normal little girl her age, it was easier for me to just pretend the wolf stuff didn’t happen. That I imagined it.”
“You asked if we’d marked her,” Ain pointed out.
“Maureen told me about that the first night. When we were waiting for Liam’s call. She showed me the mark on the back of her shoulder, said that’s what wolves did when they…mated. Said it joined them together forever. She told me she’d marked Liam first, then he marked her.”
Cail returned with her fresh drink and handed it to her. “Thank you.” She took several long sips from it before continuing. “She told me the basics, that there was a very old blood oath in Liam’s family. That some family named Abernathy wanted Liam’s girl baby because he was the first Alpha in his family line to have one. They said that’s why they came to me. They’d found out through ultrasound in Spokane that Elain was a girl and had to hide.”
“How did you know Maureen?” Cail asked. “Wasn’t Liam afraid they’d track Maureen through you?”
Carla shook her head. “We worked together for a couple of years in Spokane and became really good friends. Then I moved to Tampa for a job. After a couple of months, I lost touch with her. There wasn’t the Internet and Facebook back then. Hell, we didn’t have cell phones. I sent her a letter, and the post office returned it, no forwarding address. I tried calling her, and the number was disconnected with no forwarding number. I called my old job. They told me Maureen left with no forwarding info, and none of my former coworkers knew where she went, either. I was shocked when they appeared on my doorstep in Tampa.”
“Well, that explains that,” Ain said. “They came to you because they knew they could trust you. They’d no doubt heard about our parents and what they did. It was either that or stay on the run with a pregnant wife and then a new baby, and he didn’t want to risk their safety like that.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Carla agreed. “That’s what she told me.”
Elain looked at the photo. It explained everything. It explained why she’d reacted the way she had to the man in the steakhouse.
He is my father.
“What does this mean?” Elain quietly asked. “I’m…I’m a shape-shifter? I’m a wolf, like you guys?”
The men exchanged a guilty look.