“Is this Drew?” Aidan turned the frame toward her. The photo she saw had her heart clenching. She was smiling and her arm was wrapped around the shoulders of a handsome, dark-haired man.
“I thought that picture burned,” Jane whispered. She’d lost pretty much everything else when a deranged vampire had sent his freaking minions to burn her out of her apartment. That precious photo—she’d thought it was destroyed. “Did you save it from the fire?” Dumb question. He must have—
“Actually, I took it long before the fire.” He turned the photo back around to face him. “I took it the first night we met. It was on your nightstand, you were passed out cold and I…I didn’t think you’d remember me when you woke up.”
Because he’d used his alpha power to try and make her forget that whole fateful night. Only she hadn’t forgotten.
Turned out I wasn’t exactly human so his power didn’t work on me. Jane swallowed and said, “You know, doing stalkerish things like that will get you in trouble.”
“You look happy in the photo. I wanted to be able to see you that way every day.” His gaze rose to her face. “I often see you scared. I see you determined. I see you furious.” His lips curled. “I even see you when you’re turned on and you sure as hell know I love to look at you that way…” Aidan exhaled. “But happy? It’s hard to get you to smile, Mary Jane.”
“Jane,” she said automatically, though she didn’t really mind when he called her Mary Jane. Only Aidan called her that.
Well, Aidan…and Drew. But she hadn’t seen Drew in a very long time. Since we took that picture. She’d been telling him good-bye that day.
“I like to see you happy.”
She closed the last bit of distance between them and took the picture from his hand. “Then don’t steal my stuff.”
“It’s an old habit.”
Her thumb smoothed over the wooden edge of the picture frame. “Oh, yeah? From when?”
“From the days when I had nothing. The street was my home and I had to fight for everything I wanted.”
Her thumb stopped moving. Aidan didn’t speak much of his past. She knew there were plenty of dark spaces there. Lots of blood and pain, but he didn’t talk about them. “You…weren’t with your pack?”
“There was damn little of my pack left after my parents—after they died.”
He’d stumbled a bit at the end of that sentence. Aidan wasn’t the type to stumble with his words.
“Those who were left, they didn’t exactly have a lot of time for a kid. They didn’t know I’d turn out to be an alpha. To them, I was just a reminder of my father’s…mistake.” His jaw hardened. “I was told, again and again, not to repeat that same mistake. To never be like him.”
Just what horrible crime had his father committed? And did she really want to know? Some things are best forgotten. Jane thought of her own family and of the secrets she’d kept. “We don’t have to be like our parents. We aren’t them.”
“No.” He nodded. “We aren’t.”
She glanced down at the frame.
“When I was on my own, I took things to survive,” Aidan confessed.
Did he expect her to judge him for that?”
“Food, clothes. The things I needed.”
She waited, silent, hoping he’d tell her more.
“Later, I took things that I wanted.”
Her gaze flew to his face.
“A poor kid, looking in from the outside. He wants what others have. He wants the things that make them…happy.”
“Just what kind of things are we talking about?” She was a cop, after all.
He laughed. “Like I said, old habits.”
“Aidan…”
His arms crossed over his chest. “That’s Drew, isn’t it?”
So he was done with his sharing session and it was back to her?
“He has your eyes.”
“I’d rather hoped you hadn’t noticed.”
“His eyes are the reason I’m not a jealous bastard right now. He’s related to you. I can see that.”
Yes. “My brother.” The words sounded foreign to her own ears. Mostly because they were. She hadn’t spoken about Drew to anyone in so long.
Too long.
“Where is he, Jane?”
She put the frame down on his desk and took a few quick steps back from him. “Why, Aidan? So you can hunt him down and see if he’s like me?”
She expected him to lie to her. Instead…
“Yes. If he’s a vampire-in-waiting, I have to know.”
That was what she’d feared. “Then what will you do? Give him protection? Some werewolf guards to follow him the way they do me?” And she hated that crap. “Or will you ensure that he dies a non-violent death?” Her stomach twisted. “Because that’s the key for the transformation, the violent end. Maybe you’ll find Drew and slip him a little poison. Let him fall asleep and never wake up. Then he wouldn’t be any problem to you at all.”
Aidan hadn’t moved.
And the room suddenly seemed very, very small.
Or perhaps Aidan just looked bigger. That happens when he gets pissed. The guy’s energy seems to fill the space around him.