After an eternity of driving, the Ferrari finally came to a stop.

Moody hardly noticed at first, because he thought he had just reached a breakthrough. He had switched to a wiggling process that involved only his arms, having decided those were going to be his most important assets right about now. If he freed his legs, he could run. But if he freed his arms, he could get the rest of the duct tape off, scream for help, see where he was going, and run, all at the same glorious time.

He lifted one arm, while pushing down with the other as hard as possible, until it felt like he was about to strain something inside him. Then, he switched, over and over and over throughout the entire journey of which he was an unwilling passenger.

And just now he had felt the tape shift on his arms, a sudden loosening, followed by fierce burning as the powerful adhesive took his arm hair with it. But, it had loosened. He wasn’t crazy. It hadn’t been a phantom sensation caused by the engine hitching or the wheels hitting a bump.

Car doors thumped. Muted grunts, presumably as Arlo’s wolves dragged Isaac out of the Ferrari and took him to wherever it was they wanted him to be.

A murmuring voice grew closer to the trunk. A latch was popped, and dull light filtered in. He couldn’t actually see the light, but he could detect the difference through the duct tape covering his eyes.

“Be more careful with him, okay?” Arlo said, sounding as if he was standing off to the side, watching the procedure without getting his hands dirty.

A pair of arms wrapped around Moody. He held still, pretending to be exhausted and terrified—and his acting would have won him an award, partly because he wasn’t pretending—and let himself be carted over to a place that he couldn’t see or understand. The Alabama breeze, which could sometimes seem so clammy, had never felt better.

The breeze was replaced by a damp, musty cold that filled his sinuses with dust. Moody coughed. It made no sound, trapped behind the duct tape, but his chest convulsed with the motion. The alpha holding onto him gripped him tighter, expecting a struggle.

Moody still didn’t struggle. He was descending, he could tell, the alpha’s body dropping in rhythm as he descended a set of stairs. A basement of some kind?

His suspicions were confirmed when he was set down on bare, freezing concrete. He started shivering immediately.

No one said anything, not even Arlo, who had thus far shown a need to fill silence with words. Footsteps receded. Going back up the stairs. A door was shut, and the sound of locks being turned echoed through the quiet.

Not quite quiet. Moody could hear breathing. Isaac, somewhere off to his side. He breathed slow and even, having obviously given himself up to whatever fate awaited them.

And another sound, distinctive and familiar. Living in a parking garage, a person became very familiarized with the sound of something failing to work. As valiantly as Destiny worked to make the garage a real home, it just wasn’t a house. It wasn’t an apartment complex. It was really nothing but a shell, not meant for all the different amenities he forced upon it. So, things broke quite often and when they did, there were sounds like this one.

Dripping.

Normally, the dripping signified a broken pipe.

That didn’t tell him much about where they were. So many places, basement or not, had pipes. However, it did tell him that there was liquid nearby.

Moody flashed back to his childhood. God, it was almost like he was really there. In this space of sensory deprivation, there was nothing to interfere with the imagination. He could smell the green scent of fresh-cut grass, taste the clashing perfume of honeysuckle and mint and wild green onion. Dull blades of greenery beneath his feet as he ran down the front lawn, arms held out to his side. Pretending to be an airplane, looking up at the wide blue sky, feeling the breeze against his arms, ruffling his clothes. He really could have believed he was flying in that moment, especially during the brief moments when his feet left the ground together and he was weightless.

Someone had yelled, “Watch out!”

And at the last minute, he opened his eyes, saw an older boy flying towards him on a scooter, back when scooters had still been a thing. Real scooters, the ones powered by feet and not by battery, before this age of drones and hoverboards and electric, lazy propulsion.

They collided. Moody remembered not being able to remember exactly what happened, except that after the collision he was several feet away from where he had started, dragged there by the momentum of the kid on the scooter. And the kid was nowhere to be seen, having left the scene as fast as he could.

Moody’s ankle was bleeding, his elbows scraped. So much blood for a little omega boy, one who didn’t yet know a greater pain than being knocked into while he was trying to have fun.

He was a crashed airplane, the easy dreaming of the past few moments shoved away by pain.

In the nature of little boys, he wailed for his mother.

Thinking of her now, in that dark basement, hurt a whole hell of a lot. He nearly lost his train of thought, especially when he became aware of the sounds of Isaac’s struggles.

But, as much as it made him ache from the inside out, Moody let himself sink back into the memories. He was onto something here. He just couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He needed to keep going, to work his way there instead of jumping to the conclusion.

His father hadn’t wanted to baby him, didn’t want to kiss his ouchies and put a bandage on them. He wanted a tough son, a rough son who could keep up with the alphas.

But his mother ignored her husband, carried Moody inside and gently cleaned up his scratches. Then she dried them with a soft washcloth, informing him, “If your skin is wet, the Band-aid won’t hold on.”

This was a phenomenon he witnessed for himself not much later, when he went to a friend’s birthday party at the pool. He felt his Band-aids loosen, saw them drifting away across the blue water like sea slugs.

Now that he was older, he knew it had to do with the adhesive not being able to bind to a wet surface.

If something was dripping down here, there was moisture.

And what was duct tape but an industrial bandage?

Moody lifted his head a little, tilting his ears this way and that to locate what direction the dripping sound was coming from. It was difficult, what with the disorienting way things echoed down here in this subterranean room. At least he assumed they were below ground. Eventually, he managed to determine that the dripping came from a place far in the front of him, and slightly to the left.

Now, the problem of getting there.

A problem that was solved easily, though not gracefully.

Rolling over onto his side by pushing at the ground in unison with his bound arms and legs, Moody wiggled. He bucked his hips up, slammed his shoulder down. He inch-wormed, scrunching up and kicking out. He squirmed. He did anything and everything he could to move, though he wasn’t able to break his own momentum whenever he came slapping down against the concrete. Pain exploded through his head repeatedly, making him feel sick, but he kept at it. Inches of forward motion at a time, a fragmented journey. He kept having to stop to listen, waiting for the sickening pain in his bashed head to quiet down.

At last, at long last, the dripping was right nearby. Another wiggle, a stretch, and his hair went into the wetness.

Something seemed weird about this, however. There was a lot of water.

Moody pulled back a little bit, then experimentally stuck out his taped arms. With some careful wriggling and readjusting, he discovered that he was able to submerge his hands up to the wrist in a puddle.

There was a hole here in the floor, for whatever reason. A pipe from above was dripping, or maybe it was only natural condensation. Either way, something was dripping water and had filled up this hole to make a very, very convenient basin.

Moody kept his wrists in the hole, letting the water soak the tape, get under the folds. He struggled after a minute or so of soaking.

Nothing. No give.

Frustration opening up inside his stomach. He pulled in a deep breath and stuck his hands back in. He was so cold, and the water was pretty much freezing. He shivered, chills racing up and down his spine. His fingers went numb. He could no longer tell what was skin and what was tape. All of it just felt like a block of ice attached to his arms.

He repeated the process again, and by then he felt as if he would never again know what it was like to be warm.

Pulling his arms up out of the water, Moody pulled in a deep breath. He thought of Arlo, felt the frozen, black, bruised tendrils of hate start to wreath around his mind, sinking into the folds and crevasses of his brain.

Bracing himself, tightening every muscle he had, he squeezed his arms together as close as they could get. Then, he started to pull them apart. He went at it steadily, like a man with every intention of winning a game of Tug O’ War. He didn’t yank. Didn’t jerk. Just pulled, straining.

Nothing and nothing. Painful pressure around his arms. His fingers felt like they were being bent in all sorts of wrong angles.

Gritting his teeth, Moody struggled through the pain.

Then, he heard it.

A sound for which there was no real equivalent. Sodden tape, lifting up. Stretching in reverse.

Gave up the fucking ghost, didn’t you, you bastard, Moody thought, grinning in his mind, since the tape on his mouth wouldn’t move. Satisfaction curled through his entire body. He kept going, kept struggling, straining, and pulling. He did the same thing now with his hands, pulling them as hard and steadily apart as he could.

More strained sounds from the tape, sticky little groans.

And that was all Moody could take.

Breathless, gasping, he relaxed. He waited for some strength to flood back into his system, then assessed his progress by wiggling his arms around.

The tape was loose. Whenever he moved, he could feel several loose ends flopping around. The more he struggled, wiggling his fingers, moving his arms, the looser the tape seemed to be.

Which meant phase two could begin. Dunking his arms in a puddle was just not the same thing as swimming in a pool wearing Band-aids. The water couldn’t penetrate to the deepest layers of tape, which were what he really needed to focus on.

Wriggling and squirming across the ground, Moody managed to brace himself against the nearby wall. Taking a deep breath, he placed his taped arms against the concrete. Rough and scraggly. Exactly as he’d been hoping for. Pressing against the wall with the full weight of his body, Moody also yanked down as fast as he could.

Concrete ripped across the patches of his bare skin, and also scraped at several loose ends of tape. Something tore.

Fuck yes!

Panting, Moody allowed himself a brief moment of hope. Then, he got to work, scraping and pressing and yanking. Tape ripped. So did his skin, his arms growing sore and then bloody. Heated trickles seeped down to his elbows, then cooled rapidly. His shifter healing abilities closed the scrapes almost as soon as they opened, though this wasn’t very effective when he was constantly reopening them.

One last time!

Moody scraped his taped arms against the concrete. Tape tore, a loose end catching perfectly on the wall and ripping upward. At the same time, sharp needles of pain trailed across his skin in the wake of the tape.

The pain faded rapidly, mellowing into a stinging sensation. All that had happened was he had torn his arm hair out by the roots. And now he loved the pain, because it meant he was nearly free. The lowest layer of tape had been breached.

He got to work again, wriggling and yanking. He felt the tape tear away in swathes from his skin. More needles of pain, like the gnawing teeth of some ocean creature. And then his wrists were loose, and he could move his fingers, and he yanked away the last shreds of tape from his arms.

Yes! He crowed inwardly, his wolf howling joyously inside him.

Still blind and mute, he felt for the tape around his ankles and legs. That came off flawlessly and painlessly, in less than a minute. He was wearing jeans, which meant none of the duct tape had actually gotten on his skin.

Tossing away the last sticky shreds of that, Moody grabbed for the tape on his mouth. A single strip, stretching from cheek to cheek. Bracing himself, he yanked.

This was the only time when he really regretted part of his plan. He was already yelling before the tape even got to the corner of his lips, and then he yelled louder, more sound able to make it through his gag.

He definitely wasn’t enjoying the experience of having all the little hairs on his face ripped out by the root. Yanking didn’t even seem to be helping, as the tape on his face had adhered better than the stuff on his arms and legs. He was taking off skin and hair, especially when he got to his lips. Heat blossomed in the wake of his efforts, and he tasted blood.

Then, gasping, gulping in deep lungfuls of dusty-yet-damp air, he was almost free.

Reaching out so he could find the puddle of water again, Moody brought his face to it and angled the top of his face down. The cold made his lungs ache and he tried to breathe in. Sitting up, sputtering, coughing, he tasted the water for the first time and immediately regretted it. If someone had told him he was drinking bug guts, he would have believed them. There was a high, sour taste to the liquid, a slimy feel that coated his tongue even though he only imbibed a few droplets.

Clearly, if there were pipes leaking this, they were not in a building that had been used or loved recently.

His eyes stung as the foul water got in them. That gave him hope that the tape had lost its integrity, and he grappled with it for one final time. Knowing he couldn’t just rip it off or risk losing his eyelids, he peeled it away as slowly as possible. Even so, it was a struggle and he could feel quite intimately the tugging and pulling at his eyebrows, his eyelashes.

When he got to his eyelids, the thin flaps of skin stuck so firmly to the tape still that he had to hold them down as he went. Then, once both eyes were free, he tore off he last bit without caring and threw it aside.

“Isaac!” he exclaimed, opening both eyes. Nothing but darkness and a sense of isolation, since not even his wolf eyes could automatically adjust to these conditions. Nevertheless, he thought he might be able to make out a huddled mass back the way he’d come. He half-walked, half-crawled over to where Isaac lay, then placed his hands on the alpha.

Isaac’s skin was very warm despite the chill down here. Little tremors still shook through his muscles. Four rapid electric shocks that Moody knew of, and perhaps more on the ride here. A human would be dead. For Isaac to still be hanging on meant he had to be determined as hell..

“Don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of this, okay?”

Isaac, of course, didn’t respond.

Moody felt his way down to the tape on Isaac’s legs and summoned his wolf claws. He shredded strip after strip of the sticky stuff, then grabbed the loose ends to tear them away since Isaac didn’t seem inclined to help himself right now.

He repeated the process with Isaac’s arms, careful not to nick his skin. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was glad that he had been the one to do all the work initially. Scrapes were incredibly minor in the grand scheme of things, but he wanted to spare Isaac as much as he could right now.

He moved on to Isaac’s mouth. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be gentle. Just hold on, okay?”

In careful increments, he peeled the tape away from Isaac’s lips. Isaac had more facial hair, though he luckily didn’t have a moustache. In any case, he hardly seemed to be registering any pain at all.

When he was done, he tossed the tape aside and placed a hand on either side of Isaac’s face. “Can you stand? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Isaac grunted, sounding as if composing those two words took every ounce of strength he had.

“There’s some water in a puddle over there,” Moody spoke low and urgent. Now they had come this far, he was more aware of the fact that they had a time constraint. Each second which passed without action was another second closer to the time their captors came back.

“Not thirsty.” Isaac’s voice held wry amusement, amazing given the circumstances.

“No! We can use it to get the tape off your eyes. It’s going to hurt really bad otherwise.” Moody hesitated. Now wasn’t the time to sugarcoat anything. “It still hurt even when I used the water, but it probably would have hurt more without it. I’ll guide you. Come on. Get up.” He reached down, grabbed for Isaac’s hands to encourage him to get to his feet.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, Moody figured that he could look around the basement to get a better grip on where they were. Instead, he just looked at Isaac. The alpha lay on his side on the concrete floor, his shoulders slumped.

The tape covering his eyes looked pretty stupid, too. Like he was playing the dumbest superhero on the planet. However, Isaac didn’t seem to be able to care about much at the moment. He pulled in a deep breath, then forced out words in slow succession. “Just stop it, Moody. I think I might be beat.”

Moody sat back on his haunches, gnawing on his lower lip. He glanced anxiously over his shoulder in the direction of the staircase they had descended to get here. Steep, narrow steps led up to a windowless door.

He looked back down at Isaac, keeping his hands to himself for a moment. “What’s the matter with you? We have to get out of here!”

“We can’t. I can’t.” Isaac sighed. His chest heaved with a huge sigh. “What don’t you understand about this?”

“All of it!” Growing frustrated, overwhelmed by the responsibilities which were bearing down on him now, Moody did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed the corner of the piece of tape covering Isaac’s eyes and tore it off as fast as he could.

Isaac cried out, pain giving him new strength. He threw his hands out, pushing Moody away.

Putting his hand behind himself, Moody managed to catch himself so he didn’t land on his ass. He sat down again, then placed both of his hands in his lap. Isaac lay in the same position as before, eyes closed. He was now missing much of his right eyebrow and a strip from the bottom of the left. Miraculously, he seemed to have all of his eyelashes in order.

Moody whispered, “You can’t chase me away this time. There’s not even anywhere for me to go.”

Silence for a long moment. Then, Isaac sighed again. He actually seemed to be doing better now, impossibly. Maybe ripping the tape off had caused a surge of adrenaline, and he was currently riding on that. “I’m sorry, Moody. For everything. I’ve fucked up with you a whole lot and now look at the situation we’re in. It should just be me.”

“Maybe that’s because you keep trying to do everything by yourself, you jerk,” Moody said. He wanted to sound angry and couldn’t manage it. The pink patches around Isaac’s eyes reminded him of badly-applied makeup, amusing him despite the situation. “I said I would be there for you. I meant it. We don’t even really have a choice right now, do we?”

“Even if I leave, they’ll just find me again. Moody.”

“We can go to the police and tell them we were kidnapped!”

“And then what?”

“And then… I don’t know. Okay? I don’t even really understand what’s going on. You’re not being very helpful. Why would Arlo throw us in here?”

Isaac moved, and Moody’s heart jumped in his throat. However, the alpha only sat up and leaned back against the wall. Even that small journey must have been exhausting, given the state he was in. “He threw us in here because you’re right. We shouldn’t have trusted him. He was being weirder than normal, and I should have seen why.”

“Why?”

Crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, Moody sat beside Isaac. He leaned against him so their sides touched, then let his head lay back against the wall. He let himself look around, taking in the surroundings while waiting for Isaac to reply.

They were indeed in a sort of basement, or maybe cellar was a better word. The space was massive, yet gave a sense of being cramped. The walls didn’t seem to line up quite right, which suggested the foundation of the building itself wasn’t entirely flat.

Aside from the stairs, the only outstanding feature was a line of machinery going along one wall, near the place where Moody stuck his head in the puddle. The machines were rusty and looked incredibly old, bearing a network of pipes that wrapped across the ceiling and to destinations unknown. Many of the pipes were cracked, and their slanted angle meant that all the condensation ran off to one end. Coincidentally, that was the end with the stagnant puddle.

There were no windows, though Moody thought he could detect thin beams of light filtering in through cracks high up on the wall.

Maybe this is just a side-effect of having a fist bash into my head.

Isaac stirred, as if he’d only just realized that he forgot to answer. “Lance is dead. My pack leader is dead. Arlo has his car, and now Arlo is commanding my packmates like he’s the boss. Because he is. He’s pack leader now.”

“An omega pack leader?” Moody repeated doubtfully. Such things happened, though they were rare in the world of wolves where physical power tended to equal dominance. “I’m not doubting you or anything, but even if he managed that, how is he staying at the top? Anyone could come along and challenge him, and beat him.”

“Maybe no one wants to,” Isaac said. He tilted over to the side a little, not quite leaning against Moody so much as letting him feel more of his weight. “After all, would you want to take over Destiny’s job? In charge of everyone, solving problems all day? Even if our pack isn’t like Shadow Claws, that’s still a lot of responsibility Arlo has to deal with now.”

“So, why would Arlo want to take over the position in the first place?”

Isaac shrugged. Moody was pushed to the side by the motion of his shoulders, and then ended up leaning even deeper against the alpha. “I don’t know.”

“Well, we can’t just give up until we know the truth!”

“I know.” Isaac sighed. He lowered his head, staring down at his hands. They lay limp against his thighs, like jellyfish tossed up on the beach. “I tried, trust me. I just don’t think I have anything left in me. Getting shocked takes it out of a guy. Three strikes. I’m out.”

“Well, it was more like four strikes. But it doesn’t matter. There’s no one else on your team,” Moody said. “So, you have to get up to bat again. Can we stop with the sports metaphors, please? I’ve pretty much expended my knowledge of the subject.”

Isaac chuckled, incredibly. Hearing it warmed Moody’s heart. “You would know about metaphors, wouldn’t you? You called yourself a poet before.”

Moody blushed a little, glancing away. He didn’t move, however. “I did. It just slipped out.”

Isaac sighed. “Just another thing I messed up. I never really got to know you.” His limp hands curled into fists, nails clawing over denim and leaving paler streaks in their wake. “You told me everything about you, and I never bothered to actually listen.”

“Well, if you’re going to make us sit here until morning, when everyone comes back, we’ve got nothing but time to talk.” Taking a chance, Moody leaned his head over so that his cheek rested on Isaac’s shoulder.

The alpha shifted, resting his head gently on top of Moody’s. “So. Poetry.”

Moody smiled a little, one side of his mouth curving upward. “Yeah. Poetry. Pretty cool, right?”

“I’m not much of a reader.”

“Neither am I,” Moody admitted. He leaned his head deeper against Isaac’s shoulder, turning his face ever so slightly so he could feel as if he was talking to the alpha instead of the empty basement. “I like poems. I just think a lot of them try too hard to be pretentious. Writing is, for me, a way of getting down the thoughts in my head that I can’t talk about with anyone else.”

“It’s my fault you don’t have anyone.”

“Hey,” Moody said, a little more harshly than he meant to. “Look, this is about me for a moment, because you asked. That’s how conversations work. You can stop interjecting your pity-party into my story time.” He knew he sounded pouty and he let the sound build up, almost to the level of a whine.

Isaac groaned. “Oh, fuck. A whiner.”

Moody laughed. “That’s what you get for interrupting. And anyway, this really doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’ve always written poems, off and on. I got some awards for it at school. There are just some things you really can’t talk about without sounding stupid, but you can write about them.”

Isaac’s hand came wandering over, settling on his knee. Comfortable warmth flooded through Moody. Reaching out, he placed his hand on top of Isaac’s and left it there.

“I’m not going to pretend I’m any good at it. I don’t think I’d really want to try to be. I’m not doing this to develop a skill. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I just don’t think I could get by without it.”

This is exactly how we were before. I’ll talk and he’ll pretend to listen, and then we’ll move on to something else.

However, neither of them were the same as they had once been. Isaac turned his hand over so their fingers could tangle together. “What do you write about?”

How it felt to be alone. The betrayal of death. Heartbreak. Being happy about little things, like the color of a ladybug against a blade of grass. Throwing seashells in the ocean.

Isaac.

Casting away one identity, trading it for another.

“Just, anything,” Moody said out loud. “Anything I feel like I need to.”

“It must be freeing.”

“It’s not exactly like riding a motorcycle down the interstate, but it’s pretty nice,” Moody agreed.

“You think if we get out of this, I could read some?” Isaac’s fingers tensed briefly, then relaxed again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if that’s rude to ask.”

“It’s okay. And I’m sure I could find one or two that aren’t terrible.”

Nothing about Isaac, and nothing too deep. Maybe he would look through the pile for which Cujo had compliments, and start there.

“Moody?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you change your name?”

“I didn’t,” Moody said. This conversation was going in a direction that he didn’t like, yet he felt compelled to answer. If not now, when?

Never.

This was their chance to communicate without anything else getting in the way, just the two of them in the dark with rectangular patches of red soreness on their skin.

“My name is still Desmond. Desmond, Jr.” God, he hated that name. The taste of it was foul on his tongue. He wondered if that was how his father felt now, hating his own name because it reminded him of his son. “My dad is Desmond, Sr. The Original Desmond.”

“Obviously.”

Moody scowled, turning his head to glare playfully at Isaac. “Hey.”

Isaac smiled. It was a very tiny smile, just like his chuckle had been rather small, but it was a smile all the same. “Sorry. Continue.”

“I just didn’t want to be associated with Dad anymore. Not after what happened.” He pulled in a deep breath. He had never told this story to anyone before, except for Destiny, and that had only been to explain why he was asking to live at the garage permanently. “I told you how my mom was always sick. If it wasn’t the flu, it was a stomach virus. Or pneumonia. Just, always something. And that’s not supposed to happen to us. She kept going back to the doctor, but they could never really figure out what was wrong with her.”

“They gave her medicine to like, combat the worst symptoms. Stuff to help with the nausea and everything. But it didn’t help very much. Eventually, they started looking deeper. Doing ultrasounds. Taking x-rays.”

Moody stopped. He hadn’t imagined this could be so difficult. He felt almost like he couldn’t breathe, like a huge weight had settled on his chest and was crushing him. Even his bones ached. His heart seemed to be beating slower, his blood sluggish. Sadness, bringing him to stasis.

Isaac moved during the pause, leaning over and wrapping his free arm around Moody’s shoulders.

The warmth of being embraced, being cared for, very nearly did him in. Tears rose up to his eyes, unbidden, unwanted. He sniffed them back, rubbed his own free hand against his sore eyes before letting it drop back at his side.

“She had cancer. I guess it started out as breast cancer. Then it spread to her bones. They tried, but they couldn’t control it. She died two months after they diagnosed her.”

A wolf’s body could handle a great deal of trauma, but cancer was out of the realm of anyone’s natural ability. The body couldn’t heal itself, not when its own preventative measures had gone haywire. Moody’s mother’s body had been so busy destroying itself that there was nothing left to defend against common maladies. Of course, that only weakened her further.

“Goddamn,” Isaac whispered. His arm tightened around Moody’s shoulders, clutching him even closer. Moody let it happen, needing just this once to know he wasn’t alone. “And you were dealing with all that, alone. And your dad?”

“He always wanted stuff from me that I couldn’t give. He wanted me to be tough. To learn how to do useful things. Said poetry didn’t put food on the table. Riding a motorcycle meant I was going to wind up a homeless hooligan. He told me stuff like that all the time. I think…” He often had this particular thought, usually while falling asleep at night, though he’d never dared give voice to it before. It was the one thing he hadn’t ever even written about, because what did he know? He was no parent. He didn’t know what it was like to raise a child. “I think he thought he was doing what he thought was best.”

“Sounds to me like he was an asshole.”

Moody nodded. “Can’t disagree there. But times have changed, since our parents were kids. Hell, since they were our age. Labels don’t define us anymore.” He paused, breathing slowly to get himself back on track. “Mom was always the one who stuck up for me. I was pretty much a mommy’s boy. If I wasn’t about to go jumping off a bridge, she would let me do it. And when she was gone, there was nothing to shield me from how overbearing Dad was. That’s why I had to leave. He was suffocating me. I’d already joined Shadow Claws by that point. Mom was happy I had friends.”

She had even taken a few lessons from him on how to ride a hog. How much pain had she been in, during those bumpy rides? And still, she had gone through with it, because this was what made her son happy.

“I wasn’t really a full member. Just kind of…associated with them. But I knew some wolves lived at the garage, so I went to talk to Destiny. And he agreed, and I moved in. And I didn’t want to be Desmond anymore, so I became Moody.”

Really, that was where the story ended. Everyone knew what had happened after that. The third pack. Those killers. The wave of death across Pensacola. The broken aftermath, as Lethal Freedom struggled to adjust to their new positions in the conjoined pack.

And now this. Stuck in a basement, waiting for morning so they could…

“Be honest with me, Isaac,” Moody said. “What do you think is going to happen when they come back?”

Isaac sighed softly. He had been doing that quite a lot, and each time he seemed more and more deflated. “I think when they come back, we’re going to be taken to somewhere with a bunch of wolves from my old pack. I think they’re going to look at me like they don’t even know who I am anymore. Then, there’s going to be a mock trial. Fake evidence presented, coincidence made fact. Someone is going to conclude that everyone would be safer if I’m dead, especially since the fires didn’t stop when I was kicked out last time. I’m going to die. And then you’re going to die, because you know too much.” He paused. “It probably still won’t be enough in their eyes. After all, two of us dead isn’t equal to the amount they’ve lost. But it would appease them. I hope.”

Moody tucked himself closer to Isaac, sheltering against his broad side. Snuggled up against him, it was easy to forget the chilly experiences from only a few minutes before. The only thing that couldn’t be helped by Isaac’s heat was his sodden hair, which felt like icicles where it touched his skin.

“This seems like a whole hell of a long way to go, just to kill us for no reason.”

Isaac turned his head. Moody looked back at him, relieved to see a spark entering Isaac’s gaze. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think someone’s trying to cover something up?” Moody said. He sat up a little straighter, the spoken words making much more sense than they had in his mind. “Someone in the pack, planting evidence, blaming you?”

“That makes some sense,” Isaac murmured. “But not a lot.” He stirred around slightly, his eyes narrowing with concentration. He made a low, contemplative sound deep in the back of his throat.

Watching Isaac come to life filled Moody with a tender emotion he thought he’d forgotten about.

“Convince me of something, Moody. Why would someone start all these fires, then blame me for it, and then start making more fires after an unreasonably long period of time? Why was there a gap?”

Moody frowned a little. “I’m no detective, but maybe the arsonist has a problem? They tried to quit and then gave up on it. Or, they broke. Couldn’t resist. So, they blamed it on you. Or maybe, someone was going to realize it was them, so they planted evidence as a distraction.”

“Why did Lance die?” Isaac whispered. “And why is Arlo in charge?”

Moody looked at Isaac, eyes wide. His thoughts also felt wide somehow, as if the realization had literally blown his mind wide open. “You think Arlo killed Lance, because he was about to figure something out?”

Isaac stood up suddenly, dislodging Moody. Moody stood up too as the alpha paced, arms half-raised, not quite knowing what to do with himself. “More than that. I think Arlo is the arsonist.”