Kean

Wood cracked and spit as the flames ate deep into the logs. The yellow-orange tongues of fire danced crazily as the gentle breeze pushed through the forest around them, teasing them. Stones surrounded the fire pit, their inner edges glowing slightly in places where the intense heat had warmed them to high temperatures.

Above it all Kassian shuffled some cuts of meat placed across a makeshift grill. The fire had died down from its apex, until it was more even and full of coals. Now as Kean watched, his older brother flipped the meat and began attacking the other side with a brush coated in sauce.

“You know,” Maximus drawled from nearby, “if you weren’t such a shit cook, you wouldn’t have to drown your food in sauce. You could just apply it as an additive. I want chicken with barbecue sauce, not barbecue sauce with chicken.”

The others guffawed loudly, and Kean clinked his bottle against Pierce’s in a show of agreement.

“Yah,” Gavin chimed in. “I’m not a big fan of the options of overdone, burned, charred, or incinerated. None of those sound appealing.”

Kassian growled. “You can have yours raw if you want. Enjoy the food poisoning!”

Gavin just laughed. “You know that doesn’t affect us. I’d eat it raw if it didn’t taste so much better grilled and basted in some bone-sucking delicious sauce!”

“Hear, hear!” Pierce said, raising his bottle. The others joined in, even Kassian, despite the ribbing he was taking from his brothers.

It was the same anytime one of them cooked though. Didn’t matter who was doing it, there were always remarks about that brother being a terrible cook. Kean leaned back against the tree that was his current lounging post, a smile creasing his face. This was one of the few times lately that the five of them could get along well, without fights automatically breaking out.

Food brought them together like family, and for that he was grateful.

Mila and Madison were over at the other cabin, doing “girl things.” None of them knew what that meant in this case, not even Pierce, who was mated to Mila. She’d refused to tell him, he said. Kean was inclined to believe him. Pierce wasn’t a great liar.

“Pierce,” he said, tilting his head to the left, where his youngest brother was leaning on a nearby tree.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I…I don’t know how to phrase this,” he said slowly. “But, what was it like?”

Pierce stared at him. “What was…what like, Kean? Gotta be a little more specific there.”

Kean shook his head, waving it off. “You know what, never mind.”

“No no,” Pierce said, pushing off the tree to stand up. “You brought it up because you wanted to talk to me about something. So spit it out, whatever it is.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “I dunno. Like, with you and Mila. How did you…how did you know? What was it like, finding your mate?”

Pierce stared at him. “You’ve gone and fallen in love?” he asked, shocked.

Kean winced as the others perked up, having heard the word “love.”

“Keeny Keaner is in love!” Kassian crowed. “Who is it this time little bro? Is it that thick-legged blonde woman that wants us to work for her?” he teased, laughing at Kean’s discomfort.

“I think it is,” Maximus agreed, joining in. “Poor Kean, always falling for the women he can’t have.”

Kean glared at Pierce.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

“I never said I was in love,” he said, spinning on his brothers angrily. “This time is different.”

That brought laughter from the two eldest, and even a smile creased Gavin’s face.

“How many times have you been in love now Keener? Six? Seven?” Maximus said, still chuckling. “You always say it’s different this time, that she’s different. Face it, you’re hopeless. None of them ever love you back, because you don’t actually know what love is!”

Only Maximus and Kassian laughed at that one. Kean just stared them down, contemplating rushing across the circle around the campfire and knocking them out. He’d never succeed. Not against the two of them, that was for sure.

“You know, they might stick around and care for you if you didn’t tell them you loved them after the first or second date,” Kassian informed him. He frowned thoughtfully. “You haven’t done that with Madison the Mysterious, have you?” he asked, making a nickname out of her reluctance to divulge information.

“Fuck you, Kassian,” Kean said, not bothering to rise to the taunts any further. “That’s not true.”

“What’s not true?”

The brothers turned as the two women entered the circle of firelight.

“Um, nothing,” he said awkwardly as Madison came to stand near him while Mila went over to Pierce, laying her head on his shoulder. “Just brothers making fun of each other for stupid shit, you know?” He shot Pierce a glare, but his brother just shrugged apologetically and then focused his attention back on Mila.

“So, Madison, what’s the plan now?” Maximus asked. “Do you need the rest of us for anything?”

“Not at the moment,” she said calmly. “Though there may very well come a time where you’ll have to work together and prove you can be part of a team to show your commitment to the cause.”

Kean watched as his older brothers grumbled and began to talk angrily to each other. Gavin just remained silent and pensive, as usual. Pierce talked quietly to Mila, about who knew what.

“Is there a problem?” he asked, directing his question at Maximus and Kassian.

“We’re just saying how we don’t really feel like we have much of a choice when it comes to being ‘committed to the cause,’” Maximus sneered. “We’re sort of being forced into helping you. Not really the way for partners to operate.”

“We have a choice,” Kean said, stepping forward, angered at their attack on Madison. “We’ve always had a choice. Our entire life we’ve been making choices. Most of them bad. Now we have the chance to actually do some good. But if you don’t want to, nobody is going to force you,” he snapped. “Just head on back to Cadia. You’re perfectly welcome to go. Just know that if you do, you’ll go right back to jail.”

Madison moved sideways slightly so that she could look at them all. “Like he said, you have a choice. You can live with the consequences of things you’ve done in the past, or you can try and do something to change that. I don’t give a shit what you pick. But I am not going to just start trusting you because you want me to. You need to earn it. So make your choice, but stop bitching about the situation you put yourselves into. I do not care.”

With that Madison turned and walked back out of the ring of light near the fire. Kean thought about following her, but realized that it wasn’t the time.

He ran his eyes over his brothers, admiring the way she hadn’t backed down to them. Most people were more eager to please Kassian or Maximus than anything else, and would say whatever they wanted them to. Not Madison. She said what needed to be said, and she didn’t sugarcoat it. She was one tough customer, and he liked that about her. A lot.

Pierce, he saw, was on board. He and Mila hadn’t made any secret of their commitment to fighting the Institute. Kassian and Maximus were against the idea. That wasn’t hard to decipher. Gavin though…Gavin was, as always, an enigma. As the middle child between the more mellow pairing of Kean and Pierce and the wilder, more feral older pair, he was often torn in two, unable to decide what to do.

That seemed to go double now. Kean wasn’t sure if Gavin would eventually join their side or not, but he hoped so. He was the second biggest of the five, and the only one who Maximus truly would hesitate to go after. Kean was an alpha in his own right, and he wasn’t afraid to fight Maximus, but he knew it would take luck for him to win that fight. Gavin on the other hand, had the size and experience to not need luck as much.

Kean had rarely fought against his brothers’ decisions, going along eagerly with most of their plans. But when war had come to his homeland in the form of a rival shifter stronghold, Kean had felt the call to fight more urgently than the others. He’d been perfectly happy learning to become a Green Bearet, a bear-shifter warrior of Cadia. That had been denied to him, because of his choice to continue cooperating with his brothers.

Now Kean had the choice to set things right, to stop a threat to Cadia, and to prove he could do things on his own.

The only question was, would he be willing to stand up to his brothers if it came down to that?

I have some thinking to do.