The Wolf Within (Purgatory #1)(39)

“It’s true.” Duncan’s voice. Flat. Cold. And coming from right behind her.

She pressed her hands against the table. Thanks to the high-end equipment that Pate had stocked in her lab, she’d had the results in just a few hours. Hours that Duncan had spent pacing.

She turned toward him. “Same mother. Same father.” A father who’d been a werewolf.

Duncan shook his head. “I don’t remember a brother, I don’t—”

“You remember his screams. Now that you’ve seen him again, you’ll probably start to remember even more.” She walked toward him. Duncan’s body was thick with tension and the room seemed charged with his desperate energy. “You were a kid then, too, you—”

“I was five. I would have remembered him. Not just screams. Him.”

Holly swallowed. “You survived a blood bath. Your mother was slaughtered. You must have been in shock when the authorities found you.”

“And I—what? Just pretended my own brother didn’t exist?”

“You were a child,” she said as she tried to keep her voice soothing. “You can’t blame yourself for something that happened back then.”

“He blames me. He hates me.”

Connor certainly seemed to. “Well, if Pate’s intel on him is right, the guy is psychotic so he probably blames a lot of people for—”

Duncan’s head had snapped up.

I said the wrong thing. Oh, crap.

“He’s slaughtered so many. He’s my blood, that’s what you’re test showed, right? That’s what he told me.” Duncan sucked in a deep breath. “A killer…that’s what he is.”

“But that’s not what you are.” She wanted to shake him—so she did. A hard yank against his shoulders. So much for soothing. “You aren’t him. You haven’t spent years killing. You’re a good agent. A good man. Whatever he is, that isn’t you.”

“But we share blood. A father.” His brows furrowed. “Wait, if my father was a werewolf, was it some kind pack war? Is that what happened? Other wolves came and killed him and my mother?”

And here was going to be another revelation that wasn’t easy to give. “I…I got the ME from your hometown to fax me the autopsy reports for your parents.”

“What?”

“I should have told you first but…” But what if she’d been wrong? “Duncan, the man who died, he wasn’t your father.”

But Duncan shook his head. “He was. That was my family. My mother. My father. My—”

“Do you remember them? Or do you just remember…” She hated hurting him. “Do you just remember that the cops told you that your parents were dead?”

His silence was her answer.

“You don’t remember your life with them, do you?”

His jaw locked. “I don’t remember anything before the blood and screams.”

He was ripping out her heart. She couldn’t stand for him to be in pain. “You were alone with their bodies for…for three days.”

His pupils expanded, turning his blue eyes almost totally black. No trace of gold showed in his eyes then.

“The ME…he told me that one of the cops found you in the closet. You were covered in blood. The woman in the house—”

“My mother.”

The pain in his voice made her ache. “Her body was found outside of the closet. It appeared as if she’d locked you in, and then she’d been killed outside of the door.” The ME's reports had said that her blood had slid under the crack near the bottom of the closet door.

Duncan had been trapped in that darkness as the blood came toward him.

All alone.

Three days.

She blinked away the tears in her eyes. She wasn’t shaking him now. Just holding him and wishing that she could take all of his pain away.

“How do you know he wasn’t my father?”

“Duncan, you know what happens when a werewolf dies in human form.”

“The teeth and claws come out.”

Because at death, it was if the beast inside was dying, too. The body shifted back to human form, but the beast didn’t totally vanish. The claws and teeth always stayed out in death. “I saw…I saw the pictures taken at the scene. The man who died then didn’t have claws. There were no fangs either.” MEs had been covering up those little telltale signs for years, and she’d even taken the step of calling the retired ME, Louis Hall, to make sure that her suspicions were correct.

“Hell, no, lady,” he’d told her, voice grousing with age. “I know a werewolf when I see one. Had two of ‘em cross my table. Scared the hell out of me at first. That slaughter? No, those were two humans who died.”

Darkness had filled Duncan’s gaze. The same deep rage that had burned from Connor’s eyes.

“He knows what happened to them,” Duncan muttered.

Yes, she suspected that Connor knew a great deal.

“I’m going to make him tell me.” He spun away from her and rushed for the doors.

But those doors were already swinging open. Pate stood there. With Shane and Elias at his back.

“Duncan.” Pate’s gaze swept over him. “I’m going to need you to come with us.”