Echoes of Fire (The Mercury Pack #4)(4)

Bracing his elbows on the bar, Bracken Slater took a long swig from his bottle, letting the cold liquid slide down his throat. The Velvet Lounge was always busy on weekends but less so on Sunday nights, which was why he preferred it then. The club had originally been known as the Black Velvet Lounge, but the pack had shortened the name on buying it. The music and atmosphere were as good as the beer. He might have been able to wind down . . . if it weren’t for the accusatory stare being directed his way.

He cast a sideways glance at the enforcer at his side. “You don’t have to babysit me, Jesse. I’m not going to get shitfaced and pick a fight.”

“I’m not moving from this stool until you assure me that my gut is wrong, and you’re not thinking of leaving the pack. You are, aren’t you?”

Bracken sighed. “No. I might go roaming for a while at some point, but I’m not officially leaving the pack.”

“Like roaming is nothing?” Jesse snorted. “Fuck that, Bracken. You’ve been pulling away from everyone. We all gave you space because that was what you needed. We thought you’d make your way back to us, but you haven’t. Leaving the pack for a while wouldn’t be the answer to anything. It would just be you punishing yourself.”

Bracken threw him an exasperated look. “I’m not looking to punish myself.”

“Being surrounded by your pack is the best thing for you right now. Walking away from us would be counterproductive and, as such, a kind of self-inflicted punishment.” The barstool scraped against the wooden floor as Jesse moved closer. “Any guilt you feel is senseless, Brack. It’s a normal part of the grieving process, but it’s senseless. What happened that day is not on you.”

Bracken guzzled down more of his beer. A person wouldn’t think that a family trip to a drive-in movie theater would end in death. They wouldn’t expect to hear the spatter of bullets or the roar of explosions. Wouldn’t expect to watch the people around them drop to the ground, crying out in pain.

He could still hear his family’s screams. Sometimes, he could even swear he smelled their blood. Mostly, he could still feel that moment when a bullet slammed into his back and out of his chest, and the baby cradled against him stopped crying. And Bracken had known the little boy was dead. Known that the sudden warmth on his chest wasn’t just his own blood. Known that when he looked down, he’d see fragments of brain and skull. And he had.

Afterward, he’d watched his mother and sister—the only members of his family who escaped the theater alive—fade away right in front of him. Neither had fought to survive the breaking of their mating bonds, and he couldn’t blame them for that.

Now, they were all gone. His parents, siblings, his sister’s mate, and his nephew were all dead, but Bracken was alive. And fuck if that made any sense to him. Hayden was only three months old. He’d barely lived. What was the point in someone being born if they didn’t even get the chance to live?

Bracken’s sister, Ashley, had trusted him to get her son to safety . . . but he hadn’t. He’d failed Hayden. Failed her. Failed himself.

At first, he’d found it hard to return to day-to-day life—even more, he’d felt that he had no right to. He couldn’t relax. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to play Call of Duty because the sound of bullets firing took him back to that day. Just the same, he hadn’t been able to smell popcorn without finding himself once more in the middle of a field while the world went to hell around him.

So he’d played COD every day until the flashbacks stopped, and he’d eaten popcorn every day until the smell no longer bothered him. Other times, he’d simply sat there, reliving the attack over and over. Trying to make sense of it. Torturing himself with it. He was an enforcer; protecting people was what he did, but he’d failed to protect his own family.

Bracken had done his best to isolate himself from the rest of the pack. He’d drank. And drank. And drank. Jesse and another pack mate, Zander, had run an intervention. The three of them were as close as brothers, but the two wolves just hadn’t been able to reach Bracken . . . mostly because he hadn’t wanted to be reached.

It was Cain Holt, the foster brother of his Beta female and a player within the Movement—a group of shifters that retaliated against anti-shifter extremists—who’d gotten through to Bracken. He’d said that the Movement was planning to take care of the bastards responsible for the attack, but that Cain would give him their names and leave the matter to him, provided that Bracken agreed to get his head straight.

Cain came back three weeks later. Bracken had his head straight.

Singularly focused on revenge, Bracken had set off alone to track the extremists. And he’d discovered some things about himself. One, he was very, very good at hunting. Two, he could be very creative when it came to torture. Three, he could kill in cold blood and not lose a minute’s sleep over it.

He’d shown no mercy. Had been unmoved by pleas and apologies. Not only had he killed the fuckers, he’d destroyed the compound that housed their entire faction. He’d set it ablaze and watched it burn, listened to cries of pain . . . and felt nothing—not even grim satisfaction.

Other factions of anti-shifter extremists believed that Bracken was the culprit, since he had the perfect motive, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the crimes. Still, he remained a suspect in the eyes of the human authorities.