Midnight Wolf (Shifters Unbound #11)(68)
Angus had begun to trust Dante and Celene—no way would he leave Ciaran anywhere near them if he didn’t—but the trailer could have been bugged by others for other reasons. Any of the tents might also conceal a listener, and the grounds were now flowing with families as kids dragged their parents in for a day of sticky fun.
The middle of a field was the most likely place not to be overheard. They’d be surrounded by nothing but dirt, grass, mud, water, and furry animals that weren’t Shifters.
Angus and Tamsin walked about fifty yards into the wet grass before Angus turned her to him. Anyone watching would decide they wanted to be alone to canoodle.
“All right, what’s so important? Am I going to regret the mate-claim?” He spoke lightly, but everything inside him was uneasy.
Please say no. I’ve already lost part of myself in you. I don’t want to live with the hole your absence would make.
“Maybe.” Tamsin’s smiles and banter fell away, and her eyes took on a sadness and a worry that sent dread into Angus’s heart. “I need to tell you about Gavan, and what he was up to. I wasn’t his lover—I didn’t lie—but he wanted me to be. So he showed me things. What he showed me is why I ran away from him, why Shifter Bureau is chasing me, and why Dylan wants to catch me and squeeze every drop of knowledge from my brain. And why I can’t let any of them do it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Stop.” Angus put his hands on her shoulders, gripping hard. “Stop—I don’t want to know this.”
Dylan had wanted Angus—expected him—to pry secrets from Tamsin’s head, but Angus had deliberately put the command out of his mind. He wasn’t about to do Dylan’s dirty work for him.
Angus didn’t want to hear secrets that would change things between him and Tamsin. What they had—what they’d begun—was good. Better than good. Since Tamsin had come into his life, Angus had woken from the half awareness in which he’d existed, and he’d do anything to never lose that.
“Yes, you do.” The sadness in Tamsin’s voice pierced his heart. “You need to know what you’re getting into with me, so that when Shifter Bureau is filling the syringe to tranq you to death, you know why. Or maybe you can trade the knowledge for your life.” She let out a breath. “I also want to tell you to ask you what to do. I thought this was all over and done with, but I guess it’s not.”
She trailed off, the lingering pain in her eyes enough to make the wolf in Angus want to kill whoever had hurt her.
“Son of a bitch, Tamsin, what the hell did my brother do to you?”
“To me?” Tamsin blinked. “Nothing. What he planned to do to the world was pretty horrible.”
“What?” Angus allowed himself a minuscule amount of relief. “Gavan wasn’t overly gifted with brains. What was he going to do—shed until humanity begged him to stop?”
“I wish it could be funny.” Tamsin swallowed, then she looked at him fully, as though knowing her next words could unmake all they’d found together. “He was building up an arsenal.”
The relief ebbed. “What kind of arsenal?”
Tamsin spread her hands. “How many kinds are there? Gavan was collecting and storing weapons. All kinds of weapons, from small handguns to grenades. Machine guns. Serious shit.”
Gavan had collected this? The man who couldn’t find his own pants without a map? “You’re sure? Did you see this arsenal?”
“Very sure. He showed it to me to brag about it. Gavan wanted to be a super-dominant Shifter, making all humans and Shifters submit to him. I guess he thought my seeing his guns would make me fall in love with him, want to be his mate. But it only told me he was crazy enough to kill—to kill a lot of people.”
“Shifters don’t use weapons.” Angus’s hands balled as he spoke. Shifters disdained them, because the Shifter him-or herself was a weapon. Why use a knife when your claws are sharper? Or a gun when you can launch yourself like a ballistic missile?
“I know that,” Tamsin said impatiently. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. So when we got back to the hideout, I thanked Gavan sweetly, and then took off the first chance I could.”
Emotions churned through Angus’s brain, rising and falling like ocean waves. “What about April? I can’t imagine her stepping aside so Gavan could mate-claim you.”
“She didn’t. Gavan wanted to take more than one mate, as Shifters did in the old days. He had other females in his sights as well. April was fine with it. Younger women, she said, could give him more cubs. There was enough of Gavan to go around, in her opinion.” Tamsin rolled her eyes. “I was so out of there.”
The emotion that burst to the top of Angus’s brain, surfacing through the others, was rage. He’d damped down that rage to a simmer after Gavan’s death, in order to forget what his brother had done and get on with his life. Anger at the dead didn’t accomplish anything.
But Gavan had been a first-class dickhead. In spite of his proclamations that he would free the Shifters, all he did was rain down trouble on them. Angus had barely escaped being executed as his accessory. What had saved Angus was Gavan’s vehement denials that Angus had anything to do with his plots—not in compassion for Angus but because Gavan didn’t want to share the limelight. Gavan had considered Angus a rival from the moment of Angus’s birth.