“Malcolm found me, stuck in mid-Change. I don’t know what he would have done, but helping me clearly wasn’t on his mind. I heard my father calling Malcolm, luring him away. As I managed to Change back, I could hear Malcolm taunting my father. He kept trying to convince his two Pack buddies to challenge my father, saying no one would because he wasn’t worth anything—he didn’t have a reputation. Malcolm killed him. Snapped his neck, tossed him aside and went after me. I escaped. There was nothing else I could do, not at that age. Years later, when I was ready, I went back for Malcolm, but it was too late. Someone beat me to him.”

I tried to think of something to say. I’d known his father had been killed by a werewolf and now I knew how. And, maybe, I knew why he struggled so hard with being in the Pack. Anyone who’d been involved with his father’s death was long dead and no son could be less like his father than Jeremy, but still Karl had joined the group that killed his father. Accepted as Alpha the man whose father killed his. A death I knew he blamed himself for.

It would do no good to point out to Karl that he’d been young. I wouldn’t be telling him anything he didn’t already know. But what I’d felt in that glimpse inside him had been a cesspool of guilt and remorse—the memory he’d chosen when he’d needed to show me the worst one he had.

“I’m sorry.”

It was the only thing I could say, but I meant it with all my heart, and he leaned over to kiss the top of my head.

“I want you to know,” he said after a moment. “If I push you away, if I fight getting close, if I’m selfish, it’s because that’s the lesson I learned about myself. Let someone get close and…” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s not a good idea with someone I care about.”

“You were sixteen, Karl.”

“I didn’t say it was a rational fear. But the worst fears aren’t, are they?”

He met my gaze pointedly.

“I don’t think my fear is irrational, Karl. When I stood in that room, whatever would keep a normal person from wanting Troy to die was gone. Not buried. Not overshadowed. Completely nonexistent. It was like…” I cupped my glass between my hands. “I don’t even know what it was like.”