On my way to my room to shower after my race through the woods, I passed the room Owen had shared with Ethan. At first I couldn’t make myself go inside. Ethan’s death was still too fresh. His memory too immediate. His room still smelled like him, and entering it felt like walking through his ghost.

But then Kaci beckoned me with a wave, and I steeled my spine and stepped through the doorway, pausing to smile to Mateo Di Carlo, my fellow enforcer Vic’s older brother. Teo hardly noticed me, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in Owen, either. However, he watched Manx tend to her patient as if her every motion fueled a single beat of his own heart.

I sighed and turned to my brother. Owen lay on his bed in human form now, naked but for his green-striped boxers. The gashes across his ribs looked horrible, and the one bisecting his left thigh looked even worse.

“You okay?” I asked, as Manx knelt to gently blot his leg with a sterile cloth.

“I’ve had worse,” he said, and forced his smile. That was the standard enforcer reply, but in his case, it wasn’t true. Owen had seen less action than Ethan or our oldest brother, Michael, or even me. Not because he couldn’t fight, but because he was just as happy tending the farm while the others patrolled and went on assignment. Only Ryan, the second born, had done less fighting, and we all considered that a very good thing; he was still officially on the run after having broken out of the cage two weeks earlier.

But I nodded. Owen had stepped up in Ethan’s absence and likely saved Kaci’s life. He’d earned his scars, and like the rest of us, he would wear them with pride.

When I bowed out of the room several minutes later, I found Jace waiting for me in the hall. Suddenly irritated, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching. Fortunately, most of the toms were in the kitchen devouring leftovers from my mother’s Mexican lunch buffet, and Marc, Vic, and the Alphas had disappeared into the office, already looking for information on thunderbirds. So I grabbed Jace by the arm and hauled him into my room without a word.

“Wow, I haven’t been in here in a while.” He grinned the moment the door closed behind us. “But I feel at home already.”

Anger flooded me, tingling in my nerves as if my whole body was losing circulation. “This isn’t funny!” I hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”

Jace’s flirtatious facade crumbled to reveal the weathered pain, anger, and grief that had fueled his every action since the day Ethan died. “I don’t know.” He pulled out my desk chair and sat backward in it, crossing his arms over the top. “I just…for a minute out there, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bend to him.”

“It’s not bending, Jace. It’s working. Marc gives the orders in Dad’s absence, and we follow them.”