Page 238 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

"Your mother?" I ask gently.

"She never recovered." His thumb brushes over my knuckles. "She lost everyone except two sons in a single bloody moment. She carried us across an ocean and she kept us alive, and then…" He exhales through his nose. "She died a few years later. I think she was just done, like her mother and her grandmother before her. She'd used up everything she had getting us to safety."

My throat aches.

"Azhar and I had nothing," he continues. "No money, no family left, no connections. But we both ended up excelling at hockey. It was the only path to higher education. Scholarships." He smiles softly. "I used mine to start pre-med."

"And you almost became a doctor."

"Almost." He lets out a breathy laugh. "I nearly made it through medical school before I realized I didn't have the temperament."

"What do you mean?"

His mouth twists. "A good healer needs detachment. I had plenty of that. I went into it thinking I was made for it. What I didn't have was…" He considers. "Well, when someone was suffering in front of me, I didn't feel the urge to comfort them. I felt the urge to identify the source of the suffering and stop it."

And I know exactly what he means.

I've watched him in the pack.

Namely, I've watched him protect me. Fiercely. And now Wraith.

"And I may have gotten into a fight with another student," he adds under his breath.

"Wait, you did?"

He shrugs, poking at his food. "I was scrappier back then."

I'm pretty sure he's still plenty scrappy, considering his brawls with Whiskey. "What about Azhar?" I ask.

His hand tightens around mine.

"Azhar stayed in hockey. He's good. Really fucking good, actually." Plague's gaze drifts to the tilework on the wall behind me. "He changed his name, though. It's Azarel now. He wanted to leave the past behind. Including me."

"Including you?"

"We had a… falling out." His voice is flat. "A significant one. I won't go into details. It ended with a fight, and not the metaphorical kind. It was part of why I dropped out. We haven't spoken since, even though we ended up on the same path." He blows a puff of air through his nose. "We've even played against each other."

I watch his face for cracks.

There is one, but barely. A flicker in the set of his brow, a slight tension in his jaw that comes and goes.

"Would you like to see them?" he asks me suddenly. "My family?"

"Yes. Please. I'd love to," I murmur.

He pulls his hand from mine and reaches into the inner pocket of his coat hanging on the back of his chair. He produces a thin black leather wallet, opens it, and pulls a small photo from behind his ID. The right edge is damaged, blackened and curling where fire ate into it, consuming the corner and creeping inward.

He sets it on the table between us and turns it so I can see.

A beautiful family is gathered on a stone terrace overlooking a city that spills down a hillside in cascading white and tan, and the sky behind them is the deep, impossible blue of a Mediterranean summer.

I find Plague immediately.

He's tiny. Maybe four, five years old, smiling wide, perched on the hip of a woman with his exact same light eyes, a soft patterned fabric framing her lined face. She's laughing at something off-camera, head thrown back, teeth flashing. Behind her stands a man with a tired face and kind eyes, one hand resting on the shoulder of a tall older boy with broad shoulders on a lanky frame who has to be Azhar. There's another boy, too, stockier and smiling the widest.

A family caught in the middle of being alive.

The burned edge has eaten into the hugging girls on the far right. Half a face, half an arm. Gone.