Page 35 of Wanderer

“No. We need to get this out there, so you know why I am the way I am. When I realized he was using my mom that way, I stopped doing jobs for him. He told me if I wanted to keep my mom away from the vamps, I needed to do bigger scores. Gone was the pretense that this was revenge or getting his shit back. I was to steal things he wanted from some pretty shady people, not all of them supernatural, and then he wouldn’t whore my mom out.

“I’ll spare you the details, but it went on for years. If I messed up, he gave Mom to a vampire for the night. Then I found out that she had a vamp regular who was hooked on her blood. Boyce was trading her blood for compulsion and spell ingredients I couldn’t get for him.”

Clenching my fists, I pulled back from the memories assaulting me.

“When I was twenty-eight, I finally finished the plan to escape. It had taken years of studying his magic and his routine. I’d had enough, but that made me sloppy. I got Pax to come home a few months before we tried it. My excuse? Mom needed one of us with her at all times to protect her. Then Boyce got greedy, wanting us to work together on jobs. This helped us, though. For every job we did together, we took a portion for ourselves. We hid the money away and booked tickets. Pax had grown up on the run, so he prepared as much as he could to get us out. But it all went wrong. Or maybe Boyce had begun to suspect us. Pax went on ahead, and he got free—well, at least it felt like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“His curse is different. He’s an outcast. He can stay places longer than me, but no one ever helps him. It’s hard to explain.”

“Okay. Tell me more about him later. We need to focus on you. What happened after you tried to leave?”

“When I was taken back to Boyce, I thought he was going to kill me. Maybe it would have been better if he had. That was when he started the curse. I realized later that all he was yelling about—how his home, under his roof, was the only place I could ever call my home—was him priming the curse.”

“What does that mean?” A frown marred Gareth’s face. I stroked his cheek, loving the feel of his short beard against my fingers.

“Whenever I stay in a place more than two nights, that’s when the clock starts counting down. I get one full month in that place before I’m ripped out of there.”

“How?”

“I dunno what magic it is. It feels like my body is being torn apart and I get tossed out somewhere completely different. Sometimes it’s only thirty miles, another time it could be a thousand. It’s always toward Boyce, though.”

“Shit. That’s powerful magic.”

“Yeah. He’s unhinged. I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying, since I was out of it after the beating his cronies gave me. He kept me locked up for a long time. Didn’t trust me to go out on jobs. It was only him, his niece Mira, and Mom who were allowed in my room. One day, Mom came to me and said she’d gotten him to agree to let me leave. Not her. Just me. A month later, I figured out why. It took me so long to learn the rules of the curse. I thought I couldn’t tell anyone about it until recently.”

Gareth pulled me into his arms and kissed the top of my head. “You’re not alone. Never again.”

“It was easier when Pax came back for me. We couldn’t get Mom out. Pax and I traveled a bit, but his curse even affected me after a while. He admitted it made him feel like shit once because it was obvious Boyce valued me more than him. His curse is just a punishment for nearly stealing me away, but he stole Pax’s ability to have a family.

“Fuck, that’s cold.”

“Boyce still thinks I’ll go back to him. That I’ll get sick of wandering and head back to the one place I belong.”

“You haven’t yet.”

“No. Not that it’s been easy. In my darkest days, I thought about going. He still uses Mom, but Pax destroyed the vampire that was feeding on her. She’s safe from that now. Boyce keeps her locked away, knowing that’s is more of a punishment than the feeding was.”

“Is it hard being away from your brother?”

I thought about my older brother, how much I loved him, and how guilty I felt about dragging him back to save me. “Yeah, like I said, we stuck together for a bit, but I was broken for a long time. Neither of us was in a good place, and really, Pax was always a lone wolf, even before his curse. He started spending most of his time in fur rather than speaking to me.”

Gareth squeezed me tighter. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay. We’re better now. We both just had stuff to work out, and that was better to do alone.”

“So, what happens when we break the curse on you?”

“We break it on Paxton, get some allies, and then go kill Boyce,” I said matter-of-factly.

Gareth’s grin was feral, showing me another side to my sweet mate. “I like that plan.”

Seventeen

Gareth

Riley was getting in his head. Dredging up the memories of his past would do that, though. But I needed him here and present with me, so he could have a little piece of happiness after all that had been done to him. He needed to know that good times were ahead for us once we got rid of the blight that was his stepfather.