Alexei gripped her hips, his fingers brushing the bare skin of her back. He’d never been that alone, even at the darkest times of his life. “You will never be alone again.” Would always have arms to hold her close.

She stroked her fingers over his jaw. “Why are you Alexei and your brother was Brodie?”

The question brought back memories of childhood laughter, his father’s deep voice, his mother’s soft arms. “I’m Alexei Vasiliev Harte and he was Brodie Harte Vasiliev.” His brother’s name felt so alien falling from his lips—it had been an eon since he’d spoken it aloud. “My father came from a pack in Russia, while my mother was a California girl through and through: Konstantin Vasiliev and Calissa Harte. They split the difference.”

“Oh, how wonderful.” Petting hands in his hair, across his shoulders, his E trying to assuage his hurt. “Tell me more about Brodie.”

“Damn adrenaline junkie could make anyone laugh.” Alexei’s chest squeezed. “It was his way of dealing with life, with the world. The day we buried our parents, he came to the funeral in wolf form with a big green ribbon tied around his neck. Our aunt tied the ribbon for him.”

“She sounds like a wonderful woman.”

“She’s the best.” A tough-as-nails soldier, but one with endless heart. “The ribbon was for our mom, who loved the color green.” Alexei swallowed the thickness in his throat. “I was always the angry one. I didn’t want to go to the funeral, but Brodie used his teeth to grab the cuff of my pants and literally dragged me there.”

“All your people have left you.” She kissed his cheeks, his lips. “That’s why you’re so angry.”

He exhaled a shuddering breath, took in her warmth and life on the inhale. “My family is cursed.” There was no other way to put it. “You need to know about it if you’re determined to be with me.”

A narrowing of her eyes. “No, I get into the lap of every wolf who asks.”

Growling low in his throat, he sat up. “Who’s been asking?”

“Men,” she said primly. “Leopards keep leaving tiny, shiny gifts at my door, and before the Arrows withdrew, several of the single males asked if I’d be interested in a private dinner, or an evening stroll.”

Alexei bared his teeth. “Any man who asks now is going to get an education on the sharpness of wolf claws. As for the damn cats, I’m going to scalp their spotty fur.”

She cupped his face in her hands, her smile unrepentant and her kiss tender. “What’s the curse and why does it make you so angry and sad at the same time?”

Alexei’s wolf lay down inside him, its head on its paws and its heart desolate. “Changelings have a single major vulnerability.” It was a topic on which he’d maintained his silence with even his closest friends, the wound too close to the surface. “At times, our animal halves threaten to overwhelm our human selves.” His fingers clenched on her hips. “That’s not always bad. When I run as the wolf, the wolf should be ascendant. It’s his time. The problem comes when a changeling gives up the human side of their nature forever and becomes the animal. We call them rogues.”

It was so fucking hard to speak, to lay his family’s pain wide open. He held on to Memory, leaned on her warmth, her affection. “My grandfather went rogue when my father was two years of age.” Alexei had only ever known his grandfather as images caught on camera, a tall blond man with features startlingly similar to his own—the similarity had fascinated him as a child, but as an adult, it was a constant reminder of his ugly future. “My father went rogue when I was seven.”

“Does this mean they are wolves in the wild, lost to you?”

Alexei blinked back the burning in his eyes. “I could deal with that. If I knew they lived, I could handle it.” He’d have found them during his times as a wolf, run with them, been a family with them. “But rogues are so feared because they don’t simply become wild wolves. They’re drawn to those they used to love before they lost their humanity, and rather than just being with them—because that would be more than fine, their wolf selves welcomed—the rogues are violent. Rogues track, attack, and kill the people they once loved.”

Memory’s cheekbones pushed up against her skin, her expression stark. “As if they’re angry at what they’ve lost and want to destroy it?”

Alexei shrugged. “Maybe. No one knows. I’ve heard rumors of rogues who made a return to being changeling, but I think they’re fairy tales we tell ourselves to find hope in a hopeless situation.”

For the Vasiliev family, the pain rolled down the decades in an endless chain. “To be a rogue is to be under an automatic execution order.” The packs had no other choice. “Brodie attacked his mate when he went rogue. I found Etta’s mauled body when I went looking for my brother. She was still alive, died a minute later in my arms.” She’d been so light in his hold, a sweet, loving woman forever gone, her family devastated, their dreams for her buried in the earth with her body.

“You should’ve seen Brodie with her before. He loved her.” Alexei didn’t want Memory to know his brother only as the violent killer he’d become; he needed to show her the generous and devoted mate Brodie had been before it all went horribly wrong. “Idiot once dived out of a plane above the territory with a parachute that opened out to say, ‘Etta, I’m sorry,’ after they’d had a fight.”

Memory’s smile trembled. “I wish I could’ve known him. Known her.” She brushed back his hair, stroked his shoulder, his upper arm.

Accepting the way she touched him, comforted him, he told her the rest. “I tracked him, but when the time came, I couldn’t hurt him. I would’ve allowed him to shred me to pieces.” He’d collapsed onto his knees at seeing his adventurous, funny big brother’s bloody muzzle and mad eyes, his heart broken. “Hawke knew. He’d followed me. He did what needed to be done.”

“I’m so sorry, Alexei.” Wrapping her arms around his neck, Memory pressed her cheek to his. The salt of her tears was wet against him, the tremor in her voice potent with emotion.

Alexei let her hold him as he hadn’t allowed anyone to hold him for a long time. But he couldn’t cry, the tears locked up in concrete inside his heart, the hard substance formed of his anger and his pain.

“Just because this happened to members of your family, doesn’t mean it’ll happen to you.” Memory’s voice was fierce.

Alexei wished he could grab on to the hope, hold on. “There’s a stressor.” He spoke against her ear, the words coming out husky and rough. “My father never said much about his father, but as a child, I once overheard him telling my mother that, according to older packmates, my grandfather began to act strange prior to going rogue. Spending long hours in wolf form and becoming aggressive toward his mate when he’d always before been gentle.”

Sitting back so she could see his face, Memory frowned. “Did the same thing happen to your father and brother?”

“My father was always a little different from other changelings.” Not that Alexei had consciously known that as a child—to him his dad was just his dad. “We stayed out for weeks at a time in the wilderness, and I don’t think my father ever shifted back into human form except when my mother made him. I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.”

“So he was always predisposed to it? Then why are you worried it’ll happen to you?”

“After my father’s death,” Alexei said, “we had to know the truth. We asked our aunt.”

“Why not your mother?”

Alexei squeezed his eyes shut. “She couldn’t live with the horror of what he’d become. She took a massive overdose of sleeping pills right after he was executed.”

Memory felt a wave of fury roar over her, directed at a woman who’d permitted her own pain to overwhelm her duty to the two small souls who looked to her for hope, for answers, for love. Forcing the anger into a tight knot in her gut, she focused on Alexei.

“I was nine by the time we demanded the truth from Aunt Min, Brodie eleven.” Alexei’s voice was ragged, his muscles rigid. “She said our father’s DNA had been tested, but as with all rogues to date who’ve been examined, the scientists found no genetic red flags.”

Alexei’s claws slid out. “I knew there was more. I could tell. I asked and asked until she finally admitted that our father hadn’t begun acting the way he did—feral, secretive, just a little strange—until he mated.”

A sudden chill settled on Memory’s skin. She’d been around changelings enough by now to understand what mating meant to them. She’d also felt the intense power of that bond in the glimpses she’d caught during her mental sessions with Sascha.

Conscious that Memory had gaps in her emotional knowledge, particularly when it came to a healthy and loving relationship with a man, the cardinal had been very generous with her. Never revealing intimate details, but bringing Memory into her life, as if Memory truly was Sascha’s little sister.

Even when Memory was mad with Alexei and fighting with him, the idea of being bonded as deeply to him as Sascha was to Lucas, it had been her secret dream. “Mating is the stressor?” she forced herself to ask.

“Brodie and I, we made a promise to each other to never get mated,” Alexei ground out. “Then we grew up and began to forget, and Brodie fell in love.” A twist of his lips. “Etta was tall and slender as a reed, and as sweet and shy as Brodie was outgoing, and he adored her. When the mating bond called, he didn’t resist.”

Memory’s heart ached for a man and a woman she’d never met, would never know.

“The behavioral changes were subtle, but I’d known Brodie my entire life. I could see it happening, see him morphing into our father. He held on for three years before he surrendered to the wolf.” Alexei dropped his hands to the seat, his claws slicing into it.