How It Was by T. S. Joyce
Chapter Two
Nuke.
She’d heard rumors about a Nuke. Was he the same one?
Trina eased her foot onto the gas and compared the man in front of her to the legend. Nights by a campfire, two glasses of wine deep, she’d heard tales of a shifter who felt bigger than any other. Who growled like nothing anyone had ever heard, and was stronger in his human form than Paul Bunyan himself. They said there was an evil in him the likes of which no one had seen.
Nuke strode smoothly up the dirt road ahead of her, eating up distance with a predator’s stride. Too graceful, too powerful, too sure-footed to be human. His medium brown hair was long enough to brush the neck of his gray cotton shirt. The tan skin of his arms glistened with a thin sheen of sweat, but that was probably from working in the abnormally warm morning. She’d noticed all the moving boxes. He seemed about halfway done unloading the red old Highboy pickup truck parked in the gravel space in front of his single-wide.
His legs were long and strong and powerful, and though he was lean, he was cut with muscle, with wide shoulders and a V-shaped waist.
He cast a glance to the woods on his left, and his profile struck her with a zing of electricity. His jaw was sharp, and angled, and the two-day scruff on his face looked like it belonged in some designer magazine. His nose was straight and strong, and his cheekbones high. He swung his gaze back toward the road he walked, and she became hypnotized by his gait. He didn’t stumble on the uneven terrain, he didn’t hesitate as he took her on each turn to a new dirt road, and there was a confidence in his stride she wished she could harness.
It was very kind of him to offer to lead her to Ren.
Ren.
Her phone dinged in her purse, and Nuke turned just far enough to slide her a glance over his shoulder. Chills rippled up her forearms. His hearing was very good. Even better than hers, perhaps.
She reached into her purse and checked her phone screen quickly. It was the devil himself.
Are you there yet?
She tossed the phone back into her purse like it was a hot potato. When she looked up, Nuke was standing in the road facing her. With a squeak, she slammed her foot onto the brake and jerked to a stop inches from his kneecaps.
He stood there tall as an oak, staring down his nose at her, his hair blowing softly in the breeze and haloed by the sunlight behind him.
“Why did you stop?” she asked on a breath as her heart pounded away.
Nuke waited an unsettling moment, and then twitched his head toward the woods. “You’re here.”
Through the final layer of trees, there stood a small cabin in a clearing.
Nuke ducked out of the way of her car and watched her as she coasted by him.
By the time she’d gotten out, he had disappeared into the woods like he’d never existed at all.
She’d just met Nuke. The Nuke.
Her phone dinged again. She reached into her purse, turned off the ringer, and tossed the phone into the glove box. She didn’t need Manning in her head right now.
The stairs of the porch creaked under her flip-flops. She squared up to the door to knock, but hesitated. It was Ren. Ren had been kind to her.
Before she could wrap her knuckles on the wooden door, it opened suddenly, and there stood her friend.
“Trina,” Ren breathed. She pulled her into a back-cracking hug. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t…I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Did you leave him for good?” she asked, shoving Trina back at arm’s length.
“I think I did.” It wasn’t a lie and it wasn’t the truth. It was somewhere in-between.
Ren’s dark eyebrows drew down under her short, pink-streaked bangs. “Are you okay?”
Trina shrugged up one shoulder. Mostly she was numb.
“I heard a rumor about you,” Ren said softly.
“I thought you started rumors.”
“I hear them sometimes, too.” Ren released her shoulders and cocked her head, studying her. “I would’ve never guessed.”
“Guessed what?”
“Guessed what you are.”
“I’m human,” Trina said robotically.
Ren was a rare blue-eyed raven shifter, and those clear sky-blue eyes narrowed on Trina now. “Hmmm.”
Uncomfortable under Ren’s scrutiny, she looked around the woods surrounding the cabin and changed the subject. “Your home is amazing. I heard you paired up for good. Bron was really nice to me when I met him.”
“I wondered what happened to you after the Crow War. I hoped you didn’t go back to Manning.”
Trina’s skin crawled with how intent Ren’s attention was. This had been a bad idea. She was making a mistake. An awful mistake. Ren had been kind to her.
“I should go.”
“We have a couch you can sleep on,” Ren said hopefully. “You can stay here until you catch your breath and figure out your next move.”
“That’s very kind of you…” Trina backed down the porch stairs. “I shouldn’t have come.” Guilt washed over her like a tsunami. “It was good to see you again.”
“Trina, you should stay.”
“I really have to go. This was a bad idea.”
“If the rumors are true, you really have nowhere to go.” Ren’s voice snapped through the woods and stopped Trina in her tracks.
“What have you heard?”
“Enough.”
“Well, that’s the thing about rumors. They aren’t always true.”
“Then why is your voice shaking?” Ren asked low.
Trina blinked hard and dropped her gaze to a single dandelion weed that was growing in a crack in the concrete walkway. That weed was thriving in a place it didn’t belong. She envied it.
She didn’t know what else to say. All she knew was she didn’t want the stupid water filling her eyes to spill.
“You have the attention of a monster.”
And Ren was right. Manning was a monster. But when she looked up, Ren was looking at something behind her. Trina cast a look over her shoulder, and there stood Nuke, right at the tree line.
“There’s still the empty trailer in the park,” he said in a gruff voice. “Won’t be filled until Friday.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think about that,” Ren said on a breath, and disappeared inside. She returned a few seconds later with a key attached to a purple bear paw shaped keychain. Ren tossed it to her, and Trina caught it. The keychain was actually a bottle opener.
“The Crew is filtering in and moving in this week,” Ren explained. “The cream-colored one is a shit-shack and probably a rathole, but it’s a roof over your head, and right now, I think that’s what you need. Just…breathe, Trina.”
That wasn’t the plan.
Trina was here for someone else’s bad intentions. She was here to protect people she shouldn’t be protecting, but she had no choice. She’d never had a choice.
That’s just how it was.
“You already took the keys. You accepted,” Ren said, as if she could see the denial in Trina’s face. “I’ll come make sure you’re settled in the morning.” And with that, Ren made her way inside and shut the door behind her.
“I’ll lead you back,” Nuke said simply, and when Trinity turned around, he was holding her car door open, waiting.
What choice did she have? What choice did she ever have?
She sniffed and made her way to her car, slipped inside, and got half of her thanks out before he shut the door on her. “Thank—”
Slam.
“You,” she whispered.
Nuke walked back down the road without looking back, and okay. Here they went again. She was just going to follow the motherfreakin’ Nuke around the woods like everything was fine.
But Nuke and Ren didn’t understand. She was here with bad intentions, and if they found out, nothing would ever be fine again.