Sensitive parts of me tightened as my eyes lingered on the lines of his chest, drawn to the four long, paral el scars that had brought him into my life. It was al I could do to keep from squirming on the couch. I hated that just seeing him like that could affect me so strongly, and I hated it even worse that he knew it. And he wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the room heard my raspy intake of breath, and they’d have to be blind to miss the flush scalding my cheeks as I took in Marc’s scent from across the room. At the edge of my vision, Jace downed his first shot, following it with a slice of the lime he’d just cut. Then he snatched the shot Ethan had poured for himself and tossed it back too, ignoring my brother’s grumbling protest. I saw it, but it barely registered. I couldn’t drag my focus from Marc.

“How did you know that?” I whispered, knowing he could hear me. I’d been barely eighteen when we broke up, and too young to drink. So there was no way he could know my drink of choice. At least, there was no way he should have known.

“Vic told me a couple of years ago.” His face was completely blank, impossible to read. “He watched you at Hudson’s on your twenty-first birthday.”

My blush deepened. If Vic had witnessed my birthday binge, he’d know I hadn’t left the bar alone. And Marc would know, too. I’d been an idiot to think my life at school and my life on the ranch were unconnected. They were hopelessly intertwined around me, like two different vines fighting to strangle the same poor tree, and only my desperation for privacy had kept me from seeing it.

Marc looked away first, and my eyes followed him into the kitchen. He took a juice glass out of the dish drainer and half fil ed it with whiskey, then finished off the glass with Coke from a can. Without even a glance in my direction, he sat at the island on a bar stool, his back to me.

“Sorry, Faythe,” Parker said, waving a clear plastic carton with less than a single swig of bright green liquid at the bottom. “We’re out of margarita mix. What’s your second choice?”

“I don’t know.” I’d only had a couple of drinks since that night at Hudson’s. I’d never been much of a drinker, in part because I didn’t know how to achieve a buzz without looking like a lush in front of my friends. But the guys did, Parker in particular.

Parker was the oldest of six boys, each no more than eighteen months apart.

As teenagers, the Pierce brothers were infamous for putting their mother through hel . On one notorious occasion, Mrs. Pierce came home to find al six of her boys, the youngest of whom was then fourteen, passed out drunk in what remained of her formal living room. Her husband was at the Lazy S at the time, attending a yearly council meeting. He took the cal from his wife in my father’s office, surrounded by his fel ow Alphas. And me, of course, though at the time I had no idea why Daddy kept including me.

As luck would have it, Mr. Pierce accidental y pushed the speakerphone button at exactly the wrong moment, and the entire room heard his wife turn over responsibility for al six boys to him. In one long, near-hysterical sentence, she said that grooming Caroline, their ten-year-old daughter, was al she could handle at the moment, and he could do what he wanted with his sons, so long as he kept them away from her.

Mr. Pierce’s first act as de facto warden was to get rid of the three boys who had already come of age. He negotiated right then with the leaders of three other territories, making arrangements for his sons to serve as enforcers, to teach them discipline and responsibility. Parker had been at the ranch ever since, for the better part of ten years.

“The trick is to drink it quickly, then start on another one,” Parker said, crossing the room to hand me a tal glass fil ed with a dubious-looking brown liquid.

I held the glass up to the light, looking for a justifiable reason to hand it back.

Maybe spots on the glass, or a hair floating on the surface? No such luck. To be polite, I’d have to try it. “What is this?”

“Long Island Iced Tea.”

Oh. I could handle tea.

But, if I’d watched him mix my drink instead of watching Marc’s tanned shoulders tense and relax, I would have known that the only thing a Long Island Iced Tea had in common with its namesake was color. I took a drink and made a face but managed to swal ow it. For a moment, I considered asking Parker for a plain soda instead, but then my eyes settled on Vic’s empty recliner, and I remembered why I was there in the first place instead of asleep in my own bed.

Sara. Raped and murdered. And put on display.

I took another sip, and then another after that, trying to drown out my thoughts and wipe the gory images from my mind. But no matter where I looked, I saw her body as Michael had described it. Every time I closed my eyes, even just to blink, Sara’s eyes stared back at me, bril iant blue and framed by lashes that had never needed mascara. So I kept drinking, desperate to forget the way she died, to hold back tears I stil hadn’t shed. I drank to numb an ache so acute that my heart throbbed painfully with each beat, and my head pulsed with a near-paralyzing pressure, like it might burst and end my misery once and for al .

And final y, after thirty minutes and three Long Island Iced Teas, my liquid anesthesia began to take effect, though the taste failed to grow on me.

Across the room, Marc had settled into a faded and lumpy armchair. In one hand he gripped the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and in the other he clenched its cap, as if he were afraid of what his hands might do if he left them unoccupied. My bet was that he would ruin more drywal , and maybe break a couple of his own fingers in the process. He didn’t deal wel with anger or grief, both of which showed clearly in the lines of his face.