Avenge the Bear by T. S. Joyce Page A

feet. A warm tear fell to her cheek and she shook her head in denial. “Ethan, where did it come from?” she yelled.
    “I swear, I don’t know.” His voice sounded tortured, but she couldn’t tell what was real anymore. “I sleepwalk.”
    “You mean Bear sleepwalks?” His silence was answer enough. “Is the soot from Bron’s house? Or is it from where Trent died?” Because nothing in her believed he’d just gone rolling around in the remnants of a campfire. Her accusations rang right the second they left her lips.
    He’d gone to the burn sites where someone had murdered Trent and tried to kill Bron and Samantha. Ethan was shaking his head, staring at the tile on the back wall of the shower. He hadn’t bothered to close the curtain, so black water dripped all over the floor. “Reese, it’s not what you think.”
    Her voice cast low, she asked, “Did you kill him?”
    “Who?”
    “Trent. Did you kill Trent?”
    “No!” he yelled as his face contorted with fury. “What reason could I possibly have to kill a man I didn’t know? I’ve never even met him.”
    “Ethan, did Bear kill him?”
    He opened his mouth, then closed it like he couldn’t answer for certain. Another tear streamed down her cheek as her back hit the wall.
    “It’s not like that,” he pleaded, stepping from the shower and dripping black all over the white tile floor. He reached for her.
    “Don’t you fucking touch me! Why? Why would he do this? Why would you?”
    “No,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.” He grabbed her wrist and she hauled back and slapped him.
    A feral snarl left his lips and he brought blazing silver eyes back to hers.
    “Fuck you,” she spat. “Fuck you for making me care about you, you psychotic liar.” Shoving off his chest, she grabbed her clothes from the floor and bolted for the door. He didn’t follow and she sobbed the entire way down the stairs.
    She was broken. Only a broken woman would ignore the warning of her friends and fall in love with a man like him. He’d killed Trent. She didn’t know why. Hell, maybe Ethan didn’t even know why Bear had done it, but he had. Or maybe all of the split personality talk was just bullshit. She didn’t know what to believe. Certainly nothing he’d told her up until this point. Dammit, how could she have been so stupid?
    He was playing some game with her. Seducing the woman of the man he’d killed. Maybe that’s why he’d killed him. Perhaps their meeting in the office wasn’t the first time Ethan had seen her. Joseph was a small town. If he’d seen her in town and Bear had chosen her, what if he’d killed Trent so he could have her?
    What if Trent’s death was all her fault?
    Her tears were streaming rivers as she got into her truck and turned the engine. Ethan stood leaned against the railing on locked arms high above her, naked as the day he was born and watching her with stormy eyes as she peeled out and drove away.
    Dragging her gaze from the rearview mirror, she gritted her teeth. His world was about to be turned on its ass. She was going to find a way to prove it was him who murdered the man she loved, and then she was going to kill him.

Chapter Ten
    “Hey,” Samantha said, opening her front door wider. “Come on in. Sorry for the short notice, but I found something you should see in person.”
    Reese stepped into the house Samantha had grown up in. Endless slumber party memories flooded her like they always did when she saw the place. It had been abandoned and trashed in the years Samantha had been in Portland making a life for herself, but between her, Reese, Bron and Dillon, they’d got it completely fixed up. Now, the house looked like it belonged on the pages of a Pottery Barn catalogue.
    Reese had given herself one day to cry into a pillow like a heartbroken teenager, then called Samantha and Muriel, and told them everything. Then she’d gone to the town library to find anything she could about Ethan’s clan in the