Page 31 of Wolf Revealed

Lark reached out to take his hand, regret and anguish flooding through her yet again. “Oh, Mike. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, his gaze soft. “You did what you had to do to save our son. How I spiraled after you left is on me, not you. I own that.”

Lark wanted to argue, to tell Mike he wouldn’t have spiraled at all if it weren’t for her, but he spoke before she could.

“After witnessing the explosion I thought killed you and Kal, I should have been on desk duty, but since I never told anyone you and Kal were in my life, except my parents, my boss had no reason to think I had a problem with going back to work since my house was supposedly empty when that bomb went off. I didn’t bother to tell them any different. So, I went undercover again, this time to collect intelligence on an up-and-coming drug gang based out of LA that was moving into Dallas.”

Lark felt her heart constrict. Even though Mike had been undercover the whole time they’d been together, she still didn’t know much about the process. Even so, she couldn’t imagine him trying to do that kind of work while dealing with the trauma of watching his family die.

“I’m almost afraid to ask what happened,” she said.

“This gang was trying to beat out a local one for prime territory south of here near Waco,” Mike told her, his expression distant again. “They were brutal, going after anyone they thought stood in their way.”

Lark wanted to ask what he meant by that, but ultimately refrained, letting him tell the story at his own pace.

“When you’re undercover, you’re told to look the other way when it comes to things that aren’t related to the bigger picture of taking down the target. Or to put it another way, to ignore what happens to the little fish so we can catch the bigger ones.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” Lark murmured. “But isn’t it also incredibly cold-blooded? How do you compartmentalize like that?”

“You’re right about it making sense,” Mike agreed. “But it gets a lot harder to do when you realize those little fish are innocent people getting hurt. After watching what I thought happened to you and Kal, I didn’t care about the bigger picture anymore.”

“You had to save someone, didn’t you?” Lark asked hesitantly, instinctively already knowing where this was going.

Mike nodded. “There was this kid in the neighborhood, sort of a local sports star. For whatever reason, the gang decided they wanted this kid to work for them, but he said no. So, they grabbed his mother and his baby brother for leverage.”

Lark swallowed hard. In some ways, it was like fate had tortured him all over again with the image of a mother and child in danger.

“Anyway, I lost it,” Mike muttered. “Any thought of maintaining my cover disappeared, and I went after every drug dealer in there. To this day, I don’t remember exactly what I did. I just grabbed an automatic weapon and started shooting.”

“Did you save the woman and her son?” Lark asked.

“Yeah, I got them out of there,” Mike said, his expression flat. “Unfortunately, whoever was left in the gang caught me before I could get away. They jumped to the obvious conclusion that I was a cop, and then things got really ugly.”

“What did they do to you?” she asked, even though she didn’t really want to know.

He worked his jaw before answering. “They wanted to know if there were other cops undercover in the gang, and thought that cutting me up with a machete would be the best way to get me to talk. It didn’t work, but they kept trying until I started sliding in and out of consciousness. That’s when they drove me out to an empty field, shot me three times, and left me for dead.”

Tears welled in her eyes, but before she could tell him she didn’t want to hear any more, he continued.

“I woke up four days later in the hospital, surrounded by doctors who couldn’t explain how I was still alive. I’d survived wounds that should have killed me several times over.”

“That’s what triggered your change?” Lark said softly, wanting to make sure she understood what Mike was saying, still a little confused by all of this. “Getting shot?”

He nodded. “The pain and trauma flipped the switch and turned me into a werewolf. Of course, I didn’t know what I was until Gage got me out of the undercover division and recruited me to be on his SWAT Team.”

Lark sat there in silence, replaying Mike’s confession, her stomach twisting itself into knots at the horrible experience he’d been through. An experience she was at least partly to blame for, even if he didn’t think so.

“On the bright side—if there was any—becoming a werewolf led to Gage, which in turn led to my pack. Having a team composed of other alphas helped me get my head back on straight.”

Lark set her empty bowl on the floor, then took his bowl and stacked it on top before turning a little on the bed to look at him. “Nothing that happened to you could ever be described as good, but beyond the fact that you somehow made it through all of that, fate brought us back together again to give me a chance to fix the biggest mistake in my life. If you’re interested, I mean.”

She held her breath, afraid Mike would tell her that while he wanted to be in Kal’s life, he didn’t want anything to do with her. But instead, he mirrored her earlier move, turning a little so that he was looking at her.

“I’d be very interested in that,” he said softly.

Lark had no idea who kissed who first, but one moment, she was blissfully inhaling his intoxicating scent, and the next, his lips were on hers. And if there was a moan of pleasure involved, she refused to regret it.

For the first time in nearly a decade, she was kissing the only man she’d ever loved, and it was as perfect and delicious as she remembered.