I could see that she wasn’t bluffing. And I had given my word.

“Okay, but this is for your ears only, Robyn. You can’t tell Drew. You can’t even tell Abby. I need you to swear, and I need to know you mean it.”

“I swear.” Her smile faded into a look of concern. “What’s going on, Titus?”

I pulled her to her feet and hung my clothes over my desk chair, then sat in the chair. Robyn sank on the edge of the bed again, facing me, worry dipping her brows lower over her big blue eyes. I exhaled slowly. Then I met her gaze.

“You were right. I lied. The scent woven through Morris’s isn’t mine.” I could see the questions already forming on her tongue, but I pressed on before she could ask them, because once Robyn started talking, it was hard for anyone else to get a word in. “It’s my brother’s. The scents of same-sex full-blood siblings are very similar. Have you ever smelled Abby’s brothers?”

Robyn shook her head. “I’ve met Jace’s brothers, but at the time I was too preoccupied with the charges against me to notice what they smelled like.” She shrugged and dropped her gaze to the floor. “And that was before my mandatory training, so I wasn’t really tuned in to how much you can learn about a person from his scent. Other than the obvious advantage for identifying the bastards who did this to me.”

“Well, if any of them had had brothers, you might have made some big mistakes,” I told her.

She snorted. “The current consensus is that I did make some big mistakes.” She blinked, and I could practically see her dragging her focus back to the present. “Tell me about your brother.”

“Justus is eleven years my junior. He was a freshman in high school when our parents died.” He’d been devastated, and being there for him had let me defer my own mourning until he’d left for college, which had turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. “Now he’s a sophomore at Millsaps. In Jackson.”

Her frown deepened as the location sank in. “Where Corey Morris was infected. Do the guys know?”

“That Justus exists? Of course. There are pictures of him all over the house. His bedroom is the one across from mine and next to yours, but he never comes home anymore, and Drew’s the only one who’s met him.” A very deliberate decision on my part.

“So they’ll assume Morris is carrying a trace of your scent for the same reason I did,” Robyn said, clearly thinking it through. “Because they’ve never smelled your brother. But if Drew’s met him, why doesn’t he recognize Justus’s scent?”

“He’ll figure it out eventually. But so far, it hasn’t occurred to him that my brother could have infected Corey Morris because Justus is human. At least, he was when I saw him over the holidays. I’ve been very careful to keep him out of all Alpha-related business. He didn’t even know shifters exist. Though he clearly knows now.”

The thought of what my brother had been through—the inevitable trauma of his infection—made me want to put my fist through the wall. I’d jumped through every hoop imaginable to keep him safe and in ignorance of the violence that had become my life since my own infection. In ignorance of the struggle to protect the strays in my territory, often from each other and from themselves.

But obviously my efforts had been spent in vain.

“I should have told him.” I leaned forward with my head in my hands, devastated to realize that my attempts to keep Justus safe had actually put him in more danger. “If he’d known we existed, he would have come to me when he realized he was infected. He would have known how to handle his own transition.” I sat up and met her gaze with an anguished one of my own. “Robyn, if I had let him meet the guys and see what we’re doing, he wouldn’t be out there infecting other innocent people.”

Corey Morris’s infection was my fault, even though I’d never laid a single claw on him. In that sense, what I’d told my men was true.

“Second guessing yourself now won’t help,” Robyn insisted. “Hindsight is worthless unless you can learn from it, and what could you possibly learn from this? You can’t just announce our existence to the world so that the next person who gets infected understands what’s happening. That’s against the council’s rules.”

Which was one of the reasons I hadn’t disclosed our existence to Justus—telling him would have been violating one of the Shifter world’s most important prohibitions and likely would have kept me from being acknowledged as Alpha.

Had I sacrificed my brother’s safety for my own ambition?

“Titus, I don’t even understand this.” Robyn’s frown became a wide-eyed look of confusion. “How could you possibly keep this from your brother, logistically speaking? Doesn’t he come home on school breaks? How do you explain the parade of totally ripped men walking around half-naked in your home? Some halfway house for reformed male strippers?”

A laugh snuck up on me, and when I saw her small smile, I realized she’d startled me out of self-pity.

“Justus used to come home during his breaks, but when I decided to turn my home into Pride headquarters, I started sending him on trips during the holidays, instead. I can’t go with him, unless we vacation in one of the free zones, so we’ve rented this cabin up in the Montana free zone for the past two Christmases. And there are no shifters native to island nations, so in the summer we spend a couple of weeks in the Bahamas or the Caribbean, before I send him to Europe for the rest of his break.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how long that routine would have held up, but it’s worked so far.”

“But did you think that for the rest of his life he’d never make a surprise visit? Did you truly think you could keep this from him forever?”

“Of course not. I knew I’d have to tell him something once the Pride was recognized.” But in addition to it being against the rules, jumping the gun felt like jinxing myself—a superstitious end to the possibility that the Pride ever would be recognized.

“Okay. So if Drew will eventually figure out the truth about your brother, why bother hiding it? Or stepping down? As Alpha, wouldn’t you be in a better position to help Justus?”

“I don’t think so.” I’d thought about little else in the past hour. “And trying to help him might endanger my position anyway. Creating a stray is a capital offense. A mandatory death sentence.”