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“Don’t forget surfing movies and anything involving winter extreme sports.”

“I hated missing the last winter Olympics,” Logan moaned. “I was working my way through boxes of paperwork and barely had time to watch sections of events, let alone follow them through to the end, though I did catch the women’s hockey finals. No way was I missing such a historic run, even if it meant staying up later to finish pouring over everything.”

“The whole thing was fire, from start to finish,” Rusty said. “I kept it on in the garage. Surprisingly there were no complaints. Not even from Flame, and he’s usually the one doing the bulk of the bitching and complaining.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you two are not close,” Logan replied as he polished off the last of his sandwich.

“When we were pups, we were inseparable,” Rusty admitted. “Then he started taking after the wrong father and we started growing apart.”

“How many do you have?”

“Two,” Rusty explained. “Let’s just say that one wasn’t happy about meeting his mates and settling down and never lets anyone forget it either, or where he saw his life going if he didn’t have mates and a family to answer to.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t share a home with my mom and old man anymore. Personally, I think they are happier for it,” Rusty explained. “I just wish it had happened before Flame picked up some of his more unsavory habits and way of thinking.”

“Umm, I’ve wanted to ask this since the garage,” Logan began. “But is Rusty your real name or a nickname given to you because of your hair color?”

“A little of both,” Rusty admitted. “My given name is Russel. Either way, it was always going to be Rusty.”

“Nice.”

“In case you’re wondering, Roark really is the name my parents gave me.”

“I don’t know if my birth parents ever gave me a name,” Logan said. “Like Wren and the pups, I was a foundling. The director of the group home named me Logan and raised me as her own. When I was old enough to pick up odd jobs, I’d give all the money I earned to her to help get better food and school supplies for the pups.”

“How’d you ever get involved with the trafficking ring?” Roark asked.

“One of the other pups went missing,” Logan explained. “Quiet. Shy. We all knew he would never take off on his own, but the authorities said that because he was seventeen, they weren’t going to spend much time looking, since they felt that he’d struck out on his own. The thing was that the home I was raised in wasn’t an institution. It was a giant Victorian house that Ms. Constance inherited when her aunt passed. Every pup had their own room, and the staff who cared for us lived there too, so we all knew their reasoning was bullshit.”

“Did you ever find him? Rusty asked.

“Yeah, once I found the right kind of help,” Logan explained. “I’d just turned eighteen and was still trying to figure out a trade when he vanished. Ms. Constance didn’t want me to go looking. She was afraid something would happen to me, but I couldn’t leave it alone. A couple owls and an older wolf were hunting for a pair of siblings who’d gone missing. They’d been hired by some panthers to find their cubs. We found Dayton with the cubs and got him back home before the coyotes who had them were able to arrange an auction. I hate to think of how much harder it would have been once an auction had already taken place.”

“No shit. We’ve kicked down more than a few doors during retrieval duty and left scorched earth in our wake,” Rusty explained.

“And we are more than happy to have left that life behind us now,” Roark insisted. “That last raid, they had shipping containers full of shifters, some had been kidnapped, but others had been sold by their own kind just because someone decided that there was something about them that made them unmateable.”

“I am so sick of hearing that shit as an excuse for the atrocities they’ve committed against their own people!” Logan snapped, a fierce growl escaping him.

Roark slid off the couch and crossed the room to the one Logan was seated on, tentatively placing a hand on their mate’s shoulder, hoping that he wasn’t about to overstep when Logan’s snarl gave way to a broken sob the moment Roark touched him. Logan clung when Roark wrapped him in a hug, then Rusty’s arms wrapped around them both. They held their mate and let him cry it out the way he clearly needed, now that he didn’t have to worry about remaining stoic and hiding his emotions from Wren.

No words were needed. Logan’s fingers curled in Roark’s t-shirt, crushing the material in his fists, even while his tears soaked through it. Slowly, Logan calmed but didn’t move away from them. Instead, he curled into their embrace until Rusty managed to shift them all into a position that let them hold him as he stretched across their laps.

“It was the same way for us, after we went after the Red River Outlaws,” Rusty softly explained once Logan had the chance to wipe his face and compose himself. “What we saw that day has haunted us ever since.”

“It was the same for a lot of the crew,” Roark explained. “Which is why we’ve decided to focus on building new businesses and protecting park grounds. What we have here is too precious to allow anyone to ruin.”

“I get it,” Logan said. “I never wanted that part of my life to touch Wren’s. Now that they’re getting older and asking more questions about what I do, it was easier to change my level of involvement than to have to explain the harsh realities of shifter politics to a pup who already knows that for whatever reason, they were abandoned by those who should have protected and loved them.”

“When they’re older, they’ll be proud of the effort you put in to help those who wouldn’t have stood a chance without intervention,” Rusty said. “But I agree that they’re way too young for that now. They should spend their days enjoying the freedom of being a pup.”

“You asked about the daily routine,” Roark said, gently steering them back to a safer conversation.

“Yeah, um…it would really help to know what that’s going to look like,” Logan replied, voice hoarse and a bit raspy.

“I promise, it’s nothing complicated,” Roark said as he brushed Logan’s hair back from his cheek only to have his new mate reach up, capture his hand, and tug it until it draped over Logan’s body in a partial hug.