Page 23 of Knot Here for You

Topher lifts his head from my shoulder, and eyes the three other alphas. “I have to believe that she’s here for a reason. That this is our second chance. Anything else is just too fucking depressing.”

Davis nods. “If it’s our second chance, we can’t waste it. We need a plan.”

Asher pins me with a stare. “Did you get anything useful out of her? Where she’s staying, what she’s doing here?”

I groan. “No, nothing. Like I said, she pretended not to know me. It’s not like she was in a sharing mood.”

Davis chews his bottom lip before he disappears from the living room. I’m sure he’s going to get his laptop to see what he can find, but I don’t hold out much hope for that. Vee’s been a ghost until now. So much so that I’d quietly wondered if she was dead, a literal ghost. It seemed impossible that, with all our endless amounts of money, we wouldn’t be able to track down one woman.

That she is here and alive, tells me someone with just as much money, or near to it, has been hiding her from us.

Probably my father.

Maybe another man, an alpha, or a pack.

My alpha doesn’t like the thought of that one bit.

“I’ll put out the word,” Topher says. “Send out that picture of Vee and see if we get any more hits. We might be able to piece together where she’s staying and what she’s doing here if we get enough clues.”

At that moment, I get a ping on my phone. I pull it out to find a picture of Vee cradling three bottles of wine and a frozen pizza in her arms as she walks down the street, that same glazed, lost expression in her eyes.

I show Topher the picture. “Right now, it looks like she’s throwing a party.”

Topher’s brows lower. “She doesn’t look happy, Jacks.” He’s not wrong. She looks like she got run over by an emotional truck. And the closer I examine her, the more I see. She looks like she’s been sick recently. Her skin used to be sun-kissed gold, now it’s pale and slightly gray. There are dark circles under her eyes, and she’s lost weight. Or I guess, I should say, she hasn’t gained weight. She’s twenty-four now and she should have grown into her curves, but she almost looks malnourished, even with her curvy hips and generous tits.

Whoever has been hiding her from us certainly hasn’t been taking care of her in the way she so clearly needs. It makes everything in my alpha roar with the need to find her, scoop her up and force feed her all the things she loved to eat as a seventeen-year-old.

She’s still painfully beautiful, though.

It’s okay. I blow out a breath to calm myself. Because she’s here now and we aren’t letting her go.

My alpha is riding me, making me need to dominate, claim, control something… anything. What I really want to do is cut through the woods to Vee’s grandmother’s house, knock down the door, tie her up and make her listen to us. And then I want to kiss every fucking inch of her, wrap her in soft blankets and hand feed her until she doesn’t look so… sick.

We know that’s where she is. One of our guys followed her to the dilapidated house and, as far as I know, she hasn’t left.

I wonder if it’ll surprise her to learn that we bought the land around our little cabin, built our pack house there. The cabin is still there, tucked at the back of the property, with in view of the main pack house, just waiting for her to come back.

We built the house with her in mind as well. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it gave all of us something to focus on when we were looking for her. Every step we’ve made over the last seven years has been working toward finding her, protecting her, and giving her the life she deserves.

It’s the only way my alpha could continue to function once she was gone. By pretending she was coming back.

I’ve gotten very good at lying to myself over the years, at convincing myself that her absence was temporary and everything was going to be fine when she returned. We’d be a pack again.

Though is it a lie if she did come back? If she’s here now, just like I promised myself she would be?

We’ve been talking for hours, planning, coming up with the best way to get her to stay, to talk to us, to listen. I feel more settled with a plan, but I’m still anxious as fuck, still have excess energy racing through my veins.

Arms wrap around me at the same time Topher’s lemon and mint scent reaches my nostrils. He nuzzles his face into the nape of my neck, almost as tall as me, but not quite, and takes a deep inhale.

He doesn’t say anything. Just slides his hands down my chest, my abs and to the button of my slacks. I groan as he pops it and plunges his hand inside, finding me hard and ready for him. Strong rough fingers curl around my shaft and give me a rough stroke. My hips thrust forward, and a pleased sound hums from my beta.

“Having her so close has you all riled up, doesn’t it?”

I swallow thickly and nod, curling my hand around his, forcing his grip tighter as I thrust into it. “I don’t think I can do gentle tonight, babe.”

His lips brush against my neck in a soft kiss, and then he nips at the corner of my jaw before trailing his mouth up to my ear. “That’s okay. You know you never have to be gentle with me. I like it rough.”

My eyes slip closed as I take a moment, just one peaceful breath with his hand wrapped around my cock, stroking, stroking, stroking.

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