Page 49 of In the Shadows

“She’s mad at Crew.”

“Why?” My brows pull together in confusion. The last I knew, he was avoiding her like the plague, so what on earth would he have done to upset her?

“He had Rogers hand her a bunch of birth control options without any consultation or conversation.”

I scoff. “Sounds like him. Never has been very good with the opposite sex.”

“And you’re such an expert? Mr. I’m-going-to-sleep-in-the-corner-and-do-everything-I-can-to-not-touch-the-woman-I’m-clearly-obsessed-with.”

“You know, I think I liked you better when you were quiet and broody.”

He chuckles and pulls Camilla back into him, wrapping himself around her like he can protect her from the world. If only we could. If only the rest of the world didn’t exist and we could covet her as our own.

I stand and stretch out my sore muscles. I don’t normally get that sore, but I also only tend to sleep for a couple of hours at a time, a product of all the things we’ve been through in recent years.

“What have you got on today?” I ask him, tugging on a T-shirt I left in here a few days ago.

“I need to go to the fight club, and then Crew wants me to do some surveillance on one of Davenport’s men.”

I nod and rub my hand down my face. “I’m going to be out all day as well. I have a heap of shit I’ve been putting off, including a meeting with the manager at the club and checking in at the casino.”

He glances down at the sleeping angel in his arms, her hair falling from the messy bun she had it in before she fell asleep. Camilla is beautiful at all times, but when she’s asleep and her guard is down, it’s fucking intoxicating. “Do you think Crew will be okay for us to leave her?”

“What choice do we have?” I raise a brow. “Leave her with him or Kaos? We’ll come back to a dead body.”

He laughs. “Maybe it would be good for them to spend some time together.”

I sigh and swipe my phone off the bedside table where I left it to charge overnight. Normally, I wouldn’t be so careless around Camilla. Not when she is very much a flight risk. But she spent the night pressed between the two of us, and Kovu is way too light a sleeper to not feel her get out of bed.

I type out a message into the group chat, my fingers dancing over the screen as I wait for a response.

Bishop: One of you needs to watch Cami today, Kovu and I have shit to do.

Kaos: Nope.

Bishop: You can’t avoid her forever.

Kaos: Watch me.

I sigh at how unreasonable he’s being. It’s not as if he isn’t intrigued by her, but he hates the idea of her. The idea of us bringing another woman into our lives. He’s blinded by the past, unable to see the future sitting right in front of us.

Crew: Bring her to my office when you need to leave. She can sit with me while I work.

Kovu chuckles as he looks up from his own phone. “Maybe I’ll stay and watch the fireworks.”

I guide a sleep-rumpledd Camilla to the elevator an hour later. She’s dressed in another of Kovu’s shirts that falls around her knees.

“Why can’t I just stay in my room today? There’s nothing in there I haven’t seen.” She yawns. I let her sleep for as long as I could, but I need to get going, and Kovu has already left for whatever surveillance Crew has him doing.

“Because you’re still recovering. What if you got dizzy and hit your head on something?”

She crosses her arms across her chest, her brows pulled together. “Bullshit. You don’t trust me. You can just say that, Bishop. I don’t need you to lie to me.”

I reach for her as the elevator doors slide open, but she steps away before I can pull her in.

Camilla leans against the corner, her face an unreadable mask as she stares straight ahead, not bothering to look at me.

As soon as the doors slide open, she storms past me, walking straight to Crew’s office without even bothering to look around at the rooms she’s passing. This level is where all our offices are, and it is probably the most dangerous for her to be let loose on. But she seems anything but interested.

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