Page 7 of Wild Wolf

“Point is,” Ethan said firmly, drawing the attention of the room back to him. “Rosalie is my mate and I’m not going anywhere. So if that’s going to be a problem then we need to sort it out now.”

He pushed to his feet, muscles bulging, jaw locking, staring down a Storm Dragon as if he did so every other Tuesday. I had to admit, Alpha asshole looked good on him even if I was still pissed at him for helping to drag me here and leave Roary behind.

Tension filled the air, Dante’s lightning crackling against everything, making me curse him as I bit into my apple again and got a jolt to the tongue.

“Good,” Dante said finally, dropping into his seat at the head of the table and taking an apple from the bowl for himself. “Welcome to the pack then, Lunar. I look forward to seeing if you can keep up with me the next time we run beneath the moon.”

Ethan blinked, glancing to me as if wondering whether this was some kind of trap and I sighed loudly, waving a hand towards his chair.

“Sit down, stronzo,” I told him. “You’re in now. I told you it wouldn’t hurt.”

“Yeah,” Ethan agreed, lowering himself back into his seat slowly, still seeming uncertain, though a smile was hinting at the edge of his lips. “I guess you did.”

His gaze moved to me and fixed there, but I leaned back in my seat when he leaned forward in his, ignoring the hand he held out to me across the table.

“We’ll get him back, love,” Ethan said in a low growl. “I swear it on all that I am. We won’t lose him.”

“Maybe you should have considered that when you were running away instead of going after him back at the prison,” I said acidly.

“You know we had no choice. They already had him. If we hadn’t run then they’d have caught the rest of us too. And don’t go pretending I went against him somehow by helping ensure you ran with us because that’s bullshit and you know it. Roary wanted you to get out more than anything, love. He wouldn’t have thanked any of us for getting ourselves caught with him. From here we can actually help.”

I clucked my tongue, muttering some wholly insulting things about his idea of what was best for me in Faetalian and Dante sighed.

“He’s right, lupa,” Dante said to me. “You’re hurting and you’re angry but aiming it at the people in this house won’t do shit to help get Roary out and you know it.”

I shot a glare at my cousin then huffed out a breath. “I know,” I ground out. “I just…we were so fucking close…”

Tears burned the backs of my eyes but I blinked them away. Crying wasn’t going to help Roary but I was fresh out of other ideas too. Escaping from Darkmore once had been a miracle – trying to break him out twice was surely impossible.

“Rosa?” Aunt Bianca’s voice called to me from the TV room and I got to my feet.

“What is it Zia?” I called back, heading through the house with Ethan stalking my steps.

“You’re on the news,” she replied and I stepped into the room with the huge TV hanging from the wall, enough couches lining the big space that it was like attending the movies coming in here.

I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t have time to waste on watching news coverage of the escape but I fell quiet as my eyes fell on the screen where two rows of mug shots sat. Each image had been taken when we’d entered Darkmore, my own scowling face looking out at the camera from above the board denoting my name and number assignation.

My gaze skimmed the row of images from Ethan to Pudding to Sin, Plunger, Esme, and finally to Roary and Gustard whose faces sat right alongside ours.

“The convicts who managed to escape the so-called impenetrable penitentiary include notorious gangsters, a sexual deviant, a skilled thief and most alarmingly of all mass-murderer Gustard La Ghast who was convicted of the abduction, torture and eventual murder of more than-”

“Why are they claiming Roary and Gustard escaped with us?” I demanded, striding into the room and staring at the huge screen, my eyes on the image of Roary taken ten years ago, his hair long and eyes empty with despair. I swallowed thickly. I’d already failed the man in that picture by taking so long to come for him and now I’d done worse than that – I’d given him hope and seen it dashed before his eyes.

“They claim you kidnapped those two guards too,” Bianca said, her chin bobbing in the vague direction of the room upstairs that she had given to Cain and Hastings.

I scoffed. “Those two are more trouble than they’re worth.”

“Is that so?” Cain’s voice came from the doorway and I looked around to find him there, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across his broad chest.

“I thought the door was locked to keep you out of the way?” I asked him in a bored tone but we both knew a little lock wouldn’t stop a Vampire from escaping and that he’d never really been locked up anywhere.

“There was me assuming the lock was to keep your pups away from me,” he drawled.

“The pups are far harder to contain than any Vampire,” Bianca said with a dismissive snort. “But this is a problem,” she added, waving a hand at the screen. “Escaped convicts they’ll give up on eventually – kidnapped guards on the other hand…”

“Once they review the evidence, they’ll figure out that Cain ran with us quite willingly,” I replied. “My main concern is why they would lie about Roary and Gustard.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Cain asked, going on when I gave him a blank look. “They don’t want anyone asking about the bodies.”

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