Page 129 of Big Knot Energy (Shadowverse)

“And the other guy? There was another alpha.”

“He’s dead,” Enzo said, his arms crossed over his chest.

“So why are you looking at me like you want to throttle me?” Her voice grew smaller, and it took every ounce of control to keep from lunging at our pack lead and beating the shit out of him.

But Enzo’s face instantly softened, and he sighed heavily. “I don’t want to throttle you. You know damn well I would never hurt you.”

“Then why do you look so pissed?”

“You jumped out of a moving car on the fucking highway. It’sourjob to protectyou, not the other way around,” Ax answered on Enzo’s behalf as though they were currently two halves of one brain.

“Can we talk about this when we get home?” Amir asked through a whine.

He nuzzled his cheek against Issa’s, pressing kisses to her throat, her cheek, her temple, anywhere he could get to without overwhelming or smothering her.

It wastwo more days of monitoring before the doctors agreed to release Issa to us to go home. I was more than ready to have her back in our house, behind closed doors, and lying in the pack bed surrounded by her omega and alphas.

It had been quick thinking on Amir’s part to shove his phone down the back of her pants. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to track her the way we had. Who knows where that fucker might have taken her or what he might have done to her.

She’d still gotten hurt, but it had been her own doing when she’d lunged from the fucking passenger side door.

I still couldn’t believe she’d done that. Ax and Enzo growled any time it was brought up, so she threatened to sleep in her own bed alone if they didn’t chill out.

Not that I believed that threat for a second. Though she was a beta, she’d been more affectionate, even more so than before. She was constantly touching one of us, asking one of us to snuggle or hold her.

And none of us had a single fucking complaint. The three of us alphas had taken off a few days to watch over her and make sure she didn’t get up and move around too much.

Just because she’d only broken the two fingers didn’t mean she needed to put too much stress on her battered body. She didn’t have the accelerated healing of an alpha or an omega.

And just like when we’d first had contact with her, her bruises, cuts, and scrapes would take a few weeks to be fully healed.

We had nothing but time now.

That fucker Antonio wasn’t dead, notyet. But he was no longer a threat. Bain and his pack were taking their time punishing him with the promise that one of us had the pleasure of pulling the trigger when it was time to put him down like a rabid fucking animal.

At the moment, we were all crammed into the pack bed, some eighties sitcom playing softly in the background, takeout containers littering the end of the bed and nearby surfaces, while Issa and Amir snored softly.

That had been too close. In a span of moments, we had come so close to losing Issa.

Fuck. We could have lost them both had Abdel not kept his head and focused on protecting Amir. A small fact that had pissed Amir off enough that he’d demanded his father fire him.

Didn’t happen. In fact, we had personally hired him on full time to stay in the house until he found his own pack.

And Oscar didn’t die, nor had he suffered any damage to his brain. His recovery would take longer than Issa’s being as he’d been shot in the head, but, thankfully, the bullet had missed his brain and the bullet hadn’t gotten lodged in his skull.

“We should see if they’ll push up the wedding,” Ax said out of the blue.

Both Enzo and I frowned at him.

“Put it off longer?” I asked.

“Nah. Sooner. I want them married. I want to celebrate and have a fucking party. And put all that bullshit behind us.”

I glanced in Enzo’s direction, but he was staring down at Issa with nothing short of love in his eyes.

“She’ll want to go back to work as soon as possible,” I said.

We’d discussed possibly asking her to quit working at the club, but we also knew there wasn’t a chance in hell she would give up the sense of independence without a fight.

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