Page 3 of Ayden

“I’m sure you do, but I’m going to leave that alone. For now. So long as nothing comes back to bite me in the balls about it.” She assured him, like assuring the mom, told him that he was not going to be bitten by any of it. “Gilbert has a list of crimes that are longer than I am standing up. I guess the Feds were looking for him about a month ago, and he sort of skipped around until they left him here. I’m not saying that there would be fewer deaths had they really looked. There are three men off the lists of most wanted right now, and I’m happy with the results.”

“I think that a great many people will be.” He nodded and watched with her the reunion between a mother and her kids. “She’s Ayden’s mate. Or his? I’m not sure how they say that. The girls couldn’t be any safer so long as he had breath in his body. Not to mention, they’ll grow up not to be so terrified of every little thing. You know all of us well enough that we’ll keep the three of them safe as well.”

“You keep saying that. Like you know there is going to be trouble. Do you?” She told him that she didn’t, not anymore. “I’m not sure what that means either, but I’m too overwhelmed right now to chase you down about it. Just tell me when something like this is going to happen, and I’ll be as happy as I’ve ever been.”

After talking, she made her way to Edmond. He was standing guard over the little family, and she was glad that someone was. Once one of the officers came to talk to Ayden and Summer, Edmond followed her to the furthest away car.

“It’s all gone.” She nodded at him, and he smiled at her. “I have to tell you, I’m sort of sad about that. It was neat knowing that I could use my green spider shit and wrap people up. It was like it was there for us to use just one time, and then it just faded away. I even asked Lica about the stuff we shared with him. He didn’t know what I was talking about. Is that the way it was supposed to work, you think?”

“Yeah, I do.” Mac looked up at the man of her dreams. “You know what happened in there, don’t you? What I had to do?” He nodded and kissed her on the mouth.

“How do you feel about being able to save a life the way that I had. There were shots fired directly at the officer that day, right into his head. Had I not been there to wrap him up in that vine stuff, he would have surely died. The same way with Harlequin, too, I’m guessing.”

She smiled at him when he asked her if she’d killed Gilbert. “Yes. He was holding his daughter hostage when I arrived. The bad guys had already been shot up and left. Gilbert thought that I was the police coming in. He wasn’t going to jail, he told me. To which I thought was a wonderful idea. So he fired right into her head. Once I got her wrapped up and put into the bedroom with her sister who was still alive as well, I took care of him.” Edmond asked her if she thought he should know how she’d done that. “No. Let’s just say what they saw in there is nothing at all as to what the living room looked like when she was finished with him.”

“And the girls?” She told him that Selma had been lying in her doorway with a bullet to her head, and she’d been able to heal her quickly. But it had taken her a bit longer, and that waswhy Harley had been hurt, too. “Do you think that there will be any kind of payback? For keeping the girls alive? I mean, they, whoever it was that gave us this, they’re not going to make us choose someone else to die because of what we’d done here today?”

“No. I believe, and it is really hard to believe, that you and I were chosen to do this deed for the families of those saved. At some point? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll be around long enough to see what purpose they were to serve because we saved them both.

Chapter 1

Summer didn’t know a thing about looking into purchasing a house. How to make an offer on one, or even to know what questions to ask when it was time to put in one. As it was right now, all she knew about any house was that it was necessary and that it needed bathrooms. The house that she and her daughters had lived in was given to them by the government, and there had been no picking out carpet or bedroom furniture, nor did she get to decide what size refrigerator they needed. It was there to use, and that was what she’d used.

“There are five bedrooms on the second floor, including the master bedroom.” The woman with her, Shelly something, had been with her throughout the entire house-hunting experience. When she saw Ayden coming through the front door, she turned to go to him to figure out what the hell he’d been thinking in asking her to look at the house.

“I don’t know anything about this place.” He took a step back, and she thought about how she must have looked running up to him the way that she had. “The girls love this one because of the pool and the fenced-in back yard. I might have told them that we’d get a dog one of these days if we had a house and a yard.”

“A dog would be good for the two of them as it would know to keep them safe. As for buying a house? I know less than you do. At least you know what should be in one that doesn’t have a half dozen men living in it and messing things up.” She’d forgotten that he’d lived with his brothers his entire life. “What do you think about this house? Anywhere you want, you can have a pool and fenced-in back yard. Also, there are things that can be fixed. I only know that because of my brother’s home. Things that are outdated can be taken care of as well.”

“I told the girls that. They don’t want to give me any chanceto change my mind about the place.” He asked her if she’d done that before. “ Change my mind? Sure, what parent hasn’t? But I think they were thinking that if the pool is here now, I can’t tell them that we can’t afford it when summer rolls around. Same with the dog. I want to get them one…what does that have to do with your brother and him being the alpha? A great deal, I’m betting.”

“Yes, they’re all loyal to him. Not as much to us, but they’ll die to protect anyone that he tells them to. As for the pool? I guess I can see that.” She knew that she was his mate. What did that entail? She didn’t know. There had been enough information about mates around that she had an idea that they were supposed to be together forever. However, she’d been with a man before and didn’t much trust the forever bullshit. “I’m sorry I’m late, but there was trouble at the house we’re using to store things for people in need.”

Last night, Ayden told her that he couldn’t work around meat, eat it, or do anything else that had to do with beef or the like. Mostly, it was red meat, and he told her why. It sort of made her ill to think about it as well, and she’d not even been around when it had happened.

Ayden had been helping out Brandy by trying to see why the restaurant that she was supposed to invest in was losing money. He’d been an undercover dishwasher for a week when he found out that they were serving him dead body meat rather than the meat that had come from the slaughterhouse like his brother had been working on. He’d been sick since. Every time he thought of having a nice steak, even his wolf would have a belly ache and then nightmares on top of that.

It made her sick to think how people treated other people who would just kill them and serve them up on the menu like they were nothing. She’d yet to tell her daughters, but then she didn’t know that she would either. It was just too much to put ona couple of eight year old kids.

“What do you think of this place?” Ayden told her that he liked the yard and the fenced-in part of it. But he didn’t know anything about the kitchen. He could cook, he told her, but he’d never had his own place where he might want to cook for several people. “I guess I can see that too. My daughters aren’t all that picky, but they do have choices in mind when it comes to feeding them.”

“I’ve never fed a little girl, so you’re up on that for me, too.” She nodded, and they headed to the kitchen. There was something about the big room that she did not care for. It wasn’t until Ayden joined her in the room that it occurred to her. “What do you mean? It’s not very large. It seems large enough to me.”

“Think of this room with the four of us in it trying to get ready for school. I’m assuming since your brother has staff, we might have a cook, too. I’m not saying that I’m there with you yet, I don’t even know if I like you all that much, but it would be hard to get around with food and getting them out the door while in here in time for school or whatever else they might have going on. No, I don’t care for the kitchen. And that reminds me, your brother told me that he filed it with the city that the two of us are married and that you adopted the girls. I’ve not told them yet, but he said you’d understand. I don’t know that I like that anymore than I do this kitchen.”

“He did that because of your in-laws. Did you know that the Fortrights want to take the girls from you?” It was the first that she’d heard about it. “Brandy found the couple, and the police let them know that their son was dead. And in that, they told her about the girls. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a secret or not, but they know now and think that it’s all your fault that Gilbert is dead.”

“Are you going to be like this forever? Just saying what you want without any lead-up?” He looked at her, confused. “Youmight well have worked your way up to that. I don’t know, maybe they said that they wanted to meet their granddaughters and then come up with…you know what? I don’t want that either. You leading up to things. I’d rather you just tell me what’s going on so that I’m not blindsided. I’m sorry. Yes, I want to have it out in the open when you tell me something. And no, I didn’t know that they wanted the girls.” She thought of her in-laws. “They never seemed to want to have anything to do with them before. I wonder why they do now.”

“I have no idea, as I’ve never met any of them. But as for telling you straight up, I can do that for you. And just so you know, I’d like to have my information that way as well. I don’t like beating around the bush for things.” He helped get the girls out of the back yard and into the car.

The girls seemed to like Ayden more than they did her most of the time, anyway. After getting them loaded into the car and on the road, she was set to go to another house on the list of houses she was to look at.

She’d been living in federally subsidized homes before her ex-husband Gilbert had been killed last week. She found out that when he’d been watching his own kids—thinking that he needed to be paid to do so, he’d been dealing drugs from her place while having her children locked in their rooms or bathroom. One of her daughters, Selma, had been shot while the deal was going down, and without the help of Mac, one of Ayden’s sisters-in-law, and her magic, she might well have lost her.

Sometimes, it was too much to think about, others she just couldn’t believe how lucky she was that she’d found her mate in Ayden, who had come with a very caring and loving bunch of men. Their size only made her nervous, but she was never afraid of them, however.

Summer owed so much to this family that she wasn’t sure that she was ever going to pay them back. As it was now, all shewanted to do was find herself a nice dark corner and cry herself into a stupor. Now, because of Gilbert, she could no longer stay at the house that had made it so that they had a roof over her head. Summer needed to find herself someplace to stay with them, or they were going to be homeless. However that worked with having a new husband that she didn’t know all that well and two little girls that meant the world to her. Life was too complicated right now.

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