Page 5 of Atlas and the Traitor

Always that possibility. Always a risk he wasn’t willing to take.

The door clicked open, and he stepped back from the teetering edge, pretending to be balanced once more. “Niall, I’m glad?—”

The scent of dog tickled his nose.

A very particular dog.

Loathing, shame, fear, and a list of other things Atlas didn’t want to name slammed into him, knocking him all the way to unbalanced for a startled second before self-preservation kicked in and he flipped over his hand, fingers poised to snap.

But that single damnable second of unsteadiness was enough for Robin to race behind him and grab his hands, holding his fingers apart. The shifter growled beside his ear. “Not so fast, you stinky bastard.”

“You’re one to fucking talk,” Atlas spat back. “You smell like you rolled in your own shit.”

“Enough,” snapped a third familiar voice before the blindfold was ripped off his face. Nature stood before him in all her five-foot-nothing pissed-off glory, color high on her tan cheeks, dyed green curls piled atop her head, a new piercing in her nose. “For the record, youbothstink.” She stepped closer and shoved the blindfold between the leather straps of his harness. “But right now, you stink worse. And I want to know why.”

Four

Atlas pointedly flicked his gaze down, then back up to Mary’s hazel one. “Can I get dressed for this conversation?”

“Can you promise not to snap yourself out of here?” Robin answered, and Atlas slid his gaze to the golden one over his shoulder. The asshole coyote had the gall to laugh. “How does that even work?” he asked with a glance at Atlas’s fingers still held apart by his.

Atlas scoffed. “How do you not know that?” Robin was a highly sought-after tracker. People paid handsomely for his skills—and for what the hunter did when he caught his prey. Someone you wanted found and never found again? Robin was the assassin of choice for many.

“No one’s ever run from me like you do.” He leaned forward, those golden eyes searing a path down Atlas’s front to where his cock was still half hard. Nothing at all to do with the big, rough hands pinning his to the cross. Robin eyed him from under his long lashes, burnished gold like the rusty blond mop of shaggy hair atop his head. “Looks like you don’t really want to either.” His smirk was the definition of smug; Atlas wanted to punch it off his face. “I see that whole naked under the tartan thing is true.”

“When I mean to have sex, yes. So, around you, never. Voluntarily.”

“His snap,” Mary said, interrupting their pissing contest, “creates a tear in the plane that he slips through.”

“In that case,” Robin said, “I am definitely not letting your hands go.”

Fine, two could play at that game, especially as they were already near tied, the bulge behind Robin’s fly poking Atlas’s side. He shimmied his hips against the cross behind him, aiming to dislodge his kilt completely.

Mary jumped into action, covering his goods and securing the tartan around him. Removing his leverage. “If you two are done,” she said with a huff, “we have three weeks until Solstice. Three weeks to find Evan.”

Atlas feigned ignorance. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then why can I hear your heart racing?” Robin said.

Fucking tracker. “Because I don’t dowe.”Wehad gotten Cole killed, and that was just the most recent tragedy owing to that menacing two-letter word. “I don’t go chasing after ghosts either.”

“Then what have you been doing the past ten years?”

Atlas swiveled his gaze to the hypocrite. “You’re one to talk.”

Robin’s deep, sinister growl would’ve rattled the windows if the room had any.

“Atlas,” Mary chided in his head. “Don’t push him.”

He swung his attention back to the deity in borrowed human skin. “This again?” he mentally asked.

“It worked well for us before.” When Vincent was still alive, Mary had allowed herself to be kidnapped in order to trick Vincent into hiring her to hack the location of a powerful coven. Instead, she’d hacked his network and diverted his attention. “What happened at the Stick?” she continued in his head. “I know you sent me that footage.”

“I lost a brother,” he told her. “I’d just gotten him back from Vincent.” He flicked his gaze to Robin, then added, “I lost him the same way he lost his sister.”

Mary’s eyes grew wide, at least one mystery solved for her. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “Robin is too, even if he’ll never say it.”

Atlas scoffed, seriously doubting it. “He knows it wasn’t me?” For the past decade, Robin had chased him, thinking he was the one who’d thrown the orb that had killed his twin sister, Deborah.

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