Page 20 of Brutal Alpha Bully

I jump so hard, I nearly fall over the coffee table. When I right myself, Lachlan Cambias is laughing in that posh, collected way he does, like he’s the only person in on the universe’s inside joke.

He’s tall and athletic, just like he was in high school, with a head of sandy blond hair that screams summers in Cape Cod, or wherever it is rich people go. I know from social media that he skis fanatically in the winter, and his body shows it. He’s a little slimmer and leaner than Xeran, a little shorter, but no less physically capable. While Xeran is from a classic, long-running family name in this town, the Cambiases are a little newer, but somehow manage to carry just as much weight.

Their ridiculous amount of wealth might just have something to do with it.

“Say whatever you want,” I finally snap back at him, knowing I’ve already taken too long to respond. The truth is that the sight of him is unnerving. Xeran and I were a secret in high school. I was, in no way, ever involved with his friends.

Which always made them more like specters than real people to me.

Lachlan gives me a look that says he knows something he shouldn’t, then shrugs and disappears back into the kitchen. For some reason, I follow after him, watching as he tips a matte black water bottle up under the kitchen sink, his brow wrinkling when he watches the water coming out.

Looking back at me, he asks jokingly, “Is this water going to give me cancer, Winward?”

I hate the sound of my last name, and I know that Lachlan is dropping it on purpose. To remind me of who he is, and who I am. What does he think about Xeran keeping Nora and me here?

For years, I’ve wondered if anyone has wondered about Nora’s parentage. But the pills have worked to make her scent strange and unknowable, other than its connection to me, and nobody has even cared to ask, likely assuming her father was some random man moving through town.

That’s what people think of me.

“Probably,” I answer after he takes his first sip.

He spits the water up onto his shirt, laughs, and looks at me in surprise. Not the quiet girl he remembers from high school. Not the behavior he’d expect from a girl coming from the most notorious family in town.

He probably expected me to get on my knees and grovel to him, or to go speechless at the sight of such a rich man. But for reasons I can’t explain, Lachlan has always put a bad taste in my mouth.

And I’m not a teenager anymore.

“Funny,” he says, wiping the water from his chin with the back of his hand. Just as he opens his mouth to say something else, the door opens, and Xeran steps through, his blue eyes shifting between Lachlan and me with a dark, serious intensity.

“Is he bothering you?”

It takes me a moment to register what Xeran asks. It’s so far from what I expect that my brain lags, bouncing between the two men, trying to reconcile everything—the memories of high school, them as teenagers, them now. The fact that they’re friends.

The way Xeran is looking at me.

Finding my voice stuck somewhere in my throat, I don’t answer him. Instead, I turn and climb the steps, heart thundering in my chest, recalling first the look on Lachlan’s face, then the look on Xeran’s.

Those blue eyes, so like my daughter’s, locked on me.

And the terrifying truth that somewhere, in the furthest reaches of my mind, Ilikedfeeling his gaze on me.

***

By the time we hit the end of the week, I realize Xeran has been buying things. Clothes appear outside our door—simple shirts and shorts in roughly the right sizes. Towels materialize to replace the old, moth-eaten ones in the bathrooms. Thegrimy, squeaky cabinets in the kitchen host a variety of standard children’s snacks, most of which Nora has never eaten and has no interest in trying.

Still, the first time I open the door and see the colorful boxes with the cute characters, it does something to my heart—the idea of Xeran ordering the groceries, picking out snacks he thought Nora might like.

I avoid him as much as possible as I heal.

Xeran has been bringing the other guys around—one of his brothers, Lachlan, and two other guys we went to high school with. The second time I see them all together, out in the yard, training together, I realize what he’s doing.

He’s getting his firefighting squad back together.

Most normal parents wouldn’t have let their teenagers fight fires, but Xeran’s father, Holden Sorel, had assisted his son in the process of putting together a wildfire-fighting unit within the pack.

Wildfires were ravaging the entire West Coast, unrelated to the daemon fire, and Xeran wanted to do something to help. So he and some of his friends got professional firefighting training, worked out together on the weekends, and deployed to the fires near us. Sometimes in California, sometimes north.

The idea of sending Nora to fight a wildfire as anadultmakes me shudder, let alone shipping her off as a teenager. But there is truth to the fact that as shifters, Xeran and his squad were much more equipped against the daemon fires than the humans desperately trying to fight them.

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