Page 43 of Married into the Mob
He grinned, and the lamp filtered its yellowing light over his cheek. To distract myself from his presence and scent, I scrabbled in the desk for tape or thumbtacks and found both, along with string.
Hoping Uncle Arnie wouldn’t yell at me for sticking pins on his wall, I wrote “Draven” on a piece of paper, and beside it,one with my name, and in between my nemesis and me, I added Odell’s.
The three protagonists. My mate’s pen hovered above his notebook, and he wrote, “Draven knows I’m your mate.”
I pinned that note below Odell’s name and stretched string between Draven and my mate’s names, and again from my mate to me.
“How?” I wrote in big letters and stuck that on the wall.
“Yes, how?” Odell rubbed the end of his pen over his scalp. If it was itchy I’d have gladly massaged it. Picturing me with coconut oil on my fingers, gliding them over his head and him moaning, sent a message to my cock. It reacted and engorged, and I turned my back on my mate so he wouldn’t see my arousal.
Pretending I was studying the wall, I explained to Odell that throughout our history there were myths and legends about seers who could detect when an alpha and omega were destined to mate.
“Before they realized it and often before they met.” That was what the elders in the pack passed down from previous generations, but not everyone believed the tales, Flint being one of them.
“That sounds more like magic.” I gave him a look, one that he held just a tad longer than expected, and he grinned. “But before meeting your wolf, I would have said the same about shifters.”
My beast was impressed by how well we were getting along and thought we’d jump one another in the next few minutes. But that wasn’t happening.
“I suspect it’s done through scent.”
“That’s how you recognized me, so let’s assume the seer exists.” Odell picked up the end of the quilt and twisted it. “But unless I met the seer and didn’t know it, they must have had something of yours and mine, right? Or been with us.”
I nodded and wrote scent on the paper and tacked that to the wall with more string.
Being an amateur detective was thirsty work, and I asked Odell if he wanted a soda.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite him, I sipped my drink. We hadn’t solved the mystery, and we were still in danger, but us working together, tossing ideas at one another, was what people did who didn’t hate one another. Maybe, just maybe, we were inching closer together. Not literally, as I was on the floor and he was curled up on the couch.
Getting something of mine wouldn’t have been difficult. Someone could have slipped into the club as a customer and grabbed a napkin. It cemented the idea that Draven was on a mission to hurt me, my brothers, the family, and the pack.
But how would they have known to get something of Odell’s? They couldn’t have plucked his name out of the air and then tracked him down to steal one of his possessions.
When I relayed that to my mate, we both looked at one another, our eyes open wide and spoke at the same time.
“Your uncle.”
“Uncle Stan.”
You’re thinking alike. My wolf saw that as a positive sign.
Odell’s uncle had gambled, gotten into debt, and gone to Draven for a loan. He must have scented of Odell, and the seer was there and picked up on it. Was that a leap? Not so much. My mate’s unclehadto have been in the same room as Draven at some point.
My mate chugged his soda, and my mind swept from our predicament to how focused and determined he was. But I understood that he had a purpose: to solve how we got into this situation. Once that danger was removed, the darkness could crawl in, and I might not be there to look after him.
We have to. My beast was adamant we stay in Odell’s life.
“I’m dripping.”
Huh? His words brought me back to the present. Was he talking about slick?
“You are?” I waited, squeeing inside that we’d reached a turning point and I hadn’t been paying attention.
“The soda.” He brushed the droplets off the quilt.
“Oh. Is that all?”
He gave me a look. “You sound disappointed?”
