Page 41 of Mated to the Enemy
Decision made, Klaue closed the distance with the other shifter in a microsecond. He delivered two rapid blows to the man’s stomach, forcing him to keel over. As he bent in half, Klaue slammed his forearm upward, meeting the shifter’s jaw on the way down. Teeth crashed together and the man—his name was Korler, he remembered now—stumbled backward, spitting blood.
Klaue wasn’t done though, and he closed the distance, ducking a wild right to deliver a vicious hook into Korler’s solar plexus. He kept circling and planted his foot into the shifter’s back and kicked hard. Korler flew forward, collapsing in a heap on the floor as he lost his balance.
Not done with him yet, Klaue walked over, picked him up by the scruff of his neck, shook him violently and then tossed Korler down the hallway.
“Anyone else?” he bellowed, turning to look up and down the hallway.
The few heads that had appeared at hallways or out of doors disappeared. Nobody wanted to argue with a furious Klaue.
Smart move.
Taking several deep breaths to calm himself, he watched as Korler got to his feet and disappeared down a side hallway with one last furious glare in Klaue’s direction. Once the battle lust had faded enough, Klaue pushed open the door to his quarters and walked inside.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You didn’t need to see that.”
“I didn’t,” Jessica said. “But I heard it through the door.”
“Oh.” He frowned as the look on her face registered. “Why are you giving me that funny look?”
Jessica crossed her arms, biting her lip visibly for several seconds before she spoke. “Why do you keep doing that?”
Klaue hesitated. “Uh, which part, exactly?”
“Defending me.”
He looked away. That was a very good question. Klaue knew why. She was his mate according to the Hunter, and he wasn’t about to let some little upstart nobody just out of his teens bad-mouth her, that was why. But he couldn’t give her that answer. Not without making things even more awkward between them. Klaue wasn’t going to lie to her either.
So he toed the line. “Because so far, you deserve it. You might be a spy, but you haven’t earned hostility, only suspicion.” He snorted. “And if you are a spy, you’re the best I’ve ever seen, because they’ve nearly killed you twice now.”
Jessica smiled tightly. “Are you suspicious of me?”
Klaue sighed, walked over to the mini-fridge he kept near the couches and pulled out a beer. “Want one?”
Jessica looked ready to say no, then changed her mind. “Sure.”
He cracked the bottles open and handed her one before taking a long sip of his. “Truthfully, Jessica, how am I not supposed to be suspicious? We both know you’re hiding something. You’ve done something big, or know some terrible secret, and Canis wants you for it.Bad. It’s not like Canis and Ursa are friendly, or even on speaking terms lately. We hate one another, and while my House isn’t perfect, or even close, we arenotas bad as they are. We would never stoop to the levels they have recently.” He clamped down hard on his emotions, but it was useless. There had been too much pain recently, and it showed.
“What are you talking about?” she asked quietly. “What levels have they stooped to?”
Klaue shrugged. There was no harm in telling her. Canis already knew everything, since they’d engineered it, the bastards.
“A few weeks back, there was an uprising in our House. Dozens of shifters turned on each other in an attempt to overthrow the ruling party. It was ugly. The halls were stained with blood and filled with the bodies of men I’d called friends and comrades, many of whom I had to put down myself. Men whom I would never have suspected of being traitors.” He snarled and took another sip.
“What happened?”
“Canis happened,” he spat. “Some of the bastards over there, probably the King himself for all we know, bribed some high-ranking members of Ursa with more power if they would overthrow the King.” He sighed. “So, those high ranking members started spreading propaganda, saying the King was leading the House in the wrong direction, because he wanted better relations between House Canis and House Ursa.”
Jessica gasped.
“Most of the men who followed these assholes thought they were in the right,” he groaned, shaking his head at the memory of it. “They thought they were trying to fix the House, to put it back on its proper path. They nearly succeeded, too.”
“The Queen,” Jessica said. “She rules now.”
He nodded. “Her mate was killed during the fighting, as was the Heir to the House, among many others.”
“I see.” Jessica started chewing on her lip some more.
“Yeah. Then shortly after, one of their other lords, Laurent Canis, started a personal revenge campaign against one of us, attempting to frame Kincaid whom you haven’t met, for treason. And then Canis tried to kill him and his mate.” He breathed out heavily. “Right now is not a good time to be associated with them.”
