Page 36 of Deadly Ties

He drops his eyes, his awkwardness now lashed by self-disgust. “Shit. We’ve still got some things of yours. Your camera and phone. Your gun, too, if I can pry it away from Link…” He winces and clears his throat. “I’ll give Cam a call and get him to bring them here.”

She makes a low sound, then pinches her lips together, and I want to bang my head on the table. How exactly did my pack fuck things up so badly in a few short weeks? “Um, maybe he could just drop them to my place tomorrow? We’ll be packing anyway, and it’ll be easier for him to go into the city than to come all the way out here.”

Rory clearly doesn’t know how to interpret that, but gives another nod and heads back to his seat. The bond feels both tight and unsteady for a moment, like his emotions can’t settle, but then he gives me a smile and the conversation turns to other things. The food is amazing - even if the chef is French - but I barely taste it. Cam would be pleased at all the calories going into my body, since there’s a noticeable lack of cream and butter in the dishes, but it could be made of cardboard for all the notice I take.

Crouch is dead. Angel is pulling up her roots in the city. No one can track me in a few days’ time. I’m free, but my family is still fractured. Link isn’t answering his phone and Cam is probably back at their lake house, telling himself everything in fine and his shit is locked down tight. How the hell do I get all those moving parts to come together into a steamy, rock-solid whole?

“Speak of the devil,” Rory mutters at my side, and I realize he’s looking at his cell. “Cam,” he says, tilting the screen so I can read the message. My heart jumps, and a plan quickly starts to take shape. He’s watching my face, and he cocks his head, intrigued. “What are you thinking, Sunshine?”

“We need a bonding experience,” I tell him, although I’m really just working through the logistics in my mind. “Somewhere none of us can hide.”

“Oh, yeah?” There’s enough heat in his voice to make me roll my eyes. “I’m all in, especially if there’s going to be a show.”

“Oh, you’ll be doing more than watching,” I warn him. “But that comes later. Camhasto get in touch with Link. Will you push him, make sure he knows it’s important?”

“Okay, I know he’s trying…”

“Tell him to try harder.”

We both look up as Ferrier says something about dessert, and I realize the whole meal has flown by. But as Arben gets up with his cell in hand, clearly heading out of the room to make a call, I follow. My heart does a little pit-a-pat as he turns to watch me approach, and I suddenly feel like he can see right under my skin.Get used to it, Kelly.

I lay out my plan, my voice speeding up the more interested he looks. I fold my arms, pulling on a little bravado so he can’t see my nerves. “I can do it. But I need you to be okay with the idea.”

“You going to talk to our girl about this, or just spring it on her?”

My skin prickles at the ‘our girl’ bit, but I know better than to call the shots on this one. “Up to you.”

He smiles, and it’s got a devilish edge. “She says she doesn’t like to be watched… But I think it’s growing on her. You could be the thing to nudge her over the edge, so to speak.”

“Plus you and Rory,” I add, because if bonding a pack was just up to omegas, we’d all be fucking twenty-four seven. “You good with that, too?”

He just smirks. “I’ll have a front-row seat.”

Right. Great.

That’s exactly what you want, Kelly, and you can tell your heart to stop fluttering around like a trapped bird because he’s really just doing this for his girl, after all.

But before I head back to the table, I ask, “What did you say to her when she asked if my tracker would hurt me? You said something in your own language that made her blush.”

A low, dark chuckle rolls out of him. “That’s simple,princi. I said,do you think I would risk our beautiful boy like that?” He steps closer and brushes his massive knuckles over my throat, pressing into the patch of skin that mirrors Rory’s bite mark on the other side. “If you’re still wondering, the answer is a very firm no.”

Arben

We decide to head back to New York straight after dinner. The disappointment I see in the little prince’s eyes is amusing, but no one argues when I tell them I want to get in and out of the city before Roan returns. Elvana needs to be safely back on Ferrier land before his plane touches down, and he’s been cagey about when exactly that will be. I get the sense he’s waiting on whatever business took him to London; another thing he hasn’t chosen to share with me. I’d be suspicious if he wasn’t such a paranoid bastard. But it’s also why I’m still not certain if we will go through with our prince’s plan for tomorrow night.

Although the thought of it kept me hard as nails all the way through Chef Ricard’s exquisite coconut cherry gâteaux.

Elvana falls asleep on the drive there, and after checking the surrounding streets for any threats, I carry her inside. She doesn’t even stir when I place her on her nest, which convinces me she’s been getting as little sleep as I have. Her much talked about puppy piles have been torture on everyone except our prince. He sacks out as soon as his head hits the pillow. Princeshë tosses and turns in her sleep, her fingers reaching past him for something in the dark. And while I lie at her back – or sit in the chair at the end of the bed, watching, waiting – the focus of her torment stares back at me with exhausted silver eyes.

To give him his due, Rory doesn’t move a muscle. With his wolf so close to the surface, and his new mate only inches from his fangs, it can only be the worst kind of struggle. Every day since I sank my own claim into Elvana, I’ve had wild waking dreams of hunting her through the woods, tearing her little floaty dresses off with my teeth, and sinking my cock into every quivering, slick-covered hole. It’s theëndrra e bishës. The Beast’s Dream. When my wolf is so stirred by our mate, his lust bleeds into my waking thoughts.

Her exhaustion may also be due to the three hours before dinner when we reacquainted every surface of our cabin with her perfectly perfumed slick. The beast must be fed. And he drank of her sweetness until even he grew soft and sated.

But there is no rest for me, not with her enemies still walking this world. After putting her to bed, I triple check the house’s security, then spend the night going through new messages, checking in with my contacts in the field, and using her father’s extensive finances to undermine the Head Alpha’s position in any way I can.

That included knocking Michael Crouch off his dirty little throne and burning him to ash. There was no burial for him on his territorial lands; the guys I hired tore him to pieces and left his head propped on his pillow for Bisha’s spies to find.

I know the loss won’t mean much to Roan. He’s a master at shoring up his weaknesses and acquiring new, equally corrupt, allies. But it was worth it to hear Crouch’s confession, his begging and sniveling before my team of indifferent executioners, and to know we have new information on missing omegas. Crouch was lodged deep inside that network of abusers and defilers, and all he knew is now in the hands of the Underground. But the real reward was the look on our prince’s face when he heard his tormenter could never touch him again.

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