LOGINšŗADRIANšŗ"This is going to be a disaster, do not take her with you." Killian growled angrily in my head.Killian had been at this since yesterday evening, since the moment I told Garrick we were moving out and the decision became concrete rather than planned, and he had not varied the delivery muchāthe same growl, the same words in different arrangements, cycling through them with the persistence of a wolf who had decided that repetition was going to produce a different outcome."Don't take her with you." He growled again."You said that," I said internally. "Several times.""Your brother must not know she exists." His voice dropped into something darker when he said it, something with old weight behind it. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? He must not know.""You're being paranoid.""I don't share what's mine." The growl that came with that sentence vibrated through my chest wall, low and absolute, and I did not respond to it because responding to
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·My eyes snapped open.My hand tightened on something that was absolutely not a blanket, was nothing like a blanket, was warm and hard and⦠I snatched my hand back so fast I nearly hit myself in the face with it, and the heat that flooded my cheeks arrived before I had finished processing what I had been holding, before my brain had fully assembled the complete picture of what my hand had found in the night and decided to hold onto.I had been holding the morning hard length of him.I pressed both hands against my face and the heat under my palms was significant.I wanted to disappear into the mattress, to sink through the sheets and the floor and keep going until I reached the center of the earth.And then I heard it.Something I had not heard before, something that did not belong in the catalog of sounds I had assembled around Adrian in the months I had been in this packā¦a laugh. Low and quiet and rough with sleep, genuine in the way that only th
šŗADRIANšŗI was not someone that ate much. I barely ate, maybe once in five days, ever since the servant in my quarters had poisoned me years ago. That was the reason why no one was allowed to cook in my kitchen, why I had my meals brought in from the pack kitchen already prepared and tasted by someone else before they ever reached my table.But everything about Isora was different, and Killian would never allow me to say no to anything she offered. He had been pacing inside my head since she walked through the door with that tray, and he did not shut up until I took the first bite.And her food really tasted good. The meat was tender, the sauce was rich, and the rice was cooked perfectly. It reminded me of meals I had eaten as a child, before everything went wrong."I know she'll taste better," he said in my head, and I put the fork down for a half second and considered what was available to me in terms of making my own wolf stop talking, and came up empty.He was impossible sometim
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·Two minutes.That was how long I stood in that room with those three words sitting in the air between us before my brain finished deciding what to do with them. Two minutes of my face doing something I was not fully in control of, of the bond pulling in a direction I was not going to acknowledge."What do you mean sleep with you?" I said, and I heard the frown in my own voice before I felt it on my face.Now he was really acting weird. Was the Alpha suddenly a pervert? My mind had gone straight to the dirtiest possible place, and I could feel heat creeping up my neck just thinking about it."What do you think I meant by that?" His voice was low and even and he held my jaw and tilted my face up toward his. "You tell me, Isora."He was too tall. That was the specific, infuriating reality of standing this close to Adrian, that I had to tilt my head back to hold his eyes and tilting my head back felt like a concession that I had not agreed to make.Kira leaned into his fingers b
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·Asher had been watching me all day.Not the obvious kind of watching, not the kind that announces itself, the careful kind, the kind that happens in the gaps between other things, a glance across the guard's section while he was supposedly focused on something else, eyes finding me and moving away before they had stayed long enough to be called staring. I had caught him doing it four times before midday and I had not let him see me catching it, had kept my own eyes moving the way you keep your eyes moving when you are cataloguing something you do not want the other person to know you are cataloguing.I was watching him back.I sat in the guard's section and I watched Asher go about his duties with the easy, practiced manner he brought to everything.His shoulders carried something today that they had not carried yesterday.Why was my best friend lying to me? For how long had he been lying? What was he hiding?The question had been multiplying since the dream, branching into
šŗADRIANšŗ"Adrianā¦you can't possibly be thinking about what Damon said."Garrick used my name which told me before he said anything else that whatever was coming next was something he had decided required the full weight of the personal rather than the professional. He used it rarely enough that when he did, I noticed.He hasn't called me by my name in years."Now you fancy my name on your lips," I said, and I heard the amusement in my own voice, low and dry, the specific tone I use when I want to redirect a conversation without appearing to redirect it.Garrick turned and looked at me the way he looks at me when he is approximately one second away from strangling me. His jaw was tight. His hand had gone into his hairāthe sandy brown of it already roughed up from the last time he had done it, which had been about four minutes ago. He was pacing, which Garrick rarely did, which told me the meeting with Damon had landed harder on him than he was going to say directly."This is not funn
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·I went back to the Alpha's quarters after spending a few hours surveying the environment. It was one thing to kill Alpha Adrian. It was another thing entirely to escape his territory alive.And his Beta was just as ruthless as him, maybe worse, because Garrick
My mind was racing twice as fast as normal.I couldn't stop thinking about why he'd lied. I couldn't find a single logical reason why Adrian would back up my lie like that.It didn't make sense.None of it made sense."Because he's our mate," Kira chipped in, her voice smug in my head. "He's protec
šŗADRIANšŗI immediately pulled back from the kiss and shoved her against the stone wall hard."Alpha Adrian!" Esme yelped painfully, her eyes going wide with shock.I blinked, realizing my hand was wrapped around her throat in a choke hold.Fuck.It was Killian's doing.He
šŗADRIANšŗIt wasn't that I wanted to protect Isora from Damon.I didn't care, actually.Damon used females as sex slaves, everyone knew that. His pack was notorious for it. And if he wanted to proposition one of my servants, that was his problem, not mine.Except it wasn't me







