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The man fell to one knee with a curse on his lips. Ash rolled and leapt to her feet. He blocked one punch with his arm. The second, he was an inch from catching, but it brushed past his fingers, slamming into his temple with almost all the power she could put behind it.
Eyes crossed and head wobbling, the enforcer toppled to the side. The crowd remained silent for a long moment before applauding. Most of them applauded. The two who had glared at her when she approached remained just as unimpressed. She planned to ask Mason about them but didn’t get the chance.
When she looked his way, she found him and Derek heading back to the stairs. The pack’s second-in-command held a phone to his ear. She made out “damned teens” as Mason shook his head before her opponent stood, favoring his uninjured leg and offered his hand.
“Those shin kicks were annoying,” he grumbled, wincing when he put his full weight on the leg.
“But effective,” she replied.
“I want next,” said a man from the crowd.
Ash happily complied. After two more victories, her streak came to an end when she caught a hammering uppercut and called it a day. The crowd around the ring had changed, with a few people coming and going. The two who had never stopped glaring at her remained throughout. As she grabbed her bag and started down the stairs, they followed.
The men had either never tailed someone, or they didn’t care to hide the fact they were following her. They started down the stairs before she’d reached the bottom and shortened the distance between them as she walked toward the gym’s doors.
Ash hadn’t recognized them, but she hadn’t been with the pack for long and had spent most of her time alone with Mason. She couldn’t think of anything she’d done to anger these men unless they were involved in the attacks. Hoping for some sort of clue to continue the stalled investigation, she slowed her pace and let them come closer.
“Where are Dante and Jason?” one of them called out.
“Who are Dante and Jason?” she replied with her own question. “Why would I know where they are?”
Ash actually wanted an answer to her second question. Why ask her where they were? Mason hadn’t even shared the bunker cells they stashed the two in with Derek.
“You show up and get close to Mason … don’t try to deny it,” the other man said, pointing a finger and shaking inrage. “And then Jason and Dante disappear. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Thankfully for coincidences, they don’t need your belief to exist,” Ash said.
Neither of the men blocking her path appreciated that line. One sneered. The finger pointer’s eyes widened. His finger shook as he stabbed it in Ash’s direction.
“Traitor!” he yelled with one last stabbing point. “That’s what I think you are. You’re probably behind the attacks, too. You weaseled your way into the pack and disappeared Jason and Dante because they got too close to the truth.”
Ash shook her head. She had hoped they might have been involved in the attacks themselves. They wouldn’t have accused her of it away from others if it were a double bluff of some sort. You got nothing accusing someone of your own actions out of anyone else’s earshot.
“Traitor!” the second man added at an ear-splitting volume.
They hadn’t confronted Ash that far from the gym’s entrance, and their bellows had not gone unheard. At first, someone peeked out the door and then ducked back inside. Half a dozen soon stepped out to watch the confrontation. So much for Ash’s discounted double bluff.
With a growing crowd whispering to themselves and her accusers’ anger growing, Ash wanted nothing more than to de-escalate the situation. That left the question of how. The old her, before the mating bond with Mason, would have ended it quickly and violently.
She wasn’t that lone wolf anymore. She’d become the mate of the pack’s alpha, even if they hadn’t shared that fact yet. Her actions might as well have been his. Lashing out at these two men made a hell of a bad early impression. At the same time, she couldn’t let their words go unchallenged.
“I don’t know what your problems are with me,” she said, glare never faltering from the closer of the two shifter’s eyes. “But I have done nothing outside the interests of Mason and the pack.”
A staring contest with a shifter was almost always a bad idea, at least for a human. The inner beast saw eye contact the same as their wild cousins. A person who looked a predator in the eye wasn’t intimidated. They were a challenge.
Her accuser’s lips trembled. He was stuck between the need to meet her challenge and the understanding of what that entailed. He’d watched her in the ring. He knew what she could do.
“What’s going on here?” Mason’s voice called out from behind her.
The two men standing before her immediately relaxed, and the accusatory finger dropped. Mason stalked between them. His angry eyes softened when he looked at her, but that sharpness returned as he scanned the crowd that had grown.
“Ash is my mate,” he said slowly. “I will not stand by while she is disrespected.”
That sent a whisper through the crowd, but they quickly dispersed along with the two men, leaving Ash and Mason alone. He glanced at her with a raised eyebrow.
“They accused me of being behind the attacks,” she answered his tacit question. “And for doing something with Jason and Dante to find out the truth.”
“Friends of theirs,” Mason replied. “So close to the truth, yet so far.”
