“Let’s grab some food and check on Harper. We’ll see if he changes his mind afterward,” Maverick said, grabbing my hand.
I nodded.
It wasn’t ideal, but Maverick wasn’t going to let me speak with him this soon after he’d gotten close enough to kill me. I needed to give the Alpha time to cool off.
We stopped to grab a few bags of takeout food from the pack’s food court on the bottom floor—I hadn’t even realized it was there—and headed up to the floor Harper was on.
When we stepped into the viewing room and found her lucid again, talking to Oren, my shoulders relaxed.
She was okay.
Rhone was on a chair again, and he and Maverick communicated mentally for a minute before Maverick tugged me toward the door that connected the rooms. The one Harper was in didn’t seem to have any other entrance.
I lit up immediately. “Really?”
“Yeah. If she devolves, you have to get your cute little ass out of the room as quickly as possible.”
“Deal.”
Rhone silently followed us into the room, leaning up against the wall near the door.
Harper’s gaze lifted from Oren to me, and she was immediately on her feet. I threw my arms around her for a fierce hug, and she hugged me back even tighter.
“I told you we should’ve gone to the wolves,” she whispered.
“Next time, I’ll listen to you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“You’re probably right.”
She dabbed at tears beneath her eyes as she let me go.
“How bad is it?” I asked her, hesitating as I pulled away.
“Not great, but I’m surviving for the moment.” She glanced at Rhone. “Thanks for that.”
He dipped his head once.
I wondered if they’d had the conversation where he said he didn’t want her feeding on anyone else yet, but wasn’t going to ask. He had time to change his mind, and she would stand up for herself if he was being a pain in the ass.
“Those look like real, official bites on your neck. Congrats,” she added with a small smile. It reached her eyes, but she still looked like she was in pain.
“Thanks. We also found the killer. Kind of.”
Her eyes widened. “What?! Tell me everything.”
I took a seat on the edge of her bed.
Maverick brought my food in from the other room when I made no move to leave. Harper’s eyes kept flicking toward it, but when I tried to hand it over, she shook her head.
I wasn’t eating fast enough, so Maverick tried to literally feed it to me himself. I swatted him away, but when he declared it a mate thing, I reluctantly took one bite.
Oren and Nolan’s snorts from the other side of the room told me he was bullshitting me, so I smacked his arm with approximately zero force and stole my fork back.
Rhone reappeared in the room a few minutes later with a plate identical to mine. He told Harper she was going to eat it whether she wanted it or not. She threw her plastic fork at him for bossing her around, but when he tossed it back, she managed to get one bite down.
She seemed to shrink inwardly over the short time we spent in the room. When I could tell she was getting close to losing control, Rhone barked for all of us to leave.
