Page 60 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“You don’t get to say that and then sit there looking like you’d rip the walls apart if someone touched me.”

Silence followed. When he answered, the words sounded dragged from somewhere he didn’t let people reach.

“I am trying not to.”

That was honest. Worse, it was the kind of honest I understood. Real.

The sedative began to pull at me, soft at the edges and heavy in the limbs. My body wanted sleep. My mind didn’t trust the room enough to give it.

I forced my eyes open one more time. Ronan stood at the door, the Alpha between me and the pack that wanted a cleaner solution. Sava stood by the medicine cart, watching the monitors and the impossible mark with the sharp interest of a woman who had found a living exception to a dead rule. Ian stood beside my bed, hands open, wolf buried badly beneath his skin.

And I lay there in the center of all of them, the human mistake everyone needed to manage.

Chapter 9:

A Conflict of Interest

Ian

Cassie fell asleep with her hand curled near the edge of the blanket, her fingers empty where the phone had been.

I watched that hand until Ronan noticed.

“She cannot have the phone again,” he said.

“She asked for one thing that belonged to her.”

“And if she wakes confused, calls her father, and tells him the truth before anyone stops her?”

“She will not.”

Ronan looked at me then, and the full weight of the Alpha settled into the space between us. “You do not know that.”

No. I didn’t. I knew the scent of her fear. I knew the way pain moved through her body before the monitor caught it. I knew the mark quieted when my hand was near her and flared when I let my wolf too close to the surface. I knew she hated needing anything from me, and I knew she had still put her fingers in my palm because survival had left her no clean choices.

I didn’t know what she would do with a phone, a locked room, and a father waiting on the other side of the resort.

The wolf didn’t care. The wolf knew only that she had asked.

“She should have it,” I said.

Sava stopped packing her medical bag.

Ronan’s gaze stayed on me. “Listen to yourself.”

“I am.”

“No. You are listening to him.”

My jaw tightened as Ronan stepped closer to the bed, close enough that my wolf rose in warning, which proved my brother’s point before he made it. He looked down at Cassie. Her face was turned slightly toward me in sleep, not by choice, not knowingly. The mark had oriented her body toward mine the way plants leaned toward sun. That truth made something ugly move beneath my ribs.

Ronan saw that too.

“You are defending her phone,” he said quietly. “Her dog. Her father’s feelings. Her anger. Her right to hate you. Every small thing she claims, your wolf wants guarded as if the pack is trying to take meat from his mouth.”

My hands closed so hard my knuckles cracked.

Sava said, “Do not make me sedate both of you.”