Page 95 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“Pack incident,” he said.

I shrugged my good shoulder. “Still embarrassing.”

Ronan looked at Ian. “Stay with her.”

Ian’s eyes remained on his brother. “Where are you going?”

“To find out who opened a gate that should have been locked.”

The door closed behind him. Even Sava looked less amused now. Ian stood beside my bed, his attention still on the door, and for the first time since I had woken in this room, his anger was not centered on me, around me, or because of me.

It had a direction.

A question.

Someone had opened the way.

I looked at Ian. He already knew what I was going to ask.

“If someone let the dog through,” I said, “then I wasn’t the accident everyone keeps calling me.”

His face was hard.

“No,” he said.

The mark pulsed under my skin. This time, it felt less like a wound and more like a warning.

Ian looked down at me, and the space between us filled with the same thought.

Someone had wanted something in that circle.

And somehow, I had ended up in the middle of it.

Chapter 13:

An Unhelpful Development

Cassie

By the next morning I had learned that captivity improved when everyone stopped pretending it had throw pillows. The suite was still beautiful. The windows still looked out over the water. The bed was still offensively comfortable for a place I was not allowed to leave.

But beauty had become beside the point.

There were two wolves outside the door. The windows didn’t open. My phone lived in Ronan’s pocket more often than mine. And every time Ian stepped farther than the length of the room, the mark under my bandage began to warm with the kind of warning my body understood before my dignity could object.

Sava called that “instructive.”

I called it “deeply invasive with medical lighting.”

No one asked me to name things anymore.

Sava arrived with a folding cane, a small black medical bag, and the expression of a woman who had already decided I was leaving the room before I could produce several excellent reasons not to.

“You are going walking today,” she said.

I looked at the cane, then at her, then at Ian, who stood beside the sealed window with his arms folded and his eyes on the door.

“Is this because I complained about the bed prison?” I asked.