Page 75 of Wretched Thorns

It was the kind of still I’d never felt from them before. Not warm. Not tight. Just listening, all at once, in a way they had never listened before.

The man in the dark suit looked at the bruises for a long second.

He went still.

Not the still he had walked into the room with. The first still had been arrogance — the still of a man who owned the room before he stepped into it. This was different. Calculation. Recalculation. The still of a man whose afternoon had just been reorganized for him by something he had not planned on encountering.

I had spent my whole adult life learning to read powerful men, because reading them had been the only insurance I could ever afford. I read this one now, and what I read frightened me more than Marcus ever had. Marcus was appetite. Marcus wanted, and a man who only wants can be predicted, can be starved, can be steered. This man did not want anything I could see. He had walked in owning the room, and he had looked at the bruises Callum left on me, the print of another claim on a body he had been told was an asset, and he had simply, silently, begun to do math. There was no heat in him at all. The most dangerous thing in that room was not the warlocks or the wolf or even Marcus. It was the quiet arithmetic going on behind a face that had decided, long before he ever walked through that door, that feelings were an expense he could not afford.

His mouth didn’t move. His eyes didn’t widen. But the weight on his back foot shifted a quarter of an inch, and the count of three of my breaths went by before he moved again.

He turned his head a small distance toward the wolf at his shoulder.

The wolf stepped forward.

He didn’t touch me. He stopped close enough that the cringe dudes moved out of his way without being told to. He stood there for the length of one of my breaths, reading something. The air. The place at my center where the threads had gone still. Then he stepped back and gave the man in the suit the smallest possible nod.

The man in the suit took the nod without looking at his wolf.

He kept his eyes on the bruise.

His face didn’t change. Whatever was moving behind it, he wasn’t going to let it move where I could see it. He stood there for the length of three more of my breaths, and his eyes flattened in a way they hadn’t been flat a minute ago, and whatever arithmetic he was doing behind that flatness, he wasn’t going to do it where I could see it either.

He turned his head toward Marcus.

Marcus’s hands came out of his pockets.

The man in the suit didn’t speak. He looked at Marcus the way you looked at a man who had just handed your enemy a knife, and the part of the look that wasn’t fury was the part still deciding what to do about it.

He lifted two fingers toward the door.

Marcus followed him out.

The left handed wolf followed Marcus.

The door closed.

***

I sat in the chair with two mystics I didn’t know and the bond going quiet in a way the bond had never gone quiet before, and I listened.

I sat in the chair and put together what I had just watched, trying to put together whatever the fuck it was that I had just witnessed. The man in the suit had come here to look at an asset… or interrogate a woman? Assess a woman?

and do what?.

Regardless of the original motive, what he discovered was not at all what he had anticipated and something about it proved to be a complication for him. I had watched a powerful man discover he had no good options, and I had watched him hate it. A man with no good options is a dangerous animal.

The triplets came back to me one at a time, or their wolves at least. I was beginning to sense the differences in their nature and the shifting weight of their presence. A presence I was beginning to rely on, and take comfort in.

Callum first. Dark. Heavy. The fury of a man who had been hunting something for too long and had just been shown the face of it. He gave me weight. Heat. The settled rage of a wolf who already knew which throat to find and was moving toward it.

Then Jasper. Wild. The bad kind of laughing, the kind you did when you finally understood the scope of the situation and the position of the target.

Then Eli. Strategic. Logical. Precise. He sent me a name.

I didn’t think it. The bond gave it to me whole, the way the bond had given Eli the Thornwood sigil to send me weeks ago. A name landed in my chest the way a thrown coin landed in a fountain, and I had heard it before.

Beaumont. Then there was anger and guilt flooding our bond. A message I didn’t quite understand.