Page 95 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

She doesn’t argue about that either. That frightens me more than the bruise does. I pull out onto the street, and that’s when I see him.

A gray sedan sits across the road, thirty yards down, the engine off. Behind the wheel, a man rests one arm along the door, watching my car. He doesn’t look away when I catch him at it, and his gaze tracks us until we turn the corner. I know the face.

Kylan.

My hands lock on the wheel.

I’ve never met the man, but I have enough information to identify him from a distance.

I check the mirror, my blood going cold. The sedan hasn’t moved an inch. What is the head of the hunter syndicate doing parked outside Jessa’s building?

Chapter Twenty

Jessa

I tilt my chin at the hall mirror and press my thumb under the bruise. It’s gone yellow-green at the edges, which beats last Saturday, when it was black.

It’s been ten days since Jared Nowak put his fist into my face. I’ve worked most of the week from the kitchen table. I went in twice, and both times somebody touched my arm at the coffee machine and asked how I was holding up, and nobody asked what happened. Everyone knows that the town’s favorite firefighter attacked Marcus Steele’s girlfriend, her daughter, and his niece. I didn’t realize how much pull Marcus had in this town till the news started trickling into my ear.

Out on the lawn, my daughter misses the ball three times running, and she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

Marcus jogs it back to her the third time, talking the whole way down the lawn. He drops into a crouch beside her, taps the inside of her ankle with two fingers, then squares her shoulders with a hand on each. Mia nods so hard her ponytail whips her own cheek. When he rolls the next one in slowly, she plants her standing foot exactly where he put it, swings, and skids the ball past Bella into the hedge. Bella throws both arms up. My daughter shrieks, sprints three steps in celebration, catches her own heel, and sprawls on the grass.

I’m at the glass before I know I’ve moved. Marcus reaches her first, and he’s got her sitting up with one hand cupped behind her head while the other turns her knee to the light. Whatever he asks her, she answers by laughing, her whole face tipped up at him.

My hand stops against the glass as my stomach knots. It isn’t jealousy, I try to tell myself. So why does my throat close every time she looks at him like that? I go back to the sink and run the water to give my hands somewhere to be.

Marcus has been strange all week. He hovers now, up before me, driving the girls to and from the academy himself, doublechecking the locks every night. He’s also installed tracking in my car, ignoring my protests. To appease me, he showed me how I can disable it if need be. I know something’s up, and I want to ask, but the dark look on his face when he gets a phone call and heads outside to go near the tree line to answer stops me. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want me knowing.

I will ask him eventually, but the girls are also shaken, and I can’t have both of us on edge. And I have the feeling that whatever it is will put me in a worse mood than him.

Yesterday I saw Jared across the road from the pharmacy. He’s thinner through the face now, his hand is strapped, and being arrested hasn’t slowed his drinking. Rachel is back in her apartment with a new lock and a new lawyer who’s handling her divorce. All Marcus told me was he’d handle it, and he did.

I don’t know how to feel having somebody this dependable around. Being near him makes me feel secure, but it’s more than that as well. He’s chipped away at my walls so steadily that there seems to be nothing. All my resistance to him has crumbled, and I don’t know what to do about that.

There are still some dishes from breakfast left, and I begin washing them, my thoughts scattered. Children scratch. Hell, Mia used to be a biter when she was a toddler. But never once—My hands go still as I recall the sharp grooves on Jared’s arm. The way Mia’s fingernails were replaced by something else, something deadlier.

Claws.

I set down the dish heavily, my hands on the edge of the sink as I lean against it, muttering, “I have to have imagined that. There’s no way that was real. It can’t have been.”

My gaze flicks over my shoulder to where Mia is playing soccer with Marcus. There’s no way. I imagined it. That’s my baby. I know her.

The screen door bangs open.

“Mom, did you see?” Mia’s halfway across the tiles, grass down one shin, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. “I scored on Bella.”

“I saw.”

“You did not score.” Bella troops in after her, pink and outraged. “The ball went in the hedge. There is no hedge in soccer.”

“It went past you to get there.”

“Uncle Marcus.” Bella spins on him in the doorway. “Tell her.”

“I’m not getting in the middle of this.” He grins.

“Upstairs, both of you.” I point with the pan. “Go and shower. You both stink.”