Page 49
“Last chance,” he said. “Go get him.”
Looking down the barrel, I felt something almost like disappointment. He hadn’t even asked how Phineas was. Not once in the whole conversation. His boyfriend had vanished, and this man had led with GPS coordinates and closed with a firearm, and at no point had it occurred to him to ask if Phineas was safe or fed or even happy.
“You know what’s funny?” Rolling my shoulders loose, I stayed exactly where I was. “He apologized to a spider once. For the inconvenience of being rescued. That’s who you had. That’s what you put your shoe into.” I smiled at him, wide and unfriendly. “You should’ve stayed home, Ben.”
Ben knew Phineas’ weaknesses because he’d catalogued them. I knew Phineas’ softness because I’d paid attention. There was a difference, and Ben was about to learn it.
His finger tightened.
I was already moving.
The shot cracked the night open, deafening off the metal bay doors, and heat tore along the top of my shoulder where my sternum had been half a second earlier. The sting registered somewhere distant and unimportant. Between one heartbeat and the next, I closed the space, and my left hand clamped over the pistol and the fingers wrapped around it, and I squeezed until things crunched and the gun came away with a piece of his trigger finger still hooked through the guard.
Ben screamed. The controlled voice, the mortgage-officer calm, all of it tore away at once, and underneath was just a man in an expensive shirt, shrieking, swinging his ruined hand at my face.
His fist connected with my jaw. The punch was better than I expected—he’d had practice on somebody who couldn’t hit back—and my head rocked an inch. Then I caught his wrist and folded it the wrong direction, and he went down to one knee on the crushed rock, and the sound he made was high and thin.
“That’s the arm,” I said conversationally, “that you raised at him.”
“You’re insane—” Blood slicked his hand black in the lamplight. He scrambled, kicked, caught my shin with his heel, and lunged sideways for the dropped gun with more grit than I’d credited him.
His fingers never reached it. Gripping a fistful of pressed collar, I hauled him up off the ground until his loafers pedaled air, and for one moment, I held him at eye level and let him see me. Whatever he found in my face, it emptied his. His mouth worked. No sound came out. Somewhere down deep, past the watch and the BMW and the color-coded charts, the oldest part of his brain finally did the correct math.
“He flinched,” I told him quietly. “In my hallway. I lifted my hand to push my hair back, and he dropped to the floor and covered his head, because you taught him that. You taught him that hands only do one thing.”
“Fuck you,” Ben snarled.
My hand punched through his sternum like it was wet drywall.
Bone gave. Heat closed around my wrist. His whole body seized against my arm, mouth stretched around a scream with no air behind it, and my fingers closed around the frantic, hammering shape of the only soft thing he had, and I tore it out of him.
The heart came free with a sound I would not be describing at Friday dinners. Ben folded off my arm and dropped to the stones in a heap of ruined shirt, and the lot went silent except for my own breathing.
Standing over him, I waited for the guilt to arrive.
Nothing came. My wolf settled inside me with a long, satisfied exhale, the pacing done, the hunt closed. Some men would have lost sleep over this. Some men had never watched their mate fold against a hallway wall with his arms over his skull, waiting for a blow from a hand that had only ever wanted to feed him. The math had been finished the moment Phineas lifted his shirt in my kitchen. Ben had simply saved me the drive.
Boots crunched behind me, unhurried, coming down the side of the building. Ghost rounded the corner first with Mayhem a step behind him, and both of them stopped at the edge of the lamplight and took in the scene with the flat, assessing calm of men who had seen the inside of a bad night before.
Ghost looked at the body. Then he looked at the heart still sitting in my hand like a trophy I hadn’t figured out where to shelve.
“Well,” he said, “that’s one way to end a conversation.”
“He shot first.” Rolling my shoulder, I felt the graze along the top of it pull and sting, already knitting. Blood had glued my shirt to the skin there. The wound was shallow, ugly, and would be gone by morning. “For the record.”
“Nobody was gonna ask for the record,” Mayhem said.
Ghost had already drifted over to the dropped pistol, nudging it with the toe of his boot before picking it up with two fingers through the trigger guard. He held it up to the light, noted the finger still hooked through the guard, and grimaced like he’d found a hair in his soup.
“He came for Phineas. Had the GPS on the car. Had a whole speech about lawyers and judges and getting him committed.”
Mayhem’s easygoing expression cooled several degrees. His gaze flicked toward the building, toward the muffled laughter still rolling out of the backyard on the far side of it, and then back down at the body with fresh contempt.
“Then he got off light,” Mayhem said.
“That’s what I thought.”
Preacher came around the corner next, hands in his pockets, moving like a man out for an evening stroll. He stopped beside me, surveyed the lot in one slow pass—the body, the blood, the BMW, the graze on my shoulder—and I watched my alpha do the accounting behind his eyes. Nothing in his face suggested surprise. He’d read the situation the second I stood up from that chair, same as he read everything.
