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Chapter Twenty-Five
Meridia hadn’t gonestraight to Niko.
Uneasy, Zee eyed her friend and wondered what kind of mischief she had in mind. Meridia was many things—predictable was not one of them. She didn’t make it a habit to flout long-held rules of acceptable behavior, but this was a complicated situation—Meri was here not as the Regnar, but as a friend to a woman grieving, which she’d made clear by approaching Zee first.
If she’d been a Therian, she’d never be able to casually shrug off Niko’s presence until she felt like talking to him, despite her connection to the deceased’s family.
But... she wasn’t.
Meri would twist every little exception possible out of those caveats to accepted behavior.
Nearly a half-hour had passed and next to nobody had approached Zee since Meri walked away. It was like they all waited on edge, to see what happened between the two strongest Preterns, both of them acutely aware of the other, yet neither of them apparently ready to close the distance for the inevitable faceoff.
That wasn’t the only reason Zee was uncomfortable.
Those vague whispers of unease had increased, dancing along her spine until her skin literally crawled.
There was a fine line between Shale’s brows when she glanced at him. She wondered if he’d sensed it as well. And that thought reminded her of what Niko had said about the big man with the odd green eyes—lush forests and the gentle softness of a dawning spring.
“You feel it, too.”
He slanted a narrow look at her but it was so quick, nobody would have noticed, unless they’d really, really been looking.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, his gaze returning to the crowd, the vigilant bodyguard on task. “I imagine you’d like a walk, Ms. Day. Get a breath of air, away from the crowd.”
“Thank God.” She took the arm he offered, so desperate to get away from the crawling power in the air, she could have kissed him.
She might have done so, too, just to tweak Niko’s nose. But even above all that simmering energy, she could feel Niko’s tension.
He can’t help being possessive. We’re Therian. It’s in our genes, in our bones.
Since she wanted to snap the head off any woman who went too close or dared touch him, she decided she’d behave herself.
“You’re certain you don’t mind missing the show?” Shale asked, mischief coloring his voice as they made their way to the outer edge of the crowd, then the clearing.
Eyes already adjusted to the dark as they stepped into the heavy growth of trees, Zee gave him a narrow look. “You know, I’m just starting to think I might like you. But if you go down that road... ”
“Forget I said anything.” He mimed turning a key at his mouth, then threw it over his shoulder. As he did so, he shifted those heavily muscled slabs, a restless movement that spoke to the edginess within Zee.
“What are you?” she asked, not even thinking of how rude it sounded until the question was already hanging between them. Color flooded her face and she snapped her jaw shut, mortified. “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to ask. I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright.” With his free hand, he patted hers, then pressed down, holding her in place when she would have pulled back. “You’ve spent most of your life feeling cut adrift, I’d wager, not certain exactly who you are. Even before you found out about your Fae ancestry, you never quite fit in with your pack, did you?”
“If you knew anything about the pack I was raised in, you’d know it was a good thing, not fitting in.”
“Oh, I know about the monsters who made up Greylock before the former Prime cleaned house, Zee,” he said, his voice hardly more than a growl. “I hope it doesn’t bother you to hear this, but I was one of the soldiers he took with him that first trip up there. I watched as the old alpha was dispatched. My first kill happened there, one of the soldiers who tried to go at Niko’s back while he stood as his father’s second during the fight between him and the Greylock Alpha—not that you could really call it a fight. It was a fucking slaughter, over in less than two minutes.”
She hadn’t heard much about what had happened when Jameson Whelan went to Greylock, although she had heard it had been brutal—and final.
“No,” she said in a tight voice. “It doesn’t bother me. Hearing he died? It’s quite satisfactory.”
“Royal Graves died on his knees, his guts spilled out and pleading for mercy. There’s a bit more satisfaction for you. Niko dispatched all four lieutenants as his father watched.”
A spiky, ugly steel cage, one that had encased her heart for so long she’d all but forgotten it, cracked open the smallest fraction.
“Do you want to know more about that night?”
There had never been a time when she’d thought she’d want to hear something about Greylock, but now? “Yes. Tell me everything.”
