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Aden swallows hard enough for me to track the motion in his throat. “Excitement.”
Angling my head back, I fold my arms over my chest, mirroring him. “But you didn’t tell her about us, because she’s too innocent to have ever had the sort of relationship we want.”
She couldn’t even admit she wanted me. Maybe some of that goes back to what someone did to her, but there’s an innocence in her eyes that makes me think this will be the first for her.
Thatwe’llbe the first for her.
“Relationship,” Aden echoes, not denying I’m wrong. “Funny that it’s you using the word before me. Does that mean you—”
“Yes.” There’s no doubt in my mind. “She’s ours. And she needs us.”
A tension I didn’t even know was there leaves Aden’s face. “I know. But Dariel…”
“Her safety comes first.” Her small whimper of terror when the shifter entered the bar shoves itself in my mind. “Someone is after her. That’s the priority. Dariel can wait.”
“Dariel is just as much a danger,” Aden corrects me. “Unless you don’t think he’ll go after her again.”
“She’ll stay with me or you. Once we deal with whoever hurt her, then we’ll handle Dariel.”
A wolf flings itself at the door, but the reinforced door does what it was designed to do and absorbs the hit without breaking.
Aden raises his eyebrow. “HandleDariel?”
“Well,” I drawl. “I didn’t say it would be easy, now did I?”
36
DARIEL
Aseries of hard thumps makes me stir. “You still alive in there?”
I lift my head from the floor and take in the office door. That I’m on the other side of it, and not downstairs in the bar cleaning up, makes it clear what must’ve happened. A second later, my nose twitches.
The fading scent of sex and sweat clings to Kade. And the scent of her.
Saige.
With the scents in the air comes memory. All of it.
You try to kill her, and Kade steps in to save her.
And she fucks him.
My wolf stirs.
“Fuck off,” I snarl.
“Not going to happen,” Kade calls back, sounding so cheerful I know it’s because of her. I can’t remember the last time I heard him sound like that, but it goes back three years. At least.
I shove myself to my feet, and that’s when I glimpse the wreckage that was once my office. “Wasn’t talking to you,” I mutter.
Nothing survived my crazed wolf’s attack.
My desk is a pile of wooden and sharp splinters. The monitors, thousands of dollars worth of equipment, are little more than shattered remains. The overpriced leather chair has been eviscerated.
But the door held. So, better an office desk and chair than a person.
A sudden memory of whip marks cutting deep into pale peach skin shoves itself in my mind. Growling, I just hold my wolf back.
