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“Hm? Oh, right. So. killing you is going to make me look really good because there’s a lot of people who talk behind Vlatko’s back—and they used to behind Dad’s too—about how weak it made them look that they had this agreement with you, almost like they were scared to go up against you. But me? I’m not scared. You might be surrounded by shifters and witches and all this magic bullshit, but you? You’re just some human. Some mobster who thinks that because he’s got magic at his beck and call, that makes him fucking special. But we know the truth, don’t we?” Tiho said, leaning over like he was sharing a secret. “There’s nothing special about you, only the people you surround yourself with. But once you’re gone, they’ll scatter. It’s in their nature.”
The shifters behind him cocked their heads but didn’t say anything. Quinten wondered if they knew just how crazy their boss was. It didn’t matter though. They’d die just the same.
“You know,” Quinten said, pushing the tip of his thumb against the edge of his cufflink, “people have called me a lot of things in my life. Gangster. Don. Mobster. They’ve said a lot of things about me. But you know what they should have been calling me?”
Tiho cocked his head, eyebrows raised like he was actually interested.
“Alpha.”
Quinten sliced his thumb open on the cufflink that had been specifically made for just that purpose.
“What the hell?” one of the shifters said, catching the scent of blood in the air.
Quinten pressed his blood onto the runes tattooed on the inside of his left arm, making sure to cover all three.
As soon as he pressed the last one, heat raced through him, enveloping his entire body. Power unlike anything he’d ever felt before surged inside him, looking for release.
He lifted his head and locked his eyes on Tiho, who was gaping at him. He cocked his head, a sour scent hitting his nose and making his mouth water.
“But you’re—”
Quinten attacked.
Chapter Sixteen
“If I were smarter, I’d stop loving him.”
Nero snorted next to him in the car. “Trust me. If it worked that way, I’d have done it years ago.”
Caden jerked his head around and stared at the vampire. “Wait, what? Who are you in love with?”
Nero pulled his thumb and finger across his lips. “Not telling.”
“Yeah, fine. Keep your secrets.” Caden slumped in the passenger seat.
They were almost to the penthouse, and he still wasn’t sure what he was going to say, other than maybe call Quentin an idiot again. After their confrontation on the plane, he’d shifted and run for almost an hour, all through the cornfields surrounding the airport.
When he’d finally calmed down and felt like he could have a conversation with Quentin without either punching him in the face or breaking down in tears, he’d returned only to find that his mate had just flown off in the helicopter to go into the city for the night.
He’d barely even gotten the words out to tell Nero that that was where they were going then, and the vampire had stomped on the gas. It had taken him a little while to get used to just how fast he could drive. But luckily, they both could hear police radios long before they came into range of their speed traps.
He looked at the city flying past them. “I don’t actually want to stop loving him,” he said softly.
“I know, kid,” Nero said. “You don’t have to either. Sometimes, the boss man just takes a while to come around to an idea. If you hadn’t noticed, he can be a touch stubborn.”
“Quinten? No,” Caden said sarcastically. “But you’re right. I moved too fast. It’s like, even though I know he’s human, I still want to do things at the speed that I would if he were a shifter, and that’s not fair for him.”
Nero shrugged. “I think that this has more to do with his stuff than anything else.”
Caden looked at him. “You think so?”
“Definitely. He tries to hide it. But sometimes, I think he still feels like that little boy whose family got broken up because his dad left his mom for a shifter.”
Caden sat up straighter. “He’d mentioned that his parents got divorced and that’s how he and Liam became stepbrothers.”
Nero laughed lightly. “Yeah, it was a little more traumatic than that. I wasn’t around then. Well, I hadn’t met Quinten by then. He was just a kid, after all.”
“Wait, how old are you,” Caden interrupted.
