Chapter 2
chapter
two
“Eat it.”
Avery glares at me across the kitchen island. The dark anger in his light eyes matches the black ink covering his pale chest, shoulders, and neck. “Didn’t I tell you to get fucked?”
I shove the plate closer. It’s a flat disk that blends right into the onyx counter. If not for the bright green vegetables and steamed white fish on top of it, you’d never see the damn thing.
“It’s good for you,” I grunt, flexing a bit of dominance. “ Eat it .”
Avery has two moods—Outright Murderous, or I’m Plotting Your Demise. When he realizes I’m not going to give in, he shifts from attitude A to option B.
With a hard yank, one tattooed hand tugs the plate over while the other snaps out to grab the fork I left for him. Staring me down with all sorts of homicide in his eyes, he stabs an asparagus stalk and shoves the whole thing into his mouth, his square jaw working around it.
He tries to hide his wince at the taste, knowing a fear of green things makes him seem less “Metal”. But I laugh anyway. “Atta boy. Get that protein in, too.”
“I hate you,” he tells me, poking at his fish. “So much.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I hate you, is Avery for, I must like you because I’m using words instead of pounding your face in.
We’ve all tried to teach him manners, but since we basically pulled him out of a gutter, it’s been a slow, painful process.
I’ve been trying to remove his head from his ass for the better part of three years, and sometimes it seems like I’ve accomplished nothing. Until he drops his ghostly blue eyes to the plate and mutters, “Thanks, I guess.”
Carrying my dinner to my usual place at the long island, I pause to swat the back of his close-cropped head. “Any time.”
He spears another piece of asparagus like he’s a gladiator and the fork is a javelin. “You got practice tomorrow?”
Now, it’s my turn to try not to cringe. “Yeah. First one back for the season. Looking forward to it.”
Avery doesn’t buy my shit any more than I buy his. The corner of his mouth twitches up. “Sucks to be a living legend.”
I’m starting to hate that term. Living legend . Implying, what, exactly? That I should be dead ?
Because I’m thirty-five and I still play football? Or does it mean that most people who play longer than I have dropped dead ? Either way, I can’t figure out how to not be insulted. And Avery knows it .
I talk around a mouthful of sea bass. “Sucks to be a fighter without a belt.”
He glares. Back to Outright Murderous.
Eh, just as well. Keeps me on my toes.
As I chuckle, two sets of footsteps approach from either side of our townhome. I could probably pick them out of a lineup at this point. After fifteen years as a pack, there isn’t much I don’t know about the Thorne brothers.
The slow, distracted shuffle from the left will be Spencer. Holding a book, I’d bet. Or a stack of papers. He probably has a red pen behind his ear, too. And muttering—he’ll be muttering about something.
That shit always makes me laugh. It reminds me of the day we met, two freshmen assigned to be college roommates. I walked into the room and found the guy muttering about his socks, pissed as all hell that the tiny dorm didn’t have “a proper armoire.”
The horrified look on his face when I suggested he stash his socks in a shoebox next to his bed still makes me snicker.
Most people who met us didn’t understand how the hell we lived together. Sometimes, I still wonder. There probably haven’t been many sets of best friends who are more opposite than us.
But it just… happened. Spencer helped me with classes. I helped him not get his shit kicked in over his know-it-all tendencies. I made food, and he cleaned the room.
It worked.
When our first year of courses came to an end and we decided to get a place off campus, I knew he and I would be a pack. Meeting his older brother, Tristan—who seamlessly stepped in and rearranged our lives until they were exactly what we wanted them to be—only sealed the deal.
Tristan has always been powerful. I was second-string on the university football squad until he took a few meetings, made some calls. Three years later, I got drafted to the exact team I hoped for. When I asked how he pulled that off, he pretended not to understand the question.
I assume it’s the same way Spencer got into every doctoral program he applied to. And how he landed a prestigious position as a researcher and professor, despite not having a single people skill to speak of.
If the permanent scowl on his face isn’t enough of a clue, his students usually figure that out within two or three clipped sentences.
His intensity scares the shit out of people. It’s for the best that he’s usually too engrossed in his work to notice or care. Although, I do hope his TAs get some sort of therapy disbursement.
Opposite Spencer’s shuffles, I hear quick, focused paces. That would be Tris, our pack alpha. Likely coming from his study, where he holes up and does whatever a senator does.
Years later, it’s still not clear to me. But it must be important because he never seems to relax.
The second he appears on the threshold, his ever-present phone in one hand, I can tell he’s looking at it but isn’t even seeing it. With his free fingers, he clutches what appears to be a dead fern.
Who knew we had a plant in this house?
I would have watered it.
To break him out of whatever trance he’s wandered into, I force a cough. His head snaps up, revealing a serious face and dark blue eyes. “Yes?”
“Got a victim there?”
He nods absently, staring at the plastic pot like he can’t remember how it got in his hand. “It was in my office.”
He drops the carcass on the counter and blinks the sheen of exhaustion out of his eyes.
Shit .
The guy needs to sleep, but I know he won’t. Just like Avery won’t eat any more greens, and Spence won’t do any breathing exercises to lower his blood pressure .
These idiots will be the death of me long before any football bullshit.
“Here,” I say, pointing to the stove top built into the island and the plates on it. “Dinner.”
Spence finally wanders in, his sharper features an odd mix of light and dark. Without glancing up from his papers, he makes his way to the counter, grabs his plate, and sits between Avery and me. The second his butt hits the stool, the papers go down, and his attention shifts wholly to his food.
“Thank you, Jonah,” he offers, crisp. “Looks excellent.”
He eats three bites, then notices our pack alpha is still lingering and shoots him a patented Spencer Scowl. All disapproval, no empathy.
“Tristan, it’s rude to hover.”
When he doesn’t get a response, I laugh, “Tris. Food. Eat.”
Our pack alpha shakes himself out of his own thoughts and cuts us an annoyed look. “Beg your pardon,” he mumbles sarcastically, “But I have to run out.”
It’s nothing new. Neither is the way he can’t tell us exactly what he’s up to. He has feelers in place all over the city, scouting for all sorts of bullshit. Sometimes, he’ll catch wind of a situation and swoop in to intervene.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Tristan’s long-lost focus snaps into place as he reaches for the suit jacket hanging over our fifth barstool.
It’s basically a coat-rack at this point. My Orlando Ospreys jacket, Avery’s ever-present black hoodie, Spencer’s embarrassing elbow-patch blazer. I stare at the empty seat for a long beat before shaking my head and shoving another forkful into my mouth.
Tris sighs at his dinner and casts me a look. “Put it in the fridge for me?”
I feel for him. He’s always running off to put out fires. And I know he hates missing time with the pack. “You got it, Tris. Movie night this weekend? It’s your turn to pick.”
He offers a hearty nod, his WASP-y version of gratitude. “This shouldn’t take long.”