Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
Byron
SO, THIS WAS apparently what whiplash to the dick felt like. Also, I was going to throttle Luca when I eventually caught up to him.
I’d never gotten hard so fast in my fucking life as when I’d opened that door and scented Luca and rom-com girl going at it like bunnies in Luca’s nest. And I’d never gone limp so fast as when Mia had turned her head, the light from the hallway falling on her bruised face.
Zalen didn’t tell me they’d been hurt . Probably because he knew I’d lose my shit worse than I already had.
And now Luca and Mia had managed to sneak out of the house at oh-dark-thirty without me so much as hearing a door close—alpha senses or no. It was my own damned fault. I’d figured they’d be out cold for hours, between the adrenaline let-down and the sex.
This is what you get for barging into an omega’s private nest without an invitation , the truncated remains of my conscience snarked.
Was I supposed to feel guilty about it? Because fuck that , when Luca had done something so monumentally stupid . Why had he taken Mia into that snake pit? Why hadn’t he asked Zalen instead? Why hadn’t he asked me ?
Why in god’s name had he gone at all?
But that was dumb. I knew why the little idiot had gone. And there, come to think of it, was someone whose head I could bite off right now , as opposed to having to wait several hours to do it.
I stalked toward the central staircase and jogged up to the top, entering the attic bedroom. There wasn’t a door; the stairway simply terminated in the middle of the converted space. Even if there had been, I would have barged in anyway, because screw Emiel and his self-destructive bullshit.
Someone had left a desk lamp turned on, angled away from the sleeping area but still bright enough to cast a dim glow over the room. Zalen’s work, probably. The old myth about waking someone with a concussion every hour or two had been debunked years ago, but he still would have been up here several times to check on Emiel’s breathing and make sure the self-centered fuckin’ asshole wasn’t in distress.
“You self-centered fuckin’ asshole,” I said aloud, and clicked on both switches controlling the overhead lights.
Emiel snarled, clawing awake at the sudden intrusion into his space... blinking at me owlishly with the eye that wasn’t swollen shut. At least he’d been hurt worse than rom-com girl.
Good .
“Get out,” he rasped, wrapping an arm around his ribs. His knuckles looked like someone had run them through a meat grinder.
“I’m not going anywhere until I get a goddamned explanation,” I snarled back.
An unfamiliar scent tickled the edges of my awareness, like someone had left an unfinished cup of that weird hippy tea Zalen insisted on drinking sitting out in the room. It seemed out of place, since I was pretty sure Emiel would rather drink his own piss than drink anything that came in a teabag.
“I don’t owe you nothin’, asshole,” Emiel said.
God, he looked like shit. I couldn’t ever remember seeing him beat to hell like this—not after any of his fights.
“Yeah?” I shot back, goading. “And what do you owe Luca and Mia?”
An absolutely blank expression fell over his battered features—frightening in its utter absence . It was the kind of blankness I imagined a serial killer wearing... or a prisoner of war.
It was definitely the kind of blankness that had every hair on the back of my neck standing up in alarm, because alpha or no, I’d just invaded the room of someone who could snap me in two like a twig. Only the knowledge that I could run down a flight of stairs a hell of a lot faster than he could in his current condition kept me in place.
The silence drew out for much longer than I liked.
We continued to stare each other down—me with combined anger and fear. Him with... nothing .
“I got them out,” he said eventually, his gravelly voice a monotone.
“You got them injured ,” I growled. “ You did that , because of whatever sick, selfish need you have to slide back into the sewer we all crawled out of!”
I hadn’t thought it was possible for Emiel’s expression to get any emptier than it already was. I’d been wrong.
“ Byron .” Zalen’s calm-but-holding-onto-his-temper-by-a-thread tone filtered up from below us. Heavy footsteps on the wooden treads of the staircase announced his approach. “We’re not doing this right now.”
“Then when the hell are we doing it?” I demanded, resisting the urge to throw my hands up in disgust like a sulky kid in a temper.
“Preferably when you haven’t just woken someone with a concussion out of a sound sleep.”
My eyes were still glued to Emiel. I could feel a vein throbbing in my temple. When he turned without a word and lay down on his side with his back facing me, the throbbing intensified.
“Turn off the lights, Byron,” Zalen said.
Exhaustion laced his tone. He probably hadn’t slept any more than I had, and he’d been practically living at the Hope Project for the last few days, dealing with his latest teenage rescue attempt.
He’d rescued all of us, damn him. Sometimes it was hard not to resent him for that. My blood pressure felt like it was about to burst something inside my skull, but I turned off the lights. Swallowing the verbal parting shot at Emiel that wanted to escape was considerably more difficult.
Zalen’s footsteps headed back down the stairs. It was a few seconds before I could force my feet to follow him. He was waiting for me on the second-floor landing.
“Why are you okay with this?” I hissed, squaring up to him.
“Who says I am?” he shot back—still with that tired tone and those soft brown eyes of his.
I wanted to hurl something at him—some piece of eviscerating vitriol that would make him see that he had to shut this shit down . Instead, I turned on my heel and stalked down the hall toward my room.
Emiel was out for the count today, but Luca wouldn’t bail on work no matter how much he wanted to avoid me. If I couldn’t pound sense into one of them, I’d pound sense into the other.
I was waiting in Luca’s office for him when he arrived. Yes, his office door had been locked when I got here. No, standard door locks weren’t much of a deterrent in a place like the Hope Project, full of people like me who’d been well-versed in breaking and entering since we were tall enough to reach doorknobs.
And, okay, relocking the door once I was inside had probably been an asshole move. The lock clicked, the doorknob turned, and Luca slunk through the door like he was the criminal in this scene. Then he turned around, saw me sitting behind his desk with my feet up, and bit off a startled scream—his shoulders thumping against the wall as he backpedaled.
“ Christ , Byron!” he yelped, an angry flush staining his pale cheeks.
“Told you I’d talk to you about this in the morning,” I said, not bothering to take my feet off his desk. “It was your choice to do it here instead of at the house.”
The two patchy spots of red still highlighted his perfect cheekbones as he stomped over, shoved my feet out of his way, and slapped his work bag down with more force than was probably wise for the laptop stored inside.
“You want to read someone the riot act, read it to Emiel,” he said through gritted teeth. “Unless this is about what you saw between me and Mia, in which case fuck you .”
“Why the hell would I care whether you and rom-com girl screw?” I asked, to hide the fact that my dick apparently cared very much about this subject. “And who do you think I yelled at this morning, since you weren’t around to yell at?”
Luca scoffed. “ Sure you did. Because Zalen is gonna let you tear Emiel a new asshole while he’s hurt.”
Okay. He’d scored a point there, not that I’d admit it.
“Right,” I shot back. “And meanwhile, I can see that you’re not feeling guilty at all for dragging rom-com girl into Emiel’s shit and getting her hurt.”
For a fraction of a second, Luca looked like he might throw up on his cluttered desk.
“She’s got a name,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She’s got a name... she’s got a husband... and now she’s got a shiner like she went five rounds with Mike Tyson.”
I only realized how vicious a shot that was when I saw the unshed tears pooling in Luca’s eyes. “No one there was supposed to recognize me,” he said, the words hoarse. “It should’ve been safe.”
A chill skittered through me, prickling every protective instinct in my body as it went. I sat up straight in Luca’s chair, leaning forward to peer at him intently. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Who recognized you ?”
I hadn’t intended for the alpha bark to creep into my words, but Luca flinched.
“People from my old gang,” he said, in a voice like sandpaper. “They said... Blaze is still looking for me. They said he wants me back.”
I was out of the chair before I even realized I was moving. My hands closed on Luca’s shoulders, turning him to face me. He’d curled in on himself, becoming small, but he didn’t shake off my grip.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “No one’s taking you anywhere you don’t want to go. Just... don’t go back to that cesspit. Ever . Problem solved.”
Huge green eyes met mine—dry of threatening tears now, but red-rimmed with exhaustion and stress. “Emiel will go back there,” he said, as though Emiel being an idiot had anything to do with his own safety.
In his mind, I guess it did.
“He won’t if I have anything to fuckin’ say about it,” I growled, wondering if that was the kind of promise I had the power to keep.