Chapter 25
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Knox
“Dude, don’t make the same mistakes.”
Noah’s voice cut through my thoughts as I stood up from the couch, my eyes tracking Lina as she walked toward the stairs toward the bathroom. Inside our house. In our territory. Surrounded by guards.
I sat back down.
Fuck.
I was losing my mind. I knew I was losing my mind. Every shadow looked like a threat. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like an intruder. Every moment Lina was out of my sight felt like an eternity of worst-case scenarios playing on repeat in my head.
I felt terrified. Constantly, endlessly terrified.
“You’re doing the thing,” Noah said, not looking up from his phone.
“What thing?”
“The staring into the middle distance while your hands clench into fists thing. The I’m imagining all the ways my mate could be in danger thing.”
“I’m not doing a thing.”
“You’re absolutely doing a thing.” He finally looked up, his green eyes assessing. “You’ve been doing the thing for three days straight. It’s exhausting just watching you.”
I grunted and forced my hands to relax. My brother was right. He was always right, which was annoying as hell.
“I just need to know she’s safe,” I muttered.
“She’s in the bathroom. In your house. With guards at every entrance. What exactly do you think is going to happen? A rogue wolf is going to pop out of the toilet?”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
Over the past few days, while everyone else focused on the investigation and the security protocols and the alliance with Moonfang, I had been working on a different project. A secret project that I hadn’t told Lina about because she would probably think I was insane.
A panic room.
The idea had come to me in the middle of the night, lying awake while Lina slept peacefully beside me.
I had stared at the ceiling and thought about all the ways our enemies could reach her.
Through the doors. Through the windows. Through the walls if they were determined enough.
Our house was secure, but it wasn’t impenetrable.
Nothing above ground was truly impenetrable.
So I would go underground.
I had hired a small crew of workers, humans from three towns over who had no connection to any pack and no reason to gossip.
I paid them triple their usual rate, covered their travel expenses, fed them well, and made them sign NDAs so airtight a lawyer would weep with admiration.
To explain their presence to the guards, I had told everyone they were doing renovations in the baby’s room.
No one questioned it. New baby, new room updates. Made perfect sense.
They were building the room in the woods to the west of our property, buried deep beneath the earth.
The entrance was a tunnel that connected to our kitchen through a hidden door behind a false panel in the pantry.
You had to press a specific sequence of spots on the wall to unlock it, and even then, the door looked like nothing more than shelving filled with canned goods.
The room itself was not just a closet. It wasn’t a bare concrete bunker with emergency supplies and harsh fluorescent lighting. No. My wife had spent a month in a sterile hospital room. If she ever had to hide again, she was going to be damn comfortable.
I had filled it with her favorite books. Stacks upon stacks of them, organized by genre the way she liked, with special sections for mystery, fantasy, and those spicy romances she thought I didn’t know about. I knew about them. I had read a few. They were educational.
Snacks covered an entire shelf. All the good ones.
The fancy dark chocolate from that shop in the city that she loved.
Trail mix without raisins because she picked those out anyway and left little piles of them on the counter.
The expensive chips that she said were “too indulgent for every day” but that I was absolutely making every day from now on.
Crackers and cheese and dried fruit and protein bars and enough food to last weeks if necessary.
Soft blankets were piled on a comfortable leather couch. A bed with a real mattress and high thread count sheets occupied one corner, because what if she had to stay down there for hours? Days? There was a bathroom with a working shower, stocked with all my special scented products.
And the crown jewel: a coffee machine so high tech and expensive it probably cost more than our car.
It could make lattes and cappuccinos and espressos and about forty other drinks I couldn’t pronounce.
Lina ran on caffeine. If she was going to survive an extended stay underground, she needed access to good coffee.
Noah had found out about it yesterday when he caught me discussing the final details of the room with one of the workers.
He had listened for a full minute, his mouth hanging open slightly. Then he had turned to me with an expression of pure disbelief.
“You’re going overboard,” he had said.
“Shut up,” I had replied.
“Knox. You’re building a luxury underground bunker because you’re afraid your wife might stub her toe.”
“I’m building a secure location in case of emergency. There’s a difference.”
“You installed a cappuccino machine.”
“She likes cappuccinos.”
“In your underground bunker.”
“If she’s going to be hiding from assassins, she should at least have good coffee.”
Noah had just shaken his head and walked away.
But I noticed he hadn’t tried to stop me.
He understood, even if he thought I was crazy.
We had lost Blake. We knew what it felt like to have someone you loved ripped away without warning.
We knew the lengths you would go to in order to prevent it from happening again.
Now, sitting on the couch while Lina showered upstairs, I felt my anxiety clawing at my chest. She was in our bathroom. Connected to our bedroom. One floor above me. There were stairs between us. A hallway. A door. So many damn obstacles between me and my mate.
Anything could happen.
I stood up.
“Knox,” Noah warned.
“I’m just going to check on something.”
“You’re going to hover outside the bathroom door like a creepy stalker.”
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are.”
I was already halfway up the stairs.
Our bedroom was quiet except for the sound of running water from the bathroom.
I could hear the shower, the steady rhythm of water hitting tiles.
I could hear Lina humming softly to herself, some song I didn’t recognize but that sounded cheerful.
Everything was fine. Everything was completely, utterly normal.
I told myself I was just passing through. Just happened to be in our bedroom. Just coincidentally pacing back and forth near the bathroom door. Not hovering. Definitely not hovering.
Twenty minutes later, I was still passing through.
My wolf was pacing inside me, restless and anxious, wanting to be closer to our mate. I could feel him pushing at my control, urging me to break down the door and confirm with my own eyes that she was safe. I resisted. Barely.
Then a loud thud came from the bathroom.
I didn’t think. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t pause to consider that there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for a thudding sound in a bathroom where someone was showering.
I kicked the door open.
The wood splintered. The hinges screamed in protest. The handle punched clean through the drywall on the other side, leaving a fist-sized hole in the plaster.
I burst through the ruined doorway, claws extended, a growl ripping from my throat, ready to murder whatever assassin had dared to threaten my mate.
I found Lina standing in the middle of the bathroom, naked and wet, water dripping from her hair onto the tile floor. She was staring at a bottle of conditioner that had apparently fallen from the shower shelf and was now rolling gently across the ground.
She blinked at me.
Then she looked at the broken door hanging off its hinges, the demolished frame, the hole in the wall.
Then back at me.
“Knox,” she said, her voice completely dry despite the fact that she was literally dripping wet. “Did you just try to murder my conditioner?”
I stood there, chest heaving, claws slowly retracting, adrenaline crashing headfirst into a tidal wave of embarrassment. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.
“I thought... I heard a thud.”
“It’s a plastic bottle, honey. Not a bomb.”
She sighed and bent to pick up the offending conditioner, completely unbothered by her nudity or by the fact that I had just destroyed a perfectly good door. She examined the bottle as if checking for damage, then set it back on the shower shelf with exaggerated care.
“Fix the door, please,” she said, turning to look at me with an expression that was equal parts exasperation and reluctant affection. “And maybe drink some herbal tea. You’re vibrating.”
I looked down at my hands. They were, in fact, shaking slightly. My whole body was shaking slightly, still coming down from the surge of protective rage.
“I’ll... yeah. I’ll go downstairs with Noah.”
“Good idea.” She waved a hand at me. “Go. Breathe. Maybe punch a pillow or something. Get it out of your system.”
I retreated with as much dignity as I could muster, which was approximately zero dignity. The sound of her resuming her shower followed me down the stairs.
My brother was waiting for me in the living room, his face split by the biggest grin I had ever seen on him.
“I heard everything,” Noah said, practically vibrating with glee. “You kicked down the door because she dropped a bottle of conditioner?”
“It sounded threatening.”
“It’s conditioner, Knox. Pantene Pro V is not known for its assassination capabilities.”
“The bottle could have been thrown by an intruder.”
“An intruder who breaks into your house to throw toiletries at your wife?”
“It could happen.”