Trapp
The tones dropped that morning with a clatter, cutting through his sleep as instinct kicked in, cortisol surging, startling him to alertness.
When it turned out to be nothing but the buzz of his cell phone rattling across the nightstand, amplified by the empty glass on the table, he almost flung both across the room.
He reached out, hand scrabbling on the nightstand until it closed around the phone, and then rolled to his back with a wince.
Beside him, Adriana shifted and yawned, repositioning herself against him, her little nose nudging until his arm lifted and settled around her with her cheek pressed to his side.
Office. This morning.
He twisted in bed, stretching, groaning again when his back popped.
He had been in countless fights over the years and had always bounced back just fine.
Not this time. His whole body hurt. There was a bruise on the side of his chest where one of the other wolf’s fists had connected with his ribs, and now stretching was painful.
His jaw ached, his knees ached, his back ached, his hands felt as though they’d been run over, and his head throbbed with a pain that radiated down his neck. Fucking Grayson.
And worst of all — it was an entire month until the next moon.
He would have to suffer through these pedestrian injuries in his man skin like a human.
Pathetic. If this was what he had to look forward to on the other side of forty, rolling out of a helicopter might be preferable.
Picking another fight would not be a mistake he’d make again.
Not that anyone else needs to know that.
He didn’t especially think he should have to get out of bed.
His body hurt, he needed rest, and technically, he wasn’t supposed to be driving.
The concussion Grayson had given him had him off for another forty-eight hours.
He had more than enough PTO accrued and had worked extra shifts every single cold and flu season when the latest bug inevitably fouled his co-workers with children.
None of them would give him a hard time about needing to recover. He should be staying home.
A pretty thought, but Trapp knew better. A summons from on high was ignored at his peril. He kept his eyes closed, deciding to enjoy the weight of her against him for a little longer.
She had shown up on his doorstep the previous evening. Trapp still wasn’t sure why he’d invited her in. Perhaps the concussion was worse than he’d thought.
“All things considered, it looks like you walked away pretty clean,” Adriana had murmured.
She was seated opposite him, anxiously fidgeting on the edge of an armchair in his living room as he carefully lowered himself to the sofa.
“No broken nose, no busted lip. Not bad, considering I heard the other guy has a broken jaw.”
“The trick is to go early on your attack. That, and have a bad enough week that getting your ass kicked doesn’t seem like the worst possible outcome.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never actually been in a fight.
” She pushed up from the chair, moving into his kitchen without permission.
“The wolves — I grew up at the edge of a wolf pack. Did I ever tell you that? They fought. All the time. With each other. With us, if we got too close.” She disappeared behind the freezer door, returning after a moment with a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables.
“You should keep something cold on that,” she murmured, wrapping the frozen water chestnuts and snow peas in the towel from his counter, carefully pressing it to the side of his head, where Grayson had nearly punched a hole into his brain.
It was hardly sterile, but field triage was his specialty, not hers.
“Anyway, we never fought the way the wolves did. It wasn’t wise to draw attention to our pack. Safer to just lay low.”
“You never did,” he had mumbled, as she perched on the arm of the sofa.
“Tell me that you lived near a wolf pack, I mean.” The sweet, clean rain smell of her invaded his nostrils as she held the cold vegetable compress to his head, obliterating the smell of blood that he had been choking on since the previous evening.
With her other hand, Adriana carefully pushed through his thick hair, checking for hidden lacerations with a careful eye.
“Why?”
Her voice was small, as it had been on the first day of her ridealong, sitting beside him in his rig. Trapp swallowed hard, wincing at the pain in his side.
“I’m pretty sure I bruised my ribs, too. Why, what?” He knew what she was asking, but he didn’t especially want to answer.
“Why did you do this, Trapp? I heard . . . I heard you made a big scene at the coffee shop, too. For me. Why? Why are you quite literally beating the shit out of people for me?”
Because no one is ever going to talk about you that way.
Because you deserve better. Because I didn’t protect you when we were in school, and I should have.
I should’ve protected you better from myself.
He shrugged. “Well, I haven’t had much of a taste for coffee lately.
And I didn’t like the look of that other wolf. ”
She choked out a hard laugh, but her eyes were suddenly glossy. “That doesn’t explain why. I thought I was a backstabbing bitch?”
“You are a backstabbing bitch,” he agreed. “But no one else is going to call you that. Least of all the folks around here.”
One of her tears slipped free. He watched it move over the apple of her cheek, veering slightly towards her ear as it crested her cheekbone, when his fingertip caught it, wiping it away.
He hated it. He had wanted her anger to return, the spicy heat of her fury, her beautiful, eclipsed eyes simmering in rage, not overflowing with tears. He hated being the cause of them.
“Were you having me audited?” He saw the brief stab of panic in those same widened eyes, leaving no doubt, and he scraped out a bark of painful laughter, knocking the bag of vegetables aside as he reached for his water bottle. “See what I mean?”
Immediately, Adriana’s eyes had narrowed, the competitive fire he knew so well flaring up in them for the briefest instant, tears forgotten. Thank gods.
“Did you go to my boss to get me fired?” she demanded, moving back into tit-for-tat mode like a switch being flipped.
Trapp choked on the sip of water he had just swallowed, yelping.
He had definitely bruised his ribs, and it turned out choking was much worse than stretching.
Fucking Shay. “Technically? No. I didn’t go to him to get you fired.
I played eighteen holes of golf with him and my brother to get you fired.
See the difference? That’s commitment. That’s follow-through.
You were going to try to pin me down on a charting technicality, and all you had to do was print a file. ”
Her shoulders had shaken with laughter as she pushed off him and reseated herself in the chair. Trapp watched the way her fingers knit together nervously after her laughter faded, picking at her cuticles. Silence sat between them for a long moment.
“I’m sorry that you got one of my altered study packets,” she blurted out, taking a deep breath.
“I never meant for you to. And I know that doesn’t mean anything now, but I didn’t.
I’m sorry that you felt betrayed by me.” Her eyes rose to meet his, that same fire jumping there.
“But I’m not sorry I did it. Not at all.
If I had to redo med school tomorrow, I would do it again.
I had to protect my placement. I didn’t have a trust fund or family money to fall back on, not like the rest of you did.
I had the clothes on my back, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make something of myself before the pack swallowed me whole, and that was it.
” She shrugged unapologetically. “I can’t make you believe me, Trapp.
But I’m not going to beg for your forgiveness, either. ”
For several long, echoing moments, the only sound in the house was the drip of the faucet in the shower down the hall. Trapp shifted. He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that she’d never intended for him to be part of her scheme. Are you being a gullible simp or is she telling the truth?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked at length. “That’s what hurt, you know. I didn’t know how to trust you after that because you didn’t tell me. I couldn’t have known you didn’t set me up deliberately because you never fucking told me about it, Adi. If you had told me, I would have known not to—”
“Because what would you have thought of me if I had?”
Her voice had a hard edge, but it was shaking with an emotion that made him want to punch someone all over again. Everyone who’d hurt her.
“‘Typical sneaky ‘yote?’ Do you know how many times I heard that growing up? ‘What would you expect from a scavenger?’” Her eyes were glossy again, but the fire of her anger remained. “‘Typical scheming pack bitch?’ And I guess it’s all true, because I did what I already knew how to do. Stay under the radar. I used the weapons I had in my arsenal, so I guess I am a sneaky coyote. But how could I have told you? Who does something like that?”