Chapter 3
AXEL
This was weird, and I felt like a fucking creep, but I couldn’t help it. I watched Isla sleep, her body curled into a tight ball, and I wanted to crawl in there beside her. Wrap my body around hers. Sink myself into her warm flesh.
I’d missed her. When she left, something in me had broken.
I knew what it was. We all knew. She was my mate.
But when I’d first met her, she’d been a crazy seventeen-year-old kid with a jagged past and a chip on her shoulder.
Now she was a beautiful woman, fierce. Seeing her standing there, protecting the cub even though she could hardly stand, it had hit me right in the gut.
I sucked in a deep breath, taking in her scent and letting it wrap around me like a blanket. Being turned was changing her already. Her scent was changing. I hadn’t thought there was anything more alluring than her scent as a human, but I was wrong. The lioness in her scent made me hard as a rock.
Deciding to move out of the room before she woke up and saw me standing over her with a hard-on, I crept on silent feet out into the living room, where my Pride and I were sleeping.
It hadn’t been a hard sell to get her to let us stay. I think she’d missed us as much as we missed her. Even Archer, the asshole.
The asshole in question popped open an eye. “You done watching her sleep, you psycho?” he joked from the ground, and I toed him in the ribs with my foot.
“Watch it,” I growled.
“Leave him alone, Archer. You’re only mad because you wanted to do it too, and he beat you to it.”
“He wants to beat something,” Archer grumbled, raising an eyebrow at the tent in my jeans.
“Only thing I’ll be beating in a minute is your face if you don’t shut your mouth,” I told him, lying down on the couch. I wanted to shift into my lion to sleep, but didn’t want to scare Isla or Bohdie if they got up.
“What are we going to do, Axel?”
Wyatt asked the question I’d been trying to solve all damn afternoon.
So far, I had nothing. If the cub had been Isla’s—just some half-breed offspring of a low-ranking lion—that would have been one thing.
We could have taken them both home today, made Isla happy enough that she’d agree to be our mate, and raised Bohdie as our own cub.
But Bohdie was practically a prince amongst lions. The old Regent had only had lionesses, Kara being the oldest. Bohdie would have been the next in line to the throne, if the Regent hadn’t been killed.
“We could take them and run, maybe find a place to make our own Pride. Just us, Isla and the kid. It’d be nice to have our own progeny, you know?” Archer suggested, rolling over so I couldn’t see his face.
I knew what he wanted. I was their leader, even though in the human world, we were cousins.
We weren’t—we were rejects from our own Prides, ran out at fifteen and forced to find our own way.
Well, I was, at least. I’d lived on the streets until I’d found Archer in the same position, and we managed to scrape together enough cash to get our crappy little apartment.
By the time Wyatt came along, we were making enough that we could support him while he finished school.
We’d made him go to college, even as we searched right across North America for Isla.
Now he was a qualified accountant, with quite a little cache of private clients.
But all that would be wasted if we ran.
I didn’t have the answers, so I stayed quiet and let myself doze a little, one ear open for intruders. I would protect my Pride. Of this much, I was certain.
I was awoken by someone watching me sleep. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sexy-as-sin brunette who’d haunted my dreams for the last six years. It was a five-year-old boy with his finger dangerously close to my nostril.
“Move that finger any closer, kid, and you might lose it.” I snapped my teeth playfully in his direction, and the kid pulled back his hand in horror. But he didn’t move away. That made him brave or foolish.
“I was checking you weren’t dead. Lala said to tell you it was breakfast time. And to wash your hands to your elbows.” He tilted his head at me, a subtle sign of submission, even though he’d been raised a human and wouldn’t understand the gesture. But his lion side knew an Alpha when he saw one.
I sat up, pulling my shirt over my head.
“You first. I’ll be there in a second.” The kid was out of the room in a flash, and I followed my nose to the kitchen.
Isla stood at a stove that had probably been rolled out in the sixties, flipping pancakes.
Wyatt and Archer sat at the kitchen table, eyeing her like the hungry predators they were.
She tilted her head to the side. “I can smell you.” It was a statement, although she sounded confused.
“Are you saying I stink, Isla?” I teased, and was rewarded by her horrified look.
“No! You smell great. I mean, good. You smell fine.” The blood rushed to her cheeks again, and the guys laughed.
“It’s okay, Lala,” Wyatt said with a grin. “Apparently, the apocalypse is really happening and Axel’s joking. You’re picking up his scent. Everyone is different, like human fingerprints. It’s just your shifted abilities kicking in. Some shifters will smell better to you than others.”
She scraped a pancake out of the pan and plopped it on top of a growing stack on the plate. “Why?”
He shrugged. “No one really knows. Just something your animal does. It can smell the difference between, say, your mate, and someone who means you harm, and filters that accordingly.” I watched her shoulders tense as she processed everything Wyatt was saying.
Then she turned to me, her big eyes shining. “We need to kill Bob.”