Epilogue Bronwyn
Same day
“Francine DeWitt?” I glared at Mason. “You let fucking Francine live?”
“Not my call. When I looked up, the others were dead. The command from Alpha was to leave one alive, so it ended up being DeWitt.”
Mason stood before me in hybrid form. He was naked, and blood and sweat coated his muscles.
I tried very hard—oh goddesses, poor word choice—not to glance below his waist. The man didn’t have a pinch of fat on him, yet he wasn’t perfectly sculpted like a fitness model, either.
He was a powerhouse. Solid, bulky, and flexible.
Betty had once said something about never wanting to meet him in a dark, or even a well-lit, alley. She wasn’t wrong.
“She’s the first one I’d have taken out,” I said. “Mason, she’s going straight to Preston Emerson. You know what he’s capable of, and now he’s got the entire organization behind him.”
“Yes, I do know. Very well.” He did that scary-as-hell smile again, the one he’d flashed at The Org right before finding out that Preston was the new chairman. Right before he, along with the La Paloma wolves, had torn them apart.
“I know you have issues with Emerson, but this is big. The people The Org sent here were powerful, sure, but they weren’t the worst, either.”
“Some might call them the best,” Mason said, half under his breath. “I trained many of them, after all.”
“Of all the times for your arrogance to rear its ugly head. That’s not something you want to brag about around me, Mason Lewis Hartman.”
It was rewarding to watch him take a full step back in shock.
“Yes, I know your full name.” I couldn’t help the smugness in my tone. This man was always so sure of himself, it was kind of nice to see him drop down a peg or two.
“Keep that name to yourself, Bronwyn Jonas.”
My smug smile faltered. He knew my real name was Rachel Hill. He probably knew it was Rachel Nuru Hill, and that my middle name was Swahili and meant “light.” But he hadn’t used it, because he knew how much I hated it.
Suddenly, I felt a little small about throwing his in his face.
“I’ve never told a soul,” I said.
His mouth turned up in a hint of grin, and his gaze held mine so tightly I couldn’t look away. Didn’t want to look away.
“Because you like me,” he whispered, low and so sexy that if we hadn’t been on a literal battlefield, I might’ve shown him how much I liked him in a very inappropriate way.
Instead, I gave him a crisp smile. “Because I respect you.”
“Respect is nice, too.” His smile widened. “I can wait for love.”
I gave him a stern look. “You said like, not love, Hartman.”
His smile faded, and his gaze drifted back to the fight, which wasn’t much of a fight, really. Not anymore. “Better get back to work.”
“Going to have a hell of a cleanup on your hands.”
“Yeah, and we have to be out of here soon. Alpha promised the birds.”
There was something about the way he called Betty Alpha that made me smile. A year ago, he would’ve sooner chewed off his own tongue than utter those words, and now he said it like a true second-in-command. He meant it.
Mason wasn’t the best at making friends. Other than with me, I’d never seen him even try. But Betty was growing on him.
Good.
Because I had a plan to take down The Org and the threat it posed to my Coven Mother, and to make it work, I needed Mason’s help.
In fact, I couldn’t do it without him.