Chapter 11
Eleven
EZRA
I’ve read the text four times since I sent it, my thumb hovering over the screen at every red light like I might somehow will a response into existence.
It’s fine, she’s probably too busy to respond right now.
She’s probably elbow-deep in stems and ribbon the way she always is, that she probably left her phone in her apron pocket and forgot about it entirely. I tell myself a dozen reasonable things while I drive across the bridge with both hands locked at ten and two.
She could have said no to the movie suggestion.
That would have been fine.
I would rather have a negative response than nothing at all. I hate uncertainty.
Marsh Florals sits dark on the corner when I finally pull up across the street, engine idling, headlights washing pale across the brick. The chalkboard sign she chalks fresh every morning isn’t out on the sidewalk. And the window above the shop, the one she leaves cracked, is closed.
No light. Not one.
My hand tightens on the wheel until my knuckles go white against the leather. It’s barely past eight. She should be walking around her store as she usually does at 4 a.m.
Instead, the whole building sits there in the dark, and something cold moves down the back of my neck like a warning sign.
I kill the engine, and I’m out of the car before I realize it.
The street is quiet. A cyclist passes behind me, tires hissing on wet pavement. I cross without checking for traffic, and my shoes hit the curb outside her shop hard enough that I feel it in my knees.
I test the door.
It gives.
Unlocked. The bell doesn’t ring. Someone’s propped it open, silenced, a thin wedge of folded cardboard jammed against the little brass clapper so it hangs mute against the frame. She would never do that.
“Hey!”
The shout comes from above and behind me, sharp and furious, cutting through the quiet street. I turn. A woman stands on the roof of the building two doors down—flour dusted along one forearm, dark hair escaping a bun stabbed through with something that catches the streetlight.
“Don’t go in there!” she shouts, both hands cupped around her mouth. “Wait, I just need to talk to you…”
I don’t wait.
Whatever she’s trying to warn me about, whatever half-formed explanation is caught in her throat right now, it doesn’t matter.
The shop is cool and green-smelling, exactly the way it always is. The cooler hums. The radiator ticks somewhere in the dark. Nothing looks disturbed. The mahogany counter gleams faintly under the one streetlamp bleeding through the windows.
And then I hear it.
Voices. Male. Low, from somewhere above me. I stay still as I listen to the voices through the curtain, past the workbench, up that narrow staircase.
There. Again. A second voice answering the first, unhurried, almost amused.
And I hear a whimper in reply.
Small. Female. Full of pain.
Everything in me goes very quiet and very cold.
Immediately, I climb the stairs two at a time. I need to get to her. Something or someone has her scared, and I intend to find out what’s going on.
The scent hits me before I reach the top.
Her scent is thick and sweet. Like bucketfuls of roses and flowers seeping from her apartment door. The male voices grow louder.
I don’t knock.
My boot connects with the door, and it slams open so hard it bounces off the wall with a crack loud enough to rattle the window glass, and I am standing in the doorway of her bedroom.
Three alphas. Tall, broad-shouldered, arranged around her bed. And in the middle of the bed, tangled in sheets gone dark with sweat, Liana is curled into herself, knees to her chest, both arms wrapped around her own body like she’s trying to disappear inside it.
She’s crying. Silent, shaking sobs that barely move her shoulders. Her face is flushed dark red, her hair plastered to her temples, her whole body trembling with a heat that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with terror.
Something in my chest tears loose.
“GET AWAY FROM HER.” The words leave me as a roar, so loud it rattles the windowpane behind her.
The tallest one turns first.
“Who are you?” He says it mildly, like I’ve interrupted a dinner reservation and not a room where a woman is sobbing before him. “This is my omega.” His gaze flicks over my suit, my face, dismissing me in under a second.
Behind me, three sets of footsteps pound up the stairs. My brothers must have sensed my anger.
Cole reaches the doorway first, and I see him go rigid beside me.
August crowds in on my other side, his breath already ragged, his blue eyes wide with a fury I have never once seen on his face.
Julian is a half-step behind them, and I hear the low, dangerous sound building in his chest before he’s even said a word.
The blond alpha’s eyes move from me to my brothers, doing the math, recalculating the room. Four against three. His jaw tightens by a fraction—the only tell he gives.
“Silus Thornton,” Cole says. Flat. Certain. A statement, not a question.
The color drains out of the man’s face like someone pulled a plug.
He recovers fast, smoothing his expression back into that same cold, patient smile, but I saw it. The flinch. The half-second where the name landed and something underneath the polish cracked.
“You don’t know what she is to me,” Silus says, low.
“I know exactly what she is to you,” Cole replies, not raising his voice as he keeps his tone low and deadly. “That’s the problem. And we know exactly what your pack did to her.”
I can feel Silus doing calculations behind those pale eyes. His two packmates haven’t moved from their positions flanking the bed, but I can see the tension coiling in their shoulders, that itch in the hands of men who solve problems with their fists.
“I want her back,” Silus says. Slow. Certain.
“You can want what you want.” Cole’s voice doesn’t change register at all. “You’re not going to have it. Walk away, and we won’t start anything. Stay another minute and we will.”
I want to hit him.
God, I want to hit him so badly my knuckles ache with the wanting, my whole body coiled tight as wire, weight shifted onto the balls of my feet, waiting for any excuse at all.
One more word out of that mouth. One more step toward that bed. I have never in my life wanted to put my fist through another alpha’s face the way I want to put mine through his.
Silus looks at me. His gaze travels down and back up like he’s weighing me, then flicks toward his two men. They’re watching him for the signal, jaws tight, weight forward.
But Silus doesn’t give the word.
His eyes go instead to the bed. To Liana, curled into the ruined sheets, shaking.
“We will be in touch,” he says.
She flinches. A full-body flinch, her shoulders jerking up around her ears, and the sound that comes out of her is so small and so broken that it’s the thing that finally moves me.
I step forward, putting my body directly between Silus Thornton and the bed, close enough now that I can smell the gun oil and frozen earth coming off him.
He looks at me for one more second. Then he turns, unhurried, like leaving was always the plan, and walks past me toward the door. His two men fall in behind him, and none of them look at my brothers on the way out.
Julian follows them down the stairs. I hear his footsteps hard on the old wood, hear the front bell ring out sharp and clean as someone removes the cardboard.
Then a shriek from downstairs. High. Furious. Female.
I’m at the top of the stairs in time to see the baker from next door coming through the shop’s front door at a dead run with a rolling pin raised over her head like a woman prepared to end someone’s bloodline, flour still dusting her forearm, her dark eyes wild.
“Mira, it’s okay!” Liana’s voice, thin and hoarse, calls from behind me. “Mira, stop, it’s okay!”
Mira skids to a halt three feet from me, chest heaving, the rolling pin still cocked and ready, her eyes flicking between my face and the stairs behind me like she’s trying to decide if I’m a threat worth braining.
“Why are you here?” she asks furiously. “She doesn’t want you.”
“You brought her old pack in here,” I growl. “They could have hurt her. Badly.”
The rolling pin drops an inch. Then another. All the color goes out of Mira’s face at once, the fight draining out of her shoulders so fast she looks like she might fold in on herself.
“Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god, oh my god, I didn’t…the service…”
“It’s not your fault,” breathes Liana.
“I didn’t know,” Mira says, crouching by the bed. “Lia, I swear to god I didn’t know. I called a service; they said heat alphas…”
“It’s okay,” Liana whispers, her voice scratchy. “You didn’t know. It’s not your fault.”
“Did they hurt you, Lia? Did they touch you?”
Liana shakes her head, and something in my chest unclenches by degrees.
I move to the edge of the bed without deciding to. My hand finds her shoulder, and she’s shaking. I press my palm flat there, steady, willing my own stillness into her body the way I’ve never in my life tried to give anyone anything as I begin to purr.
Mira looks up at me.
Then past me, to Cole and August standing in the doorway. Her eyes are still wet, still wary, but something in her softens when she looks back at Liana.
“Are you okay with them here?” she asks quietly. “Him and his brothers. Do you want them to stay?”
Liana turns her head against the pillow. Her pale green eyes find mine, and she gives Mira a small nod. “Yes.”
Mira wipes her face with the back of her wrist, sniffling, guilt still written plain across her features. She presses one more look at Liana, then at me—assessing, weighing, filing something away for later—before she finally steps back from the bed.
“I’ll be working,” she says. “Call or text if you need me.”
She goes. Her footsteps fade down the staircase, and the bell rings once, distant, as the shop door opens and closes behind her.
I look back at Liana.
She’s looking at me.
Our eyes hold, hers glassy with fever and tears, mine burning with something I haven’t let myself feel in longer than I can remember, and the air between us goes electric, charged the way it does before a storm breaks over the water.
She’s in heat. And she needs our knots.
My cock hardens in an instant, full and aching against the seam of my trousers, and I don’t look away, and neither does she.