“What happened?” I asked, instinctively knowing something was wrong with my mate.“Nothing.”“What. Fucking. Happened?”She turned her back toward me. “Noth-ing.”“Why the fuck are you so aggravating?” I said, growling at her. My gaze dropped to her throat, like it always did, my canines aching to sink into her and claim her. Maybe then I would finally be able to get inside her head and figure out what she was thinking, what she was hiding from me too.“Me?!” she said, whizzing around on her heel to stare at me. “I’m aggravating?!”“Yes,Anna, you are.”“You’re the one who won’t let me out of your sight!”“For your safety.”“If anyone cared about my fucking safety, they would’ve helped me years ago!” she shouted, but then she immediately pressed her lips together, as if she had let something slip out of her mouth that she didn’t want anyone to know about.But I didn’t understand it.After tearing her gaze away and staring at the floor, she turned back around and ran up the stairs. I fo
He sank down in the water, leaned his head back, and let out a long sigh. While I imagined Lucas would be one to take baths, I could never imagine Tyler in one even though he was sitting across from me.Once I pulled my knees to my chest, I took in every aspect of this man. He was always so tense, so crazy, but now, he was quiet and looked sorta, kinda peaceful. He opened his eyes, leaned over the side of the tub, and pulled a bottle of bubble bath from the cabinet under the sink.My eyes widened even further. “You take bubble baths?”Tyler’s eyes darkened as he dumped the bottle the entire fucking bottle into the tub with us, making the bubbles pile up far past the edge of the bath and spill over onto the floor, a mess that I didn’t plan on cleaning up. It’d be a good surprise for Asher tomorrow morning.“I bought it for you the day before you showed up in bloodmoon,” he said.“Wait,” I said, sitting up in the bath and focusing my gaze on him. I wanted to really understand this becau
JAKE.In the midstof a tense breakfast, Asher stopped mid-chew and glanced at the table, his eyes glazing over, the way they did when he was talking through the mind link to one of the warriors in our pack. I watched him carefully and listened as Sina moved around upstairs in her room.Suddenly, Asher shot up from the table, eyes completely golden, and hurried toward the front door. “Jake,” Asher called before looking back at him, “watch Pretty Bird. There are two of her father’s men at our borders that we need to take care of.”Tyler stood up from the table, his eyes turning almost black, then stormed out the front door before Asher could. But Lucas lingered behind with me, his movements slower than usual.“You don’t want my help?” I asked, knowing that I’d be more helpful than Lucas .“Lucas,” Asher growled because we all knew that Lucas would be the one to fuck Anna alone next if we left him with her.They were the closest out of all of us and had always had a connection that Asher
Once he left, I stumbled into the pack house.Anna pushed me down onto the couch. I held a large hand over my abdomen to hold the bleeding wound closed, my chest rising and falling quickly. As Anna scrambled through the house to find the medical supplies, I took a deep breath, bit my tongue, and slipped my fingers down into the gash. I felt around my insides to try to find the bullet, but it was lodged too deep.When Anna came back over to me, she stared at me in horror. “What are you doing?!” she exclaimed, pushing my hands out of the way and using a utensil to slide into my wound. “You have to be careful! You can’t just poke around inside there.”Within a few moments, Anna clamped down on the bullet with the utensil, winced, and slowly pulled the bullet out of me. She dropped it into a small dish, then cleaned the wound with some alcohol and some potion that we had bought from witches who lived down in Bloodmoon.“What did they lace this bullet with?” Anna asked, picking the piece of
Once Elise left, I eyed Lucas’s pocket, where he had hidden that circular loop thing that all the guys had been exchanging on our walk over here. Thankfully, the tavern wasn’t as busy as it was at night, so we had the whole corner to ourselves, and they could do whatever the hell they were planning.“All right, well … we gotta use the restroom.”“All four of you at once?” I asked when they all stood.They didn’t even answer me as they walked through the tavern to the restroom together, like they were part of some sort of cult or something. Pissed off, I angrily tapped my foot on the ground and stared at the men’s restroom door. I shifted in my seat, rubbing my thighs together and feeling the wetness between them already. My underwear tightened around my hips, and I discreetly tried to loop my finger around it to make it a bit looser.But when I tugged, it tightened even more, almost as if it was locked on to me.Breath catching in my throat, I glanced back up at the restroom and tugge
As soon as the last few words left my mouth, the witch’s face paled. “Vampire blood?”“Yes.”“But you don’t do magic. You’re a human.”“Give her the fucking blood,” Tyler growled.Once the witch placed down the herbs, she disappeared into a back room. I shifted back and forth on my feet, glancing over at the others, who all waited impatiently for her return.“If you guys want to be strong against the potions that my father creates, then you need to be willing to drink vampire blood. Your wolf powers won’t heal you alone.”My gaze landed on Lucas, who looked to be doing better after I gave him the healing potion this morning, but his cheeks were still a bit pale. When we got home, I would have to give him some more medicine.“Are you sure about this?” the witch said, clutching a vial of vampire black blood.“Yes.”She took a deep breath and handed the vile to me. “Please be careful. This stuff is very dangerous. If you need help or directions on how to use it, please come back to my sh
Asher couldn’t protect me these past four years from all the monsters who had bent me over the side of my own bed and fucked me until my eyes filled with tears and I was begging fucking begging them to stop. He couldn’t protect me from experiment after experiment that Dad had done on me to make me a perfect specimen, a perfect fucking suitor for any type of species who could want to use my body.I had done fine, escaping Dad’s estate, all by myself. I had gone through torture worse than that poison that Lucas had taken and those men who wanted to find me. I didn’t need him to protect me.Doubling down, I put all my weight onto the pillow to hold it in place. I looped my legs around his and ground my hips against the front of his to stop his body from spazzing. If I had to use fucking force to show him that I was strong and capable of the truth, then I would.But, hell, it was getting hot in here. He even had the windows cracked open, and it was October.A low growl rumbled through the
Instead of answering me, this ho of a man walked up the stairs to his bedroom. Not wanting to deal with it anymore, I followed him and grabbed his wrist to stop him halfway up the stairs. He froze as our skin touched, then yanked himself away from me.“What is wrong with you?”“Don’t fucking touch me, Anna. I’m not in the mood.”“You sure were in the mood ten minutes ago.”He hardened his glare at me, and then, suddenly, it softened. He stared at me with so much hurt, so much love I didn’t know exactly what it was. All I could seem to do was stare back at him and wonder what his damn problem was.One moment, he hated me. The next, he was looking at me like this …“I’m fine,” I said, answering the question he was giving me with his eyes. “Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who left while I was supposedly inheat.” And then I strolled back down the stairs, ignoring the stares from the other guys, and walked to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast or lunch or whatever the hell meal