before him.
What the hell had happened?
The last time he saw Drew he’d been sitting down stairs, sipping a glass of whiskey and watching the clock, counting down the minutes until he was finally free of this bitch and now…
Ryan was truly at a loss for words even as Kara’s threatening growl had him slowly backing up towards the door. Tilting his head in submission, because it really never hurt to remind an Alpha that he wasn’t going to do anything seriously fucking stupid to risk his own ass, he stepped back again only to look up once the growling had stopped and felt his brows arch towards his hairline.
“Well, I’ll be fucking damned,” he muttered as he stopped his retreat so that he could gawk at the large female as she laid down behind Drew’s naked form and placed her large head on his back, keeping him warm and letting Ryan know that she was protecting what was hers.
When she bared her teeth as a silent reminder that he’d overstayed his welcome, he nodded dumbly and moved his ass, putting as much space between him and his new female Alpha as fast as humanly possible and when that wasn’t fast enough, he tapped into his power and moved a hell of a lot faster.
Chapter 8
“Stop staring at me,” Drew bit out as he stared down at his untouched coffee.
“I can’t help it,” Ryan said with an over exaggerated dreamy expression on his face, because apparently the little bastard wanted Drew to force-feed him his balls.
“Try,” he bit out, sitting there, feeling like shit and wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.
He should have just let her die.
Why the hell hadn’t he just let her die?
He could have saved himself an eternity of pain and suffering and right now be consoling himself between the legs of a willing female or two, but no…
For some seriously fucked up reason, he’d not only saved her, which still shocked him that it worked, but he’d risked his own life to do it. Oh, and of course let’s not forget that he’d fucking marked her!
Basically, he’d just declared himself the most pussy-whipped werewolf on the east coast. Marking a woman, especially your mate was the ultimate sign of commitment. It meant that you were more than happy with what the fates had given you and that he would kill anyone and anything that touched her.
It meant that he loved her, cherished her and put her above all others.
It also meant that he’d just put a big fucking target on her head, which he should be fine with, but-
She was his fucking mate and when it came down to it, he couldn’t let her die. She was the mother of his future children and without her, he would just…
He just couldn’t stand by while she was suffering like that. There were only a few ways to kill them, less since they were both Alphas and could summon their abilities at any time unlike regular Pack to heal themselves, but silver was probably the most painful way for them to go. Whoever had done this had been a sick fucking bastard. Not only had they targeted her, because of him, but they’d also made sure that she’d died painfully. They’d injected her three times with silver nitrate, making sure that she died slowly and painfully. Silver nitrate in their system was equivalent to having acid injected straight into a human’s artery.
It would kill you from the inside out, but unlike humans, who would probably die within minutes after being injected with acid, a shifter would heal continuously as the poison raced through their system only to be eaten away seconds later as the silver nitrate made another pass until the shifter couldn’t keep up and the silver nitrate slowly ate away at their system until it reached the heart and brain, leaving the shifter fully aware as they died, unable to move or make a sound as they died.
It wasn’t something that he would wish upon his worst enemy, and someone had done it Kara, his mate, who’d he’d fucked up everything with and marked her to make things even worse.
“You marked her,” Ryan said with a big shit-eating grin, making him want to bitch slap him, but he didn’t need to, not with the large female shifter lying by his feet, baring her beautiful fangs at his Beta in warning.
Sighing in annoyance, Ryan shifted his head to the side in submission even as he gestured impatiently towards Kara, the seriously pissed off woman who refused to shift back to human. “You marked her several times,” Ryan pointed out with glee.
Another growl, which of course pleased him so he grabbed a piece of the lukewarm bacon that he was too depressed to eat off his plate and tossed it to her. With a glare that he would recognize anywhere, she followed the bacon as it flew through the air and landed on the floor in front of her large claws before she threw him a, “Really?” look.
Shaking his head, because there really was no pleasing a woman, he returned his attention to his Beta and waited for more bullshit. His Beta didn’t make him wait long before he gestured towards Drew and happily said, “But she didn’t mark you!”
“I didn’t have fucking silver to draw out of my blood!” he snapped, wondering why his Beta loved to push his buttons so much, especially this early in the morning before he’d had time to finish his coffee.
“Still!” Ryan said, practically jumping in his seat with excitement as he pointed out the obvious.
They both knew that he hadn’t meant to mark her, but he’d been forced to bite her in order to draw out the silver as it raced through her system. He didn’t have a choice, but no one else would know that or really care, because it looked like he’d lost his fucking mind and marked her and since he didn’t bare her mark, he looked like a fucking desperate psycho.
It was just what he needed his Pack to believe, that he’d lost his mind over the fucking pain in the ass, which of course meant that he was unstable and something for his Pack to fear, which wasn’t exactly going to help make his life easier.
This was just fucking perfect, he thought as he watched his Beta finally lose control and start laughing his ass off. He considered going for the little bastard’s face and leaving him with a nasty scar, but apparently that was one of the bonuses of having an unwanted mate. With Kara around, he didn’t need to worry over the small stuff.
“Not the face!”
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