Rule Breaker (Breeds 20)

“There’s no fucking mark,” Rule snarled.

Dane gave a mocking little sneer, but it was Lawe’s reaction that held Rule. His brother frowned back at him as though disappointed.

“I didn’t mark her.” Rule shook his head. “I would know if I bit her, dammit.”

“You did something,” Lawe assured him then, and Rule knew if there was one thing his brother wouldn’t do, he would never lie to him. “It was weak, Rule, but the mating scent was there. And the Breed who drove her home reported that the scent only grew stronger after she left. Whatever you did, she’s in Mating Heat.”

She would be in pain.

He hadn’t fully satisfied her. Not enough to still the fires that would begin burning in her.

He rubbed his tongue against his teeth to still that faint irritation—

And he froze.

The glands weren’t swollen, they weren’t really sensitive, yet it was there. A faint taste of sweet heat he couldn’t quite identify. An unfamiliar sensitivity.

He shook his head sharply.

What the fuck was going on?

“He doesn’t believe he marked his little mate when she was no more than a child,” Dane drawled then, directing the comment to Jonas.

Rule watched as Jonas’s gaze flicked to Dane before he shook his head warily, warning the hybrid from saying more. The truth was in the director’s eyes, though, as they met Rule’s once again.

“I didn’t touch her,” Rule snapped as he turned on Dane again. “What the fuck kind of monster do you take me for? To suggest I’d touch a child in such a way?”

Surprise flickered in the icy green eyes. “I don’t believe you mated her. I said you marked her. You found a way to have your scent placed on her, and it stuck. Just as nature intended it to.”

“The hell—”

“You gave the female enforcer present there your shirt to put on her as we pulled those Coyotes off her body. You collected her blanket and handed it to the enforcer who brought it in to her,” Jonas broke in. “He’s not lying, Rule. Even I sensed your claim on her that night.”

Rule shook his head in confusion. “I only saw her for a moment.”

They all turned to him then.

“When?” It was Lawe who asked the question roughly. “You were never in the cavern other than those first moments.”

“The hell I wasn’t,” Rule snarled back. “I was there long enough that the scent of her pain was like an insult to my senses. It was my weapon that fired, along with Jonas’s, and killed Grody. I saw what they were going to do to her. Do you think I stayed out of the cavern? That I’m not intelligent enough to know how to direct cleanup and keep my eye on what the hell is going on as well?”

He’d shot before he’d even processed what was going on.

That huge fucking Coyote had been between a child’s thighs as she screamed for her brother. Those jagged, wrenching screams of rage and pain had been more than the animal inside him could allow. Two others held her down while two more waited behind their leader to have their turn with her.

Rule barely remembered those moments. Seeing the horror of it, the scent of her pain and fear, the agonizing scent of her self-blame and terror that had wrapped around her like a living blanket, had enraged him.

He’d taken out two of the Coyotes before the other shots had been fired.

“Hell, I didn’t even realize—” Jonas shook his head, staring at Rule as though seeing him for the first time. “When I first realized she’d been claimed, even I was unaware it was you for a while.”

“I didn’t fucking claim her,” he snapped. “She was a child.”

What did they take him for anyway?

Rule scratched at the irritating little itch beneath his tongue by rubbing it against his teeth again.

Fuck this.