AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She sat down on her bed and breathed out with a small, strangled groan. She so didn’t need this right now. Of all things she didn’t need, it was the mating heat returning.
An hour after Del-Rey had heard the paperweight strike his mate’s door, he was sitting in his office beside Command and staring across his desk at the three Coyote females his packs had adopted.
He’d darkened the windows as they stepped inside, ensuring that his little mate couldn’t wander into Command and see him talking to her bodyguards.
Sharone Bryce stood tallest, military straight as she stared at the wall above his head, her expression composed. She hadn’t even shifted during the minutes she had stood there. Her dark brunette hair was pulled back into a fussy little braid that worked its way down her head. French braid, he thought he’d heard it called. Her hazel green eyes were cool, but he could detect the flicker of wariness in them.
Emma Truing was standing similarly. Still and straight, her lighter brown hair cut short and framing her pretty face. There was the slightest crook to her nose where it had been broken in her teens. Her lips were firm, her gray eyes steady.
Ashley Truing was a whole other ball game. Del-Rey liked to tease her that she was a true Coyote: lazy, shiftless, too charming for her own damned good, cunning as hell and filled with fun.
She was a genius. A stone-cold killer standing before him with lightened hair, nearly blond, her gray eyes twinkling back at him, though he knew they could fill with crocodile tears at any moment. And she wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she was chewing gum between those perfect teeth of hers. She wasn’t standing straight; one hip was cocked and she was on the edge of looking bored.
“Okay already, chew my ass out. I told you I have to get my nails fixed today. And there’s this shoe party that Young Leaders of America or some bullshit is throwing. I’m gonna be late, Alpha.” She pouted back at him. “Come on, we weren’t totally bad. Right? We got her to you.”
He’d known Ashley would break first. Emma winced. Sharone closed her eyes for a brief, irritated second. He would have chuckled if the lives of his mate and these three women weren’t so important to him.
“And if you hadn’t gotten her to me, Ashley?” he asked, a warning growl in his throat. “If the four of you had died on that mountain, what then?”
Her eyes widened. “They didn’t have a prayer,” she scoffed.
“Come on, Alpha, I knew you’d be looking for her the minute we left on ‘no comm.’ I figured you’d catch up with us sooner than you did. I mean, come on, you’re totally hot for her. She’s not going to be out of your sight that long when you don’t know precisely where she is.”
Cunning, manipulative, charming and too intuitive—because she was fucking right.
“That’s not the point.” He leaned forward in his chair. “What would have happened if that bullet had struck you at the top of that trail and left you dead?”
She stared back at him blankly. “Umm. The coya would cry. I’d be dead. And if that had happened, I would hope you would dress me really fine and give me one of those cool funerals, you know? Like real people have. And roses.”
She was utterly serious. Like real people. His chest clenched at the words, as though in her soul she believed she wasn’t ‘real people’.
“Coyotes would have gone to war,” he stated clearly, powerfully. “None of those hunters would have escaped. I let them go, all but one last night, Ashley, to track where they went. Had you, your sister or Sharone died on that mountain, nearly a hundred Coyote soldiers would have broken Breed Law and descended on Advert with the full fury of killing rage.”
She blinked back at him. “Why?” She looked to Emma and Sharone’s surprised faces. “We’re just Coyotes, Alpha. We were born to die.” She flashed him that fucking fearless smile that tied his guts into knots.
“Your allowance has been pulled for the next four weeks.” He rose from his chair, his hands braced on the desk as he glared at her, fury beating at his temple. “In four weeks you will come to me and tell me why, Ashley, that Coyotes would have shed blood in that amount for your life.”
True distress filled her eyes. He suspected true tears.
“My allowance?” she whispered fearfully. “Oh please, Del-Rey, just like, knock it down. Don’t take my allowance.” She spread her fingers out. “Look at my damned nails. I need my allowance.”
“If a single Breed—Coyote, Feline or Wolf—pays for those fucking nails,” he stabbed his finger at her hands, “then I’l
l make damned certain he pays for it in ways he doesn’t even want to imagine. Are we clear?”
The tears cleared; the lips trembled; her gaze shuttered.
“I don’t know what your deal is.” Her voice was perfectly composed. “If the coya were hurt or killed, you’d take out my throat. Fine. I’d expect it. She’s my damned coya too, so you really don’t have to play up any loyalty here. And fuck the nails, I don’t need your allowance.”
He growled, a low, lethal sound that had her flinching.
“Four weeks,” he told her. “One more smart-assed remark and we’ll go for six. Would you like to chance that?”
She crossed her arms over her breasts, hip cocked, and glared back at him.
He turned to Emma. “Why would I have gone to war over your death, Emma?”
She cleared her throat. “We’re pack?” she suggested.
