Page 5

“No. Not even close. We’re chasing ghosts here, Cali. You saw some messiah looking bastard walk through those doors before they shut. Ever stop to think your head wasn’t right that night? That maybe you were seeing things?”

“I saw him! I know what I saw!” I charge toward him, but get stopped short by arms banding around mine and lifting me up off the ground. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“Enough, Cadmus,” Titus says from behind me, his sharp tone echoing his obvious annoyance. “She doesn’t need this.”

“You know exactly what she needs, don’t you, Titus?” Cadmus’s lips curve with his sneering. “You tell her, every day, exactly what she needs to hear, don’t you?”

My body crashes to the dirt, and Titus barrels forward into Cadmus.

The truck wavers as Titus scrambles for footing against the dirt. He slams a punch into the other Alpha’s ribcage. Cadmus hammers his elbow into Titus’s spine, and the fallen Alpha grunts as he gets to his feet, before Titus knocks his fist into Cadmus’s face, kicking his head to the side on a spray of blood. Cadmus volleys a return hit to Titus’s nose. All in a matter of seconds.

“Stop this! Stop!” Against my better judgment, I rush toward the fighting Alphas and push between them, just as Cadmus draws back for another punch. Wedged against Titus’s chest, facing Cadmus, I squeeze my eyes shut, breaths corked in my throat, and prepare for the hit.

In the absence of pain, I open my eyes to find his jaw hard and tense, chest heaving. Blood trickles out of the corner of his lip, and his eyes hold the murderous stare of a man who’s lost hope. One who has nothing left to lose.

Frowning, he lowers his fist, and I feel the tension in Titus ease at my back.

Hands lodged in my hair, I’m one thread away from losing what little sanity I have left. “Why do you have to be so damn difficult all the time?”

Tonguing the corner of his lip, Cadmus shakes his head and snorts. “Guess somebody’s gotta be the bad guy, right?” he says, as he climbs into the truck.

A dull ache throbs in my stomach, one I’ve ignored for days now. Not from my anxiety over their fight, but from something I dread even more. My estrus has arrived, and I know its presence is part of what makes the two uneasy. They can smell it on me, and instinct begs them to give release. Something they’d have probably fought over, if not for the respect of their absent brother.

After a glance back at Titus, who wipes the blood from his nose, I climb over Cadmus in the small space between his legs and the dashboard and take my seat beside him. He slams the door on Titus, and rests his elbow on the bashed-out window, daubing the blood at his lip with the back of his hand.

His eyes fall to my thighs and back, brows flickering with his troubled expression, but he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. His taut muscles, and the bulge I noted at his crotch as I climbed across him, tell me everything I don’t want to know.

A month ago, it was Titus who gave me relief after nearly two weeks of intense pain, and I know, in spite of their bodies’ natural instincts, the two of them dread the moment they’re forced to defy their brother again.

I’ll try to hold off as long as I can, though. To keep my pain and agony to myself so as not to rouse their primitive urges.

Titus climbs into the driver’s seat at my other side, and through the window I see Brandon scramble toward the back of the truck. In silence, Titus fires up the engine and turns the truck off the road, down the sloping hill. Toward the camp below.

A man, perhaps in his fifties, pushes to his feet, abandoning the fire he’s set, as we roll in and Titus parks the truck outside the perimeter. Without hesitation, he exits the vehicle and approaches the man, who stands with a hand behind his back, as though reaching for a weapon.

Palms in the air, Titus takes slow and easy steps toward him. “We don’t mean you any harm.”

“What do you want?” The man’s voice is neither friendly, nor welcoming, as he alternates his stare between Titus and the truck.

“Just kill the bastard already and take the meat,” Cadmus mumbles beside me, already bored with the exchange. The very reason Titus jumped out first, I’m guessing.

“We’ve been traveling for days. We were hoping to share your camp.”

“I don’t share nothin’ with nobody. Now git outta here.”

As Titus lowers his hands, the man snaps a blade from behind his back and holds it out in front of him.

“I don’t want no trouble. Just leave and nobody gets hurt.”

“’Fucks sake, Titus.” Cadmus lurches beside me, and I grab his arm to stop him. His gaze falls to my hand on his skin, perhaps the first contact I’ve made with him in a week, and he eases back into his seat.

“A knife is no match for a gun, and you’d do well to protect your camp with something that doesn’t require close proximity to kill. I’m happy to leave you with one. And some bullets, too.” Titus nods toward what looks to be a headless deer on a spit, strung over the fire. “In exchange for some meat for me and my friends.”

“What friends?”

With a sigh, I nudge Cadmus beside me, urging him out of the truck, and clamber out after him. Upon exiting, I grab the canteens from a hook above the back window and strap them across my body.

The man’s eyes linger on me longer than the other two, and whereas I might’ve once feared that look, standing between the two Alphas emboldens me to hold his stare until he turns away.