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“He’s overwhelmed and traumatized. He’s not a bad person. He’s not a particularly good alpha either. But he is a good trader. So we’re doing business with him. And, soon enough, we’re going to have functional control over the Swale estate, at which point he’s going to be in danger because the powers that be want to stay the powers that be, and we have no intention of allowing that.”

I nod slowly. It all makes sense.

“Rick is a fucking idiot. It’s not his fault. He was born that way.”

“That’s more or less the opposite of what I was saying, but I understand the point,” Henry says. “We’re going to head out of the city. There’s a place I like to stay in the countryside. I think you’ll like it too.”

“Okay,” I say. I’ve stayed in a fair number of country estates in my time. This will not be a hardship. Some people don’t like the outdoors, but wolves enjoy open spaces. This will be nice, I guess. It’s hard to think about things being nice when I’m attempting to integrate all this fresh trauma. I had so much pre-existing trauma that needs to shuffle around to make room for these more recent developments.

“Can you take this collar off now?” I ask the question as I reach up to fiddle with the clasp. It seems to be stuck, or something. It’s not budging.

“Let’s leave that on for the moment,” he says. His tone is kind, but his words piss me the hell off.

“Why? Don’t you trust me?”

“I adore you, baby. But I do not trust you one bit when it comes to what you do when that collar comes off, and I think you know that’s a very reasonable position to take where you are concerned.”

I want to curse him out, but he did save me from being human trafficked by my asshole brother, and he’s also not completely wrong about the things I do when I’m in my wolf form.

“This is humiliating,” I say, tugging at it. I can see Jacob hiding a smirk. I don’t like that very much either, if I am to be honest. These men think I am someone to be handled, and I am not someone to be handled. I am an alpha she-wolf in my own right, and…

Henry starts making light scratching motions on the back of my neck up into my hairline and I start to relax very much against my will.

“I am not going to be treated like a prisoner,” I complain as his lips nuzzle the sensitive area behind my ear.

“No, of course not, baby,” he says, using his other arm to wrap me up securely against him. “You’re very much a force to be reckoned with, which is why I had to reckon with you.”

“Yes,” I agree.

The van slows.

The back door opens. I don’t know what I was expecting to step out to. One of the Hamptons-type mansions my friends and I frequent, I suppose. Something that looks like a castle or deranged out of control barn cottage gone completely feral. I’m so used to sprawling homes that at first I don’t even really understand what I’m looking at.

* * *

Henry

“A shed?”

She turns to me with a look of pure confusion on her face. My initial reaction is to think how spoiled she is, but the absolute innocence in the way she asks it makes me give her substantial leeway.

“This is a five-bedroom house, sweetheart,” I say.

“Oh.”

She looks dubious, as if she doesn’t believe me.

“It’s very cute,” she says. “Very… compact.”

My murderous little rich girl mate has never lived anywhere with significantly less square footage than Versailles, so I do understand her perspective.

“Come inside,” I say, taking her hand.

The front door opens and we encounter some of my pack immediately. Hades and his mate are in the lounge, playing some kind of video game on a very large television.

Tinker is short, with pink hair that she most often wears in pigtails. She has glasses, big thick chunky frames that sit over bright blue eyes. She’s wearing overalls that do very little to hide her curvy frame. The skin of her arms is well covered in tattoos done in cartoon styles. They’re bright and colorful, much like her. Tinker is often overlooked because she looks too cute to be trouble. That is not an accurate assessment.

Hades, her partner, is six foot four with long dark hair and a lot of tattoos. His, however, are not bubblegum colored. A lot more dark ink with gray scale. The two of them are walking contradictions, but they’re more in love than anybody I’ve ever met, well, before I met Fiona.