Page 4

Four

Atlas pointedly flicked his gaze down, then back up to Mary’s hazel one. “Can I get dressed for this conversation?”

“Can you promise not to snap yourself out of here?” Robin answered, and Atlas slid his gaze to the golden one over his shoulder. The asshole coyote had the gall to laugh. “How does that even work?” he asked with a glance at Atlas’s fingers still held apart by his.

Atlas scoffed. “How do you not know that?” Robin was a highly sought-after tracker. People paid handsomely for his skills—and for what the hunter did when he caught his prey. Someone you wanted found and never found again? Robin was the assassin of choice for many.

“No one’s ever run from me like you do.” He leaned forward, those golden eyes searing a path down Atlas’s front to where his cock was still half hard.

Nothing at all to do with the big, rough hands pinning his to the cross.

Robin eyed him from under his long lashes, burnished gold like the rusty blond mop of shaggy hair atop his head.

“Looks like you don’t really want to either.

” His smirk was the definition of smug; Atlas wanted to punch it off his face.

“I see that whole naked under the tartan thing is true.”

“When I mean to have sex, yes. So, around you, never. Voluntarily.”

“His snap,” Mary said, interrupting their pissing contest, “creates a tear in the plane that he slips through.”

“In that case,” Robin said, “I am definitely not letting your hands go.”

Fine, two could play at that game, especially as they were already near tied, the bulge behind Robin’s fly poking Atlas’s side. He shimmied his hips against the cross behind him, aiming to dislodge his kilt completely.

Mary jumped into action, covering his goods and securing the tartan around him. Removing his leverage. “If you two are done,” she said with a huff, “we have three weeks until Solstice. Three weeks to find Evan.”

Atlas feigned ignorance. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then why can I hear your heart racing?” Robin said.

Fucking tracker. “Because I don’t do we .” We had gotten Cole killed, and that was just the most recent tragedy owing to that menacing two-letter word. “I don’t go chasing after ghosts either.”

“Then what have you been doing the past ten years?”

Atlas swiveled his gaze to the hypocrite. “You’re one to talk.”

Robin’s deep, sinister growl would’ve rattled the windows if the room had any.

“Atlas,” Mary chided in his head. “Don’t push him.”

He swung his attention back to the deity in borrowed human skin. “This again?” he mentally asked.

“It worked well for us before.” When Vincent was still alive, Mary had allowed herself to be kidnapped in order to trick Vincent into hiring her to hack the location of a powerful coven.

Instead, she’d hacked his network and diverted his attention.

“What happened at the Stick?” she continued in his head. “I know you sent me that footage.”

“I lost a brother,” he told her. “I’d just gotten him back from Vincent.” He flicked his gaze to Robin, then added, “I lost him the same way he lost his sister.”

Mary’s eyes grew wide, at least one mystery solved for her. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “Robin is too, even if he’ll never say it.”

Atlas scoffed, seriously doubting it. “He knows it wasn’t me?” For the past decade, Robin had chased him, thinking he was the one who’d thrown the orb that had killed his twin sister, Deborah.

He’d been chasing the wrong Shaw twin.

“Paris saw it through the eyes of a lingering soul. He told us it wasn’t you. That it was Evan.” She stepped closer once more. “We can work together,” she said, her aspirations for him unrealistically high. Same as his mother’s. “We’re after the same thing.”

“I don’t think we are.”

She pressed her lips together, assessing. “You think you can save him.”

“Not for myself,” he admitted. Honestly, he’d love nothing more than to hold Evan down while Robin ripped out his throat. But for the sake of the woman waiting on the other side of the veil for him—and his brothers, all of them—he had to try.

“I promised Robin vengeance,” Mary said, as if reading his thoughts. Her telepathy, unlike Daphne’s, didn’t go that far, but her observational skills were just as sharp. “If we get to him first, without you, I won’t stop him.”

“And you think I can?” Her answering smirk made his own hackles rise. “Always with your games. Go home, or what Canton did, what Cole gave his life for, will be all for naught.”

She gasped, eyes wide once more. Another mystery solved, most of his secrets out in the open for her now. This close to the end, why bo?—

A roar shattered the connection between them and spiked claws dug into his palms, making the hairs on his arms stand up.

Making his cock take notice too.

“Do not shut me out,” Robin snarled.

“Take her home,” Atlas bit back. He didn’t believe for one second that Mary’s brother, Icarus, had sent her off into the wild with their team’s least reliable member.

“What planet are you on?”

“Hers.” He nodded at Mary. “And I’m trying to fucking save it, but you and your lot are constantly in the way.”

This autumn alone, Robin’s brother-in-law, Adam, a cop turned vigilante, had gone head-to-head with Vincent, who he blamed for his late spouses’ deaths.

And while that chaos was ongoing, Vincent had offered Paris to a giant as a sacrifice.

Paris had been rescued from near-death, but as a result of the spell, he’d become a medium and soulbound to detective Cormac Kelley, Adam’s former cop partner and the then-reaper for the Monte Corvo ravens.

And Atlas, admittedly, had had a hand in all of it, which Robin rightfully called him on. “Except when you need us to be your fucking bait. First Icarus, then Paris. Why do you get to use us, and we can’t use you?”

Problem was, they could never just be bait. If it could go sideways, it did when Robin and company were involved, which was why Atlas needed them as far away as possible at this late, delicate stage of the game. “Not how this works, dog.”

The coyote flashed his pointed canines. “Oh, I beg to differ.”

“Don’t you have someone to go kill?”

Robin’s hold on his hands faltered and something that looked an awful lot like guilt flashed through his gaze.

But before Atlas could bring his thumb and middle finger together, Robin hardened his grip and every bit of the hunter—the assassin—shone in his glowing golden eyes.

“Make no mistake, you’re still on that list. Just in the two spot now. ”

“You have to fucking catch me first.”

Robin’s claws pierced his skin. “What was that?”

“You cheated.”

For once, Mary defused the situation instead of stirring the pot. “Robin, let it go. He’s not going to give us anything tonight.”

But the shifter couldn’t just let it go.

Ever. He leaned close, nose behind Atlas’s ear, his hot breath flooding the hollow there, his hotter words so low only Atlas could hear them.

“I can smell you,” he purred. “Not the dirty warlock stench. The real you. I know you’re hard under that kilt.

” Atlas didn’t bother to deny it. “Do you want to give me that load?”

He channeled the shiver racing up his spine into his voice, pitching it low and gravelly, hiding the edge of desire just on the other side of hate. “Not if your mouth was the last warm hole on earth.”

A cold nose and chapped lips skated the outer shell of his ear. “It’s a bet.”