Page 25

“Hold on.” Kalen gripped her other thigh, preventing her from moving. His fingers flexed. His jaw flexed. He seemed to be fighting for the ability to say anything more than that. Eventually, he nodded at Kilian, telling him to speak.

Kilian lifted her and settled her down, facing him again, his hands catching her jaw. “Are you okay, baby?” His voice was almost a purr, so at odds with the rest of the room. “You’re going to be punished later, but we can wait for that, can’t we?”

Before she even realised what she was agreeing to, she was nodding. She caught herself with a frown. “What?”

“It’s happening whether you like it or not,” Kilian told her gently, leaning down to brush his velvety lips along the corner of her mouth.

“Kalen and Mikel have decided it’s the best way to deal with all of our pent-up aggression over the little deal you made on everyone’s behalf.

” His lips whispered across the other side of her mouth.

“Because you traded away something that doesn’t belong to you, didn’t you? ”

Isobel swallowed, dizzy and confused by the soft wrap of heat around her body and the drugging drag of his lips against hers as he gave her one, two, three full kisses … but his words …

“My body is mi—” she began to say, but he kissed her again, softly stroking her cheeks while a sound behind her had her convinced that one of them had just gnashed their teeth.

“Your body is ours,” he whispered threateningly against her mouth before leaning back and breaking his spell on her, his voice deceptively soft again. “Do you need help in the shower?”

She did, and usually, she would have chosen him, but the ironclad control he was displaying over his body, scent, voice, and gentle influence was terrifying because she knew he wasn’t as calm as he was pretending.

She quickly disentangled herself from the bed. “I’ll be fine!” But after only a single step, Theodore was catching the back of her dress with a frown.

“Maybe don’t—” His eyes raked over her apologetically. “—run away from us right now. My instinct just now was to—” He cut himself off, forcing his fingers to loosen in her dress.

She nodded, walking much slower to her bathroom this time.

She wasn’t surprised when a body brushed along her spine as she entered the room, slipping in behind her.

The scent of smoking, burning oleander curled around her as Oscar’s muscular body forced her several steps forward before he closed the door with a soft snick.

She glanced over her shoulder at him as he leaned back, throwing up a boot to notch against the door, arms loose at his sides, fingers tapping agitatedly against the wood.

“They’ll feel better with someone watching you.” His voice was a dark rasp of sound that didn’t even attempt to seem reasonable and comforting. His shadowed eyes were narrowed in challenge, sweeping a strange, insidious energy into the room.

She watched carefully as his fingers curled into fists against the door before loosening again. And curling again. Loosening. Curling. The rhythm of it was almost hypnotic.

He followed the direction of her eyes. “Don’t worry.

” He forced a stiff, false smile. “My dick won’t be holding you prisoner tonight.

” Dark eyes crawled down over the silk that caressed her body, fixating on the press of her nipples pebbling against the dark material.

“We’ve been informed that until we can stop thinking violent thoughts, we aren’t to touch you. ”

“Violent thoughts about?—”

“Not you, little rabbit. Not really.”

“Not really? ”

He only ran his tongue across his teeth in answer, eyes still fixed to her chest. He dragged them back to her face with considerable effort.

“And you’re following orders?” she asked. It wasn’t a challenge; she was curious and wary of the way they were all acting.

She had seen them in countless disastrous and stressful situations, but this one seemed to be affecting them all differently and they were fighting harder than ever for control over their instincts.

She could only assume it was because they didn’t have anyone there to direct their rage at except her, and that wasn’t where they wanted to put it.

When Oscar didn’t answer, she decided to just get it over with. She tossed herself into the shower and turned on the taps to fill the space with steam as she slipped off her dress and reached out of the alcove to throw it onto the floor.

The needling water did nothing to ease the pain thumping up against her chest, and the low, gruff sound of Oscar’s frustration told her that she was testing his—and likely everyone else’s—patience, so she moved as fast as possible.

She scrubbed her skin until it was pink, removing all traces of where Ivan might have touched, though her memory was still slightly fuzzy.

Oscar was already standing there with a huge, fluffy towel when she turned the water off. He dried her with jerky, unsteady movements before tossing the towel aside, grabbing her hand, and pulling her into the dressing room.

She was fresh out of stolen T-shirts, something she noted with a deep frown.

“Here,” Oscar grunted, rapidly popping the buttons on his dress shirt.

“Hate these things anyway.” He swept it around her shoulders, holding it for her as she poked her arms through the sleeves.

His dark gaze briefly drifted down to her breasts, a deep flash of rage transforming his face before he wrangled the emotion back under control.

He seemed very fixated on the fact that Ivan had seen her boobs.

“He was just putting on a show,” she reiterated in a whisper.

Oscar began fastening the shirt, his fingers shaking slightly. “Do I want to pull his spine from his skin and play it like a fucking piano? Put on a private concert for him just to entertain him in his final breaths? Yes.”

“Oh.” Her body went numb with shock. “Okay.”

“But my attention has shifted,” he continued in that same low, roughened tone.

“To me?” she squeaked.

For just a moment, his rage fell away to incredulity. “What?”

“To who then?”

“Yulia fucking Novi—” He flexed his fingers, pulling them away from her body, vibrating with so much rage that he seemed robbed of breath for a moment.

“I can’t think about it. We’re all trying not to think about it.

We can’t afford to lose our shit. The last time a bunch of us went feral, it was messy.

Bloody. Very bloody.” He hummed low in his throat, seemingly to like the sound of what he was saying, before quickly shaking his head.

“No,” he said, apparently talking to himself before turning and striding out of the dressing room. “Come, Carter.”

She quickly tugged on a pair of panties beneath the shirt and then trailed after him with her heart beating into her throat.

Oscar had taken up a position against the wall with Moses.

Kalen, Kilian, and Theodore were still sitting on her bed.

Cian had lowered to sit against the end of the bed, his head in his hands, golden strands of hair escaping the knot he had tied to tangle about his fretful fingers.

His back tensed as soon as she entered the room, but he didn’t look up.

Mikel was sitting in one of her armchairs, strong, scarred fingers drumming incessantly against the velvet material.

Niko sat in an armchair across from him, his hand wrapped around something green, squeezing roughly.

A loud popping sound filled the room as he looked up at Isobel, and he opened his hand to reveal a ruined tennis ball.

There was no way he had taken that into the Stone Dahlia.

It hurt her heart to think of him pacing his room and trying to find ways to calm himself down, possibly filling his pockets with tennis balls.

“I said no noise,” Elijah growled, his Alpha voice whipping through the room like the sharpened blade of a knife.

She blinked at him in shock. He was sitting on the chaise, his laptop across his thighs, his hands loose in his lap, his eyes closed.

Gabriel was beside him, forehead resting in his hand, elbow notched onto the arm of the chaise.

Oddly, Gabriel’s slumped posture was the biggest indicator that she had seen so far that something was seriously wrong.

Theodore motioned to her, and she tip-toed over to him, terrified to make a noise as Elijah’s eyelids seemed to move with the effort he was putting into his own thoughts, his jaw flexing methodically.

Theodore drew her over his thighs, Kilian capturing her legs and stretching them out until her toes brushed against Kalen’s thigh.

His big hand immediately dropped, curling around her ankle, though he kept his attention on Elijah.

They were all watching Elijah.

“The fuck is going on?” Oscar asked.

A snarl slipped from Elijah’s lips—his only warning—and Oscar rolled his eyes.

Finally, after what felt like hours but was likely only a minute, Elijah’s eyes flicked open, trepidation dripping over his regal features. He set his laptop aside and scrubbed a long-fingered hand down over his face, his sigh ragged.

“We’re going to have to run.”

“Take a hundred steps backward,” Cian spluttered. “Start at the beginning, not the end.”

Elijah gave him a bored look. “Obviously I thought further than that, or I never would have suggested it. That isn’t the end.”

“Start at the beginning,” Kalen demanded.

Elijah’s bored expression twitched into something distinctly uneasy. “The number that was scratched into?—”

“What number?” Isobel asked with a frown.

“Right.” He gave her a tight smile. “Sorry.” He stood and strode to the bed, holding out the USB to her. “Look there.” He leaned over Kalen to turn the little metal device in her grip, revealing small etchings on the silver surface.

A series of letters. “This isn’t a number,” she said with a frown.

“It took me a moment to realise as well,” Elijah allowed. “But it is most definitely a number. A phone number?—”