Page 6

6

AREN

I scowl at my uninvited, unwanted guest. “When are you going away?”

Silence is a tangible thing in the dining room as my pack’s eyes bounce between me and Tagge, the Wolf Lord of Starling’s Peak.

He’s practically spilling out of one of the dining room chairs. Long dark brown hair, golden skin, greenish-blue eyes, and there’s a hint of a smile on his lips that says I don’t intimidate him in the least.

He’s bigger, over six feet five, and slightly older. Thirty-three to my twenty-nine. But I’m the better fighter. Always have been. Always will be.

His sister sits at the same table. Shira has the same green eyes and longer, slightly lighter brown hair. The two dark-haired enforcers he brought continue to dig into their breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage, and steak.

If a fight started between me and Tagge, Tagge would shove his enforcers out of his way so he could do the fighting. His enforcers are likely only here to keep an eye on the sister he’s determined to make my mate.

“My capable beta is on hand to keep an eye on things,” Tagge says cheerfully. “Heath will call if a situation requires my light touch.”

He’s smiling, but there’s a rod of steel in the Alpha from Washington State, my closest neighbor. I know all about that rod of steel because I’ve seen him fight. There’s a reason he came second in the Wolf King Trials, and that reason had nothing to do with his amiable disposition.

I don’t like people underestimating me. It’s a waste of time—theirs and mine—when they think they can beat me. I make it clear they can’t and they won’t.

Tagge likes to trick people with the smile that makes them think he’s friendly.

He’s a threat.

Stubborn. Pig-headed and an annoyance I don’t need.

“I want you gone,” I snarl at him.

He’s already ruined my breakfast this morning because I haven’t been able to take one bite from my plate without him reminding me that his sister is here, she is available, and he doesn’t intend to leave Burning Wood until we’re mated.

Not what I needed after being forced to leave Kat behind, driving for five hours to return to our remote northern Montana home at nearly two a.m.

I’m tired, I want my mate, and I won’t be able to relax in my own home until Tagge has left.

Finan raises his eyebrow.

I know.

I could learn to be more subtle, but I don’t have the patience for diplomacy.

I want the Wolf Lord gone, and I want him gone yesterday.

Patience and subtlety are not working on the cheerful Wolf Lord, who is not getting the message that he isn’t wanted.

“Shira has spoken of seeing more of Burning Wood,” Tagge says between large bites of his breakfast. “What better man to show her the sights than its Alpha?”

I eye his sister, Shira, who doesn’t look the least bit diseased. Or interested in anything except her breakfast.

She’s quiet.

I was young when I overheard one of the older shifters in my pack say that it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. I hadn’t known what that meant.

Like all the pups with a question, I went to the best person in the pack to get an answer. Gregor, pack medic and my teacher. He always had an answer for everything. Even my father, the former Alpha of Pack Kasen, went to him for advice.

“Always the quiet ones who did what ?” I’d growled at Gregor.

Gregor hadn’t been gray then, and his short beard wasn’t the salt and pepper it is now. He’s always had the same sharp, observant brown gaze though.

“What have I told you about growling in lessons, Aren?” he’d asked mildly.

I’d glowered at him. “I’m going to be Alpha, so you’re going to have to get used to it.”

As a pup, I was difficult, but dominant shifters tend to be.

Nevertheless, he had answered my question.

“Loud ones like you demand all the attention.” He had kept speaking before I could argue that I wasn’t loud. “But the quiet ones have the greatest capacity for surprising you.”

I hadn’t understood.

Quiet meant submissive, and I was strong and dominant. If anyone surprised me, I’d still beat them in any fight. Easy .

Now I’ve met Kat, I understand that there are different types of strength. She is quiet. Always quiet. But not shy. Watchful, careful with her words.

No matter how many times I growled at her, she decided when she would tell me something. I couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do.

Not because she’s quiet or afraid of me. Her eyes, those incredible pale blue orbs flecked with brown, never shone with fear. Not once.

Shira is quiet in a different way. Bored.

I don’t know why she agreed to come here with her brother, but I get the sense she doesn’t want to be here at all. That she has no interest in mating with me or anyone else.

After the lengths Tagge went to offload her onto me over the last three months, I’d expected to be peeling her off me or finding she’d crawled into my bed while I wasn’t paying attention.

“Finan can do it,” I eventually say, picking up my fork.

“Shira has been looking forward to you showing her,” Tagge says insistently. “She has been excited about it for months.”

I look at Shira, who is poking at her scrambled eggs and couldn’t look more bored if she tried.

“Shira,” he growls.

She rolls her eyes and reluctantly puts her fork down. “I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing whatever it is.”

“The forest,” Tagge growls, showing the first signs of irritation.

“Whatever,” she mutters.

She’s had her head down since she arrived. Now I look into her face and I understand what’s going on here.

I shovel a few bites of food into my mouth and get up. Time to deal with this once and for all.

“Let’s go.”

She stares at me, eyes wide. “ Me ?”

“Yes. You.”

I walk past Tagge, who nods, pleased.

Shira follows me outside.

I say nothing until we’ve left my large, two-story log home and reached the forest a few feet away where Tagge is unlikely to overhear us.

Then I stop and peer down at his sister, dressed in the sweatpants and cotton clothing that shifters prefer. “What do you have on him?”

She blinks at me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Short of sticking you in a human-sized slingshot and firing you across state lines, he’s been doing everything possible to get rid of you. Why ?”

She snorts. “A human-sized slingshot?”

“Answer the question.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know why my brother wants me mated to some Alpha. He just does.”

I eye her with suspicion.

“I’m not lying,” she says, scowling at me.

“Okay, fine. I believe you. You can go back to the house. I need to think.”

“But my brother?—”

“Or go for a walk. I don’t care. Leave .”

Huffing, she swings around and stalks away.

I wait until she’s disappeared inside, then I fish out my cell phone from my pocket and speed dial number one.

I press the phone to my ear with no hope that this call will be answered.

Because I didn’t just steal Kat’s address from the faculty office when I broke in. I stole her cell phone number. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to call it, and yet again, it goes unanswered.

I told myself she was sleeping when I called her early this morning. It’s nearly nine a.m., now, but I have a feeling that if I were to call her at two in the afternoon, my call would still go unanswered. Either she doesn’t answer calls from numbers she doesn’t recognize, or she suspects it’s me. I have my suspicions it’s the latter rather than the former.

A phone call won’t get Kat back here. Speaking to her face-to-face will.

I hang up my phone, toss it aside, and strip.

* * *

“Aren, you can’t hide in the forest forever.” Finan walks out of the house as I return from a long run that only my growling belly forced me to come back to deal with.

The sky is a dark blue as late evening sets in. I barely ate any of my breakfast, missed lunch, and I don’t intend to miss dinner with the delicious food smells that have been drifting out of the house and into the forest. I am starving .

“I can hide in the forest or I can kill Tagge. Those are the only options available to me.”

“The only options…” He echoes.

His face is blank, but I know exactly what he’s thinking.

I scowl at him. “Stop being so reasonable. You know how I feel about it when you give me that look.”

“I do.”

“Are you sure you can’t see a future with his sister?” I ask him, hopeful.

“No.”

“No, you need time to think about it or no…”

“The other no. Aren.”

I glare at him. “Okay. Fine . I’ll go back to the house, kill Tagge, and I can go back to the city and get Kat.”

“Did she sound interested in coming back?”

“She did.” I nod firmly.

He raises his eyebrow.

“What have I told you about that eyebrow?” I warn him.

He lowers it like a well-trained circus performer.

“ Aren ?” Tagge yells from the decking. “When are you going to stop pretending you have a mate?”

“I’m not pretending,” I yell back.

“As if I’m going to believe that you happened to meet your fated mate right when you ran out of excuses to take Shira as a mate.” He walks toward me as he speaks, glaring all the while as he pulls Shira along with him.

She has her cell phone in her left hand and seems more interested in it than anything else.

“I don’t want her,” I snap, and glance at her. “No offense.”

She shrugs, clearly disinterested. “Whatever.”

The sound of an approaching vehicle grows louder, distracting me from my argument with Tagge.

“We’re not expecting anyone, are we, Fin?” I frown at the approaching car, alert in case it’s a threat.

“Ah.”

I glance at him. “What do you mean, ah?”

A dark blue Toyota Corolla comes to a stop feet away, and the driver, a beautiful woman in a pair of blue jeans, a black sweatshirt, and her dark hair tightly braided, climbs out.

Kat .

A slow grin stretches across my face.

I was right. I didn’t need to go to her. I should have just waited for her to come to me.

Guess she decided there was no one better than me after all.