Page 7

7

KAT

B efore I’ve gotten one leg out of my car, I’m itching to slap the smug smile off the Wolf King’s face.

A bear of a man with long brown hair, sea-green eyes, and a massive chest stares at me with naked curiosity.

The woman standing beside him is shorter and slimmer, yet bears such a striking resemblance to him they could be siblings. She lowers her phone. “You’re real.”

What is that supposed to mean?

“Who are you?” The man demands.

“ This is Kat.” The Wolf King’s smug smile ramps up to eye-twitching levels. “My mate .”

I look at the stranger and he looks at me.

“ Kat ?” His eyes probe me.

I close my car door as I wonder if coming here was a good idea. “Yes. Why?”

“Where did you come from?” He stalks toward me, and I edge back a half-step, not loving all this attention.

“Uh, the city. Who are you?”

“Tagge. The Wolf Lord of Starling’s Peak.”

Shit. Aren was telling the truth. I genuinely thought he was making it up to get me back here. I dart a rapid glance at Aren. The Wolf King is still looking far too smug for my liking. I look away before I give in to the urge to slap that smug smile off his face.

“Now you’ve seen her. You can leave,” Aren tells Tagge. “ Now .”

“Not so fast,” Tagge says, not taking his eyes off me.

Like Aren, the woman beside him, and Finan, Tagge wears black and gray sweats. Loose, comfy, and making me regret the skinny jeans I’d picked out for the long drive to northern Montana.

It’s a relief when the Wolf King snaps at Tagge. “Stop staring at her. She’s mine.”

Tagge gives me another long look, then spins around. “I’m going for a walk.”

I watch him disappear into the forest. Before I lose sight of him, he dips his hand into his pocket and pulls something out. A cell phone, I think.

“What’s his problem?” I mutter.

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” The Wolf King grins at me. "I knew you would return."

"I am here to take you up on your offer. I need a killer found. You need to get rid of someone. That’s all. You, I would prefer to see as little as possible while I'm here." I turn to grab my bag from my trunk, already regretting my decision to come.

He grabs my wrist.

I look at him. "Or I can leave?"

"Or I can lock you up. Stop you from going anywhere,” he says, voice silky with his soft threat.

I look at Finan. "Is he an idiot? Was he dropped on his head as a baby? Perhaps some other unfortunate accident in his youth might explain his inability to learn from his mistakes?"

Aren growls.

I yank my arm free. “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I’ll do this on my own.”

He hauls me right back, scowling down at me from his six-foot something height. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me, and if there’s one thing I know how to do well, it’s hunt. Stay .”

My eyes narrow at that last word.

“ Please ,” he grinds out.

I blink, surprised he knew the word existed.

His lips twist in a half-smile that is far sexier than it has a right to be. “Tagge won’t leave unless he sees us together, so you turning up when you did was perfect timing. I was getting ready to live in the forest with the squirrels. Not sure how well Finan would have done in charge, but I’m sure he’d have done all right. Probably.”

“Of course you were.” Finan releases a quiet, tired sigh that almost makes me smile. “Nice you think so highly of me.”

Aren points his chin at my car. “You got any bags you need Finan to carry out?”

I should have known he would relegate the task to his beta.

I walk back to my car. “No.”

“What are you doing?” he calls after me.

“Getting my bag myself.”

No sooner have I pulled my duffel from my trunk than the Wolf King is slamming my trunk shut and taking the bag from me.

He tosses it back to Finan. “Take it up to our room.”

Dangerous, dangerous words.

“What did you say?” I ask.

But the Wolf King is leading—and I use that word lightly because it feels an awful lot like dragging—me into his house.

The last time he led the way inside, he had a length of silver chain wrapped around my neck. He might not have a silver chain this time, but the grip he has on my upper arm feels unbreakable.

“You’re time for dinner. We’ll eat. You can laugh at my jokes, and Tagge will leave my home, never to return.”

“Why don’t you just tell him to leave?” I try not to appreciate the gorgeous dark wood and gray stone interiors of the Pack Kasen log cabin. But I fail. It’s a beautiful home. I can’t help but appreciate it as much as my wolf loves our remote forest surroundings.

And the food smells are incredible. I stopped at a drive-thru on my way up here, but I demolished the burgers, fries, and a large chocolate shake hours ago. Someone must have heard my stomach growling for Aren to lead me straight to the source of those yummy smells.

“He’s stubborn. Not unexpected for a Wolf Lord.”

I frown up at him as he enters a pale green dining room, where everyone has spread themselves across long rustic wooden tables. No one is eating, though.

“Wolf Lord?”

There is so much I don’t know about this world I’ve stepped into. So much I want to know. I haven’t dared ask the Wolf King because right from the start, he’s wanted more from me than I was prepared to give. If I told him I knew almost nothing about my past, including how I came to be a shifter, how can I trust him to tell me the truth when he’s already told me that he means to claim me as his mate?

I don’t trust his motivations, and I don’t trust him.

The Wolf King is heaping rice and gumbo onto two plates when Tagge walks in, tucking a cell phone into his pocket. Before I can ask who he’s planning on feeding all that food, he thrusts a plate my way. “Here. I’ll explain everything tonight in bed.”

“In bed?” I echo.

“Tonight.” The Wolf King walks to an empty table with his plate, leaving me with two choices.

I can sit down, eat, and do the thing that I came here to do—find someone to play bait to lure a killer. Or I can put this heaping plate of food down, walk out of here, get into my car, and go back to a frustrating search for a killer that was going nowhere.

Tagge is watching me as he dishes up his meal, head tilted to the side, his expression openly curious.

Get rid of him, and you’re halfway to dealing with a killer

I follow Aren to his table and take a seat beside him. I could sit opposite him, but I’d have my back to the open door, and I refuse to put myself in such a vulnerable position. Especially in a place where I nearly died.

Aren picks up a fork and starts digging into his meal.

Only once he’s eaten his first bite does everyone else start eating.

Strange .

“You said your name is Kat, huh?” Tagge calls across the dining room as I fork a piece of shrimp and prepare to take a bite.

I meet the staring Wolf Lord’s blue-green gaze. “Yes, it is.”

But it wasn’t always. The name I had before didn’t feel like me. Neither did that life. So I changed it. The changing my life part was much harder to do. And expensive. Between changing my name in county court and my college tuition, this new life was not cheap.

He slowly nods as he chews his meal. Still staring.

He swallows. “And you’re Aren’s mate?”

“I’m—”

“She is,” the Wolf King speaks over me.

But Tagge doesn’t take his eyes off me. “How did you meet?”

“He thought I was a feral and locked me in his cage,” I say.

Tagge bounces his eyes from me to the Wolf King. When Aren doesn’t respond, a deep, rumbling laugh pours out of him. He throws his head back and laughs for so long that he wipes the tears from his eyes as everyone studies him.

Still laughing, he picks up his plate and walks out of the dining room.

I turn to Aren. “What was that all about?”

He shrugs, unconcerned. “Don’t care. Hopefully that means he’s leaving.”

Across the room, my gaze connects with a beautiful blonde when she enters the room carrying a large silver pot.

She’s familiar, painfully so. It wasn’t all that long ago that she tried to hang me from the decking. Marisa. The Wolf King’s former lover, if I can believe what he said about ending things with her after she tried to kill me. She’s wearing a stained light gray apron, belted at the back as she adds more gumbo to one of the large, empty serving dishes.

My throat no longer hurts, but I haven’t forgotten what she did to me, nor has my wolf, who is filling my head with her angry growls,

Marisa looks away, her lips flattening as she picks up her empty pot and stalks out of the dining room. I feel Aren glance from me to her, but he says nothing, and neither do I.

Another familiar woman catches my attention. Her shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair hangs over her right shoulder in a loose braid, and her blue eyes are warm as she smiles at me. I struggle to remember who she is until I spot the little boy with a mop of light brown hair and a slightly darker shade of blue eyes sitting beside her. Leo’s mom.

Propped up in a chair next to Leo is a large red and yellow lion named Rupert.

“Dania,” Aren says, distracting me.

I glance over at him, surprised to see he’s cleared his plate. “What?”

He points his chin at the woman. “The woman is Dania, and she wants to thank you for saving her son’s life.”

I look at Leo again. “He’s not a wolf anymore.”

The last time I’d seen him had been just after I’d played a game of chicken against a four-hundred-pound deer that had charged Leo. After I’d scared the deer away, Leo had shifted into an adorable, fluffy-looking gray wolf with blue eyes.

He’d been in his relieved mom’s arms when I ran away from Burning Wood—and Aren—but I had wondered if he was still a wolf or had changed back to his human form.

“The urge comes and goes. He’s the first to shift among his peers, so he is now incredibly popular and cool. He’ll probably want to thank you as well.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t do anything.”

Aren puts his fork down. He grips my chair and twists it around until I’m facing him.

He’s so serious, I can’t help but tense in response.

My fingers tighten around my fork as he leans so close to me, I’m terrified he’s going to kiss me and I’ll have to stab him in the neck to stop him. His beta, Finan, will probably kill me to avenge him or something.

But he stops short of a kiss.

The room falls silent, and I feel all eyes on me.

“You saved the life of one of our young.” His voice is quiet, but I feel the intensity of it like fingers brushing my chest. “That is not nothing. That means more to everyone here than you will ever know.”

I glance around the room.

No one is staring at me like I’m a thing that needs to be chained or caged. I’m no longer a feral in their eyes. Their smiles are welcoming.

“Eat and I’ll show you your room.” Aren stands before I can respond, carrying his plate to the serving table on the other side of the room.

Hungry, I clear my plate in seconds, eager to escape his pack’s attention. I’m not used to being treated like I’m where I belong. I’m used to being the outsider, the loner.

Aren’s plate is emptied of the chicken, shrimp, and sausage gumbo in record time.

He tells me to leave my empty plate when I move to pick it up. “Someone will deal with it.”

I’m complaining that I can do it when an older woman in the same light gray apron that Marisa was wearing enters the room with a dish of rice. She smiles at me. “It’s okay. Leave the plate. We’ll take care of it.”

I follow Aren out of the dining room, up a beautiful wooden staircase, and to a short hallway that splits off in two directions.

We step into a bedroom that occupies at least three-quarters of the entire top floor, with exposed dark wooden beams running across the ceiling. A massive window overlooks pine trees and a beautiful creek.

It’s nearly dark now, but this room must get incredible sunrises or sunsets. It even has its own fireplace, a smaller version of the stone one downstairs. An open door leads to a bathroom from the hint of white stone counters I spy.

It is… stunning .

And then I spot men's clothes sitting on top of a dark wood dresser.

His clothes.

On the floor beside it is my duffel.

“You said you were taking me to my room,” I say.

“And I have.” Eyes fused to mine, he pushes the door closed. “We’re mates, so your room is my room.”

This room is beautiful. Don’t get me wrong. The most beautiful room I’ve seen in my life. But I’m not about to spend a single night sleeping in here.

I cross my arms and lift my chin. “No.”

“Tagge will never believe we’re together if you’re off sleeping in the woods. A mated couple sleeps together. That means we’ll be sharing a bed.” He does nothing to hide his pleasure.