Page 69 of Psycho Alphas: Part Two

My lips parted in shock as Rogue barked a laugh. “They thought you were performers?”

“That’s Vegas, Baby.” Thistle looked rather pleased with herself. “But then we ran out of Poptarts, and all the people who hated you knew what I looked like…” She scrunched her expression up bitterly. “Bastards nabbed me.”

Ace rolled his eyes. “Perhaps it would have been prudent to have brought me back sooner.”

“I couldn’t!” She crossed her arms. “You’d just gone feral. I think it needed to settle for a bit before I could undo it—betweenme and Glade—” She cut off as Ace went deathly still, a menacing shadow crossing his expression. “Anyway, you didn’t deserve it.”

“So what then?” Ace asked.

“The Ring got her,” I said. “Sold her as‘scent match and killer of Ace Maverick.’”

I watched him intently. He barely shifted, his expression remaining as impassive as ever, but his middle finger began tapping absently on the armrest. It stopped the moment my eyes drifted to it.

“And you bought her?” Ace asked, fixing his gaze on me. “Why?”

“I scent matched Rogue at the auction,” Thistle said. “He figured it out.”

“You’reluckyI did,” I said. “Ace has a lot of enemies.”

For the first time, I saw something catch Ace off guard. He went still, gaze fixed on me as if working through that.

Thiswas what I’d spent the last few years becoming an expert at: reading monsters right down to the slightest tell. Again, his finger tapped the armrest, then stopped. He took a breath, the only sound in the utter silence.

“How much?” he asked, finally.

Rogue laughed, but I frowned. “How much what?”

“How much did you pay for my mate?” he said the words slowly, and I knew it was more than just a curiosity.

I shrugged. “Twenty-five,” I lied.

Thistle’s eyebrows shot up, her gaze snapping to mine. But instead of blurting out the five-million-dollar answer, she kept her mouth shut. I noticed she squeezed Bunny tighter to her chest as she peered back at Ace curiously. Rogue was fighting a smile as he picked at his nail.

Ace had gone rigid.

“Twenty-five thousand?” he confirmed, the words rolling from his mouth like each syllable stabbed his tongue on their way out.

“That was the starting bid.”

Ace’s fist balled, knuckles going deathly white. “You were theonlybidder?”

I nodded, finally catching the slightest tick to his jaw as his expression began to give him away.

Rogue, who had the worst poker face of anyone I’d ever met, became even more fixated on his nail as he wrestled with his expression.

“And theyknewwho she was?” Ace demanded.

“Made a whole show of it!” Thistle declared. “Dragged me out in chains, said I was the one who killed you and everything.” She’d tuned in to how tense he was, too, and her eyes sparkled with delight. “How much do you think… would have been right?” she prodded, shuffling closer to him, lip caught in her teeth.

Ace Maverick’s killerandscent match? Never before had the cogs in his brain been so veryvisible, and even Rogue broke his fixation with his nail to get a glimpse of the spectacle. I could practically see his pride eroding every wall he erected to keep his reactions unreadable.

It was hard not to smile at how delighted Thistle was by this gift I was teasing out of him.

“I would expect, what…?” Rogue glanced at me. “Thirty, forty, maybe? Twenty-five did seem abitlow…”

“Forty…?” Ace looked like he was about to launch at Rogue.

Rogue frowned. “That’s not uncommon,” he said. “You’re not mainstream in those circles, right?” He shrugged. I almost wished it was true, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. “I paid fifty for Knox,” Rogue added. “Well. To join the hunt—fifty was the entry price.”