Page 17 of Ruthless Alpha (Nightfire Islands Alphas #3)

I should have known things were going too well.

Even if Rosie hadn’t made a whole lot of progress on channeling her magic, she was still willing to try, willing to talk to Eve about it, which was more than I’d expected from her.

She’d grown much easier around me, too; the pair of us joked over dinner in the evening, and she’d stopped looking at me out of the corner of her eye as if waiting for me to attack.

I did still catch her staring wistfully out of windows, but she hadn’t asked to go home or made a fuss in recent days, and that was an improvement.

Sure, maybe I couldn’t stop thinking about the insistent heat of her lips, or the soft give of her hips beneath my fingers, but I would get over that eventually.

I had to. Not least because it was distracting me during training, and during important development meetings with Jace, who had just asked me a question:

“Did you hear a word I just said?”

We’d been talking about Noah. About the wife his father had forced on him, and the two-year-old we’d never met.

“Sure. You wanted to see if Cunic would let us visit. It’s a good idea.”

“I did say that,” Jace confirmed, not giving me any time to feel smug before he continued, “twenty minutes ago. Just now, I said that we need material with less friction on the expanding straps.”

“Right. Sorry. I was just—”

“Thinking about Rosie,” he finished for me.

“I’m not always thinking about Rosie.” It was the truth, but only just.

“You had your Thinking About Rosie face on,” Jace informed me, as if this wasn’t a patently ridiculous thing to say. “It looks like this.”

I couldn’t help laughing at the expression he pulled, like a teenage girl thinking about her crush.

“I do not look like that,” I protested, but Jace only shrugged.

“Just calling it like I see it. And I do see it. Every day.”

I was about to reply with something incredibly witty and correct when the door of the lab opened, and Cole rushed in.

“Challenge in South Four,” he panted. “Looks like one fatality.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Stay here, Jace. I’ll check in later if I can.”

Jace simply nodded, shooing me away as he turned his attention back to the project.

With tensions already high, I didn’t need Jace on hand to make me look weak.

Not that Jace was weak, but when faced with a similar resources issue, Opifex had elected to concentrate on mechanics over warfare, and there were plenty of Ensign who looked down on them for it.

If a fight had broken out, the males’ blood would be up, and I didn’t need them trying to challenge a visiting Heir.

“Report,” I barked at Cole as we ran the short distance to South Four.

“Tyler’s mate came to see him in the dorm because she’s an idiot,” Cole told me. “Harris made some comments about her—he’s always liked a blonde—and then all hell broke loose.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Tyler.”

That was not the answer I’d wanted to hear.

Tyler was pretty level-headed, a decent fighter who knew what his business was and what it wasn’t.

His mate, Nessa, was never sporting bruises, and the two seemed happy together.

Harris, on the other hand, was a hothead who thought he could brute-force his way through any issue.

It seemed like he’d done so successfully on this occasion, and it was my job to bring him back down to earth before his ego made him do something stupid.

I could hear Nessa wailing from a hundred yards away.

When we arrived at the scene, she was cowering against the side of the South Four dorm, her clothes torn and her hands bloodied.

She’d probably tried to staunch the bleeding of her mate’s wounds before she realized it was fruitless.

My heart ached for her, but now wasn’t the time for comfort: Harris and a couple of others were looming over her, and it looked like I had gotten there just in time.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, what the fuck’s going on here?”

The assembled males stood to attention at the sound of my voice, and Nessa curled further in on herself where she was backed up against the building. Harris was still eyeing her, unable to keep still, his attention barely on me.

“I won her fair and square, Alpha,” he declared. His mouth and chin were soaked in blood, and I could tell he was still high from the kill. “Tyler started with me, so I finished it, and now she’s mine.”

“You gonna give her a minute to mourn the loss of her mate?” I said.

Technically, it was within his rights to claim Nessa, but the thought of letting him take her made my stomach turn.

She was so small, blonde just like Rosie—but I knew she’d put up a fight if he tried to touch her, even if the smarter move would be to just let it happen.

“He was useless anyway.” Harris grinned, hawking a gob of pink spittle onto the ground. “She’ll have a better time with me.”

“She’ll have a better time in the widows’ dorm,” I corrected. “Cole, take her over there, see if you can pick up Lenise on the way. She’ll know what to do.” Lenise was good with the widows, knew just what to say, and offered the right brand of comfort. She was feisty, too.

“But Alpha—” Cole tried to argue, but I shut him down, my voice ringing with authority.

“I wasn’t asking.”

Everyone seemed to hold their breath. This wasn’t how things were done, and maybe I was going to regret it later, but I couldn’t allow Harris to touch Nessa with hands still covered in her mate’s blood.

Cole looked at me like I’d lost my mind—and maybe I had—but he followed the order, yanking Nessa up and dragging her toward the females’ dormitories.

Harris stared after her, his fingers sharpening into claws, and a growl shaking his chest. He had no self-control, no discipline. I walked into his space, ignoring the warning snarl he let out as I placed a fist against his chest.

“If I hear you’ve laid a finger on her,” I said quietly, evenly, “you’re gonna find out what your insides look like.”

“It was a fair fight, Alpha,” he insisted. “I have a right—”

“You have the rights I let you have,” I reminded him. “You might have beaten Tyler in a fair fight, but I won’t hear you talking that way about your Packmates. He was a good man and a good fighter, and you will leave his mate alone if you know what’s good for you.”

I was definitely going to pay for that later. No matter how much I dressed it up in respect for the dead, I’d come between a victorious fighter and his prize. The males wouldn’t like it—hell, they were probably already planning their challenges—but I wasn’t about to back down.

It took another hour to clean up the mess in South Four and to move Tyler’s body into the little morgue at the back of the medical building.

We’d hold a proper funeral for him in a few days, and I barked orders at my Betas to build a pyre and make sure the bell was rung at sundown to let the Pack know we’d lost someone.

As if the news wasn’t already all over town.

It wasn’t exactly common to lose a Packmate like this, but it had happened enough times that I should be inoculated against the anger that burned beneath my skin. I’d been defending this Pack to Rosie for the last month, and this was how they were going to act?

I would be of no use to Jace for the rest of the afternoon.

I needed to go home, head downstairs to the basement, and wail on my punching bag until my knuckles were bruised and swollen.

I didn’t even think about the fact that I was covered in congealing blood when I arrived at the house, only realizing it when Rosie’s eyes widened in horror.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about this with her, didn’t want to give her another reason to hate the place I hoped she might one day call home. “Sorry, I didn’t think.”

“That’s not nothing, Xander,” she insisted, rushing forward to check me for injuries. Her hands were so small. She was so soft, so vulnerable. Maybe she really didn’t belong here.

“A couple of males got into a fight,” I said, catching her wrists so she wouldn’t stain her fingers red. “One of them died.”

“And the other?”

I dropped her wrists, stripping off my shirt and throwing it straight into the sink. What did I need for the stains? Baking soda?

“Probably telling the tale over a can of beer with his friends,” I said. I didn’t want to see her face as I said it. I could picture the horrified look in her eyes well enough; I was all too familiar with the downward curve of her lips.

“That’s—” she started to protest, but I couldn’t hear it right now. I couldn’t handle her disgust with my Pack, not when I was so disgusted with them myself.

“We live by conquest here, Rosie. They fought. He won. End of story.”

Where was the damn baking powder? It had to be here somewhere. In the doorway of the kitchen, Rosie was still trying to argue with me.

“But you’re Alpha. Surely you could—”

“I stopped Harris from taking Tyler’s mate, and I’m probably going to get challenged over that soon enough,” I told her, still unable to turn and look her in the eye. “One Alpha isn’t enough to change centuries of Pack culture, no matter how strong he is. No matter how much he wants to.”

There was a long silence. Had I been too curt? Was she afraid to argue back? Had I just ruined weeks of careful gentleness?

Then there was a small, warm hand on my bare back.

“You did a good thing,” said Rosie, quietly. “You protected her.”

“I can’t protect her all the time,” I lamented.

“Harris is too stupid to know he couldn’t beat me in a fight; he might still try something.

” I could consider putting a Beta or two on watch for a week or so, just until Harris cooled off, but what was the point?

Maybe it would give Nessa a few days of peace, but what about the next time something like this happened? And the next? And the next?

As if she could read my mind, Rosie said,

“Don’t do this to yourself. You did a good thing today.”

“I could have done more,” I insisted, but she shushed me with a hand on my face.

“Hey—look at me.”

I couldn’t deny her. When she turned my face toward hers, Rosie’s eyes were damp with tears, but she was smiling.

“You’re a good man, Xander.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said. I ought to pull away, but her little hand was so warm on my face. “It’s alright, you don’t have to comfort me.”

“I want to.”

She rose up on her tiptoes, brushing her thumb along my cheekbone, and I was lost. I wanted to disappear into her, to let her softness envelop me until all my hard edges disappeared.

This time, she met me halfway, tipping her head back so her lips could meet mine.

Her touch lit an inferno inside me, and my hand flew to her waist, tugging her close.

She gave a little gasp against my mouth, her hand leaving my cheek to grasp fruitlessly at the buzzed hair on the back of my head.

The rake of her short nails against my scalp made me shiver, and I bit down hard on her lower lip in response.

Her little whimper only spurred me on, and I dug my fingers into the generous flesh of her hips, relishing the give of it.

It wasn’t enough. With a growl, I bent to lift her by the bottoms of her thighs up onto the kitchen table, and she made the sweetest little sound of surprise.

I wanted to touch her every way possible to categorize all those little sounds; the groan when I pushed her legs apart to stand in the cradle of them, the hitch of her breath when my thumb found her nipple beneath her shirt, the high whine when I sucked her bottom lip into my mouth.

It was her hiss of pain when I grabbed her thighs that brought me up short. When I tore my mouth away from hers, my fingers were digging deep into her flesh, and when I let go, stumbling backward to create some space between us, I could see her lower lip was bleeding.

She looked gorgeous. Her clothes were in disarray, her face flushed, blonde curls escaping from her braid, and I had done that to her. My wolf gave a pleased growl, but I couldn’t share his victory. I’d been angry and unthinking. I’d hurt her.

“Go to bed,” I told her. Rosie blinked as if coming out of a trance.

“What?”

“Go to bed, Rosie. I can’t—I can’t be gentle with you right now.”

I couldn’t look at her as she clambered off the edge of the table, but I could feel her standing in the quiet kitchen, just looking at me, for several long seconds before she finally turned and left me alone.

What was I doing? I’d bought her to keep her safe from exactly the sort of man I was turning out to be.

I’d never felt this way about a female before, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think—but that wasn’t an option.

There was nothing driving my behavior but lust and an embarrassing lack of self-control.

No matter what my wolf insisted, I didn’t need to touch her; I only wanted to.

I wanted her so badly it might ruin me.