Page 21 of Winter Lost

Mary Jo jerked up her head and stared at my phone.

“Hello,” I said in what I hoped was a disinterested tone. He didn’t usually call twice in one day. I found that I was terrorized out. Oddly, sitting across from Mary Jo steadied me, too. “Is there something I can do for you?”

A shivery tension filled the air. When silence answered me, I ended the call.

“He really defeated Adam?” Mary Jo asked in a smaller-than-usual voice.

My mate had cut his teeth in Vietnam and was one of the toughest werewolf fighters I had ever seen—and I’d grown up in the Marrok’s pack with the bunch of crazy werewolves he’d deemed too dangerous to inflict on any other Alpha. Adam was a born warrior.

“Yes,” I said. I tried not to picture my mate’s broken body on the ground, curled around an artifact that was trying to turn him into its slave. It had been so close.

Mary Jo looked at my phone.

“He found your number,” Mary Jo said heavily.

I shrugged. Worrying too much about it wasn’t useful, but shoving it to the side extracted its own toll. I wasn’t going to talk about Bonarata anymore.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to come here and tell you that you did the right thing in refusing Renny. You wanted me to argue with you, because I’m not any better armed against the bad guys than someone like Renny is.”

“Probably,” Mary Jo admitted.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “He is not equipped to deal with folks like—” I tapped the screen of my phone. I didn’t use Bonarata’s name any more than necessary.

She flinched but stiffened her spine and raised her chin.

“You didn’t come here to ask me why I accepted Adam as my mate,” I said. “I’m the wrong side of the equation. You came here to find out how Adam had the courage to take me as his mate.”

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly. “I take great comfort knowing that Adam is very hard to kill. Bonarata left us that night thinking Adam would die—and he was wrong. I don’t know how Adam deals with the fact that I would not have survived the wounds he took that night.”

“You are hard to kill, too,” said Mary Jo. “You shouldn’t be, but you are.”

I wasn’t going to argue about that. It didn’t seem useful. Instead, I said softly, “Renny has a dangerous job. How are you going to feel if he gets shot trying to interfere in a domestic dispute or a standard traffic stop? Just because you don’t accept his marriage proposal, that doesn’t make him safe. It doesn’t mean that he won’t die in a car wreck on the way home tonight.”

The wolf in her eyes lit right up, and my phone rang.

“How are you going to feel then?” I asked.

I answered my phone. This time I didn’t check the caller ID because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to give Bonarata that power. Not with Mary Jo—my pack—here with me.

“Mercy,” said my husband. “You need to come home. Your brother is here.” There was a noise—I couldn’t quite make it out. And then Adam grunted and disconnected.

Mary Jo grabbed her wallet. “I’ll take care of the bill,” she said. “My invite. Go.”

“You need to wait before you drive,” I told her.

She smiled. “I promise. Go.”

—

I did not speed on the way home. I was very, very careful about when and how I broke the law, and right now a speeding ticket would cost me more time than the few minutes I would save speeding. When a light turned red in my face, I stopped.

I’d called Adam back before I left, but he didn’t pick up. The noises I’d heard before he’d disconnected had sounded like combat. But I couldn’t be sure. Who would he have been fighting?

I tapped my foot as I waited for the light to turn green.

Why had Gary come to my house? Gary and I weren’t close.