Kai was alone, sitting on the end of his bed when Rhys found him. The wolf had managed to lose R.J. somewhere along the way. He didn’t come in, just stood in the doorway looking contrite.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” Kai admitted.

“I’m sorry,” Rhys said.

“For which part? For embarrassing me? For treating me like I’m helpless again? For acting like I’m some nineteen-fifties housewife and you make decisions for me? Which part are you sorry for this time?”

Rhys slunk inside, metaphorical tail between his legs, closing the door and walking to Kai. Kai dropped his gaze, refusing to look at the wolf as anger and adrenaline pounded through Kai, making his head hurt. How was this supposed to work? How was it ever going to work if Rhys didn’t honestly believe Kai could take care of himself? Doubt started to leach its way into his bones. Maybe Rhys didn’t want this to work. Maybe this was Rhys pushing him away again.

When Kai refused to look at Rhys, he sank to his knees, taking Kai’s hands, elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry for all of it. I’m an asshole.”

Kai scoffed. “Yeah, you are.”

“I know,” Rhys said. “I-I just get so nervous when you’re out there.” Kai started to say something, but Rhys held up his hand. “It’s not because I think you’re weak or can’t handle yourself. I swear. It’s because having you there makes me weak. The same reason Isa doesn’t want Wren going is the same reason I don’t want you going.”

“Yes, but I’m the one staying home. If you can’t handle me being out there without you getting distracted, then you stay home and watch the baby, and I’ll go fight vampires.”

Rhys looked at him with his big, sad, stupidly beautiful eyes. “Be reasonable. My strength makes me a better fighter against the vampires. You know it’s true. It’s not skill; it’s genetics. I don’t think of you as a…housewife.” He flushed at the idea. “At all.” He brushed his lips against Kai’s. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

“You can’t just kiss me and expect everything to be okay,” Kai said. “You should be resting. I have to go open the restaurant and pretend that you guys didn’t just make a plan to get our pack slaughtered.”

Kai went to stand, but Rhys stopped him, dropping his head into his lap. “Please. I’m not going to sleep if you’re mad at me.”

Kai glared at the top of the wolf’s head. “Well, you’re going to have to, because I’m not ready to forgive you yet.”

Rhys nodded but then looked up. “But you will forgive me, right?”

Kai closed his eyes. “Eventually, yes. But you’re going to have to figure out how to get your shit together because I’m not going to sit at home while you fight because you’re afraid I’ll get hurt, and I’m not going to spend our whole lives having this same argument.”

Rhys nodded. “I know. I’ll do better. I promise.”

“I hope so. Now get out of here and go to sleep. I have to shower before work.”

Rhys’s lips twitched, hands sliding along the outside of Kai’s thighs, before pressing himself close to brush a kiss across Kai’s ear and whispering, “I could scrub your back.”

Kai bit down a groan. That was such a dirty move, in every conceivable way. “Nice try, Romeo, but not gonna happen. Go.”

Rhys relented with one more mournful look. Kai showered with lightning speed, grateful to put some distance between him and Rhys as he left for the restaurant with the others.

The first two hours at work proved uneventful. A steady crowd came and went, but it wasn’t so busy Kai and Ember couldn’t keep up. Wren had the grill, and Isa picked up the slack where needed. R.J. was in his playpen behind the counter playing with his blocks and gumming on a frozen rag. The door chimed overhead, signaling a new customer, and by the time Kai turned around, the man was sliding onto the stool directly before Kai. He tilted his head, trying to place the man.

He was tall and blonde with a curved scar along his cheek. The man’s eyes widened in surprise. “Hey, I know you. You’re the new dad, right? The guys from the store the other night.”

That’s right. The man he’d talked to in the formula aisle. “Oh, yeah. Hey, man. How are you?”

“Sleep deprived,” the guy said with a laugh. “You look about the same.”

Kai nodded, tilting his head in R.J.’s direction. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he’s trying to kill us.”

The man spotted the rag. “Teething?”

“Yep,” Kai said, flipping over the coffee cup in front of the man. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, that’d be great, thanks. I’m Michael, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand for Kai to shake.

Kai did. “Kai,” he said, turning to snag the pot. “You seem kind of far from home.” It was easily a forty-minute trip from the store where they’d met.

Before the man could respond, Isa was pushing through the door from the back. Kai was pouring the man’s coffee when Isa stopped short. “Detective Hughes. What brings you here?” she asked, mouth tugging down at the corners.

Detective? Was this guy one of the cops harassing the girls? Kai fought the urge to accidentally spill the man’s coffee in his lap.

“Uh, you, actually,” he said. “Detective Fitz told me what happened on my night off with you and Chavez. I wanted to apologize for my partner. He’s just blowing smoke. It’s like he’s got something to prove since—well since something happened that has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, you’re his partner, can’t you get him to see reason?” Isa asked.

“I’m too new. Low man on the totem pole,” he said with a self-effacing laugh that made Kai instantly distrust the guy. “Anyway, we don’t think you had anything to do with what happened to those kids. Not directly anyway.”

He stirred an insane amount of sugar into his coffee before taking a sip. Isa looked at Kai. She’d caught that too. “But you think we had something to do with this indirectly?”

“Isa, do you have any enemies?”

Kai fought the urge to snort. How much time did this dude have? It would be easier to list the people who didn’t want to kill them lately.

“No, detective. I run a diner. My fiancé and I take care of my brother and the twins and Ember. I just go to work and go home every day. I have no idea why this person chose to target my business or pick victims that look like my kids, but it wasn’t because of something we did.”

He looked at Kai and then Isa and back to Kai. “So, the guy with you the other night, that was your boyfriend?”

Kai’s heart rate went wild. “Fiancé,” he said, his voice wavering just slightly.

Detective Hughes looked at R.J. again and then Isa. “His fiancé and a baby also live with you in that two-bedroom apartment?”

“His fiancé is my brother, Rhys, so yes,” Isa explained with a smile.

“Oh, that’s…Isa, I thought you said your brother was eighteen?”

Isa shifted her weight, crossing her arms over her chest. “Yes, he is.”

“And you’re seventeen?” He asked Kai.

Kai wanted to lie but what was the point. They were cops. All they had to do was look up his birth certificate, if they hadn’t already. “Yes.”

“But the state of Florida let you adopt a baby?” he asked. “And before you say yes, keep in mind that Florida doesn’t allow adoption by underage couples, so don’t work too hard on whatever lie you are thinking of telling me.”

“He’s not ours,” Kai said. “We were just…playing house.”

The detective frowned. “You had two carts full of baby items.”

Isa gave a long-suffering sigh that would have made Rhys proud. “My friend Ingrid had a family emergency and had to fly back to Brazil to care for her mother. She was supposed to be back last week, but there was a problem getting back into the country. I sent the boys to get more supplies to get us through until she could get back. They went a little overboard.” Isa smiled wanly. “Never send two teens anywhere with cash and no list. Lesson learned.” The detective pulled his wallet out to pay for his coffee, but Isa put her hand up. “Law enforcement doesn’t pay here.”

He stared hard at R.J. once more. “Isa, a bit of advice. Be careful. I don’t think you killed those kids, but I also don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. My partner won’t either.” He took another sip. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said.

When he left, Isa collapsed against the counter. “If this keeps up, I’m going to take up day drinking, I swear it.”

Kai handed her a cup of black coffee. “I don’t think these guys are going away. And if he starts digging at that flimsy-ass story you just told him about this imaginary girl named Ingrid, our story is going to fall apart.”

Ember pushed open the door from the kitchen, looking between him and the alpha. “Wren’s freaking out back there. What’s going on?”

“We just a had a visit from the detective,” Isa said, gazing out the front window.

“The douchey one, the female one, or the sort of nice one?” Ember asked.

“The nice one…the too nice one if you ask me,” Isa said. “I don’t trust any of them.”

Ember nodded.

Kai looked to his alpha. “Isa, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think we have to figure out who turned the cheerleaders into cannibals.”

Ember gave him a look. “How are we going to figure out who turned the cheerleaders when the cheerleaders are dead?”

“Same way we do everything else,” Kai said, grimacing.

Ember sighed. “Wing it and hope we don’t die?”

Kai threw his arm over her increasingly bony shoulders. “Exactly.”

Isa took another sip of her coffee. “So, where do we start?”

“I think we need to look at Quinn’s photos again.”