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I woke to an Atwood male leaning over me...but not the one I’d gone to bed with. Instead, it was Ransom’s eyes gleaming with approval as he took in my unclad state.
“My brother should learn to share,” he murmured, lips twisting into a smirking smile. I didn’t smell any actual arousal and had a feeling he was just being a jerk. But that didn’t prevent me from closing my fingers around a sword that was abruptly under the bedclothes along with me, just in case.
Then I remembered what was missing from this picture. Where was Gunner and why wasn’t he tearing out his brother’s throat?
For half a second, I thought last night’s argument had been more divisive than even I realized. Then the hotel-room door banged open and Gunner came in backwards, his hands full of a paper bag and a container of steaming coffee cups.
“I got you a...” he started. Then liquid splattered as he dropped my breakfast—or maybe, from the height of the sun outside the window, lunch—ruining the already stained carpet in front of the door.
Before Gunner could shift or roar or just strangle his brother, I leapt out of bed to prevent cold-blooded fratricide. But both brothers remained rooted where they’d been when they first saw each other, more expressions than I could identify flitting across nearly identical faces.
“So you didn’t let her come alone after all,” Ransom murmured after a moment, taking a single step toward his brother and giving me the space to slip into my clothes.
“She’s my mate. I don’t leave her,” Gunner answered. “But I held true to the letter of our agreement. I didn’t set foot on the soil of your land.”
And in that moment, I learned what a werewolf bond looked like when it was shattered. Like two brothers who itched to hug each other but instead stood separated by far more than ten feet of musty air.
I shivered, realizing that the dull ache I felt from having to refuse Elle was nothing compared to Gunner and Ransom’s agony. But they could still fix this. All it would take was the right gesture of reconciliation and I knew both brothers would embrace the other and put the previous four months firmly in the past.
So I held my breath and waited. Waited so long, in fact, that I not only started breathing again but inhaled the scent of donuts disintegrating in a pool of coffee on the floor. And when it became clear that neither brother was willing or able to speak about the real issue, I decided it was finally time to break the ice.
“You found something about Oyo?” I suggested, stepping into the no-man’s-land of empty space between the brothers.
“What I found out is that everyone and their mother knows Atwood clan central is home to kitsunes,” Ransom agreed, his eyes meeting mine with what actually looked like gratitude. “One of the outpack males we took in last month heard the story and apparently thought it was a good idea to spread it around outside our territory. He won’t make that mistake again.”
So Ransom’s pack really was the source of the leak...and the problem was larger than either Gunner or I had supposed. I shivered, wondering if less friendly kitsunes—and werewolves—would be showing up at clan central by the time we got home.
But it wasn’t cool to shoot the messenger. “You can ask for what I owe you,” I reminded the older Atwood brother. “I’ll be glad to fulfill my debt.”
“Later. Maybe,” Ransom answered. Then as abruptly as he’d appeared above me, he brushed past his brother and padded out the door.
***
“THE CAR IS TOAST.”
An hour later, with a silent Gunner beside me, I stood on the other side of the counter in a well-lit automobile dealership and felt like I’d taken a misstep forward and stumbled off a cliff. “You mean it’ll be expensive to repair her,” I suggested. “How much are we talking? Five hundred dollars? Six hundred? More?”
The human glanced at me once with pity in his eyes, then returned his attention to Gunner. “For fifty bucks, we’ll take it to the crusher. Or, if you’re looking for a new set of wheels, Joe here can likely give you five percent off any new vehicle on the lot.”
Joe nodded from a nearby counter, exuding the same smarmy pleasantry shared by salesmen everywhere. But that wasn’t why my hackles rose. Instead, I tensed as Gunner hesitated, clearly wishing to replace my vehicle with something more reliable but at the same time well aware that I’d never let Old Red—and the freedom she represented—slip away without a fight.
Perhaps it was my flaring nostrils that won him over. Whatever the reason, after only a millisecond of internal debate, Gunner backed me up. “How much to repair the vehicle we brought in yesterday?”
“Two.”
I wanted that to mean two hundred, but I knew from the way the mechanic twisted up his face that he meant a whole lot more. Two thousand? At the same time, my phone chimed and I glanced down, noting an incoming call.
From Kira. From a sister who usually texted, saying it was too time consuming to actually talk with me.
Reality was literally calling. So, caving to the inevitable, I told Gunner, “You deal with this.” Then I stepped away to answer the phone.
Behind me, the werewolf dealt with the car situation in the exact way I didn’t want him to. “You—make that discount ten percent and we’ll take the best car on the lot.”
“The best car?” I could see dollar signs rolling through the salesman’s head as he considered a commission on what was bound to be the most expensive car he had available rather than the best. Meanwhile, I could feel my own debt piling back up like walls around me, just months after I’d last wiggled my way out from under its weight.
But Kira was speaking into my ear now, her words running together in a way that made hairs rise along the back of my neck. “Oyo wasn’t here when I woke up this morning,” she said. “Tank and Allen aren’t answering their cell phones. And there are scary noises coming from the direction of the Green. What do I do next?”
It looked like I had far greater problems than losing Old Red.