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  “I didn’t ask you to fight my battles.”

  I should have known better than to bring up the ill-fated bacon episode. Still, the growled dismissal in Gunner’s voice rubbed me entirely the wrong way.

  Because I felt like I gave and gave and gave to this werewolf. Now he was telling me my compromises weren’t good enough?

  Which might explain why months of smoothed-over slights bubbled to the surface with the force of a volcanic eruption. “You said you wanted me to be part of the pack,” I started, “so how exactly does that make my battles yours to take over? And let’s talk about you insisting I take you with me to talk to Ransom. As if I’m just a weak woman who couldn’t be trusted to deal with your brother on my own.”

  I hadn’t realized how angry I was until I started speaking. How hurt I felt by werewolf instincts that might have been intended as supportive but instead came across as an undermining of my own authority and free will.

  Gunner’s patience, apparently, had been similarly strained by dealing with my vulpine nature. Or so I gathered as he snapped out his reply.

  “I don’t trust you to watch out for yourself because you don’t do it,” he spat back. “Perhaps you didn’t notice the fact you almost died on the highway this evening? I told you that rustbucket wasn’t safe enough to drive down the block let alone across the state.”

  “So you want to make another decision for me, is that it? You want to take over yet another aspect of my life?”

  I expected him to yell a rebuttal. Because, yes, I was yelling. Heat suffused my face while my hands shook with the urge to turn into fists.

  Only, Gunner didn’t speak. Instead, he stalked over to the closet. Silently, he pulled the spare blanket and pillow off a shelf before retreating to a padded chair as far as he could get from the waiting mattress.

  For my part, I headed in the opposite direction, swishing my mouth out in the bathroom while wishing I had toothpaste to cover the foul flavor of my own mistakes. Because my words—while based on reality—had been intentionally hurtful. Yes, Gunner stepped on my toes from time to time and impinged upon my autonomy. But my arguments became small and petty when I realized his only return complaint was that I didn’t take good enough care of my own skin.

  Whether or not I was wrong, I wasn’t about to apologize. Not when doing so would relinquish the last shred of independence I clutched so frantically to my chest. Instead, I slipped alone between scratchy sheets while straining my ears in hopes Gunner would be the one to relent first.

  And he did speak even though he didn’t apologize. Instead, he explained what Allen had guessed and what I hadn’t previously known.

  “I’m going to spell it out for you,” Gunner growled, his voice tight with barely restrained anger. “If you want to be my mate, it’s a simple matter, although breaking a mate bond isn’t easy and it isn’t fun. So, be sure before you do it. Then say you’re mated and I’ll become your mate.”

  That was it? I opened my mouth to release words that would have ended the battle between us by confirming that I loved the frustrating yet adorable alpha curled into a chair on the other side of the hotel room. I opened my mouth...then choked as something stilled my tongue.

  No, not something—someone. Or make that several someones.

  Because promising myself to Gunner meant promising I wouldn’t take Kira and flee if living in the pack became too dangerous. Meanwhile, a bond as ironclad as Gunner was suggesting meant his own pack might suffer if they were unable to come to terms with a kitsune in their midst.

  My breath caught as I realized I was caught on a ledge with yawning crevasses on both the right hand and the left hand, with only one small path leading to safety on the other side. I fully expected Gunner to push me toward that knife-edge trail, demanding a declaration I wasn’t ready for. But instead, he let me off the hook.

  “It’s not a choice to be made hastily,” he continued, his voice gravelly with repressed emotion. “Until you tell me to leave you, I’ll still be here.”

  He was still there...and was just as heavy-handed about his urge to take over my life as ever. I hadn’t missed the fact there was no promise to abide by my future decisions emanating from the opposite side of the room.

  So I did what foxes do best—I slid out from under a difficult situation. Sighing, I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to descend. Tonight, I’d recover my equanimity. Tomorrow would be plenty soon enough to figure out the puzzle of becoming an alpha werewolf’s mate.

  Chapter 20

  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 hou
r 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.

  Chapter 21

  “Maybe you should try calling Tank?” I offered three hours later as we sped along the final leg of our journey toward home. I was driving the shiny new sedan that was superior to Old Red in every way...at least from Gunner’s point of view.

  Not that we’d had time to argue about his vehicular decision. Instead, Gunner was trying to figure out what had happened at clan central during our absence, a task made significantly more difficult when everyone refused to answer their phones. Even Kira’s texts had transitioned from vague to outright evasive as the afternoon faded closer and closer toward night.

  Adding to our stress levels, there were werewolves who didn’t belong scattered all along the drive home. First, the scent of fur had surrounded us at a service station well into Atwood territory where we’d stopped to fill my new car with gas. Old Red would have required refueling long before then, making me grudgingly admit that the new car’s improved gas efficiency would save me money in the long run—money I wouldn’t have to ask Gunner for.

  Still, I refused to name our current ride, instead keeping my attention riveted on our surroundings. Sure enough, a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye an hour later had resolved into a trio of unfamiliar wolves racing down the side of the interstate as if they owned the place.

  “Not ours,” Gunner had confirmed when I glanced in his direction. But we hadn’t stopped to investigate. We couldn’t afford to get sidetracked when the replies from Kira had stopped arriving by that point.

  No wonder Gunner couldn’t quite manage to come up with human words as he growled out a curt reply to my suggestion to call his most trusted lieutenant. Of course, he’d already tried Tank half a dozen times over the course of our travels. That went without saying. But it was better that he beat his head against the cell phone than turn four-legged and feral as I drove.

  Then we were there, the unmarked driveway disappearing into darkness beneath the glowering tree canopy. Gunner’s hand—almost a paw—landed atop my arm as I prepared to flick on the headlights. “No,” he ordered. “Park here.”

  Obediently, I pulled over and shut off the engine. Rolled down my window and listened to the night. It was quieter than it should have been, as if wildlife had fled in the face of a terrifying predator—like the wolf who now appeared by my side.

  Gunner hadn’t bothered to undress before shifting, and he wriggled out of his clothes as he stepped across my lap. The boxer shorts landing on my knee might have been intimate under other circumstances. As it was, I knew Gunner was merely angling for the window so he could make his escape.

  “Wait,” I told him...and he did wait just long enough for me to crack open the car door so we could disembark together. With a whisper of magic, my star ball materialized into my hand then solidified into the reassuring mass of a sword’s hilt. At last, I was armed and ready to take off down the road at a run.

  Only Gunner halted our forward motion a second time. Taking my left hand into his jaws as gently as if I was made of tissue paper, he pulled me off the road, through a hanging curtain of ivy...and onto a trail I hadn’t known existed before today.

  Which would have been no surprise if our move-in day had been my first introduction to Atwood territory. But Kira and I had come here at least half a dozen times over the last few months since Gunner had become the alpha in residence. I’d run nearby trails with Tank and Allen...and many times with Gunner himself. The fact I’d never been in this vegetation-shrouded tunnel suggested I’d been deliberately left out of the loop.

  Is that how mates treat each other? Ignoring the twinge in my gut at the omission, I followed Gunner through the tunnel without protesting the past. There was no time to mull over hurt feelings when the setting sun made silence from my sister more ominous with every step.

  After that, we traveled for several minutes in silence before Gunner stopped so abruptly that I almost stepped on his feet. I reached forward to catch my balance, steadying myself on his furry rump...

  ...Then my fingers clenched into fists as I heard what had stopped him. Outside our tunnel, the air rang with the clanging of swords.

  NOW WE WERE RUNNING as best we could within the confined tunnel. And as the trail split in two before us, Gunner, to my distress, turned away from rather than toward the much louder battle sounds.

  “But...” I started, then decided to trust him. And was glad I had when, barely a minute later, we emerged from the trees just behind the roiling melee.

  This was the same spot of the ill-fated bacon breakfast. The same spot where Edward and I made our differences worse rather than better as we fought. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to come out of the tunnel into fighting...I was merely shocked at the extent of the pitched battle made up of angry wolves.

  It appeared as if the entire pack was present, the haze of sulfur so strong it nearly made me choke. All of them were human, too, as they sliced at their friends with wicked metal blades.

  As I watched, Tank—the level-headed lawyer who used words as his weapon—slashed twin knives at a female I couldn’t remember the name of but who’d attended my spur-of-the-moment swordsmanship class the day before. No milquetoast, his opponent grinned ferociously and fought back with a sword that looked remarkably like one of the advanced-level training blades I’d packed into a duffel. The only problem was, she’d removed the protective foam intended to shield the tip.

  The female lunged forward with more grace than I remembered her being capable of. And, sure enough, her sword raised a streak of blood along
Tank’s forearm before the latter managed to knock the blow aside.

  Now that I saw them together, in fact, I was relatively sure this same female had been flirting with Tank just a few weeks earlier. Which would have been fine if they’d only been sparring rather than, apparently, battling to the death.

  Something was seriously wrong here. But all I could think was—Kira, Kira, where is Kira? Spinning, I ignored battling pack mates in search of the teenager I knew would be somewhere in their midst.

  And there she was, on a picnic blanket in the center of the disaster, bouncing with excitement as Sakurako held her in place with one gnarled hand.

  This was so wrong I didn’t know where to begin chipping away at the problem. “Gunner,” I started, speaking to the wolf vibrating with anger beside me.

  Unfortunately, at that moment the battling shifters took note of my presence. And rather than offering the real or feigned respect they usually showed me, one in particular shed his facade of pleasantry and leapt away from his current opponent so he could threaten me instead.

  Edward’s face contorted with rage as he raised a massive ax over his head with both hands while roaring like a berserker. And all I thought was, Gunner will have no doubt of Edward’s allegiances now.

  Chapter 22

  My sword was useless against an ax. But, luckily, my weaponry was magical. So instead of stabbing the attacking werewolf, I flattened my star ball out into a shield as the tremendous wedge fell toward me from above.

  The weight, when the ax struck, was excruciating, the star ball’s magical-yet-material gripping straps reverberating painfully within my hands. But my energy-infused armor held. And I breathed more deeply as it became apparent that Edward’s attack would do no more than bruise my skin.