Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
I turn back to my whiskey. Job well done. Wish it felt more satisfying, but I guess you can’t really decide how you feel about things. You’ve just got to do what has to be done. That’s what being an alpha is. Taking care of problems forever.
“Boss?”
My friend Raglan gives me a quick nudge. “We’ve got a human problem. When the shit kicked off in here, not everyone was human. Girl saw some of the boys shifting. Freaked out. Tried to record it. We think we stopped her, but so much of this shit goes straight to the cloud.”
The cloud. We’re worried about remote fucking computer servers. I hate it. I hate everything I have to concern myself with that feels like a sneaky little trick by a weak little fucker who couldn’t stand up in a fight.
“Why haven’t they taken care of her?” I don’t even bother to turn my head as I ask the question.
“She’s pretty.”
I sigh inwardly and finish my drink. Humans who see wolf shifters have to be killed. Period.
Recent events have made that more clear than ever. Letting people live when they know what wolves are is asking for trouble of a kind that disrupts and puts everyone in danger. Better to kill one or two people every now and then, than to be exposed as supernatural creatures in a world starved of magic.
“I’ll take care of her.”
He shifts uncomfortably. “She’s really pretty, boss.”
“Not a problem.”
I get up from the barstool, aware that every eye in the place is on me. These are my men, my pack mates. Some of them are friends, but most of them are underlings who like to do what they’re told. It gives them a place in the world, somewhere to belong, and someone to belong to.
They respect me, and they fear me. Some of them probably hate me, too. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’d prefer to be under my father’s law. He was old-fashioned. He’d been in power for the better part of forty years. Most people here don’t remember a time before Orion Dulac. Karl Dulac doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
I’ll deal with the girl who saw too much. I’ll deal with it because it’s my fucking job, and because half the reason I’m in the mood I’m in is because someone else failed to deal with another cute girl who saw too much. Being adorable is not a get out of death free card when it comes to me. I’ve spent years hardening my heart. Hell, my dad ensured it would be hard from the moment I was born. I was raised to rule the pack one day, but the truth is I’m not like him. I’m not a strategist. I’m not a diplomat. I’m not even really a leader. I’m a brute. I know it, and I let everyone else know it.
“Where is she?”
“Put her in the back office, boss. Sorry.”
This won’t take a minute.
I go through the door marked Management Only to the office. It’s full of all the crap involved with running a business. I don’t pay attention to the location. I pay attention to the female who must die. My tongue runs over the sharp points of my teeth as I look at her. I like killing. I never hesitate. I bite the neck or I pull the trigger, and that is the end of it.
Seconds pass by. We look at each other.
She should be dead already.
Why is she still alive?
She looks at me with seductive eyes full of some kind of emotion I can’t quite place. It might be fear. If it is, it’s fear mixed with something else. Raglan was right. She is very, very pretty. She has long dark hair, big brown eyes, and the kind of features that angels would be jealous of. Generous, wide mouth. Cute nose. Her face is round and her chin is sharp and her body is all curves. She’s wearing leather. I wonder if there’s a cute pink bike out there with a fuzzy toy on the end of the keychain and a bunny ear cover on the helmet.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she says.
My anger flares. How dare she ask for mercy in a world where it doesn’t exist? She thinks she’s special, that she gets to break the rules. That’s what everyone thinks these days, that consequences don’t apply to them.
I walk over to where she’s standing, bend down, get ready to snap her neck.
She punches me in the throat.
Straight arm, twisted hips, she puts her whole weight behind it.
There aren’t a lot of places a human woman can hit a wolf shifter and make an impact. She hits one, and then finds the other, significantly further south, driving her knee right up into my crotch with a viciousness that I’ve really only previously encountered in myself.