Derek didn’t say a word, just tracked her with his gaze as she made her way inside. His empty smile made her skin crawl.
She missed Ronin. And not just the safety he enveloped her with, but…Ronin himself. She closed her eyes for a second and imagined his lips on hers. She then steeled herself and pushed her way through the crowd gathered in the living room. There were towering lion shifters everywhere. There were so many dominants in one room, she fought the old urge to run. To hide. To be invisible.
Hurt them back.
If she hadn’t been here before, she wouldn’t have known where the kitchen was. There were that many Pride members here. “Excuse me,” she muttered, pushing past a trio of giants who purposely blocked her path.
Her politeness didn’t move them. Instead, they clumped closer together and glared down at her with the devil himself in their smiles. More of them gathered behind her, blocking off her view of Annamora. Emerald’s lioness didn’t like being separated from her friend, and a growl rattled her chest.
“Your face looks all healed up,” one of them said. “I can’t decide if you look prettier with a shiner or not. What do you think, Carl?”
The Carl in question walked around her, and for a split second, she could see Annamora. One of the males was holding her in place by the back of the neck, and she was giving Emerald a warning look. Careful.
“She belongs to Cassius,” Orion growled.
“Shut the fuck up,” Carl said, lurching at Orion.
And Orion, to his credit, didn’t back down an inch. He stood up straighter and his eyes blazed white as he glared down Carl-the-megachode.
“You got the balls to post up?” Carl scoffed. “What’s your job here, Orion? To wrangle a bunch of scatterbrained women? You’re a glorified babysitter, not a guard.”
“I’d rather be a glorified babysitter than a goat-licking douchetart, Carl.”
“Oh, shit,” Emerald murmured. Her eyebrows were so far up in her hairline, her forehead ached.
“You really want to do this?” Carl yelled.
“Been waiting my whole fuckin’ life,” Orion said with a grim smile. His eyes flickered to Annamora. “Get her out of here,” he gritted out as he turned to lead the trio of giant assholes out the front door.
By “get her out of here,” Emerald honestly couldn’t tell if he meant out of the living room or out of the territory. Orion was confusing.
“He’ll be fine,” Annamora whispered, grabbing her by the hand and yanking her toward the kitchen.
“H-how do you know?” Emerald asked, watching the four behemoths shoving their way through the front door.
“Trust me,” Annamora said. “They’re barking up the wrong tree with Orion. They keep testing him because he ain’t from here, but they keep coming back with their skulls nearly bashed in. And no one’s got him pissed off enough to Change yet. He’s been beating them fist to fist, but you can just tell his animal is a monster. Probably got white eyes and looks like a damn demon…”
Someone suddenly grabbed the back of Emerald’s hair and shoved her forward, then released her so she blasted toward the kitchen island. She barely caught herself before her nose hit the hard edge. Chest heaving, she turned slowly to find Derek chuckling to himself and stalking toward her slowly. “That was close,” he murmured.
“Cassius won’t like your hands on me,” Emerald said, straightening her spine.
“Cassius won’t give a shit. It was supposed to be your pairing day, and where is he?” Derek looked around at the jeering males around him. “Are you Cassius?” he asked one of them.
“Not I,” said the monster.
“You?” he asked another.
The man with a scar down his face and only one eye looked her up and down and said, “I wish.”
“This ain’t just a meeting, cupcake. This was supposed to be your celebration. Your coronation. You were supposed to be one of them already.” He gestured to the blonde, Sora, and the two brunettes who had been serving Cassius when she’d come here. The other mates.
She let herself get lost in a merry-go-round memory. She was scared, and sometimes it was easier to escape to a pretty picture in her head than face reality. She was new to this bravery thing, and it was a lot with all this attention on her. The memory didn’t hold though. It was a kiss from Ronin and then the vision flickered and faded. Dominants were everywhere, and they all looked hungry. For her. It felt like bugs were crawling under her skin, and she wanted to retch as Derek brushed her hair off her shoulders. She leaned back away from him as far as she could, but the countertop was blocking any escape.
Trapped. Trapped. Trapped.
“Hey, man, leave her alone,” one of the males said from the crowd.
Derek rounded on an unfamiliar man and snarled, “Or what, Cason?”
The man dropped his head to the side, but his eyes were full of anger. His gaze flickered to Emerald, and he twitched his chin toward the other side of the kitchen.
Okay then. Emerald sidestepped to the other females, who had stopped their meal preparations and were staring leerily at Derek. One of the mates of Cassius, the submissive blond one, brushed her fingertips against Emerald’s back and then held her shirt gently to keep her in place. “Stay in the middle of us tonight,” she whispered shakily.
Oooooh, something was happening. There was a tension here that she didn’t understand. Dissention in the ranks. A Pride wasn’t supposed to squabble like this. She was beginning to think that not all of the Old Tarians were bad. Perhaps they’d just gotten stuck in a situation they couldn’t escape. Like her.
The saying that it took one bad apple to ruin the bunch? Well, what if here it took a few good apples to ruin the Old Tarian Pride? They could ruin them with morals.
Hope fluttered in her chest. She wished for the hundredth time today that Ronin was here and she wasn’t navigating this alone, but maybe this was meant to be. She’d always believed that some people’s destinies were beige. They weren’t meant for anything exciting, weren’t meant to make a ripple in the ocean of their generation. She’d always thought that was her, but now…she felt something building, something growing, some storm that was much bigger than her, and she was right in the eye of it. And her lioness, the Fury now, was watching and waiting like a wild lion in hip-high grass, the same color of her fur, every muscle tensed, eyes steady on some prey Emerald couldn’t figure out yet.
Derek turned around to find her gone from where he’d cornered her. Emerald smiled at him. She shouldn’t poke at the rattlesnake, but today she couldn’t seem to help herself. He’d hurt her dad. She would never forget him dragging Dad behind that snowmobile while he laughed.
She’d never been able to hold a dominant’s gaze before today.
Something had really broken inside of her.
Or maybe Ronin had put her together, she didn’t know.
Hurt them back.
“What can I do to help?” she asked the girl with the hand gripping Emerald’s shirt.
The woman, Sora, rested her forehead between Emerald’s shoulder blades and released a shuddering breath. And on that breath, she whispered, “When you run, I want to come, too.”
“Me, too,” a brunette mouthed quickly before she returned to buttering loaves of French bread.
Hurt them back.
Females were power to a Pride, right? That’s why Cassius was binding mates to him. If they paired up, their families became allies. Well, if Emerald took the Old Tarian females, where would that leave this Pride?
Hurt them back.
It would leave them without allies and with a big gaping hole for Ronin and his people to come in and destroy this Pride from the inside out.
She turned and squeezed the girl’s hand gently and gave her a single nod. Okay. Let’s hurt them back.
And inside of her, for the first time since the lioness had been broken…or had awoken…Fury smiled.
Chapter Thirteen
“Can you hear that?” Annamora whispered in the dark. “Something’s happening.”
The room didn’t have any windows. Just cots lined up and thin blankets to cover them in the frosty night.
Emerald was wearing the clothes she’d worn to the Pride meeting—to stay warm, yes, but also to stay ready. Because Annamora was right. There was lots of activity and talking right outside. This cabin was located near the big house, but a much smaller version. Cassius’s two brunette mates were missing, but Annamora had explained they were waiting in the big house for Cassius to come home from some super-secret meeting that had the entire Pride all abuzz.
Whatever his meeting was for, Emerald was eternally grateful, because she sure as heck hadn’t wanted to have a pairing day with him. His duties had bought her time.
Ha! Doodies. It shouldn’t be funny right now, but doodie was and always would be her favorite word.
“We have to be careful,” Maris, one of the females murmured as Emerald stood and pressed her ear against the wall. “If they come in here and we’re out of bed, they will punish us. I’ll tell you when they’re coming.” She scrambled out of her tangled sheets and pressed her ear against the door.
Annamora hopped up, too, and tiptoed to the wall right beside her. She pulled a glass off the nightstand beside her and pressed it to the wall, then pushed her ear onto the bottom like some old spy movie. Emerald snorted at the very very serious look on Annamora’s face.
“Not funny,” her new friend said. “I’m a professional detective.”
“Oh, are you?”
Annamora grinned and held up Emerald’s cell phone, and in the dim light, she waggled her eyebrows.
“Oh my gosh!” Emerald whisper-screamed.
“It’s been going off for a while. Jenny is very persistent.” Annamora checked the door. “It took three of us casually searching the house to figure out where Orion kept it.”
“Be quieter,” one of the girls murmured from the cots behind them.