I hung up, calling Ambrose again.
I expected it to ring all the way to voicemail, so when his husky voice answered my breath hitched. “I’m on the way home right now.”
“Where the fuck were you?”
“You know where I was.”
“The woman?”
I’d successfully kept the jealousy out of my tone until this very moment. Who was she, and why was he ignoring my calls and spending time with her? We were pack. We used to belovers. I was still in love with him, a fact we both tried steadfastly to ignore.
“Don’t use that tone,” Ambrose growled. “If you’re mad at anyone, be mad at me. I’ll explain when I’m there.”
I hung up before I could get any more worked up. My panic had calmed at the sound of his voice, but it had only morphed into rage.
I wanted what we had back.
Why did Dash have to be falling apart? Why did I have to worry about him so much? Letting Ambrose go—going back to being just packmates and nothing else—had been the hardest thing I’d ever done. I never would have done it if I hadn’t cared too much about the bitter scowls Dash levelled us with every time he came home to us being affectionate with each other.
Pacing across our living room, I didn’t stop even when I heard the door swing open and closed. He would come to me, and it was better if I didn’t start this conversation. I could be mean when angry, just like my fathers had been.
“Mercury.” His gruff voice saying my name brought me back to all the times he’d brought me breakfast in bed. The man treated me with the love and care usually reserved for a goddamn omega, and I’d revelled in it.
“You can’t just—”
I whirled to face him, stopping short with a gasp.
Bandages wrapped around his torso, his shirt ripped and jeans covered in blood. My fury bled to concern and I raced to him, searching the bandages for the source of the injury. Most of the blood was at the back, and when I tore the bandage down, it revealed a stitched-up wound. Thin and short, it was clearly a single stab from a knife.
“Who stabbed you?” I asked.
He grabbed my shoulders and moved me in front of him. We were almost the same height, but he was bulkier. I was willowy, with narrow shoulders and hips and a severe lack of muscle definition.
“This is going to take some explaining,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. “Clearly. You were with the woman and somehow you got stabbed. What kind of trouble is she into?”
“Sit on the couch, baby.”
I backed up and sat, unwilling to call him out on his use of ‘baby’ in this instance.
He sat on the ottoman facing me, so close my knees were between his. “I told you about the woman I was seeing,” he said.
I nodded. “Yes. You started seeing her back when we were still together, and I said it was fine to see other people as long as it wasn’t a new one every week.”
Maybe I would have preferred to have Ambrose to myself—or at the very least, shared in his sexual endeavours outside the pack—but with his work at the BDSM club I was used to him touching other people.
“I didn’t tell you who she was.”
“Obviously. What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s Leighton Winston.”
I jolted upright, only to have him grab my hips and shove me back down to the couch. “What?” I hissed. “We stopped having sex because it was hurting Dash, and you thought it was acceptable to be fucking our scent match’s older sister behind our backs?”
Ambrose sighed, his scars doing that twitching thing they did. Muscle spasms, the doctors said. The muscles got confused that they couldn’t move the way they used to be able to.
“I’ve never cared about hurting Dash. No offense to him, but he needs reality to slap him in the face or he’s never going to pick himself up.”
