When I handed the keys off to the valet, I had to bite my tongue not to beg him to hide me in the trunk and stash me somewhere I wouldn’t be found until tomorrow.
And then Dimitri and I looked at each other, nodded grimly, and went in shoulder to shoulder.
Despite my mother’s general disapproval of everything that had led us to this point, the first part of the reception went perfectly smoothly, orchestrated to the nth degree. And no one would ever have known how much she deplored the necessity of it, by her precisely calculated smiles and sophisticated small-talk. Lanterns hung from every tree, waiters circulated with probably delicious hors d’oeuvres that I didn’t have a chance to get any of, champagne flowed, and bubbles of chatter and laughter rose up, mingling with the splash of a couple of fountains and the soft strains of party-appropriate music.
Probably awesome if you were there as a guest, but Dimitri and I were trapped near the entrance with my parents and Blake, greeting everyone as they arrived, and, in my case at least, starting to go lightheaded with boredom, my cheeks aching from the force of my polite smiles.
And after a while, it became more than that. I could feel something brewing, a heaviness in the atmosphere. It hadn’t quite reached the level of something wicked this way coming, but close. My father had mustered an appropriate level of courtesy for the guests, but every time one of them wasn’t observing him, his brows drew together, his face setting into lines of—I didn’t know what. Pain? Annoyance? He didn’t seem altogether well, either way.
Blake’s usual smarmy self-satisfaction had a brittle, edgy quality to it, expressed in his laughter at the guests’ jokes being a bit too loud and a bit too sharp, and in the venomous glances he shot my way now and then.
And Dimitri was like a statue by my side, solid and dependable, but so tense he could’ve broken bricks with his jaw. He kept subtly sniffing the air. Scenting my father? I thought he might be scenting my father. Christ, he wasnuts. Everyone around me had gone fucking crazy. Maybe they were all pod people and I was Donald Sutherland.
The flow of arriving guests had slowed to a trickle. In a sizable gap between groups, I turned to Dimitri, whispering out of the corner of my mouth, “Do you feel it too? Something’s up, right? And stop sniffing, you psycho!”
“I feel it,” he muttered back, leaning down by my ear and slipping an arm around my waist, like we were having a private mate moment. Even though I knew why he was touching me, and that it wasn’t because he simply wanted to, it still made me quiver. “But you didn’t want to hear it the other day, Brook. You ready to listen now?”
Ready to listen…? What the fuck could my father’s odd scent have to do with the strained, unnatural behavior of everyone around me?
“Cut the PDA, Creek,” Blake snapped from behind me. “Act your age.”
“Brook!” my mother gasped. “Don’t upset your brother! You know he’s sensitive.”
I spun on them both, startled and goaded past endurance. “Sensitive? He’s as sensitive as a—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” my father interjected heavily, face flushing an ugly, dusky red. God, could Dimitri be on to something? Because he didn’t sound good, either. “This isn’t the time for your petty envy and rivalry.”
“Mypetty—envy? Are you—I don’t envy Blake!” As the words left my mouth, I wished desperately that I could call them back. In their minds, of course I envied Blake, the tall, handsome alpha brother with no Hensley’s and no disgusting eyeglasses displaying my imperfection to the world. And even those few words of rebellion against the family’s creed that being an alpha werewolf was the universe’s most desirable possible state would be enough to set my father off like a match to a pool of gasoline.
I could see it starting in the swelling of his chest, the clenching of his fists, that vein in his temple going wild.
But Blake got there first.
“You’ll envy me when I’m your boss,” he snarled, lips twisted and eyes glinting with malice. “You keep clinging to this delusion that if you try hard enough, you’ll be the CEO someday. Wait until you’re doing what I tell you, you little asshole!”
That hit me like a punch to the gut, and the world went bright and hazy around me, everything lit up like highbeams in fog.
“What?” My voice didn’t sound, or feel, like it belonged to me. It came from far, far away, hoarse and echoing. “What did you say?”
My parents were both arguing, with each other or with Blake, and he’d started expostulating with them, but it buzzed in my ears like static.
Dimitri’s voice cut through it, clear and real. “We should go discuss this somewhere private.”
“You have no place in this, you lowlife upstart—”
And Dimitri interrupted my father without hesitation, possibly the only person to have ever done so in my presence. “You’ll do what I say, or I’ll take the microphone over there and tell all these rich, snotty friends of yours that you’re not really an alpha.”
***
The quiet private meeting room the club management had found for us in a big fucking hurry could’ve held at least thirty people, but just the six of us made it feel horrifically claustrophobic.
Six, because Dimitri had insisted—his voice still low enough to keep anyone else from hearing, and his tone even and measured—that our pack shaman be brought along.
We faced off in a circle of sorts, my mother seated stiffly in an armchair near the fireplace, eyes glittering with fury, hands clenched in her silk-clad lap. Blake hovered at her shoulder, red-faced with fury after my father had told him to shut up when he started whining.
And my father and Prescott, our shaman, stood a few feet away, reeking of anger…and of fear.
Fear. Because Dimitri, who stood calmly beside me, had terrified them both.
