Page 32

I slammed a mental wall down on the reaction, disgusted with my own biology. My wife had been trapped in a restaurant bathroom by a brute. She’d watched me smash a man’s brains out. Then she’d fled into the woods, hunted through the trees by a beast twice her size until I forced her back into her human skin. She was cold, exposed, and exhausted. None of this was supposed to turn me on.

I cleared my throat, the silence in the cab growing thicker than the fog outside.

"I'm not going to apologize for killing him. He was overstepping. But I didn't want you to see that side of me. The brutal side."

Rosalind didn't flinch. She just pulled the lapels of my jacket tighter around her shoulders, her pale eyes staring out the side window. "I didn't actually see anything. Just smelled and tasted the blood."

A beat of silence stretched between us before she let out a quiet sigh.

"If you're beating yourself up over saving my virtue, don't bother. Diego wasn't assaulting me. In the past, I’ve allowed him to perform oral sex on me. He was just asking if I wanted him to do it again in the bathroom."

Leather groaned under my hands as my fingers dug into the steering wheel. My wolf growled low in my chest, the vibration sinking through the seat and into the SUV's frame until the whole vehicle rumbled with it.

"I was telling him no when you burst in," she continued, completely unbothered by the vibration of my threat.

"Are you mad that I killed your lover?" I demanded, the words bite-sized and bitter.

"Ew," Rosalind made a face, turning her head to look at me. "He wasn't my lover. Just a walking sex toy I played with when I was horny and sent away when I wasn't." She paused, her nostrils flaring subtly as she leaned a fraction of an inch toward me.

"He always washed before coming to me. All the men I toyed with did."

Another growl. This time low enough to vibrate through the chassis, making the windows tremble in their seals.

"I smell two different men's blood on you."

My grip on the wheel didn't loosen, but my breath hitched.

"I don't like the smell of blood."

"That will be hard to compromise on in this marriage since it's part of my job."

"I'm not asking you to quit." Rosalind leaned back into the leather seat, the jacket slipping slightly to reveal the curve of her collarbone. "And I'm not some fragile flower. Despite what you just saw in the woods. If we're going to trust each other, if this alliance is going to work, we have to be willing to tell each other everything."

I stared at the black asphalt rushing beneath the headlights, weighing the many things I was holding in secret against the undeniable pull of the woman sitting next to me.

"When I left you this morning, I went to interrogate an enforcer from another pack."

Rosalind shifted in her seat, turning toward me. The movement tugged my jacket open across her lap, exposing the long sweep of her bare thighs all the way to the shadowed V between them.

"My father sends me when they need someone broken."

"Did you break him?"

"Yes," I said bluntly. "The wolf spilled everything."

Beside me, her breath changed—a tiny, microscopic hitch in her lungs that only a shifter’s ears could pick up. When I cast a quick glance sideways, her face was completely impassive. A smooth, perfect mask of slate.

"You killed him, too?"

"I did."

I expected her to pull away. I expected the disgust, the horror, the barrage of frantic questions about who, how, and why.

She asked nothing. She just sat there, listening impassively, waiting.

"Some of the information he gave up before he met his end points to someone close to us," I pressed, watching her out of the corner of my eye.

Still, nothing. Not a flinch. Not a flicker of curiosity. Just that cool composure.