“I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me, Daniel.”
Her eyes shifted back and forth as the number of voices increased, and grew louder. A fine sheen of sweat broke out across her forehead and perspiration trickled down the crease between her breasts.
“Stop!” Her voice was hoarse, ragged.
“Calm—down. She’s human— It’s not worth it.” That was followed by a loud grunt, as if the person speaking were now in pain.
“How about we leave here, and head back to your place?”
She lifted her hands to her ears, trying to stop the sounds, as her eyes squeezed shut.
“Shit! The cage! Put him in the cage!”
“Stop it! Oh, God, stop!”
“Stop what? Viv, are you okay?” Drew’s voice faded out toward the end.
“What’s going on out here…what’s wrong with Viv? Viv!”
Someone was shaking her. As Vivienne’s head snapped back and forth, she tried to regain a sense of control. The voices still raged on, overlapping, mixing, contorting, confusing, but she managed to pry her lids open.
Max stood before her. His hair was tousled badly, as if he’d recently run a hand through it, and the expression on his face was one of concern mixed with rage.
She could see Drew off to the side of Max. Her phone was to her ears and her eyes were focused on Vivienne.
Her head felt like it would soon implode.
“Stop,” she muttered again, and before she could elaborate on what she meant, her eyes rolled back and her world went peacefully quiet.
***
“Release me.”
Conall’s voice was the equivalent of a whiplash, quick and harsh, as he paced the silver-reinforced steel cage into which they’d thrown him. His quick strides took him from one side of the square cage to the other, and back again.
Raoul Salazar and Sloan McTavish, his betas, both stood in the room with him, their arms crossed over their chests as they lifted brows at his command. Half an hour had passed since they’d subdued him long enough to get him into the cage, and they seemed to have no intention of letting him out anytime soon.
“Release me now,” Conall repeated, locking his angry gaze on each of them in turn.
“No,” Sloan replied calmly, shaking his close-shaven head in the negative.
“Our laws prevent the murder of humans unless it cannot be avoided,” Raoul interjected, a trace of humor in his voice. “No matter how much it’s deserved.”
Conall snarled and glared before beginning a new round of pacing. His nose was still filled with her scent, but it was also filled with the scent of the human male. He would find him and sacred law or not, kill him. He would not stand for anyone—human or immortal—coming between them.
A thought entered his mind and sent him into another frenzy. Was the man her lover?
Red obscured his vision, and his canines punched into his mouth, before he remembered her scent, free of any others, and calmed enough to see clearly. Vivienne did not have a lover, had not had a lover for months, perhaps years.
He remembered her eyes, clear and open, and his rage gradually began to subside. The scent of sunlight and ripened peaches overwhelmed him and he took his first controlled breath following his encounter with her. She was human. He could not have this type of attraction to a human. It was dangerous, for both of them. Wolves mated for life, and humans, fragile, mortal creatures that they were, died easily. He’d heard of instances where male wolves took human females as their mates, and the females died during a particularly intense mating session or the birth of the pups. It was their fragility more than anything that rendered them unsuitable mates for his kind. Another half an hour of controlled breathing and thoughts like those, and Conall found it easier to quell his attraction to the human. He could also sense she was no longer as close as she’d previously been. Her scent had faded.
Moving to the front of the cage, he repeated his command to his betas.
Sloan stepped forward and surveyed him. Conall’s piercing gaze unflinchingly met his, and a frown marred his lips. “Are you disobeying a direct order from your alpha?”
His beta shook his head even as a slight scowl touched his lips. “No, I am protecting him and our pack from the repercussions of slaying a human. Has the madness passed?”
Conall might have killed him for that statement, but Sloan and Raoul had been with him for the past century. They were the closest to litter-mates he currently had. After Gregory’s untimely death, after a cutting betrayal by one of their allies, Conall had fought his way to the head of the pack with both of them at his side. Although each was strong and powerful in his own right, Sloan and Raoul were content to let him lead, and never once in his years as alpha had they attempted to usurp his rule. It was for that reason that he overlooked most of the things they said, though not all.