Coming up with nothing but dead ends, we left the station with Cedes promising to keep us posted if she came across anything, but I wasn’t holding out too much hope. I rarely found my answers by human means.
When I walked into my apartment to see Lucas in my living room, I was both relieved and oddly guilt-stricken to still have Holden with me. It was now the second time in as many nights Lucas had seen me with the vampire, and I knew what it looked like. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew what it looked like.
Lucas appeared a lot better than he had when he barged into Holden’s apartment the night before. He’d shaved and was wearing a clean blue polo shirt and stain-free jeans. He smelled spicy, like all werewolves, but different somehow. I used to love how unique his smell was. Now I wanted it out of my house.
“Are you out of your mind?” I demanded, bypassing all polite forms of greeting. “You’re breaking into people’s apartments on a regular basis now?”
“I had a key.”
“Whose key?” I’d given him one once, but I’d made damned sure I got it back.
“Desmond’s,” he confessed. The way he said it made me believe Desmond wasn’t aware his key had been borrowed. Lucas tried to look sheepish, but I wasn’t buying it. He did all sorts of unacceptable bullshit and tried to act apologetic after, but he never stopped doing the wrong thing. He hadn’t learned a single damn lesson. His policy remained—begging forgiveness is easier than asking permission.
I was all out of forgiveness.
“Give me the key.”
Lucas didn’t argue and put the key ring into my outstretched palm. “What, you’re not going to hand it over to him?” He angled his chin at Holden.
My eyes narrowed, and my rage was hot and unstoppable when my lips parted. “He already has one, and he uses it frequently.” If my implications had been too subtle for him, I grabbed Holden’s belt and tugged his body close to mine, looping a possessive arm around his torso and giving Lucas a glare that invited him to protest.
Bless Holden’s perverted soul, he didn’t dispute my territorial claim on him. The problem with what I’d done was that Holden was a shark, and I’d just dumped a bucket of chum in front of him. He hated Lucas and he wanted me, he’d said as much himself. I’d given him the perfect opening for the ultimate fuck you to the wolf king.
I knew I’d made a mistake the moment I put my hand on his belt, but there was no going back.
“Oh yes,” Holden said with a hot, mischievous grin that made my heart feel a bit wobbly. “Secret loves it when I slip through her back door late at night.”
I fought against the snort trying to escape me and gave him a warning smile. It worked about as well as showing a yellow traffic light to a Ferrari driver. With eyes only for Lucas, Holden jerked me hard against him, and when I started to say something, he merely put my open mouth to good use.
It wasn’t the first time I’d kissed Holden, and unfortunately it showed.
When the vampire claimed my mouth with a bruising, eager, too-showy kiss, I returned the embrace. I molded against him, fisting my fingers in his soft shirt and letting a small, telling moan rumble through my throat. Maybe Holden wasn’t the only one being unnecessarily theatrical. He tangled his fingers in my hair and placed a possessive hand on my hip, slipping it low to cup my bottom. When I opened my eyes, his pupils were an oil-colored black, and he dragged his exposed fangs over my swollen lips.
“Apologies,” Holden said, sounding ever so pleased with himself. He grinned, flashing his fangs at Lucas. “I completely forgot you were here.”
I looked at my ex-fiancé and tried not to appear the least bit guilty about what I’d just done. It was a cruel way to stick the point home, but he had to understand I wasn’t his anymore. Not only that, but I’d never be his again. If he had to believe I was screwing around with Holden to make him get the message, then so be it. I’d do anything short of letting the vampire mount me to keep Lucas from coming around again.
I still felt sleazy.
“What do you want?” I asked, when the bristling silence had stretched into the realm of uncomfortable. Lucas glared at us, his skin red with bottled frustration, blue eyes shiny.
“I’m here to see how far you’d come in looking for Kellen.”
“Since yesterday?” It had been only a day since he’d rudely woken me up, and he was already asking for a status report.
“I wanted to be sure you were taking my request seriously. Obviously I was right to check.”
Now it was my turn to be mad again. “Thank you,” I snapped.
He didn’t know what to do with that. “Thank you?”
“Yes. Thank you. For a split fucking second I almost felt like you could be redeemed. That I could forgive you for ruining my life.” I spat each word at him, inching closer with every inhalation until I was out of Holden’s grip and in Lucas’s personal bubble. “But you’re doing a bang-up job of reminding me how goddamn easy it is to hate you, you stupid, selfish, son of a bitch.”
Lucas didn’t reply, but our faces were barely an inch apart, and we were both breathing hard, glaring at each other.
“For your information,” I continued, “I have been looking for Kellen, and I have Keaty looking for her too. The reason I’m with him…” I wheeled around to point at Holden, as if I could mean anyone else, “…is because I was attacked by four werewolves on my way home.”
“What?” Now Lucas’s rage was for someone other than me. I was right to think the rogue wolves were going to be in a heap of trouble when the two kings got hold of them.
I took a step backwards, out of his space now that the initial anger had simmered down.
“They claim to be loyalists. To Mercy.”
“Mercy McQueen?” Lucas looked as taken aback by this development as I had been. “What claim could your mother possibly have to my throne?”
“From what I gather, she believes she cannot reclaim her rightful place in the south. We both know Callum would sooner eat a pound of his own flesh than to let someone steal his crown. So she’s come looking for someone else’s. That’s the party line, at least.”
The wolf king frowned. “You don’t believe it.”
I shook my head and settled into the space on the loveseat where I’d cuddled with Rio the night before. I was ready for this day to end and climb into my own bed, preferably alone.
“Mercy can only have one reason to be here. The throne is a way for her to get muscle. Tell people she has rights to being queen—she has the right name, after all—and promise them power when she gets her crown? Power is the easiest way to motivate someone. It has more appeal than sex. More importance than love.” I made sure he was looking at me when I said the last sentence.
Lucas managed to ignore it. I’d thrown enough jabs at him since he’d been here, what was one more? “You think she’s here for you.”
“I know she’s here for me.”
“But she’s trying to stake a claim on my throne.”
Holden slipped out of the room, leaving me with the wolf king. There weren’t a lot of places he could hide in the apartment, which meant he was probably in my bedroom. After that showy kiss, I wondered if I’d be spending the night alone after all.
“We’re constantly trying to prove you’re not a weak king, but since Tuesday you’ve been rolling over and showing your belly all because you’re worried about a human.” I wasn’t trying to be cruel now, and we both knew I didn’t think of Kellen as just a human, but he had to see what he was doing. “If ever there was a time outside sources would think your throne was theirs for the taking, it’s now.”
Lucas sat, not next to me, but in the armchair nearby. He looked as worn down and tired as I felt. I didn’t want to empathize with him, but our bond made it impossible to ignore his emotional state. The worse he felt, my emotions mirrored his misery. Awesome.
“Do you think they took Kellen?”
“It crossed my mind, but it doesn’t feel right.”
“Your mother is batshit crazy. I once watched her try to shred your face with her bare hands. Do you think what’s right applies here?”
My head slumped back, and I propped my feet up on the coffee table. From this point I could see my sword collection mounted above the fireplace. A medieval broadsword; my go-to katana; and recently added, the silver katana I’d kept as a grim reminder of how often I was at the wrong end of a sword. For a while I’d kept the second sword stashed in my closet, but after Desmond left, I decided to put it up.
Actually, I’d had my friend Nolan hang it since I couldn’t touch silver.
“I still don’t think Kellen is missing the way you think she is. I wouldn’t put anything past Mercy, but kidnapping isn’t her style. If she wanted to make a point of using Kellen, she’d have cut off assorted body parts and had them delivered to you. She doesn’t do anything half-assed. In my experience, anyway.”
I might not be an expert on my mother, but she had never been what I would call wishy-washy, and kidnapping was a lazy villain’s game. Mercy didn’t take the easy route for anything.
“Let me worry about Kellen,” I said when he didn’t speak again. “You need to talk to Callum and figure out what to do about Mercy. One of her little henchmen was that bigoted asshole, Hank, who we met in St. Francisville.”
“Did you recognize any of the others?”
“No, they weren’t ours.” That was what he really wanted to know.
After another long silence where we neither spoke nor acknowledged each other’s presence, Lucas got to his feet and moved to the door. Before he left, he turned and stared at me until the weight of it forced me to meet his rapt gaze.
“What?”
“I need you to understand how important it is to me that you find her,” he said.