Pack Darling, Part One by Lola Rock
Twenty-Nine
JETT
Long after Lilah leaves,I can sense her in my space. She taints my sanctuary, slender legs peeking out from under her oversized T-shirt. Her bare toes clenching and unclenching on the floor, and the dazed expression that sank her features while I poured poison into her elfin ears.
I feel like I’m spinning out.
Lilah doesn’t belong here.
She belongs in the past, my one pure memory.
My nostrils work as if I can pull in her scent, but it’s not there.
I gravitate to the security cams the same way I have every spare second since Lilah showed up in my home.
She’s already out of the house, sprinting barefoot. A growl rises at the back of my throat.
It’s cold at night, and our property’s as secure as I can make it, but we have too many enemies. Even a stray hunter wandering the edge of our property could mistake her fleet footsteps and rich brown hair for the flight of a fawn through the underbrush.
Lilah strips off her shirt and dives into the lake.
She doesn’t resurface.
I know exactly how long she can hold her breath. Three minutes is nothing. But I count the seconds, my blood pressure rising, every fiber focused on the screen until her head finally, finally pops above the water.
Lilah starts to swim.
I wish she’d cross the lake and never come back.
I can’t have her here, stirring shit, disturbing the carefully balanced status quo. Smiling and cozying up to Orion, making our pack house feel like a home.
Because what happens when she leaves?
She will leave.
I don’t for a second believe she’ll stay.
Why would she want to? With each of us more fucked up than the next.
And I’m the worst of all.
I want to scream into the night.
I want to hit the gym and punch the bag until it breaks, but then Hunter and Finn will want to talk.
I don’t want to speak.
I want to remember what it feels like to be powerful. To have the control that Lilah steals from me with every glance and breath.
I send the text, grab my keys, and head out in my Porsche, taking the country turns so wildly that Finn would be proud.
I blast the same rock song I’ve been listening to on repeat for more than a decade.
Engine screeching, I roar up to a shoddy pack bar where the sign says Diamonds, but the street says crime report.
I’m barely parked when the female figure flies out the side, wrenching open the door and throwing herself inside the car, already ducking down, half submissive, half terrified.
Her omega scent is a rotten, sickly sweet mocha. Coffee and skunk.
“Renee.”
“Al-Alpha.” She trembles, perching on the seat like a bird ready to take flight. “We can’t be seen here.”
I slam into reverse, shoving her against her seat and enjoying the way she bites back her yelp. I take us down the street to the dodgy parking lot of a 24-hour grocery store where working girls line up for customers. Seeing Renee in my ride, none of them pounce.
She fidgets, toying with her too-short hem. “You should’ve called. It’s too big a risk coming in person.”
Some days, I’d rather die than see her face.
Others, I crave her fear. I need to know she knows how easily I can ruin her.
Ruin her the way she ruined me.
“What have you found?” I pin her under my dominance, holding her captive in my gaze.
Renee used to be attractive enough.
Now her black hair is crunchy with hairspray. The makeup she cakes on to hide the broken blood vessels of her drinking habit gathers in the shallow creases around her eyes, her lurid purple eyeshadow smudged. That bodycon dress is nowhere near tight enough to hold together her shit.
“Dominik has a mole at Wyvern House. Someone who knew your pack made an offer to a new female. That’s why he targeted you at the ball. He wants Li—”
“Don’t say her name.”
Renee whimpers at my bark, hunching into herself.
I won’t allow her to taint the one precious thing I have left.
“What’s his next play?”
“The soldiers don’t know. I’m working on one of his higher-ups. I’ll have him in my bed before my next—Ah, soon.”
Diamondsis under the Redfang organization. It’s not where the power players gather—I have other, more trustworthy sources digging there—but it’s the perfect gig for Renee with her bullshit story about how she was fired from her cushy OCC training job. Her loud, well-documented resentment for my father makes a good cover.
And her real story is blackmail gold.
As she picks at her chipping manicure, uncomfortable under my attention, I take solace in the fact that I can kill her at any moment.
A bullet in the ear with the silenced gun under my seat. A slit throat. Or I could strangle her with my own hands and watch the life leave the eyes of the pedophile bitch.
The power settles the fraying parts of me.
I’m in control.
Even when the memory comes—the way the memory always comes—I can swallow it down.
“Have you ever touched an omega before, little Wyvern?” Renee grabs my hand, dragging it down her body to the heat between her legs. I freeze, half-hard and half confused. “Can you smell my scent? Do you want to taste it?”
I shudder, blinking away the past.
Renee fucked with me for a year before I got her fired. Now I own her, and watching her squirm is the only thing that keeps me from falling apart.
“If you like Lil-her,” Renee stutters. “Keep her safe. The Redfangs are out for blood.”
I snort.
Safe.
As if Renee can fathom what that means.
“I want to know the second you have more information.” The sooner we nail Dominik, the sooner we can safely send Lilah packing.
The sooner I can go home without feeling like I’m in freefall.
I need her gone.
I need her to stop reminding me of everything that might have been.
Even if driving her away destroys us both.