Page 52 of Savage Claim

The door opened, and Fane entered the room with Barric on his heels. The demon shifter quickly did a once-over to ensure nothing else had harmed me for the five minutes he was gone.

“I’m glad you’re awake.” Barric took the seat Fane had vacated, running his hand over his face with a sigh. Dark circles bruised beneath his eyes, and his beard appeared a little unkempt. “You had me worried.”

“Really?” Why did he care so damn much about my well-being if he had something to do with the vanishing shifters throughout Georgia? The story about me reminding him of his deceased son didn’t add up if he was in The Collective Hunt.

“Of course.” His expression hardened, and he folded his corded arms, his muscles straining against the plaid button-down shirt. “You really can’t listen to orders, even when someone is trying to protect you.”

Fane snorted as he moved across the room to lean against the headboard. “She tends to do the opposite.”

One of my phantom hands disengaged from my corporeal body to flick his nose.

He shook the teasing off and licked his lip ring. “Cute.”

The urge to suck that sliver of metal along with his lip into my own mouth burned within me.

“Now that Venna and Mykel have been eliminated, you have no reason to stay under my protection. You can leave—if you want.” Barric palmed the back of his neck. “Or you could stay.”

“We’re leaving.” Fane didn’t even wait for my input.

I glowered, fighting the desire to jump from the bed and throttle him. “Actually, we’ll stay a little longer.”

“What the fuck are you doing, Teague?” Fane’s growl in my head rattled my skull.

“I think Barric might be involved in the missing shifters.”

Fane’s gaze drilled into me as he sat on the edge of the bed, rigid as stone. “And you have to be the one to figure it out, right?”

“You can leave if you want.”

He gave an audible laugh, catching Barric’s attention.

The head alpha glanced between the two of us, his brows furrowed. “I would love for you to stay, Tate. Perhaps you would consider actually joining my pack.”

“Does that offer extend to me?” Fane asked, barely masking his smirk. “Because if she stays, I stay.”

Barric gave an exasperated sigh. “Yes, I’m aware, Fane. You’re both welcome to stay.”

“Thanks,” I said, hoping he didn’t notice my erratic heartbeat.

“This is a bad idea, fiera mika,” Fane said. “But I guess I’ll have to stick around because I’m one hundred percent sure you’ll get your ass in trouble, and I’ll have to save you.”

The odds of that happening were relatively good.

Chapter

Nineteen

Pain shot through my torso as I reached for a book on a dusty shelf in the back of the archives, gritting my teeth and cursing up a storm. Only a day had passed since I nearly died from a stab wound through the gut. Much to Fane’s annoyance, I refused to lounge in bed any longer.

How could I just lie there when Barric might be involved in the abducted shifters? I had to do something to unravel this twisted mystery even if it meant being cramped in this dusty, stuffy room for hours.

Finally, I managed to pull out the heavy book that supposedly held some of the earliest records of the Silver Ridge pack and hobbled back to my table. But as I opened it, a few old manila pages fell out.

“What the hell?” I lifted one, attempting to decipher the cursive writing and old dialect. The frayed edge on one side made it clear the pages had been torn out of another book and shoved into this one. A word within the decorative writing suddenly caught my eye.

Bloodlines.

My pulse spiked as I continued to read the page describing pure bloodlines of shifters that could be traced hundreds of years back. These wolf, coyote, bear, panther, lion, and tiger lines had founded an organization to protect their lineage and keep the sacred magic of shifters safe.

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