Page 9 of In the Mouth of the Wolf

“That’s the cutest bark I’ve ever heard. Do it again, baby,” he groaned, his hand reaching for his pants.

I curled my lips in disgust. “You’re gross.” I turned back towards Elias. “Look, this is all making a bit more sense now.”

“It is?” Elias asked.

“Yep.” I nodded. “My mom refused to have me and my brother live in this weird furry cult, and my dad left us so he could play werewolf in the woods with a bunch of delusional LARPers who throw around words like ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ as if they actually mean something.”

Elias’s shoulders dropped and Camden took another step towards me, desire seeping through his voice. “I can show you right now that alpha means something real around here.” He grabbed my wrist and forced my hand onto his bulging hard-on.

I reeled back and slapped him as hard as I could, and he let me go while laughing.

“You’re a fucking pig!” I yelled, my voice shaking with rage.

Storming down the stairs, I got back into my rental car and headed to the highway at a snail’s pace on the slippery roads to get to the chain hotel I’d seen on my way over. I’d get a room, barricade the door from those freaks, and book the next flight home.

None of what happened in that office had been okay, but for some reason my rage was tinged with desire, andI couldn’t deny how strangely turned on I felt, which frustrated me even more. I shook my head to clear it, but my mind refused to let go of its thoughts of those two. Did they taste as good as they smelled?

I bit my lip reflexively, remembering the size of Camden’s erection. The man was packing. There was no denying that. It was almost too much – would he even fit?

Goddamnit, stop it.

I turned the air conditioning on full blast and found a polka station on the radio to get my mind out of the gutter and back to the snowy road in front of me.

3

ELIAS

“You’re just going to let her go?” Cam snarled.

I sighed, running my hand down my face. Did I want to let her go? No, I wanted to wrap her up and bring her down to Chicago with me immediately, hiding her in my home, where no one would ever realize the treasure I’d just found.

But unlike Cam, I wasn’t a Moon-damned barbarian.

“She didn’t grow up in this world. Everything we say is going to sound bat shit crazy to her. Marlowe needs to figure this out on her own.”

Cam started pacing angrily. He ripped off his coat and rolled his shoulders as he growled to himself. He had always been a hot head, and today, he might have just scared off the first omega the area had seen in almost one hundred years.

I really should punch him.

“How can she not know?” he asked. “She’s gotta be in her mid-twenties, right? How many heat cycles has she gone through? After the first one, wouldn’t she know she wasn’t human?”

I got up and walked around my desk, picking up my coat and inhaling the scent that still lingered. Marlowe scoffed at the idea of biological social structures, but the raging hard-on in my pants was proof otherwise. No alpha could resist the sweet perfume, no matter how muted, of an omega in her prime.

“She must be on hormone suppressants,” I said. “It’s the only plausible explanation. If she wasn’t, she would have attracted every shifter in Northern California. You didn’t pick up on her scent until you were just a few feet away, correct? Same with me.”

If she didn’t know about this world and yet was taking pills, it meant someone close to her had been lying. James hadn’t talked much about his family, but unbeknownst to Marlowe, he hadn’t abandoned them, at least not financially. He’d been sending her mom thousands of dollars every month for years.

It must have been a concentrated effort between the two of them to keep the truth of their children’s identities a secret.

But why?

“Fuck!” he yelled, collapsing into one of the armchairs. “I want her, Elias. I want her so bad it hurts.”

I scoffed, still pissed that Cam had interrupted us. I had scented her attraction to me. Sure, she had a fiancé, but engaged wasn’t married. We could have been working closely for months to unravel her father’s estate – I had no doubt eventually she would have given up and ended things with the human to be with me. “And you think I don’t? And every other alpha who’s going to get a whiff of her while she’s in town?”

His hands gripped the arms, his nails running down the fabric. “If anyone lays a finger on her, I swear to the Moon…”

My mind traveled with his, and I felt my anger boil over at even the thought of another alpha trying to knot or bond her against her will before she knew what she was. Before we had a chance to make her ours.

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