Page 87 of Purchased

“With one easy trick: killing people,” Volkov says.

“Exactly! You get me.”

He really does seem to get me.

I’m still not sure I like him, but I have been able to open up more lately, and when I tell him things that everybody else would freak out about, he just takes it in stride.

“But Armand doesn’t like it. It scares him because of what might happen if we ever get caught. I just don’t think we will because of the plausible deniability of animal attacks. People don’t believe in werewolves, but they do believe in animals.”

Volkov nods. “Can you imagine a time when you will feel safe without having killed anybody?”

“Maybe? I guess it depends if men keep showing up and telling me they’re going to save me, or look after me, when I know all they really want to do is use me and hurt me. Those officers in the alley? The ones who started this? I could smell what they wanted to do to me, and it wasn’t help me. If they’d separated me from Armand…” I give a little shudder.

“You think you would have been hurt?”

“Every time a man gets his hands on me, I am hurt. Armand’s the exception.”

“Is he?”

“Yes. Because what he does to me, I want. He smells like family. He smells like home. And he smells like love. He worries about me, and for me. He wants me to be happy. You can smell all of that. The others are sniffing for a whole different experience.”

“When you explain things that way, they make sense to me. You put a lot of stock in your senses. Do you think there’s any chance…”

I’ll never know what the question is, because an impatient knock at the door heralds Armand’s arrival. He walks in without waiting to be invited, like he owns the place, because he does. The intrusion annoys Volkov more than it does me.

“I need to speak with my mate,” he says. “You can fix the damage I do afterward.”

“That’s a very flippant…”

I don’t get to hear the rest of Volkov’s sentence, because Armand has grabbed me and is physically abducting me.

“Hey! I was doing therapy!”

“You’re beyond therapy,” he declares as he carries me off.

* * *

Armand

I have come to a decision. Enough is enough. An alpha has to take responsibility. Has to do things that he does not want to do, and will not necessarily make him popular.

I put her down in the hall for a brief moment.

“Tell me you didn’t kill Barbier and Gaulle.”

“Okay, I didn’t kill Barbier and Gaulle.” She pauses for a moment, then cocks her head to the side. “Who are Barbier and Gaulle?”

I lose my temper. I don’t want to, and even as I lose it, I try to keep it in, but there’s some part of me that just can’t believe she’s done it again. I’ll never be able to trust her, and that breaks my fucking heart.

I’m going to have to treat her like a prisoner. I’m going to have to constantly keep watch over her. She’s never going to have freedom the way other pack members do because she just can’t be trusted.

“Christ, Beatrix! They were on their way home! It was over! Now there’s going to be an investigation to find out where the investigators went after they crashed.”

“They might think they wandered off and fell off a cliff? Or that wild animals ate them. They think there are wolves here. One attacked a man in the village not that long ago,” she says, speaking as if she’s not the responsible party.

“They might. Or they might think that it is a little odd that every officer who comes near this place ends up missing.”

“The world is a strange place,” she says. “Remember the Bermuda Triangle?”

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