Page 19 of Broken Rejected Mate

Somehow, by some divine intervention of fate, I clear the other railing and come to a skittering stop on the landing. The meaty shifter halts, eyes widening, pace stuttering in his advance toward Veva and Sarina.

He was so giddy to get her, I realize. Excited.

“Going after a mother and her child?” I ask, swinging my hand back toward them, fury piling up inside me at the look on this guy’s face—he was so excited to get to Veva, but not so happy to go up against me. “You’re looking for a fight, you fucker? I’ll give it to you.”

He blocks my first hit, and delivers one right back, knocking me in the side of the head hard enough to cause an instant headache.

I stagger back, but when I rally and sweep my leg under his, it knocks him off balance and he falls to the side, his head hitting the iron railing with a metalclang. I see the blood oozing from the side of his head, know that I could leave him like this—it’s enough to fuck him up, take him out of commission long enough that I could get Veva and Sarina away from here.

But all I can picture is the way he was prowling toward Veva.Mywoman. That child—the two of them defenseless. How he’d spoken to her at the market, looked at her. His hungry eyes, the cruelty in his smile.

If I let him live, he might just decide to go after some other woman, use his strength to go after an injured target. I let him live at the market, and the second he healed enough to stand, he came out here and tried to get her again.

I can’t have that.

Not stopping my advance toward him, I turn to the side, punch through a thin piece of glass, and pull out a fire extinguisher from its red box. He sees it in my bleeding hands and sits up, bringing his hands up in front of his face.

“Wait—” he starts, and I hate him even more for being a coward.

Distantly, somewhere behind my fury, I hear Veva say, “Don’t look,” just before I bring the fire extinguisher down on the fucker’s face.

Three good swings later, and he’s not hurting anyone else, ever again.

I glance to the side, see Veva slumped down against the wall, her daughter in her arms, Sarina’s face buried in her mother’s chest. Good. Veva is right—Sarina didn’t need to see that.

For good measure, I pick the Grayhide shifter up, haul him over the side of the railing, and toss him down to join his friend on the ground, watching with satisfaction as he hits the gravel. When I look up, Aidan is standing across from me, six feet away, almost in the exact spot I jumped from, a body at his feet.

His mouth hangs open as he looks at me, expression caught somewhere between concern and admiration.

“Emin,” he says, but his face starts to warble in my sight, his voice fading in and out. “...get the feeling you were holding back…?”

He finishes his sentence just as Dorian’s truck swings into the parking lot, several other shifters hot on his tail. Good. We handled these guys, but there could be more coming. I glance at Veva again, and, seeing that she and Sarina are in one piece, feel a wave of exhaustion sweep over me.

I reach back to the wall for support, then everything goes black.

Chapter 11 - Veva

“Thank you all for coming together so quickly,” Dorian says, barely managing to rub the exhaustion from his eyes.

He’s not the only one. Last night, Dorian and Kira’s babies took turns crying every thirty minutes. On my bed, in the room across the hall, I’d stared at the ceiling, listening as Dorian and Kira took turns getting out of bed, tending to them. Hearing Kira whisper to them, shush them, beg them to latch.

It reminded me of when Sarina was a baby. More than likely, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep anyway, not after the attack, but the constant crying was the nail in the coffin.

Beside me, Sarina is slumped in her chair, snoring lightly. Seems the babies kept her up, too.

This morning, after Kira put a cup of coffee in my hand, Dorian said he’d be calling an emergency council meeting to figure out what to do. Though I didn’t ask, he told me that Emin was okay, he’d just blacked out from the blow to his head, too much exertion.

“Maybe,” I’d said, eyes on the ground, “Sarina and I should just be on our way. I don’t want to draw any attention to your pack.”

Dorian had looked at me for a long time, then said, “Ourpack, Veva. Don’t forget that you’re Ambersky, too. If you want to be. And we protect our own. Which means I’d like to have a meeting to make sure we can come together and plan to do just that.”

This is that meeting. And, unfortunately, it includes both Argent men, whom I’d rather not see again. Kellen, Emin’s father, looks far older than the last time I saw him, morewrinkles around his eyes and mouth. There’s a sense of dejection to him that I can’t deny, feels somewhat good to see.

Emin—sitting in a soft gray, long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans—looks even more exhausted than I feel, with a slight bruise under one eye and a subtle cough that must be from inhaling so much smoke yesterday.

He must feel me looking, because he raises his gaze to mine and I quickly look away, fixing my gaze out the window, where I see a colorful bird perching on one of the sparse branches outside.

We’re in the pack hall, a place I’d only been occasionally as a teenager. Usually, to pick my mother up from an overnight jail stay when she’d had too much to drink. The people around the table look competent, and that, at least, puts me at ease.

---