Page 7 of Broken Rejected Mate

The third man hollers, pointing at her, “A psychic!”

My heart has already skipped into overdrive, but this call has moved the skirmish from this tight circle to the whole of themarket, people to our left and right turning to look at us, interest flashing in their eyes.

Up until this point, I hadn’t been sure. Willow said there was news, whispers coming through that Jerrod was searching for psychics. For a long time—certainly when I was young, and my grandmother had her visions—people dismissed psychics as erratic, unreliable. If they even believed them.

But now, things have changed enough that soon there might be an entire market after my daughter, seeking the reward for delivering a psychic to Jerrod’s doorsteps.

I’ve never met the man, but there’s not a chance in hell I’m letting my omega daughter within fifty paces of him.

My body is practically vibrating with the need to protect her. I’m spinning around, searching for the final remaining opponent, when something cracks over my face, hard. As I reel back from the blow, I look up to see the meaty man, embers still burning in his cheek, puss and blood oozing down from the wound, glaring furiously at me.

“Youbitch,” he says, stalking toward me. His one remaining friend steps toward Sarina, and the cord inside me pulls taut.

I willdiedefending her. Lunging away from the meaty man and toward my daughter, I call to her, trying to break her out of her premonition trance, trying to get her to have the presence to run away, turn, move on her own.

But she doesn’t move. Instead, someone else comes flying in from the side, and the last thing I see before the meaty man strikes me again is a nauseatingly familiar shock of red-gold hair.

Chapter 4 - Emin

When Dorian pushed the scent-blocker into my hands, I hadn’t realized just how effective it would be.

Moving through the market, nobody turns to look at me. Nobody cares that I’m Ambersky, that I’m scented for my pack, likely even carrying Dorian’s scent on me from seeing him earlier. To them, I must be a total blank slate, a ghost among their ranks.

Dorian had described the dark market to us the last time he went. The first and only time he went.

As I push through the crowds of supernaturals, tall and short, all stinking of their own pungent scents, memories push through my head of what happened when Dorian came to this very market.

Seeing Kira, my sister, up for sale. Bringing her home, back to the Ambersky pack territory, despite the fact that he had rejected her years before, in front of everyone. My eyes dart to the left and right as I walk through the market, but besides some questionable goods—slime in tubs, various rocks of various sizes, powders and little animals locked in tiny cages—nothing seems too bad.

Meaning there are no omegas chained up, being auctioned off on a stage in front of drooling bidders.

Hood up, head down, I wind my way through the stalls and people, looking for my first objective. Deliver the head of Aidan Grayhide to some of Jerrod’s men, collect the sizeable payment for his death. Our hope—Dorian’s strategy—is that Jerrod wouldn’t suspect any random shifter to have the resources necessary to craft a fake head like this.

To study Aidan and make it perfectly in his likeness, to magic in the rot and bodily fluids. While I may smell like nothing, due to the scent-blocker, the stained, heavy burlap sack at my side is drawing more than a few curious glances from the other shoppers.

I’d thought severed heads might be pretty common here—maybe not.

Finally, I reach my contact right next to a stand selling some sort of endangered fish, it looks like. He’s a large man, thick around the waist and neck, and scowls at me when he sees me.

“Grayhide?” he asks, nodding to the bag. He’s straight to the point, so I am, too. Dropping the sack, I kick at the head, unrolling it from the fabric and watching as it comes to a stop a single pace from the man’s feet.

The air around us goes still and silent, some people sucking in air through their teeth, veering away, leaving a wide path around me, this man, and the head on the ground between us.

“Gods be damned,” he finally says, shaking his head and reaching into his pocket. “Boss’ll be happy to see this one. Slippery fucker avoided us for years. How the hell did you get your hands on him?”

I shrug, “He walked right into it.”

After the money changes hands and he rolls the head back into the burlap, depositing it into the hands of the shifter next to him, I watch the four of them wander back into the crowd, heading west.

My next objective is clear—find the Llewelyn contact and trade the powder in my pocket for the Amanzite they have forus. But there’s something tugging at me. Something about the gleaming look in that big guy’s eyes, something about the way they turned and started walking through the market with a purpose.

If Dorian was here, he would be right in my ear, telling me there’s a plan for a reason, that we can look into the cronies later. Or, better yet, he might just be saying that guys like that are nobodies—alphas, sure, but with not an ounce of integrity. The kind of guys who let their natural standing pull a lot of weight. That they’re not worth the follow, that they’re probably just going to go jack off on the corner.

But my intuition—my wolf—is telling me that’s not right.

So, even hearing Dorian’s frustrated voice in the back of my head, I move, stalking them through the market, slipping around a crowd of crooning succubi, through a gaggle of witches.

Finally, after what must be another ten minutes, the man seems to find what he’s looking for.

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