Page 64 of Stolen By the Alpha Hunter
“You believe him?” Abel asks, voice low.
Ephraim gives him a sharp look. “What reason would he have to lie?”
Gideon doesn’t speak.
He just wipes his mouth, slow and deliberate. His eyes flick from one face to the next, daring anyone to keep going.
Nobody does.
But I clock the way his jaw is tight. The way his hand curls slightly around his glass. The way he lookstired, suddenly.
Too tired for a man at the head of the table.
Too tired for someone so obsessed with legacy.
“Enough of this talk,” he says at last, his tone forcibly lighter. “Javier—tell us about yourself. What wily adventures did you go on between your time in Miami and when you arrived here?”
He’s already smiling again. Like nothing happened. Like he didn’t just damn near snap at his own men.
But there’s something curdled underneath it.
Something that makes my instincts itch.
Like he’s trying to steer the ship back on course before we all notice it’s sinking.
I clench my jaw, not wanting to offer any information about myself if possible. These men are not my friends—they’re my captors, and they have ill intentions for my mate. I catch sight of Peaches’ red curls in the kitchen and almost lose my train of thought before I hum to myself.
“Spent some time in Puerto Rico,” I say. “My mother was from there—pre-Convergence.”
“And you?” Gideon says.
“Miami born and raised,” I say. “Not much land left in Puerto Rico; mostly barges and scaffold cities, just like Louisiana. Pre-Convergence flooding and hurricanes did a number on the island.”
“My first wife was from Florida,” Gideon says. “Weird place, if you ask me. And she had some little quirks, was feisty as all hell.”
Ephraim’s expression tightens, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed. He must be talking about Peaches’ mother—the one who she said he kidnapped and later killed.
She had some quirks.
That’s all he has to say about her.
Fuck, I want to kill this man.
“I don’t like it when you call her feisty,” Ephraim mutters—the first sign I’ve seen that he gave a damn about his mother at all.
“Well, that’s too bad, ain’t it?” Gideon says.
He and his son fall into quiet bickering on the other side of the table. I let the sound wash over me like static, grateful for the moment of silence, for the chance to breathe. My eyes drift to the kitchen doorway again, just in time to catch a glimpse of her.
Peaches leans over the counter, sprinkling sugar on something.
The shirt she’s wearing—my shirt—is hiked up just enough to reveal the swell of her ass. She’s oblivious to what she’s doing to me. Oblivious to the way my blood is simmering every time I look at her. That soft curve, that flash of skin. The way she bites her lip when she concentrates.
She doesn’t know she’s mine.
She doesn’t know how hard I’m trying not to take her.
“You know,” Abel says, slicing through the quiet like a dull knife, “before she left, it was supposed to be me.”
