Page 40 of Grey
Colton stared at the pit. “Another foot down, you have to account for the wood.”
Weston looked like he might argue, but after Colton gave him a scathing look, he tilted his head in deference and returned to the pit to keep digging.
Levi walked out of the cabin and handed Colton a cold drink. “What now?”
“We mourn the dead and plan our revenge.”
Levi cleared his throat but didn’t say anything.
“Yes?” Colton asked.
“It’s not better for us to just move on? I mean, we could clear the land here and make a place for us. Or we could just leave and find another place to stay.”
“Yeah,” Weston said, leaning on the shovel. “Why can’t we just go back to the Valley? I don’t know why we had to leave anyway; the humans didn’t find out where we lived, they just found the clearing.”
Colton was only mildly surprised that his younger brother had no clue how close they’d come to discovery by the humans when their people were captured by the poachers.
He took a long drink of a sugary sports concoction and said, “First of all, we set the homes in the Valley on fire, so there’s nothing to go back to. And second, Zara betrayed us and the herd tried to force us out. Instead of trying to make peace and Crew stepping down as alpha, he’s made it impossible for us to do anything but take over by force.”
“We lost Silas, though,” Asher said. “That one male went off his damn rocker when we took his mate.”
“Then we’ll just have to see how unhinged they become when we make our next attack.” He finished the drink and tossed the bottle into the grass. “Finish up here. I’ve got plans to make.”
“Hey, don’t you want to say something, like a funeral? For Silas?” Weston called.
Colton turned and looked at the blanket-wrapped body of his number-two. “Just get it done. I’ll get vengeance for his death when I take out the Little River Herd.”
And he would.
He was more determined than ever to take the farm and drive the other herd out, but not before he had his revenge for what had been done to him and his herd.
Starting with Zara.
The morning after she’d been drugged and abducted, Tatumfeltfine but she also didn’t quite feel right. Residual shock, maybe, or fear of something happening again. But she wasn’t the sort of girl who was going to let some assholes keep her in the house cowering like a mouse.
She’d broken free of her past and started a new life in Little River, and she’d carved an even better life for herself with Grey. She wasn’t willing to give up any of it, even the library.
“You’re not going to ask me to stop working at the library, right?” she asked as she waited for her toast to pop up.
“What? No, of course not,” he said. He poured cereal into a bowl at the counter and walked to the fridge to get milk.
“Okay, I’m just asking, because you know I love you but I also love the library. Not the same kind of love, you know, but still.”
He chuckled and moved to give her a peck on the cheek. “I wouldn’t ask you to give up the library, sweetheart. I’m going to stay there today and install security equipment. I have some left over from our last installation, very inconspicuous. And at lunch we can run to the supply shop in Devondale; they have this highly rated pepper gel that you can keep on you.”
“What’s pepper gel?”
“It’s like pepper spray, but it’s a concentrated gel and doesn’t go everywhere like the spray does. And,” he said, giving her a long look, “I want you to keep your phone on you all the time.”
She nodded. “I will. So some motion cameras or something like that?”
“Yep. And I’ve got some vibration sensors for the windows, which will send out an alert to us here at the farm if someone messes with one of the windows. I’ll be sure that the security alerts will ping to your phone too, so you’re not out of the loop.”
“You guys should start a security business,” she said.
“We just want to keep our people safe, that’s a job all by itself.”
“Yeah, it seems like it.” After fixing her toast with Tris’s homemade blackberry jam, she joined Grey at the counter and they talked about the day ahead. It wasn’t until the dishes were put away and they were walking out to the truck that she asked the question that had been on her mind all morning.
