All around me, clothing began to tear and claws unsheathed. My skin pricked with goose bumps and I suddenly really needed to pee. The uncomfortable vibration of growling made my teeth chatter. A strange metallic taste coiled down the sides of my neck.
Anastasia fell back into step beside Noah. He traded me off to her. They were making an assumption that Max would be less inclined to hurt a female. I wasn’t so sure. If Agatha hadn’t teleported herself away from the arena, Max would have ripped her head off her body and crunched her bones for breakfast.
“I’m not asking,” Max said, voice dropping so low it was barely speech.
Inside the mating link, a tendril of darkness appeared. It cascaded into a spider’s web of poison, and I gasped. He was on the verge. If they attacked him now, they would die.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough.”
Struggling away from Anastasia was impossible. She was miles stronger than me. Her fingers clenched around my arm as though we were joined at the hip. I stamped my foot on hers. She didn’t budge. Her white-blonde hair seemed to have grown a couple of inches and hung like an ivory curtain around her head.
“I mean it,” I said, trying to get her fingers off. “I’m done. Let me go, please.”
“I would do as she asks,” Max said, being oh so helpful. When Anastasia still wouldn’t comply, he said, “Get on your knees.”
It wasn’t a roar. He didn’t even raise his voice. But the brutal dominance in it hit me like the aftershock of an explosion. It lashed at the protection circle I’d thrown around myself and became a pressure in my mind that wouldn’t let up.
Outside, the trees began to shake as though an invisible wind was ripping through the canopy. I heard creaking like the earth was moving under us. The mating link flared again, this time with a soft glow that saturated my insides with comforting heat. It helped to cut through the heady waves of Max’s will. I was human, and it took all of my mental scrambling not to get down on my knees.
They resisted for as long as they could. But eventually, one by one, they crouched and lowered their heads. Anastasia tried to drag me down with her. Everything inside me screamed in protest. Who the hell did he think he was? I didn’t care if he was alpha of all the supernaturals. I didn’t care if he was fricken Lucifer himself. I would not now, nor would I ever, bow down to anyone this way.
And then he arched his brow and all of that disappeared. If I was going to pretend to be submissive, I couldn’t give in to my true instincts to tell him to stick his command up his behind. I sat down heavily, knowing that if I had any chance of getting him to back down, I had to play this part even if it killed me. And it seemed like it very likely would. Because if he had any inkling that I wasn’t submissive on this point, he would never let me go.
Don’t let them make you forget who you are, Sophie.
I would never forget. Even if we had mated, I would never forget. Max wanted me safe in a bubble in the Reserve. How could I ever be safe in this world with Lex as a best friend? I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted her back more than anything.
I would love him and hate him at the same time. And because of that, I would be miserable. And so would he. But the misery would be so coated in feral toxicity that we wouldn’t even notice it until those quiet nights when all was still and well, and yet, at the back of our minds, something still nagged at us. A little seed of poison that would begin to throw out vines, infecting everything around us including the other shifters linked to us. Eventually it would leach out into the pack link and we’d become like the rogue shifters and the packless roaming shifters who gave up all honour for their own self-serving goals.
The sentiment was so laced with bitterness, I could barely stand it when I said, “If Kai was here, he would kill you for doing this to me.”
In the blink of an eye, a shadow descended over him. The amber ring around his eyes winked out. All there was now was black. “What the hell did you say?”
“I’m not repeating myself. And I won’t argue with you. Just know that if you force this on me, if you make me do this, when Kai and Lex return, you’ll have to answer to them.”
He took a single step forward, the muscles in his neck straining. He was fighting a battle inside himself. Every shifter in the room was tense to the point of snapping. They would throw themselves at him if he lost it. But even that wouldn’t be enough.
Anastasia’s claws sank into my thigh. I gasped and bit my lip thinking that she was using the moment to finally attack me, when I felt her hand trembling. She was frightened.
In my mind, I saw an image of Kai’s fiery green eyes crinkling at me from a place of endless quiet. In the depths of the mating link, I heard a voice that made me repeat a single sentence.
“Is this who you want to be when the demons come for us, Max?” I said.
His head reeled back like I’d slapped him. Gold rolled over his eyes, eating away at the darkness that had tormented him a second ago. Without saying a word or looking back, he marched out of the conference room and disappeared.
32
Anastasia helped me to my feet. Her hands still trembled but she was no longer sweating. “Shit!” she said. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
She kept repeating it as
