I needed to make sure Ajag was okay as much as I needed to kill the man that had attacked him.
When I turned back to the bed and took a step, I hesitated. Ajag was staring at the man under Ze'ev's knee, but I wasn't surehe was seeing anything. He seemed to be kind of staring off into space.
I approached him slowly. "Ajag?"
Nothing.
I called out his name a little louder. This time, Ajag slowly turned to look at me. When he didn't freak out, I moved closer and then sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Hey, how are you?"
"I'm fine."
I would have believed that if there had been any inflection in his voice at all, but there was nothing. After what he had just gone through, there should have been something.
When I saw him shiver, I reached down and grabbed the throw blanket draped over the end of the bed. I stood, shook the blanket out, and then carefully wrapped it around Ajag.
His shirt was torn to shreds, but his pants were still in place. That was something at least. It wasn't going to take the horror of what had happened to him away, but it could have been much worse.
"Can I sit with you?"
Ajag nodded.
Instead of just sitting down next to Ajag, I reached over and picked him up, scooted against the headboard, and then settled him on my lap. I pulled the edges of the throw blanket around him and then pressed his head down to my chest.
My anger hadn't abated simply because the guy that had attacked him was down on the floor, but my wolf was more interested in making sure Ajag was okay, and so was I.
I wanted the sour scent saturating his skin gone and the only way to do that was to make sure Ajag felt safe.
This was all I could think of.
"Sy is safe," I said in a low tone. "He's with Jackson and Gunner. He did exactly what you told him to and he ran and hid.Once I found him, I alerted Ze'ev and we came to get you." I swallowed tightly. "I'm sorry we were late."
This never should have happened to him. He was supposed to be safe here on the ranch. We had promised him he would be safe here.
We had failed epically.
"Rad."
I glanced up to see Ze'ev standing beside the bed. My eyes shot to the man he'd had pinned to the floor a few moments before, but Lu was leading the guy out of the room.
I hadn't even realized Lu was there until that moment.
"I need to talk to Ajag and find out what happened." Ze'ev grimaced as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. "We're going to have to call the authorities because these idiots are human. We can't take care of them our way."
I curled my upper lip back when I growled. Our way was much simpler. If you broke shifter law, you paid the consequences based on your crime. It was as simple as that.
Human law let people off on technicalities.
"Why can't we just call the shifter council?" I asked. "Ajag is a shifter after all."
Made sense to me.
"We can, but then I would have to tell them about Ajag and Sy, and I don't want to do that."
For some reason I didn't understand, I agreed with Ze'ev.
"We could just kill them," I suggested eagerly.
