Dewi hated this.Everything about it.
That she’d had to do what she did, and that she’d manipulated Ken to accomplish it.
No more.
It ripped at her soul that she’d hurt Ken, even though she’d known when it finally came out that he would feel hurt.Except she’d hoped to delay that revelation for days, possibly weeks.
Maybe even forever, had she been lucky enough.
Which she rarely was, but that didn’t mean a bitch couldn’t hope, right?
She lay in their bed, staring up at the ceiling and knowing anything she said right now, until Ken was ready to come to her, would only make the situation worse.
I don’t know how to do this when I’m not single.
Then again, she technically hadn’t been single before Ken, since she and Beck had an ongoing situationship.But Beck understood the mission came first, by any means necessary when the pack was at stake.
And yes, it pissed her off that she’d been sloppy on thatonefucking little detail.It led her to obsessively replay the day in her mind, scouring it for any other minutiae she might have overlooked that could come back and haunt them.
I never used to be sloppy.
And thatwassloppy of her.Not only because it revealed to Ken what she was doing, but because before, she would’ve thought about a detail like that and kept it in mind.Leave no footprints, no trace of any kind.
She’d violated that rule.
Worse?She’d violated her mate’s trust.
When Ken finally came up to bed he wore a towel draped around his hips and she knew he’d showered on the lanai.After closing the bedroom door he hesitated, staring at her in the dim light.
“I know you’re awake,” he said.“You don’t need to pretend to be asleep.”
“I wasn’t pretending; I was waiting for you.”
He headed to the bathroom without turning on any lights.On his way to bed a few minutes later, he stopped and grabbed a pair of sleeping shorts from the dresser and pulled them on.
Then he walked over and sat on the end of the bed, his back to her.
“I love you, Dewi.But since the night we met, it’s felt like a non-stop mindfuck.Like I’m in a parallel world.And one of the things contributing to my feelings about it is that I don’t like that I’ve become a murderer, someone who can easily do it and still sleep at night.”
She stared at him, shocked.“You’renota murderer!”
“Uh, I am.Endquist.”
“That was self-defense!He was attacking us and would’ve killed us.He’d damned near killed you.”
“Then there were Manuel Segura’s men in Idaho.They were disabled by Duncan and the trap.I didn’t have to kill them.I could’ve let Duncan kill them all.”
“Again, they would’ve killed you and Nami.They deserved it.That was also self-defense.”
“It wasn’t self-defense when I killed Manuel Segura.”
“Manuel Segura was an execution.He had a blood edict on his head.It was justified after everything he did.”
“And I walked up and shot him.”
“He was a dead man walking,” she insisted.“There’s nothing wrong with you executing him.Especially considering that he protected that feral, murdering rapist scumbag brother of his for so long.How many more people would have had to die at their hands to consider it justifiable?”
“The point is, I don’t like that I went from not knowing shifters existed, much less that my grandparents are shifters, to walking up to guys and shooting them point-blank.If you’d told me this was going to be my life?I’d probably have run far and fast the other way in terror.”
