Which didn’t exactly make me feel safer.
I hesitated in the doorway, that familiar feeling creeping in, like I didn’t quite belong.
That lasted maybe thirty seconds.
Then the front door slammed open.
A gust of air swept through the room before the recruit on door duty stumbled in, wide-eyed. “Uh, Wrecker says everyone inside. No one leaves. No one rides. Phones off unless you’re patched in.”
The card players cursed in unison.
Lock hadn’t been gone five minutes.
And now the whole compound was going on lockdown.
My stomach twisted.
Razor looked at me. “Kellan. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said automatically. “I’m fine.”
He studied me like he didn’t believe that for a second, but he let it go. “Your dad’ll figure it out.”
“I know,” I said. My voice sounded far away, even to me.
But how long was “it” going to take to figure out? A day? A week? Longer? I suddenly wanted to be back at college, where the worst thing I had to worry about was an exam or whether the washing machines had eaten my socks again.
Here, it felt like the walls were closing in.
I stood, restless. The room felt too small, the air too thick. “I’m gonna go upstairs.”
“Keep your door locked,” Razor warned.
“I always do,” I said, even though that wasn’t technically true. I nodded anyway and headed for the stairs.
Halfway up, I stopped.
Through the small window that overlooked the yard, I could see the gates pulled shut and two guys pacing near them. Another stood near the junkyard side fence, arms crossed, scanning the tree line like bullets might start falling out of the sky. Everyone looked tight. Coiled.
All because Lock Lachlan had walked in like a storm and walked out the same way.
I swallowed hard and kept climbing.
Up in my room, the door clicked shut behind me with a soft thud. I stayed there for a second, leaning my weight against it, forehead tipped back like I needed the wood to hold me up. The silence felt too big—maybe that was just me, my head, my pulse, everything spinning.
God. What the hell was today?
Lock. In our office. In our territory.
And I still felt… weird. Not in a romance novel way. In a my-body-did-something-without-my-permission way.
I pushed off the door and scrubbed both hands over my face.
“You’re fine,” I muttered. “You just need sleep. And maybe a lobotomy.”
Really, Kellan? Really?
I’d smelled alphas before. I’d talked to them, worked next to them in class, passed them on the street. None of them had ever made my knees go weak or my throat go tight or my pulse trip over itself like it wanted to crawl out of my skin.
