Fuck.
I was losing my mind. I knew I was losing my mind. Every shadow looked like a threat. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like an intruder. Every moment Lina was out of my sight felt like an eternity of worst-case scenarios playing on repeat in my head.
I felt terrified. Constantly, endlessly terrified.
“You’re doing the thing,” Noah said, not looking up from his phone.
“What thing?”
“The staring into the middle distance while your hands clench into fists thing. The I’m imagining all the ways my mate could be in danger thing.”
“I’m not doing a thing.”
“You’re absolutely doing a thing.” He finally looked up, his green eyes assessing. “You’ve been doing the thing for three days straight. It’s exhausting just watching you.”
I grunted and forced my hands to relax. My brother was right. He was always right, which was annoying as hell.
“I just need to know she’s safe,” I muttered.
“She’s in the bathroom. In your house. With guards at every entrance. What exactly do you think is going to happen? A rogue wolf is going to pop out of the toilet?”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
Over the past few days, while everyone else focused on the investigation and the security protocols and the alliance with Moonfang, I had been working on a different project. A secret project that I hadn’t told Lina about because she would probably think I was insane.
A panic room.
The idea had come to me in the middle of the night, lying awake while Lina slept peacefully beside me. I had stared at the ceiling and thought about all the ways our enemies could reach her. Through the doors. Through the windows. Through the walls if they were determined enough. Our house was secure, but it wasn’t impenetrable. Nothing above ground was truly impenetrable.
So I would go underground.
I had hired a small crew of workers, humans from three towns over who had no connection to any pack and no reason to gossip. I paid them triple their usual rate, covered their travel expenses, fed them well, and made them sign NDAs so airtight a lawyer would weep with admiration. To explain their presence to the guards, I had told everyone they were doing renovations in the baby’s room. No one questioned it. New baby, new room updates. Made perfect sense.
They were building the room in the woods to the west of our property, buried deep beneath the earth. The entrance was a tunnel that connected to our kitchen through a hidden door behind a false panel in the pantry. You had to press a specific sequence of spots on the wall to unlock it, and even then, the door looked like nothing more than shelving filled with canned goods.
The room itself was not just a closet. It wasn’t a bare concrete bunker with emergency supplies and harsh fluorescent lighting. No. My wife had spent a month in a sterile hospital room. If she ever had to hide again, she was going to be damn comfortable.
I had filled it with her favorite books. Stacks upon stacks of them, organized by genre the way she liked, with special sections for mystery, fantasy, and those spicy romances she thought I didn’t know about. I knew about them. I had read a few. They were educational.
Snacks covered an entire shelf. All the good ones. The fancy dark chocolate from that shop in the city that she loved. Trail mix without raisins because she picked those out anyway and left little piles of them on the counter. The expensive chips that she said were “too indulgent for every day” but that I was absolutely making every day from now on. Crackers and cheese and dried fruit and protein bars and enough food to last weeks if necessary.
Soft blankets were piled on a comfortable leather couch. A bed with a real mattress and high thread count sheets occupied one corner, because what if she had to stay down there for hours? Days? There was a bathroom with a working shower, stocked with all my special scented products.
And the crown jewel: a coffee machine so high tech and expensive it probably cost more than our car. It could make lattes and cappuccinos and espressos and about forty other drinks I couldn’t pronounce. Lina ran on caffeine. If she was going to survive an extended stay underground, she needed access to good coffee.
Noah had found out about it yesterday when he caught me discussing the final details of the room with one of the workers.
He had listened for a full minute, his mouth hanging open slightly. Then he had turned to me with an expression of pure disbelief.
“You’re going overboard,” he had said.
“Shut up,” I had replied.
“Knox. You’re building a luxury underground bunker because you’re afraid your wife might stub her toe.”
“I’m building a secure location in case of emergency. There’s a difference.”
