“Good. I don’t think it would be good for our relationship if you made me hunt you down.” Viggo’s mouth curved in a wide grin, showing off his pearly white teeth. “Unless you’d like me to, that is?”
Sebastian’s burgeoning boner died a swift death, his breath freezing in his lungs at the sudden overwhelming sensation of beingprey.
Viggo dropped his hold on Sebastian’s collar, taking a step back. His evil grin turned sheepish. “Sorry. That was supposed to be sexy, not scary. Are you okay?”
Sebastian took a deep, trembling breath, his heart slamming into his chest with the force of a jackhammer. He swallowed, even though his mouth was dry, and nodded.
“Yeah, sorry. I just…”
“Just had an apex predator promise to hunt you down?” Viggo said, the words self-deprecating. He took another step back and rubbed his eyes. “I’m really fucking this up, aren’t I?”
Despite himself, Sebastian shook his head. “You stopped when you saw that you’d scared me.”
“I’m not supposed to be scaring you in the first place.” Viggo took a deep breath, shaking his head and looking out the window. When he finally looked back at Sebastian, there was something resigned written in the curve of his mouth. “Never mind. You head home and take some time to collect your thoughts.”
Sebastian made his way to the door, hesitating before crossing the threshold and going into the hall. He turned around.
“You wouldn’t hurt me, right? When you caught me?”
Viggo looked surprised, but then his grin was back in full, evil force. The bulge in his underwear twitched, and Sebastian’s breath hitched at the sight of it. “Only in ways that you would enjoy.”
Swallowing, breathless like he’d just come in from a run, Sebastian nodded. “All right. That’s… that’s good to know.”
He rushed out of the room, walking fast and then jogging as he made his way to the garage, finding the key to the Jeep on the door and climbing behind the wheel.
After spending an embarrassing five minutes trying to figure out how to open the garage door, Sebastian was on his way home.
13
BJORN
When Bjorn woke up, it was to a blinding headache and a bone-deep feeling that something waswrong.
He tensed, adrenaline pushing his headache into the background, and opened his eyes. Familiar surroundings took some of the edge off his panic, the bedroom he shared with Viggo appearing as it always did, but he didn’t let himself relax. He climbed off the bed without making a sound and positioned himself in the corner of the room, facing both the door and the window while he tried to identify why he was feeling so uneasy.
Something was very obviouslyoff. The room was dark except for a sliver of painfully bright light shining through the crack in the blackout curtains, aggravating his pounding head, and there was an unfamiliar scent clinging to the inside of his nose.
It wasn’t a bad scent, Bjorn decided, and if he hadn’t been so confused, he would have very much liked to find the human it belonged to and rub himself all over them.
His headache intensifying, Bjorn poked his wolf to see if it had any insight. To his surprise, his wolf barely stirred, buried more deeply than it had been since it woke up for the first time back when he was a pimply twelve-year-old.
Disconcerted, Bjorn poked it harder, forcing it to wake up and to help him deal with the situation they found themselves in. He was completely unprepared for the avalanche of memories that crashed into his brain, one after the other, impressions, emotions and even words tangling together in a nonsensical mess that sent him crashing to his knees.
My turn to sleep, his wolf grumbled.
It drew back, burrowing down into the darkest depth of Bjorn’s subconscious, and Bjorn spent an undignified ten minutes on his knees, trying to process the fact that his wolf hadspokento him.
Closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall, he let the tangle of memories that the wolf had dumped into his brain settle. Moments passed, memories making themselves at home where they belonged, and gradually Bjorn began to form a picture of what he’d been up to for the past few months.
Feeling down his hip, half convinced everything his wolf had dumped on him was some kind of strange fever dream, Bjorn touched over the now smooth skin where he’d been shot. It had to have been moonrock, he realized, though how a human would have access to it – never mind think to weaponize it – Bjorn didn’t have a clue.
It was bizarre.
Pushing to his feet, Bjorn steadied himself against the wall and opened the curtains. Light flooded the room, bright and uncomfortably warm, and he reared back at the sudden intensity. His head throbbed, the light like daggers in his eyes.
Turning away and shielding his face, Bjorn took a second to get used to the intense light. He headed into the bathroom and bent over the sink, taking a drink from the faucet before splashing cold water in his face.
The cold water helped. Bjorn dried his face and leaned his hands on the counter, taking a look at himself in the mirror and grimacing at his reflection. He didn’t like what he saw. His beard – a bushy monstrosity that made him look like a caveman – was hideous, and his hair was even worse. Six months without properly washing and conditioning it had left it a dry and unsightly mess.
