A stab of jealousy filled me so potently and I was half-tempted to track down any person who had so much as looked at Dante sideways and rip their hair out at the roots.
‘Don’t do this with anyone else ever again,’I commanded peevishly, sounding like a petulant child as I clenched around his knot to underline my words.
Another laugh came from Dante as he snuggled his face into my neck, his warm breath tickling the sensitive, sweaty skin there.
Dante yawned and flipped so that I was lying on top, pulling one of the blankets over the both of us as his inner-voice grew heavy with exhaustion.‘Baby, I wasn’t planning on it. Trust me when I say I belong to you and only you.’
Twenty-Two
“How long do you think we’ll be here for?” I asked as we stepped over the threshold of the mountain cabin that we had been keeping in case of emergencies.
I had made sure, to the best of my abilities, that it was untraceable.
Offshore accounts, a ghost buyer, and a security system around the perimeter that would make the Pentagon jealous would hopefully keep us and our precious cargo safe at least until we could figure out our next steps.
And the best part? It was only an hour and a half away from the city, so if and when we got our shit together we could operate out of it like a command center.
Not that we were even close to that at this point.
Almost every single alliance we had been building, even the ones that had stuck around after Cini’s kidnapping, had gone so far underground after Amante’s last stunt that I wasn’t even sure if they were in the country anymore.
The Amante family had fractured irrevocably the moment that Amante had chosen to join hands with whoever the hell Mr. R was.
As soon as we, thankfully, made it back to shore I put my ear to the ground and learned that things were definitely not copacetic back home. All of the Amante family’s business had ground to a complete halt as Amante tried to complete his partnership with Mr. R and the palms of Amante’s closest men were no longer being greased the way they used to be.
People say not to bite the hand that feeds, but what they don’t say is that even a starving dog will tear apart the master who doesn’t feed them. That’s the circle of life.
But none of that would help us right now. Even if we tried to bring them over to our side, those bastards would sooner kill us and declare themselves king of the proverbial hill rather than let us take over.
It was a conundrum that I had been thinking about constantly as we drove up the coast and into the mountains and I could only come to one possible solution:
Say fuck it and run for the hills.
I had even been secretly looking up places in Europe where we could hide out until the brewing civil war figured itself out.
Of course, Elio, Nico, and Dante disagreed with my take. The assholes.
We were supposed be democratic about our pack decision making—an agreement we’d quickly come to once we made it out of prison and Alesso was no longer there to lead us.
The only problem with that sort of thing was that I was usually the minority opinion.
Now, most sane guys would think: hey, maybe that just means I need to reform my opinion, maybe I’m the wrong one.
But I had too big of an ego and the desire to say ‘I told you so,’ so I was always the loud, dissenting opinion.
Case in point now.
“A couple of weeks at best. Tomorrow, I want to head down to the house in the city in order to try and coordinate with Edison Keane,” Elio said as he dropped our bags inside of the door.
“That’s a bad idea—” I began but was cut off before I could really get into all of the ways that it was a bad idea because Dante entered the house with our girl in his arms.
She was asleep, her cheeks flushed a bright red color signifying the heat that seemed to have taken over completely now.
The day after she bonded with Dante she started spending more and more time sleeping in the cabin of the boat. It had been hard to even get her to wake up and eat.
It was different from any pre-heat symptoms I had ever heard about, probably thanks to the fact that she wasn’t a typical omega.
We had briefly considered giving Dr. Stedmeyer a call in order to ask his opinion, but chances were too strong that the doctor’s phones would be tapped and it could give our location away.
