I frowned at that, because that seemed like a weird thing to say. Did he think I was trying to trick him by saying Cash would live? Or was he saying the challenge was a trick? Why would Cash try to trick us? Hell, Grant wasn’t even suggesting that Cash had been wrong, he was just acting like it was normal that he planned to challenge Jax to a fight and try to steal control of our pack.
My doubt must have shown on my face, but the giant guy didn’t growl or glare or anything I expected from someone enormous and... okay, I could admit my own bias. I had assumed he wasn’t very bright because he was enormous and muscley.
Instead, he looked mildly frustrated and huffed a sigh, the way Jax did sometimes when he didn’t know how to say what he wanted to.
The language barrier, I realized, was probably the biggest thing getting in the way.
“I don’t imagine you speak Japanese?” I asked.
He glanced up at me in interest, cocking his head. “No. Only Russian.”
“Sorry, I can’t help with the language barrier, then. I’ve only got Japanese and some German.”
He smiled at that for a second, but then it dropped, and he shook his head again. “My English isn’t so bad, only frustrating. You are alpha mate, yes?”
“Yes. You know that.”
“No. Is... this is not normal. Most alphas do not make their matealphamate. You arealphamate.Equal.”
For a second, I just stared at him.
Alpha mate.
Equal.
I sucked in a breath and stared at him. “That fucker. He’s not going to challenge Jax. He’s going to challenge me.”
Without a word, the blond man jerked his head in a nod, and left the bathroom.
15
Jax
Iwas trying to keep my shit together.
Holding onto sanity with ten claws, dug in hard.
But even on my best day, I had my fucking limits. And this was a bullshit day on which I got to sit across from a smarmy fucking asshole and hope that the right combination of queso and tequila could get me through it.
All right, I wasn’t drinking.
I didn’t trust myself to drink. Or, well... I did. It wasn’t like I’d get wasted. I just needed to hold it together around these people that I definitely did not fucking trust.
So I was a man down, and queso was picking up a lot of slack.
Well, his buddy, chorizo helped.
And then, Dakota got up.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and there was no sense in that.
Dakota was allowed to go to the restroom by himself. Of course he was. He was an adult. This was our city, a place the pack frequented, ourhome. I shouldn’t have worried about him at all.
But I was wolf enough that I didn’t like losing sight of him while there was a threat nearby. It was a toxic, feral impulse, and I was better than that.
I tried to be better than that.
Fuck, around these assholes, I really was not better than that.
