His knees bent inward, and he doubled over.
Then Cole brought her elbow down between his shoulders with a sickening crack, and he fell forward face-first against the ground.
Tanner groaned and cried on the floor.
Cole stooped low.
“Commercial naivety is forgivable. Disrespect within business matters is correctable. Insulting my omega, however, I find entirely intolerable,” she told him calmly before standing straight.
She turned to Levi.
“Take him and go,” she instructed.
Levi didn’t hesitate before he dragged Tanner up from beneath his armpits. Cole opened the door for him and closed it after he had dragged the beaten, near-unconscious Tanner from the room.
Cole lifted the edge of her sweater and scowled at the blood before her head rose and her eyes met mine.
“Harriet?” she asked.
I looked away from her to the blood on the table across from me.
I tried to speak, but made no sound.
“You’re shaking,” she said. Suddenly, directly next to me, within the booth. “Shh, breathe,” she instructed, taking hold of my shaking hands that I clutched in my lap.
I wheezed in a terribly shaky breath.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said softly.
“The blood,” I managed to speak.
I hated it.
I couldn’t look away from it.
Cole tugged on my hands, leading me out of the booth and then out of the room entirely.
With the door shut and the sight of the viscous red away, I felt the pressure in my chest lift.
“I’ll have Frankie make a couple of new burgers; we’ll take them to go,” Cole said.
“I don’t feel hungry anymore,” I told her.
Chapter five
Mean Girls
Alan smiled; his usually paper-white cheeks were tinged pink as I stood at his open office door and knocked.
“Harriet,” he greeted, pleased to see me.
He wasn’t all that bad. A grumpy old man, for sure, but he wasn’t grumpy all the time, at least not in the morning.
I had been working as a cleaner within the Pack House for a week. My time at Sandstorm was passing by, slowly but thankfully uneventfully, since I visited Heaven’s Bar with Cole. The violent display was terrifying. I kept jolting awake from nightmares filled with red since.
I was keeping my distance as much as I could from her. Cole was dangerous in a completely different way from Ashford. He was volatile, but I could sense his tantrums, predict them. I knew what to do to protect myself, to calm him. Cole was calm, competent in a lethal sort of way.
She was unpredictable.
