Sliding the paper across the counter, the ware tossed down a twenty beside it and exited the coffee shop. Through the pooled moisture in my eyes, I read the name “Osyrius” and a number scrawled in black ink.
“Who is this son-of-a-bitch?” Ethan demanded, as he looked down at the piece of paper Osyrius had handed me this afternoon while I was at work.
“I’m not sure yet,” Flint returned. “But it’s not going to take long to figure out. One of my ware connections told me he has a file on somebody by that name and will send it right over with pictures so we can determine if it’s him.”
“How about you, Stark? Have you ever come across him in your business dealings?” Ethan pressed, breathing so hard I could see his chest rising and falling from across the room.
Stark shook his head. “No. But with a name like that, it shouldn’t be hard to track him.”
“I’m sorry, Millie. I should have been there. I should have taken care of the man myself,” Gavin apologized from his place beside the fire. Until now, he’d been cradling his head in his hands, devastated over what had happened on “his watch”.
Placing my hand on Gavin’s slumped shoulders, I took a seat beside him. For the hundredth time since he’d returned from the comic shop, I reassured him this incident wasn’t his fault.
“I told you to leave, remember? Nobody knew what my stalker looked like. There’s no way you would have been able to stop Osyrius from coming into that coffee shop today, even if you’d been stationed directly at the front door. None of you could have,” I added, glancing around the room at all the downturned faces. “Even if you smelled him coming, the coffee shop is open to the public. You would have no authority to keep him from entering it.”
The front door swung open then and Logan strolled inside. Right away, he picked up on the dark mood in the air.
“What did I miss?” He asked as he poured himself a whiskey from the decanter resting on the coffee table.
Colt succinctly explained while Ethan stalked back and forth in front of the hearth on which I was perched beside Gavin.
Logan didn’t convey any emotions as he listened without interruption. His silence caused Ethan to pause his pacing and study his brother hard.
“You’ve lived in Alaska longer than any of us,” he noted. “Have you heard of someone called Osyrius from the Tupilaq pack?”
Logan didn’t answer right away. Instead, he savored the mouthful of liquor he’d been sipping before slowly swallowing it down. “I can’t say I have. At least, not that I remember.”
There was something about his response that didn’t sound entirely honest. Kind of like he was being evasive about something, though I couldn’t tell what.
“My friend just sent over that file,” Flint interrupted, as his phone began to ding multiple times in a row. His eyebrowsrose as he opened it and scanned through the contents. “Ethan, you’re going to want to see this.”
Handing over his phone, my mate began to scroll through the electronic file. His face tightened as he worked his way through it in total silence.
Not able to take the suspense any longer, I demanded, “What is it?” Part of me didn’t want to know, but a bigger part of me needed to.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan said by way of denial, tossing the phone back at Flint after he’d sent the file to his own device. “This piece of shit isn’t going to live long enough to be a problem.”
Getting to my feet, I stalked over to Flint and put out my hand. “Let me see the documents. I have a right to know who’s been stalking me, Flint!”
Ethan could threaten Flint with his eyes all he wanted. He couldn’t stop me from finding out what I had every right to know. It was my life on the line, after all. I shouldn’t be kept in the dark about who I was dealing with.
Flint shrugged. “She’s the only one who can identify the man, Ethan. None of us have ever met or seen him before.”
A pained expression of shame washed over Gavin’s face again. I wanted to comfort him, but nothing I said was going to help right now. The wound was still too fresh. We’d talk about it again later, when he could truly hear what I had to say.
In truth, I was glad the youngest man in our pack wasn’t there when Osyrius had entered the coffee shop. My stalker was an absolute brute. Far larger than Gavin and ten times as aggressive. After all the threats he’d made in regard to killingmy family, I wasn’t exactly eager to give him a chance to carry them out. I might have been scared for myself, but Osyrius had left me terrified for my pack. I didn’t know the man from a hole in the wall, but I could tell the ware was capable of great cruelty and savage acts of violence. The eyes never lie, and his were crazy as hell.
Flint unlocked his screen, pulled up a picture of Osyrius, and flipped it toward me. “Is this the guy that you talked to this afternoon, Millie?”
The minute my eyes landed on the image, my body reacted like he was directly in front of me. My muscles tightened, the hairs on my arms pricked into a standing position, and my mouth grew instantly dry.
“That’s him,” I affirmed, once I’d gathered my wits about me.
I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the man’s face and those disturbing eyes. It wasn’t their color, per se. A kind of golden brown with flecks of darker shades streaked throughout. It was how much of the whites were showing as he looked at me, like he didn’t dare blink in case he missed the smallest movement. Like he was always in hunting mode, and I was his intended prey.
“That’s him,” I choked out again, feeling like the walls were closing in all around me.
Ethan rushed to my side and helped me to the couch. I felt cold all over as I remembered the threats the arrogant asshole had made. He wanted to kill my mate, my whole pack. I might never have shifted before, but despite that, this was still my family. Losing them was the worst fate I could imagine.
