“She’s taken.”
Two words. Delivered without aggression. Just a fact.
And awarning.
Martinez swallowed. “Got it. Loud and clear.” He shot Mira an apologetic glance, muttered a “nice seeing you,” and retreated toward the counter.
I slid into the booth.
Mira stared at me.
“That,” she said, “was unnecessary.”
“He was flirting.”
“He was making conversation.”
“He told you that you looked ‘really good’ three times while I was gone. I counted through the window.”
“You were counting? How did you… Right. Lycan. But still. You really counted?”
“I count everything.”
Her lips pressed together. In the particular way they pressed together when she was trying very hard not to smile and losing the battle.
“You scared him.”
“I informed him.”
“Solomon, you towered over him. Poor guy.”
“I can’t help that I’m tall.”
She lost the fight with the smile. It broke across her face in a way that flooded the booth with the scent of her amusement and my wolf settled beneath my skin with a smug satisfaction.
“You know,” she said, picking up her fork and cutting into a pancake, unbothered by the territorial display she’d just witnessed, “for someone who uses fewer words than anyone I’ve ever met, you really know how to make a statement.”
“Efficiency.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“I said what needed to be said. He understood. The interaction required no additional dialogue.”
She chewed, swallowed. Pointed her fork at me.
“You’re grumpy. This is a first.”
“I’m not grumpy.”
“You’re the grumpiest person in this diner right now, and there’s a man in the corner who’s been scowling at his eggs for twenty minutes.”
She was laughing genuinely. Full-bodied, the kind that turned heads across the diner. The two women by the window tracked the sound, and I watched their expressions shift from curiosity to the particular warmth people displayed when witnessing someone else’s happiness.
My possessiveness wasn’t simply about Martinez. Not really. Not at the core.
It came from the fact that she was sitting across from me in a public place, unmasked, unhidden, laughing freely for the first time since I’d known her, and the primal part of my brain needed every person in the building to understand that this was mine.
A declaration of belonging.
