“Stop thinking so hard,” Peter muttered, and Chad snorted out a laugh.
He closed his eyes and let his mind wander in less weighty directions, knowing that sleep would claim him soon.
There was no reason to worry.
***
Chapter 26
The next morning Chad ordered room service pancakes, scrambled eggs, and a plate full of bacon.
“You’re going to get fat,” Peter said, staring at him over the rim of his coffee cup as he dug in. Chad just grinned at him and poured another helping of maple syrup on his pancakes.
If he kept taking Tank Security fitness and training classes, the chances of getting fat were pretty much zero.
“So what was up with you yesterday?” Chad asked, taking another huge bite of his pancakes and chewing it with a strip of bacon so that his cheeks bulged.
“One of our clients tried to set me up in a sting operation for the FBI and ended up challenging me. It wasn’t pretty.”
Chad stopped chewing and stared at Peter with his mouth full. Peter had been in a challenge? He couldn’t believe it. Chad had faced off against other alphas plenty of times, but it had never gone that far.
And the FBI?Why was the FBI setting up sting operations to catch Peter?
Chad swallowed the rest of the food in his mouth without chewing. “What?”
“He was in trouble, and he tried to make a deal by stabbing me in the back. It didn’t work.”
Chad nodded. Obviously it hadn’t worked. Peter wasn’t a criminal.
“What are you going to do now?” Chad asked.
“About the FBI?” Peter shrugged. “Nothing. The only proof they had that I’d done something wrong was Sprain’s word, and he’s dead, so… they’ve got nothing.”
Chad froze for a second time. “What do you mean he’s dead?”
Peter just stared at him like he was being particularly dim-witted.
“He challenged me, Chad. Do you honestly think I’d let that go?”
Chad remembered suddenly how Merchant had trained them with the assumption that every real fight would end in death. Was that how alphas like him and Peter operated?
“So what? If I accidentally challenged you, you’d kill me?”
Peter scoffed. “You wouldn’t challenge me, Chad. I don’t think that’s something you have to worry about.”
Notthe reassuring and resoundingNOChad had been after. When he just continued staring at Peter incredulously, Peter sighed.
“It’s not like it’s an instinct I can control,” he said, putting his coffee cup down. “I’m challenged, I fight. I fight, it’s to the death. That’s just how I’m built. This can’t be news to you.”
Chad shook his head. It wasn’t, really. He knew that uber-alphas were intense about things like this—violent and unpredictable. It’s why they were so scary. But it hadn’t seemed to apply toPeter.
“I just… youkilledhim. Doesn’t that make you feel bad?”
Peter stared at him like he was speaking another language. His expression was blank and a little confused, like he couldn’t quite figure out what Chad was asking.
Chad tried to wrap his head around the idea that Peter had gone straight from killing someone to playing kinky sex games with him like it was nothing.A bad day, that’s how he’d described it. Like he’d spilled coffee on his shirt or missed a meeting.
“Not really. He tried to set me up and he attacked me. As far as I’m concerned he got what was coming to him.”
