“How you’ve maintained your playboy image all these years is beyond me.” Samuel shakes his head. “Women are simple, more so if you have money. You take her shopping. You tell her that she’s important to you so you want to spend your money on her. You spoil her.”
“I’ve never stopped her from going shopping with my card,” I mutter.
Brody points out, “She’s not Vanessa, you moron. She doesn’t seem to be the type to spend your money by herself. Do you even know what to do with a woman, Grayson?”
“Fuck you.” I flip him off.
“My point is that she was probably down because she saw your ex and started comparing herself to her.”
The idea doesn’t sit well with me. “So I should get her clothes? Better clothes than Vanessa so she feels good about herself?”
“You take her shopping, you idiot. The point of if it is she’s wearing what you bought her, reaching for it in her closet, walking around in it. She knows it, you know it. It’s also marking territory.”
From the showers, Eric calls over his shoulder, “Or you could just pee on her leg. Same thing, but I don’t think she’ll like it as much.”
The locker room loses its mind.
Samuel knocks me on the shoulder. “I know she has clothes. Women say they have no clothes when they have closets full of them, but if she and Vanessa are going to be crossing paths, new, fancy clothes are going to be your girl’s armor.”
I think about Miranda’s belongings at my place. Her clothes barely take any room in my closet. She has three blouses, two pairs of jeans she rotates, two sweaters, boots with salt stains, and that’s everything she owns. She’s been wearing my T-shirts to bed because she doesn’t own pajamas she wants me to see. She doesn’t have any jewelry either.
I’ve never noticed. Her clothes are all clean and presentable but simple. She’s never mentioned going shopping for more. If I get her clothes, stuff that closet, have the dressing table in our room covered in her jewelry, have her sit there, getting ready…I like it.
I want her to wear the clothes I chose for her, covered in jewels that I bought her. Everything on her body should be something from me. Mine.
She, her body, her clothes, all mine.
My wolf growls, darkly possessive, enjoying the image.
I pull the shirt over my head and decide to look for some good boutiques in the area. I’m reaching for my jacket when I hear a faint sound.
Everything in me stops.
It comes distantly through concrete and a closed door, but the pitch is one I would know in a stadium of screaming children. The voice is Ethan’s.
I’m moving before I know it.
My vision narrows to a tunnel. The wolf is rising inside me, shoving against the bones of my face. I round the second corner, and the scene resolves into something my body responds to before my mind does.
Vanessa stands with her hand raised, teeth bared, claws extended dark and slick.
Miranda is curved over Ethan on the bench with her back to the strike, her shoulders rigid for impact, and a red, wet line runs down the inside of her forearm. The whole world falls into a hushed silence around me, my eyes fixed on that line of red.
My shoulder catches Vanessa center mass.
The impact is not a man hitting a woman. It is something larger than either of us, my wolf already half through my skin, and she goes airborne backward into the plexiglass hard enough to crack a panel.
I land between her and the bench, chest heaving.
A snarl tears out of my throat, low and continuous. My claws have come through my fingertips without permission, and the tunnel light catches them.
Vanessa is on the floor twenty feet away, propped on one elbow with her mouth open and blood at the corner of her lip.
The wolf inside me doesn’t care that she looks shocked.
A small sound at my back pulls my head halfway around. Just my eyes turn, because I can’t make myself break from the threat yet. Miranda is lifting her face. Her cheek is streaked, her braid is half undone, hair is stuck to the corner of her mouth, and her good arm is curled around Ethan’s small, shaking shoulders.
She looks up at me.
