Page 116 of My Unhinged Alphas
“Then stop saying it like you’re talking about coffee and toast. You’re literally saying someone tried to assassinate me.”
Fair.
Havoc pushes off the wall. “Look, call us whatever you want. Monsters. Liars. Bad company. None of that changes the part where somebody opened fire at your café, followed you into an alley, and your name is sitting in places it shouldn’t be.”
Lena folds her arms tighter. “And your answer is what? I stay in a motel with three psychopaths until you solve it?”
“Two,” Havoc says. “Maybe two and a half.”
Knox shoots him a look.
Havoc lifts his hands. “What? I’m being generous.”
Lena doesn’t smile.
I say, “Our answer is that you stay alive long enough for us to pull this apart.”
I can see it in the way she goes quiet, in the way anger gives ground to calculation.
Knox speaks then, clipped as ever. “You don’t have to trust us.”
Havoc huffs a laugh. “Probably shouldn’t.”
Lena looks down for a second, then back up. “And you really think you can do something about it?”
“No,” I say. “I know we can.”
She studies me too long. Maybe she’s trying to decide whether that certainty comforts her or scares her more.
It should scare her.
Havoc looks at her and says, quieter this time, “You don’t have to be with us.”
Then he jerks his chin toward the window, toward the dark outside, toward everything waiting beyond the motel walls.
“But until we know who wants you dead, you probably shouldn’t be alone.”
Chapter 18
Lena
I feellike I’m standing on the edge of a deal I can’t take back.
Like one more word out of my mouth and something invisible is going to close around my ankle and drag me under. Not because they’re forcing me. That would almost be easier. This is worse. This is me standing here, fully aware, looking at three men who feel like violence in human form and knowing that if I stay near them, I might live.
And that thought alone feels rotten enough to make me sick.
I drag in a breath and say, “I need to call my friends. I need to see if they’re okay.” My voice sounds thinner than I want it to. Not weak. Just frayed.
Knox answers first. “I checked the news,” he says. “No reported deaths. Minor injuries.”
That should help.
It doesn’t. Not really.
Minor injuries. Reported deaths. The words feel cold and distant, like they belong to somebody else’s nightmare, not mine. Jess and Mara and the café and overturned tables and people screaming and all of it turning into some neat little line on a screen Knox already read before I even thought to ask.
I stare at him. “That doesn’t mean they’re okay.”
