Page 97 of My Unhinged Alphas
His eyes stay on mine, steady, impossible to read. Around us, the café keeps moving. Milk steaming. Cups clinking. A muted conversation near the pastry case. Traffic sliding by outside. Normal life, still pretending it belongs to me.
“I’m here because things changed,” he says.
“What things?”
“Things I’m not explaining in front of a window.”
I almost snap back, but then I catch Mara in my peripheral vision, watching us while pretending to wipe down a table. Jess is near the espresso machine, doing the same thing.
They know something is wrong.
I lower my voice further. “Then you shouldn’t have come here.”
His jaw shifts once. “Probably.”
“So leave.”
“Not yet.”
I’m about to tell him exactly where he can go when the first gunshot cracks through the air. For one blank second, my brain doesn’t understand it.
Then the front window beside us erupts. Glass punches inward with a deafening burst, spiderwebbing and blowing across the floor as two, three, four more shots slam into it in brutal succession.
I duck on instinct, my hands flying over my head as the café explodes into chaos around us. Cups crash. A chair goes over. Mara shouts my name.
Knox moves fast. One second he’s standing in front of me, the next his hand is on my arm, shoving me down hard behind the nearest wall as more rounds hit the glass, spraying the window with fresh cracks and sending glittering shards skidding across the floor.
My heart is pounding so hard I can’t hear right.
All I know is the gunfire, the screaming, Knox’s grip on me, and the horrible certainty that whatever found me?—
It found me here.
Chapter 16
Lena
One secondI’m standing there, staring like an idiot while the glass bursts inward, and the next I’m slammed to the floor so hard the breath leaves my body in a pathetic little sound I will deny forever.
His body comes down over mine immediately. Not awkwardly. Not hesitantly. Instantly. Like he’s done this before. Like protecting someone while bullets are flying is just another item on his to-do list.
Around us, the café loses its mind. People are screaming. Someone is crying. Cups are smashing. A chair scrapes and tips over. The espresso machine is still hissing like it has no idea this is a very bad time to keep doing its job. Glass keeps raining down in little pieces around us, and every fresh gunshot makes the whole front of the diner jump.
But Knox? Knox is calm.
Not relaxed. Definitely not relaxed. But controlled in this terrifying, unfairly competent way that makes everything around him look even more chaotic by comparison. He’s braced over me, one arm planted near my head, the other shielding me in a way that pins me flat to the ground without quite crushing me. His weight is heavy, solid, warm, and I hate that some tiny,treacherous part of my brain notices that in the middle of active gunfire.
His face is close. Too close.
His expression is hard and focused, eyes scanning over me once, then the room beyond, like he’s already calculating angles and exits and all the things I very much do not want to know how to calculate.
Then, with one quick movement, he reaches behind him and pulls out a gun.
A gun. An actual gun.
I stare at it. Then I stare at him.
“What the hell?” I gasp. “Why do you have a gun?”
