Page 61 of Bound

“Dammit!” I curse, running both hands through my hair.

“No luck?” Maddox asks from the doorway.

“Nothing,” I say, flicking the monitors back to the live stream so I can see Red. She’s sitting on the couch between the twins. I let out a small sigh at seeing her unharmed. “They used a scrambler,” I finally tell him. “The feeds were all static when he came through.”

“That must have been one heck of a scrambler to cut through our systems,” he muses. I grunt in reply, my eyes still focused on my little red wolf. “She’s safe, Bain,” Maddox says after a minute of silence.

I glance up at him, almost forgetting he’s there. “She’s safe with us,” he tells me again.

“I know,” I nod, my eyes finding her again. “But I don’t like any part of this. Starfall is sounding better by the minute.”

He lets out a small laugh. “You too?”

I shrug. “There’s nothing keeping us here, is there?” I look at him properly now as I sit back in the chair. “You don’t want to be the Westgrove Alpha, so why pretend you might take it one day?”

He turns his head to look out the window into the backyard as he takes a long breath. “You’re right. We all know I have nointerest in the pack. I guess I stayed because I worried what my parents would think if they were still alive.”

“They’d want you to be happy,” I tell him. Even though I never met them, he’s talked about them fondly enough over the years for me to know they were good parents, and his dad was a great alpha. “This isn’t the same pack you grew up in,” I remind him.

He nods but doesn’t respond. The need to see Red in the flesh has me leaving him to his thoughts as I seek her out in the living room, curled on the couch between the twins.

I almost scoop her up and lift her into my lap, but I pivot at the last moment, choosing a nearby armchair instead. It’s not right for me to stake a claim over her. As much as I want her to be mine, this is a complicated situation. She might be fated to one of my brothers.

When Gage finishes cooking, I make sure to cut up the chicken for Red. I know she won’t get sick from undercooked chicken, but she hates raw food. Luckily, he’s fully cooked it all this time… a littletoocooked, in fact.

When I place the plate down for her, she sniffs it then looks up at us sitting at the table, as if waiting to see if we eat it first. We all turn to Gage, who’s watching us expectantly.

“Go on, try it,” he encourages us. “I think you’re really gonna like this one.”

“Why don’t you do the honor?” Maddox says, trying to hide his grimace from the strange-smelling chicken.

He frowns at us, and I see Red starting to lower her head toward the plate. As subtly as I can, I reach my foot out and pull her plate between my feet. When she tilts her head at me, I give mine a small shake. I don’t want her eating that crap.

Gage finally takes a bite and chews twice before his jaw stops moving. His nose scrunches, and he swallows it down,making it look like a chore before he grabs his glass of water and chugs half of it down.

“I guess the recipe could use a little work.”

“I’m ordering pizza,” Chase declares, and he pulls out his phone and jumps up from the table.

“It was a good try,” Maddox says as he stands and starts grabbing plates. “Just maybe try something a little simpler next time.”

Gage just stares at the table, looking annoyed as I stand and lift up Red’s plate and my own, helping Maddox to toss out all the chicken before someone eats it by mistake.

When I turn around, I stop in my tracks at the sight of Gage smiling. I realize Red has moved to his side and is licking his hand. Leave it to her to cheer him up so fast. He normally sulks for a full day after a failed attempt at cooking.

After the pizza arrives and we’ve all had our fill, Chase and I head out to do patrol on the pack grounds. He waits for an entire three seconds after we enter the forest until he starts yammering in my head through our pack bond.

“We’re gonna find Blaze and kill him, right?”

“He came by vehicle. His scent ended in the drive,”I tell him as we move through the trees, our ears, eyes, and noses on alert for anything strange.

He growls in frustration, but otherwise remains silent. My body is full of energy today, and Chase might feel the same as we move at a faster pace than usual. We run in silence for a while. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy patrolling with Chase’s wolf. In person, he can sometimes be loud, but his wolf is deadly.

Although he and Hunter share their sense of humor, Chase has more darkness to him. I think he started working out when he was younger so he could better protect his twin, whom heviewed as younger, since Hunter was born five minutes after him.

His protection allowed Hunter to be more gentle and more level-headed. He’s a gifted negotiator and was often the one to calm everyone down and see all sides of a situation. He joins our patrols on occasion, but I think it’s good for the two of them to do some things without one another.

When they first moved in with us, they were practically glued at the hip, and we had trouble telling them apart sometimes. Now I enjoy seeing how they've grown into individuals within our pack. It makes me proud to be a Silverstorm wolf.