br /> “Who?” he barked out.
Beau gave him a grim look. “Her brother.”
“What the fuck!” West roared.
“Ease up, West,” Beau told him.
“Was he there when you got her?” Alec asked tensely.
“Nope. She was on her own,” Beau replied.
“Bring her upstairs,” Mia said immediately. “Bedroom next to ours. I’ll call Doc.”
Felicity whimpered.
“I promised no doctor,” Beau told them.
Why the fuck would he promise her that? But before West could ask, Alec moved in. He stepped in front of Beau, looked down at Felicity then gently cupped the side of her face. The side that was covered in a purplish-black bruise, her eye swollen shut.
“Flick, honey, you’re safe now. I promise,” Alec told her.
“I can’t stay,” she whispered. “He won’t let me stay.”
“He’ll have to get through all of us if he wants to get to you,” he promised her.
How the fuck could her own brother have done this to her? Wasn’t he in a wheelchair? Frustration bit at him as he realized he knew absolutely nothing about her life beyond the basics. Because he’d made a point of not learning anything about it.
“You’re going to stay here. With us. Okay?” Alec had injected firmness into his voice.
West wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Alec had always been the head of their family, but he wasn’t Flick’s man.
Neither are you, asshole.
“He’ll try to create problems,” she warned. “He can get nasty. Really nasty.”
“You let me worry about that,” Alec told her. “That’s my job, you just agree you’re moving in here with us.”
“Flick, please,” Mia begged.
“I just don’t want any of you to get hurt.”
“Not your problem to worry about, darlin’,” Beau reassured her. “We can protect ourselves and we sure as shit can protect you. You already mean a lot to us, soon as I saw you lying in your bed, curled in a ball, beaten to shit, you most definitely became ours. You aren’t going anywhere. Which means, you accept Alec’s rules. Got it?”
West turned his glare to Beau. He barely bit back a rebuke.
Not yours. Not yours.
A moment of silence. “Beast can come?”
“She’s worried about her horse,” Beau told them. “Maddox is riding him back, because she thought that bastard might hurt the horse to get to her.”
What. The. Fuck?
Alec nodded. “Beast can stay.”
More silence. What was there to think about? How could she possibly want to go back to a situation where her bastard brother beat the shit out of her? And he knew from the way she held herself that her face wasn’t the worst of it. She was cradling her right arm. Her index finger looked swollen. Was it broken?
“You’ll be protected here, Flick,” Mia told her quietly. “You can trust these guys; you know you can. They have their own moral code. They can be wild and they will drive you insane, but if you’re theirs, you’ll never be safer. I promise you that.”