“Right,” she says.
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll take you to them, then. After that, you can do whatever you want.”
“How do I get you out?” she asks.
“Can you pick locks?”
“Never have before.”
“Grab that nail on the floor over there.” I point it out. “That ought to work.”
She fetches the nail and I talk her through the process of opening the padlock on my cage. Finally, the door swings wide, letting me out. I scramble for freedom and rise to my feet, stretching my body out fully for the first time in four days.
She averts her eyes, and I remember that I’m naked. My clothes are in a heap in the corner. I grab them and pull them on.
“When will your pack be back?” she asks. “Or are they coming back at all?”
“Probably not for three days,” I tell her. “That’s when they were supposed to let me out of the cage. But I’m not planning to go back to them. Not after this. I always knew my alpha was a jackass, but I never knew he had this in him. I can’t be loyal to him anymore.”
She nods as if that doesn’t require any further explanation. “We have time to wait out the storm, then,” she says. “Let’s go upstairs so we can keep an eye on it. We’ll leave as soon as it lets up.”
Chapter 10
EMLYN
“Youcanputyourclothes in my backpack,” I tell him. “If you want.”
He grins insouciantly. “And what if I say I just want to leave my clothes behind and go naked?”
He really thinks he can bother me like this, I can tell. “I don’t give a damn what you do,” I tell him. “But when it’s windy or cold or raining and you’re balls out in it, don’t come crying to me because I don’t have a spare set of pants that will fit you.”
He rolls his eyes. “Come here,” he says, stripping his shirt over his head.
I already have the backpack buckled around my torso, my shoulders slipped out of it, so I cross the room and turn my back to him. I feel a redistribution of weight as he packs his things into it.
I shimmy out of my own clothes and hand them back to him. “Can you put these in there too, please?”
I’m fully expecting him to say something lewd, to make a comment about my body. After all, no matter how many times we shifted in front of one another, the men in my pack never stopped nudging each other and raising their eyebrow suggestively when they caught a glimpse.
But he doesn’t say anything. He just stuffs my things into the backpack on top of his own and zips it up.
So that’s weird. But I guess he’s probably just not attracted to me. And that makes sense. We did meet under really strange circumstances.
Besides, I’m not attracted to him either.
I fucking wish I was because I’ve been frankly wildly aroused ever since Victor and I went our separate ways. I’d love to get it out of my system, even if it is with this guy. But he’s not putting me in the mood.
Then he slips his fingers under the straps of my backpack. I’m about to object, to pull away from his touch, but he tugs at them a little and says, “Is this going to stay on?” And I realize he’s just evaluating how tight I have it, not looking for an excuse to touch me.
I nod. “It stays on when I shift,” I tell him. “It’s a little loose on me now, but it’s a snug fit on my wolf body.”
“That’s pretty clever,” he says. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
I have no idea if he’s mocking me or not, so I don’t respond to it. “You ready to go?” I ask.
“Ready,” he agrees.
“Which way to the coven?”