I don’t want to go.But he had to.
Zio slipped out of the tent. Daylight hit him, along with a face full of rain, and he cringed. In wolf form, the weather didn’t bother him. In human form? Yeah. It could suck a bag of southern wolf dicks.
Grumbling, he followed Michael’s scent to the embankment where the drone pilots were embedded. Danielo was there too, viewing the captured footage on a laptop.
Zio peered over his shoulder, still half asleep. “You stink of sex.”
“You stink of a Shadow Clan healer, brother. Care to explain?”
Zio had no verbal answer to that. He elbowed Danielo in the ribs and forced himself to focus on the grainy drone footage. “What have we got?”
“They’re trying to flank us,” Michael said. “See here? The unit coming our way split in two an hour ago, one vehicle headed east, one west.”
“You sure those are the only vehicles?”
“No,” a drone pilot spoke up. “But we are sure these two are gunning for us. We’ve got them loading up with weapons—bats and knives. Pretty sure we saw a silencer, though we didn’t see any guns.”
Zio felt sick. Varian had long feared that the southern packs would bring human weapons to a shifter fight, despite every law in the land forbidding them. Explosives could be explained away as accidents. But guns? The human authorities wouldn’t stand for that.
“Maybe we should say fuck it and get guns,” Danielo mused, voicing what was almost certainly on the collective pack mind.
Zio growled, lacing it with every ounce of beta authority he possessed. “That’s not who we are, what we’ve lost so many friends fighting for. No fucking guns, not now, not ever.”
He got no argument, for that or the hastily formulated plan to intercept their would-be attackers.
Zio selected two teams. “I’ll lead one, Bomber the other.”
“He stinks too,” Danielo offered as acquiesce.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Danielo grinned before sobering and returning to the task at hand. “What about Devan? He can’t be in two places at once.”
“That’s if he’ll even come with us,” Michael said, gaze on the laptop screen. “After yesterday.”
Another growl built in Zio’s chest. He swallowed it down. “Devan is under orders to be here as much as the rest of us. He’ll go out with Bomber’s team to the west. Go get your shit. We need to rock out in ten minutes.”
The makeshift council adjourned. Zio exchanged a meaningful glance with Michael, grabbed the satellite phone, and dashed back to camp, unsure of what he wanted to find when he returned to the tent he was sharing with Devan. A grinding headache and a craving for peace, even if only for a few minutes, had driven him to invade Devan’s bed the previous night—along with an irresistible desire to keep Devan warm—and he’d never intended to stay till morning, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.I don’t regret anything about him.
The realisation startled Zio. He’d spent so many long nights wishing he’d never gone to that fucking club, that he’d stayed home like a good beta—like Gale—and guided his unit through the grief they owned as much as Zio did. But it was true. Zio had little knowledge of the bonds and relationships shifters formed away from their units, sometimes even away from their packs, but what he shared with Devan was... something. It had to be, or he was losing his damn mind.
He slipped inside the tent. Devan was awake, sitting among the mess of sleeping bags they’d slept in, lacing his boots. “What are you fretting about?”
Zio crouched beside him. “I’m not fretting.”
“Liar.”
“Uh-huh. What are you going to do about it?”
Devan glanced up, his upturned face so close to Zio’s that they could’ve kissed without moving a muscle.
Zio licked his lips, his wolf stirring and demanding something he didn’t have time for.
Devan laughed softly. “This is getting complicated.”
“I know.”
“So what areyougoing to do about it?”