I breathed into his ear for the pleasure of feeling him shiver against me. “Of course not.” He smelled like home, like safety, like love. “Of course not.”

“I promise I won’t spank you,” he told me, his voice rough and low as he added, “not unless you ask me to.”

I let him feel my laugh against his shoulder. “That’s because you aren’t genuinely suicidal.”

We loved again then, the short nap of the rug soft under my skin and the warmth of him surrounding me.

Afterward, he fell asleep while he was eating, between one bite and the next, like a toddler. I don’t think that he had slept since the pack was taken. He didn’t even stir when I pulled away from him to go put my clothes on.

The room might have been finished, but it was not heated. Adam was a werewolf, which meant the colder the better for him—not so for me. Fully clothed, I sat down next to him to watch over him while he slept.

The quiet time didn’t last.

The door between house and garage opened no more than twenty minutes after Adam dropped off. Warren called, “Sorry, boss. You’re needed if you don’t want Kyle to shoot the rest of the pack.”

He didn’t speak that loudly, but Adam’s eyes opened up anyway. He smiled at me, and said, “Good to know. Tell Kyle to hold up, and I’ll be right down.”

Warren steadied the rope ladder when Adam tossed it out of the trapdoor. “We’ve put the pack downstairs in the big room to create some space apart from the Sandoval girls.” The big room was the largest room in the house, and it had a pool table and a stairway leading to an outside door into the backyard. Kyle’s house was bigger than ours, but not set up for groups of people quite this large.

“They wouldn’t do anything on purpose,” Warren said, as I climbed down the rope ladder behind Adam. “But we’re all on edge.”

“Silver-sick doesn’t help,” I said. “Tad can help with the silver.”

“And then we’ll send most of them to their own homes,” said Adam. “Even if our enemy has teeth left, it will take them a while to regroup. For the short term, we should all be safe enough.”

Warren grunted, and, with my feet safely down on the cement floor, I took a good look at him. Warren was my first friend in Adam’s pack—he’d been my friend before he’d joined the pack.

“You look better than I expected you to,” I said, and, to my surprise, he flushed.

“Food,” he said with a shy smile.

Adam snorted. “Kyle.”