Alex rolled back his shoulders. “I’ve got things on my mind.”
“Then you should go somewhere else to brood. You scare off customers.”
He felt his brows snap together. “I don’t brood.”
She rolled her eyes. “All dominant male shifters brood—they just like to pretend they don’t. You, my son, are champion brooder.”
“I’m just uneasy.” He ate his last pretzel and then scrunched up the small bag. “The hyenas want Bree badly, and they’re not going to drop it.”
Valentina sighed. “This I know. I also know you will protect her. Which is good, because Vinnie is useless.”
Alex let out a heavy breath. His uncle could demonstrate the ability to walk on water and Valentina would still call him useless purely because he didn’t work at her pace. “It isn’t his fault that we can’t find the hyenas—you know that.”
Catching movement in his peripheral vision, Alex looked to see the human push away from the counter. Fucking finally. Once the guy left, everyone readied the store to be locked up and grabbed their personal things from their lockers.
Back on the showroom floor, Alex lifted a brow at Bree. “Ready?”
“Yep.” Her brow furrowed. “You didn’t save me any pretzels?”
“You can have some when you get home. You had more than one bag when I looked earlier.”
Her frown deepened. “I have pretzels? Where?”
“The kitchen cupboard.”
“Which cupboard?”
With a hand splayed on her lower back, Alex ushered her out of the store. “The white one.”
“They’re all white.”
He stayed at her side as they walked, protecting her from being jostled by pedestrians. One of Mila’s pack mates stepped out of the coffee shop up ahead of them, muttering at a glowering male who followed her out of the shop. His jeans were badly stained with what looked like coffee.
Spotting Bree and Alex, the she-wolf grinned and said, “Hi, guys, how are you?”
“I’m good,” Bree replied. “You?”
Makenna waved a hand. “Oh, we’re fine.”
Alex exchanged a nod with the wolf enforcer, Ryan. The guy took the “strong and silent” type to a whole new level and mostly communicated in grunts that his mate was convinced she could translate into actual words.
“What happened?” asked Bree, looking at the coffee stains on Ryan’s jeans.
“It was his own stupid fault,” said Makenna. “I warned him this morning that it was bad luck to put new shoes on a table, but he went and did it anyway. Then he’s all surprised when he finds himself covered in scorching hot coffee.”
Grinding his teeth, Ryan turned to his mate. “If that woman in there hadn’t bumped into me, it wouldn’t have happened. This was a result of clumsiness, not bad luck.”
Makenna put her hands on her hips. “And what about the puddle you stepped ankle-deep into earlier? Or how about the fact that you broke your brand-new pair of shades? And then there’s the little matter that you lost forty dollars somewhere. Dude, hello, are you not seeing the correlations here?”
Ryan’s eyes flared. “It’s all coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” Makenna said in a mysterious voice.
Honestly, Ryan looked like he might explode. But then he just grunted.
Makenna gasped. “Oh, is that so?” She gave a haughty sniff and then turned back to Bree and Alex. “We sadly can’t stick around and chat. White Fang needs to get out of those jeans. I’ll hopefully talk to you both again soon. Bye!”
“Take care,” said Bree, giving the couple a brief wave.
Alex put a hand on her back and once more herded her toward the cul-de-sac.
“You could have at least said ‘see you later’ or something,” Bree told him.
Alex only shrugged.
“It wouldn’t kill you to say hi and bye to people, you know.”
“I know.”
She just sighed.
Finally, they reached the cul-de-sac. When they stepped inside her house, he closed the door behind them. She headed for the kitchen, announcing that she needed coffee. And then … he really didn’t know what happened. But it was as if an invisible force slammed into her and knocked the breath from her lungs, because her body came to an abrupt halt and her knees buckled.
He quickly grabbed her by the waist, worried she’d fall. And then he saw it. A pile of gold necklaces littered the kitchen countertop, gleaming under the sunlight that streamed through the window.
Tension zipped through his body and tightened every muscle. The jewelry hadn’t been there when they left the house that morning. Which meant someone had broken into her fucking home. Someone had managed to sneak past the enforcers guarding her house and—for some unknown goddamn reason—dump necklaces on her counter.
Even as his protective instincts beat at him to get her outside so he could search the house, he dragged every surrounding scent into his system. Coffee. Foods. Cleaner. Herbs and flowers filtering in through the open window—a window she hadn’t left open.
He smelled something else, too. Smelled someone. A person who carried the scent of bitter apples, thick smoked wood, and black pepper.
“Calvin.” Alex bit out a curse, his blood boiling. The male cat’s scent was faint, but there. “Does the dumb prick think that breaking into your house and leaving you a mound of jewelry is some kind of courting ritual?”
He turned Bree to face him, intending to tell her to go to the porch while he took a look around, but then he froze. She was white as a damn sheet, and her eyes were glazed over. They were as lifeless as those of a doll.
His scalp prickling, he palmed her face and stroked his thumb over her cheekbone. “Don’t worry, baby girl, he’ll be dealt with. I need you to go sit on the porch while I search the rest of the house and make sure he’s gone.”
She blinked, and then the vacant look left her eyes. Now they glittered with something dark and unforgiving. Straightening her spine, she stepped back. “You check upstairs. I’ll check down here.”
He stiffened. “Bree—”
She ignored him and immediately started to search. Not wanting to leave her on her own, he worked with her as they checked first downstairs then upstairs. Calvin was nowhere to be found.
Alex fished his phone out of his pocket and called Luke. “Send your enforcers to pick up Calvin. He broke into Bree’s house and left her what I guess you could call gifts; he knows that shit isn’t done. Call me when you’ve got him, because I intend to have a little talk with him.”
He rang off before the Head Enforcer had the chance to respond. Alex followed Bree as she returned to the kitchen.
Standing in front of the counter, she stared down at the jewelry, her gaze clouded. “I don’t know why he’s playing these games,” she said, talking to herself … as if she’d tuned him out.
Alex frowned. “Games? He’s done this before?”
“I thought it was Bernadette. She seemed the likeliest person to do it.”
His hackles rising all over again, he sidled up to her. “Do what?”
“He obviously couldn’t find the necklace after I threw it away, so he just … bought these.”