“Now you’re just babbling.”
“No, I’m making a point that you don’t want to admit holds merit. But that doesn’t surprise me. People prefer to believe that love is a magical thing that makes everything worthwhile. It’s no more than a chemical reaction in the brain, but you live with your illusions if it’ll make you feel better. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking Alex is the one for you. He’s not. Never will be. You need to get rid of him.” Again, his voice deepened, thickened with menace. “You need to move back to your home, where you belong.”
“What I need to do is hang up,” she countered.
“I’ll kill him if I have to.” The silken threat slid up her spine. “You’ll leave me no other choice but to end his life if you don’t walk away from him.”
Her cat growled and clawed at air. Bree fisted her free hand, wishing she could smash it into the bastard’s jaw. “You stay away from Alex.”
“No, you stay away from him. He’s not what you need. If you want my cousin to live, get rid of him. And do it fast.” The line went dead.
Bree stared down at the phone, her hand trembling. She’d accepted that there was a very real possibility he was behind the recent goings-on. Still, there was something surreal about that moment; about facing that it was true.
Taking pity on her shaky legs, Bree sat right there on the rug. Her cat wasn’t so shaky. No, she was still pacing, absolutely livid. Livid that his heart still beat, livid that he’d threatened to harm her mate, livid that he thought to control Bree’s choices.
Even though that same anger bubbled in Bree’s veins, she couldn’t find it in her to vent. It was like coming to terms with this fucked up situation had just robbed her of the strength to do anything but sit there like a wet lemon.
Venting wasn’t her thing, anyway. She always made a point of staying in control of her emotions. But part of her longed to rant and rave and scream out her anger just this once.
Dumping the cell on the rug, Bree sank both hands into her hair and closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that. It could have been minutes. Hours. But she didn’t lift her head until she heard a key turn in the lock.
The front door swung open. Alex stalked inside and shut the door behind him. Every muscle in his body seemed to tense when he caught sight of her on the rug. And then he made a beeline for her.
“Bree, what’s wrong?” he asked, crouching in front of her. “You’re white as a fucking sheet.”
“Paxton called me. I wasn’t sure if it was him at first, but he knew things that Calvin wouldn’t have known. He even knew that Desmond orchestrated the kidnapping of Bray’s daughter. Unless one of the people at the mediation meeting blabbed about it, no one else within our pride knows—certainly not anyone who could have told Calvin.”
“Shh.” Alex smoothed his hands up and down her upper arms. “Slow down, baby girl. Tell me everything. Start from the beginning.”
Bree took a deep breath and then gave him a quick rundown of the conversation.
“You should have called me.” He sat down and placed one bent leg on either side of her. “I would have come to you straight away.”
“I guess I needed a chance to process it all. What do we do?”
“Well, we’re sure as shit not giving him what he wants. I told you when we first imprinted, I’m not going anywhere.”
“He said he’ll kill you if I don’t leave you.”
“I figured he would. The guy hasn’t contacted you once in all the time he’s been away. For him to suddenly pick up the phone and call, something had to be bugging him in a major way. Your imprinting on another male … yeah, that would do it.”
“I didn’t think you’d so easily believe it was him.”
Alex curled his hands around her calves. “I had a call from Sergei. My uncles found evidence that someone has been using the tree directly behind your house as a hangout.”
She stilled. “Someone was spying on me?”
“Looks like it.” He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen a few times with his thumb. “The watcher carved this symbol into a thick branch. It’s barely noticeable, really. But Sergei spotted it and sent me a picture of it.”
Taking his cell from him, she looked down at the photo on the screen. Her stomach sank. “Totenkopf,” she whispered. It was an old international symbol for death or danger or even the defiance of death. “Paxton had this tattooed on the back of his right shoulder.”
“Yeah, I remember it. If the mark on the tree was bigger and more visible, I’d have said that Calvin could easily have done it in the hope that someone would see it; that he did it to add credence to his ‘Paxton’s alive’ argument. But it’s small and inconspicuous.”
She handed the cell back to Alex. “Paxton was branding the tree as his, in a sense, wasn’t he?”
Alex nodded. “There’s more, Bree. On a hunch, I asked my uncles to check if the symbol had been carved anywhere else.”
“Don’t tell me he marked all the damn trees.”
“Not trees. Your planters. Your front porch. Your back deck. The fence of your backyard. The brands are small and hidden well, but very much there.”
The breath gusted out of her lungs. “Did they check the interior of the house?”
“Yes. He didn’t mark the inside. As if he acknowledged that that was your space, not a space that belonged to both of you.”
“Because he doesn’t want to be a real part of my life.”
“Exactly. But he marked the outdoors. Almost like he was warning others to stay away.” It made Alex’s blood boil. His beast was infuriated that another male would leave his mark on her territory. Infuriated that Paxton believed he had the right to mark it.
She rubbed her upper arms. “It makes me feel sick to think he might have ogled me while I was undressing. He probably even saw us having sex—which he’ll have hated, if the way he just talked about you was anything to go by. Yet, he never did anything. Never went after you or found a way to warn you off. I don’t get it.”
“He never went after me because it’s not so much me he’s pissed at. It’s you. He only really sees you, Bree. Everyone else … we’re interchangeable. Haven’t you ever seen a swarm of ants? They all look the same, none stand out, none make us feel threatened. They can be a general annoyance at times. The rest of the time? We’re mostly indifferent to them. Right?”
She slowly nodded. “Right.”
“That’s how Paxton views everyone except you. He does not like that I’m in your life, but he won’t feel jealous that I am. He won’t see me as a threat to whatever significance he feels he has to you—I’m just a mere annoyance who is not whatsoever important. He truly believes that. In his mind, you just don’t see the situation clearly.”
“But he’s threatening to kill you.”
“Because you and I have imprinted on each other. He can’t dismiss me as irrelevant to you anymore. But he didn’t call me, did he? He called you. He issued the threat to you. I’m not important to him; he just wants me gone. He will try to kill me if he believes it’s the only way to get me out of the picture. But he wouldn’t derive any pleasure from the act, because it would be no different to him than squashing a bug. Like I said, you’re all he sees.”