The Viper's Nest (Kit Davenport #4)(5)

He knew what I was doing. The two of them had been at each other’s throats almost since the second my bonding with Austin had been completed. It wasn’t the fact that Caleb had walked in on us having sex covered in blood while my former abuser lay gutted on the floor; that had been purely a necessity in order for me to heal my many, many injuries.

No, Caleb was pissed as hell that Austin had bonded to me, and Caleb still hadn’t..

“Come on,” I sighed, unlinking my heels from behind him and smacking him on the bare ass. “Let’s clean up before Tyson really does decide to join us.”

Or before I have to break up yet another King twin argument.



“Wait, run that past me again?” I had been only half listening while scratching Tyson’s massive head where it lay in my lap. The damn tiger was no more than an overgrown house cat with human-like intelligence. “Split up? As in... go to different locations?”

“That is generally what split up means, Princess,” Austin snarked, and I resisted the urge to pull a face at him.

Asshole.

Ever since we’d bonded, the emotional link seemed to be working both ways, and it was seriously messing with my head. Half the time I wasn’t sure whose emotions I was feeling, and half the time, neither did he.

We’d silently agreed to a very healthy arrangement of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, meaning that when I felt the little flare of amusement that I was pretty sure wasn’t mine, I simply ignored it.

Austin was confident we would both learn how to control it, to be able to, essentially, block it out unless we chose otherwise, which I sincerely hoped was true. Until we could master that, though, I wouldn’t risk bonding with any of the others.

A shudder of fear rolled through me at just the thought of having seven conflicting emotions raging within me at the same time. No. Thank you.

Austin frowned at me, having clearly just felt that chill of fear, and I ignored him. We had an arrangement, dammit.

“I’m not saying that’s what we will do,” River replied, standing there looking every bit the leader, the Alpha. He folded his thick arms, causing his crisp white shirt to strain a little, and his golden eyes narrowed as he watched me. “It’s just one possibility we should keep on the table in case we need to create a false trail.”

“Makes sense,” I nodded, burying my hands in the soft fur of Tyson’s neck. “I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Did we have any luck finding somewhere safe for Lucy and Elena to stay?”

My rainbow-haired bestie snorted from the barstool where she perched, eating cereal from a bowl. “Fat fucking chance, sunshine,” she snickered. “I’m sticking to you like glue.”

Rolling my eyes, I let out a long-suffering sigh and looked back to River. Despite the guys having formally resigned from Omega Group, River was and always would be the leader of our little team.

“Okay, so where to this time?” I asked, dropping the whole Lucy-safehouse scenario for another day. I would win that argument sooner or later, even if I did need to appeal to her protective side. Elena—her girlfriend, as well as Cole and Vali’s sister—was nowhere near equipped to handle being on the run from Omega and whoever else was hunting me.

“Toronto,” Vali responded instead of River.

Dragomir Valeriu du Romane, or Vali for short, was a bit of a wild card in our crew. Cole’s estranged older brother, he had been, or still was, the head of a huge crime syndicate set up by their Romanian father.

His intense, granite-gray eyes locked on me, unblinking as he stood in an almost mirror pose to River. Muscular arms, encased in butter-soft black cashmere, folded while he leaned his back against the door frame.

“Cool,” I nodded, not needing to ask inane questions like why there? The location was irrelevant. Staying ahead of my adoptive father, Jonathan, was all that really seemed to matter at this point in time. Hopefully once we’d moved a few more times, we would have confused the trail enough we could go back on the offensive.

The ducking and hiding was grating against me. I needed to know why Jonathan had been using me, but possibly more important than that... I needed to find the creepy doctor who had taken a vial of my blood.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Wesley reassured me, sliding his strong hand over my shoulder and rubbing the tense muscles in my neck. “We’ll track him down sooner or later.”

One the one hand, I loved that Wes was in tune with my thoughts enough to know exactly what I was thinking, but on the other... “Yeah, it’s the ‘later’ that I’m worried about.”

“Toronto might be okay as a base,” River suggested, but didn’t look overly optimistic. “I’d feel more comfortable with somewhere more secluded.”

“I get that, I do,” I nodded, still running my fingers through Tyson’s fur, his throat vibrating against my lap as he purred. “But maybe we can just start looking when we get to Toronto? I don’t know what that dude wanted my blood for, but given he’d made an arrangement with Mr. Gray, it can’t have been anything good.”

A deep shudder rippled through me as I remembered the slimy little man attaching an IV to my vein while I lay immobile, zip-tied to a bed. Then how he had left me there, knowing full well the kind of hell Gray intended to rain down on me... Some people were seriously sick fucks.