The problem was, she thought, she didn’t want to hurt him. She was too worried to consider hurting him. She just wanted him home.
Once again, Del-Rey was forced to follow his mate’s scent through the caverns to find her. With comm down, there was no calling Brim to locate his once again missing mate, and that was pissing him off.
He checked her room first, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t with her bodyguards and she wasn’t in the community or rec rooms. She wasn’t in the kitchen, or if she had been there, she was gone now. He thought perhaps he caught the scent of her there.
Finally he stalked into Command and faced Brim.
“Where is she?” he asked the other man as he slouched in the chair that sat at the back and to the side of the room.
Brim glanced up from the reports he was filing on his e-pad, with a quizzical look on his face. “You’ve lost her again?”
The unemotional expression, the chill in his voice warned Del-Rey that he and his second-in-command just might be coming to yet another disagreement where Del-Rey’s mate was concerned.
It was becoming a common, ongoing fight between them.
“Don’t f**k with me, Brim,” he growled as the other man laid the e-pad to the side of the command chair and stared up at him.
Glaring down at Brim rarely fazed him. There were few things that did. The bastard. Del-Rey often wondered if his friend challenged him for leadership of the packs, which one of them would come out the winner. Or if either of them would. They knew each other too well, faults and all.
“It’s a little early to be chewing her ass,” Brim finally answered. “She paced the command room most of the night worrying after your worthless hide. Let her sleep.” His response was voiced in a low tone that carried no farther than the two of them, but the deliberate insult had the animal inside Del-Rey rising along with his temper.
“She’s not in her rooms sleeping, Lieutenant,” Del-Rey told him, his tone warning. “Now, I’ll ask you one more time, where is she?”
Anger flashed in Brim’s gaze. “She’s safe. Let her sleep awhile longer.” He had reached his hand out for the e-pad again, when Del-Rey gave a low, savage growl.
Brim’s jaw clenched. “She drank coffee not too long ago. You know what that does to her; Sharone has already reported it. A confrontation at this moment isn’t what she needs. She needs to sleep.”
Del-Rey stared back at him, unblinking.
“You let her drink coffee?” Del-Rey bit out. “Have you lost your f**king mind?”
Brim’s jaw clenched as his light blue eyes flashed in anger.
“Well, I wasn’t willing to spit in it like Ashley does,” he retorted mockingly. “Somehow that just seemed rather rude to me.”
As though Brim cared about rude.
“She’s not supposed to have coffee,” Del-Rey snarled. “She’s like the damned Energizer bunny from hell and you know it. She’s irritable and confrontational and threatens to kill anyone that gets in her way. Usually me the minute she sees me again.”
Mating heat and caffeine did not mix well at all. Unless the male mate in question was into a little BDSM and a whole lot into a defiant, challenging mate.
“She can’t eat chocolate, she can’t drink coffee, she can’t see her family, she can’t take a f**king walk at night.” Brim moved from his chair and glared back at Del-Rey then, the unemotional facade falling away. “You take everything from a woman that once had freedom and control and expect to play these asinine games with her that you’ve developed to get her back into your bed and then you wonder why she doesn’t inform you of what she’s doing whenever she’s doing it. Hell, Del-Rey, it’s a wonder she hasn’t shot you.”
“And a wonder you haven’t loaned her the gun,” Del-Rey sneered. “I’m getting sick of battling you over her. You’re not her brother.”
Brim’s lips quirked. “I think she rather needs a brother. Perhaps I’ll petition the tribunal for adoption. Someone needs to see beyond their own wants where this woman is concerned.”
If it wasn’t for the fact that Del-Rey was damned certain Brim was seriously brotherly rather than in lust with Anya, then he would have taken him out years ago. They had been fighting over Anya since she first showed up in that damned bar, and the confrontations had only grown more frequent over the past eight months.
“I’m losing patience with this, Brim,” he warned him.
“Try being honest with her then.” Brim crossed his arms over his chest and glared back at Del-Rey. He was possibly the only man in the world who could get away with it. “You should have been honest with her from the beginning.”
“Oh yeah, I should have told a sixteen-year-old virgin I intended to f**k the hell out of her after she grew up, and that I was going to shoot her father and cousins for the hell of it because they allowed her to endanger herself. Now, wouldn’t that have just inspired confidence in me? We’d have really managed to get her and those Breeds she protected out of that underground facility, wouldn’t we, Brim?”
This argument had played out for nearly seven years now. For some reason Brim had all but adopted Anya since the moment he saw her. There was no lust, there was concern. And Brim rarely concerned himself with others besides Del-Rey. They had been fighting together since they were kids. They had been created in the same labs and plotted to escape them since they first understood they were prisoners and expected to kill.
Five, Del-Rey realized. Brim had been five and Del-Rey had been ten when they first began planning. Brim had been fifteen and he twenty, and both were hardened killers, before they’d managed it. That had been nearly sixteen years ago, and until Anya, Brim had never questioned Del-Rey’s plots and schemes.
“You should have warned her before you shot her father about what you had to do.” Brim repeated his years-old refrain. “All you had to do was tell her that if you didn’t do it, it would endanger their lives. She would have understood that. You didn’t have to shell-shock her.”
“Well f**k, let’s just get our little time machine and go back and fix it,” Del-Rey sneered.
Brim grimaced.
“Where the f**k is my mate, Lieutenant?”
Brim sighed. “She’s asleep in the lounge. She just went to sleep less than an hour ago, Del-Rey. She’s worried herself sick about you while you were out there. She already looks like she hasn’t slept in months. Leave her the hell alone for a while.”