Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

license. It looked as clean and fresh as it had the day she’d agreed to take it. To the shock of her doctors, Mrs. Cullinan’s cancer mysteriously disappeared and she’d died in her bed twenty years later at the age of ninety-four. Leslie still missed her.
    Leslie learned two valuable things about the fae that day. They were powerful and charming—and they ate children andpuppies.

CHAPTER

1
    ASPEN CREEK, MONTANA

    “Go home,” Bran Cornick growled at Anna.
    No one who saw him like this would ever forget what lurked behind the Marrok’s mild-mannered facade. But only people who were stupid—or desperate—would risk raising his ire to reveal the monster behind the nice-guy mask. Anna was desperate.
    “When you tell me you will quit calling on my husband to kill people,” Anna told him doggedly. She didn’t yell, she didn’t shout, but she wasn’t going to give up easily.
    Clearly, she’d finally pushed him out to the very narrow edges of his last shred of civilized behavior. He closed his eyes, turned his head away from her, and said, in a very gentle voice, “Anna. Go home and cool off.” Go home until
he
cooled off was what he meant. Bran was Anna’s fatherin-law, her Alpha, and also the Marrok who ruled all the werewolf packs in his part of the world by the sheer force of his will.
    “Bran—”
    His power unleashed with his temper, and the five other wolves, notcounting Anna, who were in the living room of his house dropped to the floor, even his mate, Leah. They bowed their heads and tipped them slightly to the side to expose their throats.
    Though he made no outward move, the speed of their surrender testified to Bran’s anger and his dominance—and only Anna, somewhat to her surprise at her own temerity, stayed on her feet. When Anna had first come to Aspen Creek, beaten and abused as she’d been, if anyone had yelled at her, she’d have hidden in a corner and not come out for a week.
    She met Bran’s eyes and bared her teeth at him as the wave of his power brushed past her like a spring breeze. Not that she wasn’t properly terrified, but not of Bran. Bran, she knew, would not really hurt her if he could help it, no matter what her hindbrain tried to tell her.
    She was terrified for her mate. “You are wrong,” Anna told him. “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And you are determined not to see it until he is broken beyond repair.”
    “Grow up, little girl,” Bran snarled, and now his eyes—bright gold leaching out his usual hazel—were focused on her instead of the fireplace in the wall. “Life isn’t a bed of roses and people have to do hard jobs. You knew what Charles was when you married him and when you took him as your mate.”
    He was trying to make this about her, because then he wouldn’t have to listen to her. He couldn’t be that blind, just too stubborn. So his attempt to alter the argument—when there should be no argument at all—enraged her.
    “Someone in here is acting like a child, and it isn’t me,” she growled right back at him.
    Bran’s return snarl was wordless.
    “Anna,
shut up
,” Tag whispered urgently, his big body limp on the floor where his orange dreadlocks clashed with the maroon of the Persian rug. He was her friend and she trusted the berserker’s judgmenton most things. Under other circumstances she’d have listened to him, but right now she had Bran so angry he couldn’t speak—so she could get a few words in past his stubborn, inflexible mind.
    “I know my mate,” she told her father by marriage. “Better than you do. He will
break
before he disappoints you or fails to do his duty.
You
have to stop this because he can’t.”
    When Bran spoke, his voice was a toneless whisper. “My son will not bend or break. He has done his job for a century before you were even born, and he’ll be doing it a century from now.”
    “His job was to dispense
justice
,” she said. “Even if it meant killing people, he could do it. Now he is merely an assassin. His prey cling to his feet repentant and redeemable. They weep and beg for mercy that he can’t give. It is destroying him,” she said starkly. “And I’m the only one who sees it.”
    Bran flinched. And for the first time, she realized that Charles wasn’t the only one suffering under the new, harsher rules the werewolves had to live by.
    “Desperate times,” he said grimly, and Anna hoped that she’d broken through. But he shook off the momentary softness and said, “Charles is