Chapter 202: A Tale Of Two Bite Marks

Derek’s face had left the conversation somewhere around dish soap and had not returned. His body was present. His expression was somewhere else entirely, processing a list of offenses that was getting longer with every sentence.

"Alright. I’m over this." The High Luna set her glass down with a decisive click. "Derek, dear, put her down. Oxygen clip on. Nova is sleeping with Landon tonight. You got her in the bath. It’s only fair. You get her tomorrow."

"Over my dead body," Derek growled.

"Yes, yes, we know, dear. Dead body fifty-two times."

"You heard Gran. She sleeps with me. Hand her over, Derek."

"Over my dead—"

"Fifty-three," the High Luna murmured from her chair.

"She’s not going with you, Landon."

"She reached for me in her sleep, Derek."

"She reached for me when she was awake."

"She absorbed my aura."

"She rode my cock."

"DEREK," the High Luna gasped, visibly offended.

Tavian’s head rotated towards the High Luna with the bewilderment of a man who had heard this woman say semen and ding dong in the last hour but that was the line.

"He started it."

"I did not start it. You started it when you bit my MATE in my bathtub."

"I was in your bathtub because mine is a crime scene."

"Those things exist because I provided them, Derek. While you were horizontal."

"I was DYING, Landon."

"And she was LIVING. HERE. WITH ME. Someone had to take care of her and someone did and the someone was me and I will not apologize for it."

"I’m not handing her over."

"I’m not asking you to hand her over. I’m telling you to. She’s my mate. I am taking her. And she’s sleeping in my bed."

"YOUR bed? The one you PUT her in while I was in a COMA."

"You know," the High Luna mused, swirling what was left in her glass, "I feel I should point out, since clearly no one else will, that one of you is the Alpha of this pack." She looked at Landon over the rim. "You have perhaps two dozen guards standing in that hallway pretending to admire the stonework. You could order them to peel your brother off that woman and hand her to you, and every one of them would have to obey. You could have ended this in the time it has taken me to finish half a drink."

"Give the order, Landon." Derek smiled and the smile was the worst thing Tavian had seen all night and Tavian had seen a lot. "I will show every person in this keep what happens when someone tries to take her from me. I don’t want a body count tonight. But I will build one if you force my hand."

The High Luna looked at both grandsons over the rim of her glass with the fond, detached assessment of a woman deciding which of her grand children disappointed her more and finding it a very close race.

"That is a little over the top. You’d think the girl was made of gold."

"She is, Gran." Derek looked down at the woman in his arms, still glowing.

The High Luna took an unhurried sip. "Yes, yes, we know. Nancy is worth half a billion. Don’t forget that."

"NOVA," both Landon and Derek snapped.

"Nova, Nancy, 4300, whatever she’s going by this week. The girl has more names than husbands. The one thing you two can cooperate on is persecuting your grandmother."

Both brothers went quiet at the same time and the quiet was not the grandmother’s doing. The quiet was the sound of two men arriving back at the thing they had been circling.

"Put her down, Derek. I’m asking you nicely, and this is the last time."

"My answer hasn’t changed. Go on, call your body guards in here. You’ve been dying to."

"You think I want to send guards after my own brother?" Landon’s voice was low and the low was a warning. "I don’t. I could have twenty minutes ago. I haven’t. But you are holding a woman whose body is running my venom and I can feel her distress from across this room and my wolf does not care that you’re my brother. My wolf cares that my mate is in someone else’s arms. Give her to me or find out what happens when I stop fighting it."

"That is also dramatic," the High Luna commented. "The fact that you haven’t called your guards, dear, tells me you can’t stomach it." She tipped the glass toward him. "Which is the first sign of decent leadership either of you has shown all evening."

Derek’s eyes narrowed, reassessing his brother, because that was not the version of this he’d been fighting.

Landon’s jaw flexed. He said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t prove her right.

The High Luna looked between the two of them, deeply satisfied.

"Let me wrap her shoulder." Landon’s face twisted with something that wasn’t anger for once. "Derek. She needs it rewrapped and iced. She’s been doing it all week. I know how she likes it."

"It was fine." Derek’s grip stayed exactly where it was. "I know what my mate needs. She needs to lie down with me and rest."

Astra swept into the chamber, set her bag down on the one dry surface left in the room, and straightened. The look she leveled at the two of them had, in its day, reduced junior healers to tears in under thirty seconds.

"Let me make certain I have the sequence correct," Astra began, her voice flat. "The Alpha tackled this woman to the stone floor of a sacred chamber, in front of the entire pack, and bit her." She turned her head a precise degree toward Derek. "And then, approximately one day later, the Crown Prince, freshly out of a week-long coma, with fractured ribs and burns that have not finished healing, climbed into a bathtub and did the exact same thing."