Ronan arrived within twenty minutes, and the look on his face when he saw the blood on Jax's temple and the cracked front window told me everything about how badly this had already spiraled beyond whatever careful control he'd been trying to maintain.
"Report," he said to Jax, voice gone flat and commanding in a way I hadn't heard from him before — every trace of the man who'd sat across my workbench that morning replaced by something colder, sharper, unmistakably an Alpha giving orders.
Jax gave it fast and clean — three attackers, no colors, one with a mark further progressed than anyone should have survived carrying. Ronan's expression didn't change while he listened, but something in his stillness told me the information had landed harder than his face let on.
"You knew about this,"
