Bought By My Alpha Mates

2: LIKE PREDATORS

JEN’S POV

I didn't wait for an explanation. I turned on my heel and walked straight off that stage, robe clutched around me like it could actually shield me from three sets of eyes that hadn't stopped tracking my every move.

"Jenna." Cross's voice cut through the noise behind me, low, commanding, the kind of voice used to being obeyed.

I kept walking.

The backstage hallway was dim and narrow, lined with peeling paint and the smell of cheap perfume and cigarette smoke. I made it exactly four steps past the curtain before a hand closed around my wrist — not rough, but immovable, like a manacle dressed up as a touch.

"Let go." I didn't turn around.

"You're shaking." Cross's voice had dropped, quieter now that we weren't performing for a crowd. Just the two of us and the muffled thump of bass through the wall. "Jenna, look at me."

"I don't want to look at you. I don't want to look at any of you." I finally spun around, and God help me, up close he was worse. Worse because I remembered exactly how his eyes used to look at twelve years old, full of mischief instead of this bottomless, hungry weight. Worse because some traitorous part of me leaned toward him instead of away. "You show up seventeen years too late and expect what, exactly? That I fall into your arms because some ancient bond says I'm supposed to?"

"I expect you to be safe." His jaw tightened. "Do you have any idea what kind of men come through a place like this? What they'd do if they knew what you are?"

"I'm a dancer." My chin came up. "That's all I am in this building. Nobody here knows what I am, and I intend to keep it that way."

"They will the second your control slips." Rhys's voice, easy as ever, floated down the hallway as he and Kian caught up, boxing me in without quite touching me — a wall of three bodies, three sets of eyes, three heartbeats I could suddenly feel like they were echoing inside my own chest. "Adrenaline. Fear. Arousal." His gaze flicked briefly, deliberately, over the lace still hugging my hips, and something low in my stomach twisted traitorously tight. "Any one of those cracks the human mask, little wolf. You reek of all three right now."

"Don't call me that." But my voice had lost some of its bite, because he wasn't wrong, and we all knew it.

Kian said nothing. He just watched me from a few feet back, dark eyes unreadable, arms crossed over a chest that looked like it had been carved out of granite the same way Cross's jaw had. He unsettled me more than either of the other two, precisely because he gave me nothing to push against.

"I need my things," I said finally, forcing steel back into my spine. "I have a shift to finish."

"No." All three of them said it at once, and the flat, absolute certainty of it made something in me flare hot with anger.

"Excuse me?"

"You're not finishing this shift." Cross's tone left no room for negotiation, which only made me want to fight harder. "You're not dancing in this club again. Not tonight. Not ever."

"You don't get to decide that."

"We just did."

I laughed, short and humorless. "You've known me for five minutes in seventeen years and you think you get to control my life? I have bills, Cross. I have debt that isn't even mine, breathing down my neck every single day. I make more in one shift here than I would in a week anywhere else, and unless one of you is about to hand me forty-two thousand dollars—"

"Done," Kian said.

The hallway went silent.

I stared at him. "What?"

"Whatever you owe. Done. Paid tonight." His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, like he was discussing the weather instead of erasing the debt that had been strangling me for three years. "You won't dance for strangers' money again."

Heat rushed up my neck, and not the good kind. "I don't want your charity."

"It's not charity." Cross stepped closer, and this time when his hand found my chin, tilting my face up to his, I let him, hating myself a little for it. "It's what's owed to our mate. What should have been yours from the beginning, before your mother ran and hid you from everything you were born to."

"My mother ran because your world got her killed," I snapped, and watched something flicker across his face — not denial. Guilt.

The silence that followed was heavier than the bass thumping through the wall.

"That's not—" Rhys started, then stopped, exchanging a look with Cross that told me there was history there, ugly history, things they weren't ready to say and I wasn't ready to hear.

"I need to get my things," I said again, quieter this time, and pulled free of Cross's hand. None of them stopped me.

I made it to the dressing room, locked the door, and pressed my back against it, breathing hard, heart still thundering with that impossible pull toward three men I hadn't seen since I was a child in pigtails chasing fireflies through a backyard that didn't exist for me anymore.

Through the door, I heard Rhys's voice, pitched low, clearly not meant for me. "She's not going to make this easy."

"Good," Cross said. "Easy was never going to prove anything."

I closed my eyes, forehead against the cold metal door, and made myself a promise. Whatever they wanted from me — whatever fate thought it owed them — I was not going to be handed over like a debt finally collected.

If they wanted me, they were going to have to earn it.