“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.”
That was it.
Del-Rey’s hand snapped out, wrapped around Brim’s throat and applied just enough pressure to assure the other man he was dead serious now.
Brim’s gaze flickered.
“We haven’t fought since you were fifteen years old and you decided you could take me and the alpha position in my pack. Do you want to try me again?”
Brim stared back at him for long, tense moments before he sighed. “I swore loyalty to you. I won’t go back on it.”