clocking me and talking on his cell phone at the same time. No doubt he was reporting my position to Ambrose. My partner, Wade Massey, would have asked how I knew he was one of my brother’s flunkies. And I would have told him it was because they all looked the same, like little clones from a GQ photoshoot, sycophants with their two-thousand-dollar suits, polished wingtips, and three-hundred-dollar haircuts.
“Come here!” Ambrose ordered, actually yelling, which he never did. I would have told him it was gauche and stood there in mock horror, trying my best to look aghast, but I knew he was thinking it to himself as he looked around, appalled at his own behavior. I’d hear about it later, what I’d “forced him to do,” but I didn’t care, and had no idea if it was the volume or his spontaneous action he was so chagrined over. Either way, I continued with the pretense that I hadn’t heard him over the din of conversation, and said excuse me and pardon me a hundred times as I moved through the crowd to evade him.
“Avery!” my sister, Andrea, bellowed, which was in just as bad form as Ambrose, but I spun around and headed the other way through the press of people, moving under one of the arches in the cavernous living room of the house I’d grown up in.
“Avery,” Sandor Graves, our butler, a man who had served our family for as long as I could remember, barked, hoping to get me to stop so he could deliver me to my father.
I turned and waved at him like I was on the jumbotron at the United Center, but didn’t alter my course in the least because, really, did he think that was going to work? Had it ever? He was not my father, and if I wouldn’t stop for the patriarch of our family, did Sandor honestly think I would stop for him?
Being a wolf, I could feel everyone closing in on me, and worse, because I was an omega, there was always that extra layer of hardwired, genetically engrained trepidation that came from being at the bottom of the food chain. My brother and sister were both alphas. My mother had impressively birthed two, which was a feat that not many betas, as she was, could boast of. When she had me, she’d received hundreds of condolences. The odds were—in scrutinizing the members of her family tree, as well as my father’s—that I’d be a beta, or at least a gamma like many of my cousins. It was just bad luck I turned out to be that which another family could claim for their own.
“Avery,” Sandor growled, closer than I’d thought, and I had that moment of fear, of dread, and I hated that even after all the years of police training, and the fact I had a Glock 22 strapped to my calf under my pants, still, I was responding like an animal and not a man. It was one of the many reasons my wolf and I did not get along.
I felt our butler’s hand on my shoulder, slowing my momentum toward the salvation I could now see, and because I didn’t want to deal with him, or any of them, I cheated.
“Mom,” I yelled, shrugging off his hand, and I made sure my voice carried like it did when I used it on suspects to freeze or get on the ground.
People turned and stared, which would have mortified any other member of my family but not my warm, down-to-earth mother.
Elira Rhine Huntington snorted and quickly abandoned the circle of fawning admirers she was constantly at the center of at any party she, or anyone else, had ever thrown. “My baby,” she gushed, rushing over, her movement made possible because people cleared a hole for the golden-haired goddess that was my mother. “How are you, love?”
I lifted my arms, walking toward her, and she filled them, wrapping around me tight. “I’m good, Mom. How’re you?”
She pulled back to look up at my face, her own lighting up with a smile that made her charcoal eyes, several shades darker than my own, crinkle in half. “I’m wonderful, and so far I’ve got the winning bid in the silent auction for Chicago Blackhawks tickets,” she informed me gleefully, rubbing her hands together.
“That’s creepy as hell,” I assured her, pointing at her hands, which she instantly dropped to her sides.