Chapter 302: The Wrong Direction

Jessica pulled her phone out of her pocket and pressed it to her ear as she walked away from the rail of corporate shirts.

Everything in this place was ridiculously, outrageously expensive. Odelia had promised her they would find something affordable here, and Jessica was beginning to suspect that Odelia’s definition of affordable had been formed in a completely different tax bracket.

"Sid, where are you?" Odelia’s voice came through. "The bus is going soon."

"On my way out now," Jessica said, picking up her pace.

The two of them had come into Aethelwulf to sort out her work clothes. By some absolute miracle, Odelia had turned up another opening in this very shopping centre barely two days after Jessica left Orange Grove, which felt less like luck and more like the universe finally paying up on a very old debt.

She had gone without telling Sebastian. That had been deliberate. If he had known she was leaving, he would have found a hundred reasonable-sounding ways to stop her, and Jessica had genuinely worried she might let him.

By the time he found out, she was already gone and there was nothing he could do about it. He had rung Odelia and raged down the phone at her for a solid twenty minutes, apparently. Jessica felt guilty about that, but not guilty enough to regret it.

The interesting part was what came next. Sebastian had promptly moved to Aethelwulf himself, on the grounds that somebody needed to be here protecting her.

Jessica still had not worked out what exactly she was being protected from. Whenever she asked, his answers went vague and slippery, like a man describing the weather in a country he had never visited. But she didn’t think much about it, since his job had been in Aethelwulf all along.

While Odelia and her cousin Martha browsed through fancy nonsense that none of them could actually afford, Jessica had gone looking for shirts cheap enough to justify. She started work next week, and unlike The Copper Lantern, where you turned up in whatever you owned and hoped it survived the shift, the company restaurant expected proper uniform.

"Sid, hurry up!" Odelia again, louder this time.

Jessica broke into a jog.

Somewhere behind her, a man shouted a name. She glanced back over her shoulder without breaking stride, but the concourse was thick with shoppers and she couldn’t pick anyone out of it. She kept moving towards the exit.

The shout came again, louder. "Jessica! JESSICA!"

She turned properly this time.

A man in an immaculate white suit was tearing across the shopping centre towards her, shoving people out of his way as he came, shouting that name at the top of his lungs.

Her brows pulled together. Behind him, a group of other men had broken into a run as well. Five of them, maybe six, all built like they lifted furniture for a living, all moving in precisely one direction.

Towards her.

Jessica’s heart kicked hard against her ribs and she started running properly. It might be nothing. It might be entirely in her head. Some part of her brain, the calm and sensible part that clearly had no experience of being chased, pointed out that these men were almost certainly after somebody else, and if she simply stopped walking they would sail straight past her.

She was not interested in testing that theory. Not today. Not with a bus to catch and two women waiting on her. She fixed her eyes on the exit, hit the escalator, and did not wait for it to do the work. She went down it on foot, weaving around a woman with shopping bags and taking the last few steps two at a time.

Kai was certain.

She had turned. He had seen her face, properly, clearly, for a whole second. There was no version of this where he was mistaken. So why was she running from him?

Phantom was already awake behind his ribs, pacing and snarling, straining towards her. That was the maddening part. He had not caught her scent the way he would have usually caught it. And it was strange. But deep down, in his heart of hearts, he knew it was her.

He was very nearly out of his mind when somebody stepped straight into his path.

"Kai, darling. You’re late."

Alicia planted herself in front of him and he had to pull up short to avoid going straight through her.

His eyes never touched her face. They stayed locked on the ginger head disappearing down the escalator. He shifted his weight to go around her, and Alicia’s hand closed hard around his arm.

"Wait." She held on. "What are you doing?"

Then she looked down at what she was holding, and her expression changed.

Kai followed her gaze. Dark fur had already crept across the backs of his hands. His claws were fully out. Alicia moved fast, grabbing both his hands and folding them in against his body, angling herself to block them from view.

Most humans knew perfectly well that shifters existed. Aethelwulf was crawling with them, and had been for generations. What humans did not appreciate was a man turning into an animal in the middle of a shopping centre on a good afternoon. The treaty between the human government and the shifter Alphas was blunt on the subject. No shifting in human territory, especially nothing in open public spaces.

Kai was an Alpha now. He knew the rules better than anyone in this building. The fur receded slowly, grudgingly, but his eyes never moved from the escalator. The crowd at the bottom had already swallowed her whole.

His men caught up and stopped behind him, saying nothing.

Alicia turned and followed his stare across the concourse. She saw shoppers. She saw a handbag display. She saw absolutely nothing worth a grown Alpha half-shifting in public over.

She looked back at him. His jaw was tight, his chest was rising and falling too fast, and there was a sheen of sweat at his hairline. He was not looking at her. He was waiting. Waiting for her to let go of him so he could carry on chasing whatever it was he thought he had seen.

Her eyes narrowed, and drifted past him to his beta and the gammas standing in a loose, awkward line. Every one of them found somewhere else to look. They seemed embarrassed, though not embarrassed enough to explain what was going on.

"What is going on?" Alicia asked. "Why are you running through a shopping centre like you’re chasing a criminal?"

Kai’s gaze finally came down to her face. "I saw her."

Alicia’s brows lifted, but she did not ask the question. She did not need to. She had known exactly who her meant from the moment he opened his mouth.

"I saw Jessica. It was her, Alicia. She’s alive."

Alicia said nothing at all. She simply stared at him.