I turned and ran for the stairs.

TEN

Abby

“Jace, no!” Melody shouted, but he was already halfway to the second floor, and the tight clench of his fists was not a good sign. Though that did seem to indicate that he hadn’t sprouted claws yet.

“Wait!” I raced after him, and from the sound of the stampede, everyone else in house was behind me.

“Abby!” Lucas called from half a flight below. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Not now!” I yelled as Jace hit the second floor landing. There’d be plenty of time to avoid talking about my private life once I was sure Isaac wasn’t going to be killed, or fired, or…systematically neutered. I should never have said anything about Melody and Isaac, but she could be such a little bitch sometimes, and I’d struck out with the only weapon I had.

As I raced up the last half of the first flight of stairs, a door creaked open on the third floor, and Garrett, Jace’s youngest half brother, leaned over the railing overhead. Garrett was my age, and he was the only one of the Malone brothers I’d never wanted to punch. “What the hell? It’s barely six in the morning.”

When Foley Malone peeked over his shoulder, I realized the entire house was awake except for Patricia, and with the level of noise our stampede was causing, Jace’s mom couldn’t possibly be asleep for long.

“Jace is going to kill Isaac!” Melody squealed, as I followed Jace across the landing toward her closed bedroom door. “You guys do something!” She gave Chase a shove and he stumbled past me, but our Alpha’s growl of warning stopped him cold.

“I’m not going to kill him,” Jace snapped, and when he tried to open her door, he pulled the doorknob right off. Not good. “I’m just going to rip his balls off and—”

“Jace!” I grabbed his arm, then wrenched the amputated doorknob from his grip. I briefly considered recruiting Lucas for help, but if any of the guys touched Jace while he was seeing red, this would escalate too quickly for me to control. “That’s my brother!”

“In a minute, he’s going to be your sister,” Jace growled, and my stomach clenched miserably.

“Okay, wait. Let’s talk about this calmly. Melody’s an adult. Just like I am,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t need me to spell out my point. And maybe he wouldn’t have if the knobless door hadn’t swung open at that very moment to reveal Isaac standing in the middle of Melody’s bedroom floor, his hair wet and dripping, a towel tucked around his hips.

Jace’s gaze narrowed and his face flushed. “What the hell did you do to my sister?” he growled, and I could tell from the sound that his throat had already started to shift.

Uh-oh.

“Do to her?” Isaac stood his ground, his hands raised, palms out. “I didn’t do anything to her.”

Melody raced past us and threw herself between her brother and mine, her back pressed to Isaac’s chest. She held her arms out to protect him like a human shield, her brown eyes flashing in anger like I’d never seen from her. “Don’t hurt him, Jace. I love him,” she said as Garrett and Foley stomped down the stairs from the third floor.

I gaped at Melody, still clutching her broken doorknob. She loved him? She could not be serious. Melody was as self-centered as a tabby could get—which was saying a lot, considering that most of us were treated like precious cargo from birth—and she’d thrived on attention from tomcats since she was fourteen years old. From all the toms.

She’d claimed she was only trying to find the right match, which her father had told her was her one and only duty to the world, but her kiss-a-hundred-frogs approach had left more than one of the guys with a broken heart and a chip on his shoulder. Jace had traded two miffed enforcers for two of my brothers a couple of years before, just to patch the rift Melody had carved in his carefully bonded brotherhood. Now she was doing it again.

Or was she?

Tears stood in her eyes. Every muscle in her body was tense. And she wasn’t trying to defend herself; she was trying to protect Isaac.

“You love—” Jace shook his head, and I realized he couldn’t see the change in her. Or he wouldn’t, anyway. “You were in love with Chase this past summer, and Nate Blackwell back in the spring. You don’t know what you want yet, because no matter what year is stamped on your birth certificate, you’re still just a kid. I’m trying to give you time to figure out what you want.”

He’d been encouraging her to get to know herself before she threw herself at the next tom. Or to at least get to know the next tom before she threw herself at him. But she couldn’t be the only one who’d noticed he was preaching one thing but practicing something else entirely, with his endless string of human women.

At least, until me.

“Things are different now,” he insisted. “You don’t have to get married at nineteen and have six kids by thirty. You could go to school. You could get a job. You could even travel—”

“I don’t want any of that!” Melody shouted. “Not all girls are like Faythe and Abby, you know, and just because you want a woman who’d rather throw a roundhouse than a dinner party doesn’t mean every tom wants that. I just want a pretty wedding and a bunch of redheaded babies, and you obviously want the same thing,” she said with another pointed glance at me. “So, stop being a hypocrite.”

“Wait, what?” Isaac looked past Jace to me. “You and Jace? Since when?”

“It’s new,” I said, trying to avoid his gaze.

“What about Brian?” Luke demanded from my right.

“We broke up.”

“Oh. Well…good for you!” Isaac said, though I got the distinct impression he was only saying that because he knew he was currently in no position to criticize his Alpha’s private life. “I hope you’re happy together.” Isaac turned back to Jace. “The least you can do is wish us the same.”

“She’s nineteen years old and she doesn’t know what she wants!” Jace shouted. “You’re taking advantage of her!”

“No, he isn’t!” Tears rolled down Melody’s face, but she stood her ground, still pressed against my brother’s bare chest. “Being an Alpha doesn’t mean you know everything. We’re going to get married, and I’m going to have this baby, and you can’t—” Melody slapped one hand over her mouth, shocked by what she obviously hadn’t meant to say, and astonished silence descended over the now-crowded bedroom.