Now that she had a second to catch her breath and calm down, she doubted Brandon could have smelled the SWAT cop on her even if she hadn’t been doused in perfume. They hadn’t even realized the SWAT team had been made up of werewolves until she’d told Brandon and the others back in the warehouse. That was because omegas couldn’t use their noses worth a crap. As they got older, the only werewolf abilities they seemed to retain were their strength and aggression, and the claws and fangs that came with them. They let most of their finer talents simply waste away.
She grabbed at the opportunity offered by the distraction of the perfume and took a step toward the tall omega. Brandon flinched slightly but didn’t retreat. “It’s not a French whorehouse you’re smelling, not that I believe for a second you’ve ever been in one. What you’re smelling is Clive Christian perfume, and it’s worth almost as much as that platinum we were there to steal. I got tossed into a whole pallet of it when I fought with one of those SWAT cops. You remember them—the big-ass alpha werewolves you and your omega friends ran from like a bunch of little girls while leaving the real girl behind to fight them by herself?”
Brandon seemed stunned. “You fought them hand to hand?”
Jayna took another step closer and let her fangs slide out as far as they would go. For whatever reason, her canine teeth were starting to come in longer these days…almost as long as Liam’s. And when she was really fired up, like now, her incisors seemed to be sharper too. Megan had told her that made her look damn intimidating to other werewolves, especially omegas.
“That’s what real werewolves do once we’re out of ammo but there’s still someone in our way,” she said. “Or didn’t you think I could because I’m a woman?”
Brandon looked like he wanted to say that’s exactly what he thought, but she knew he didn’t have the balls to try it. The rest of her pack standing right behind her obviously had something to do with that. But she noticed him eyeing her fangs and debating just how tough she had to be if she’d stood up to those SWAT werewolves by herself.
Brandon might have gotten in a lot of fights and had the face of a lifelong bar brawler to prove it, but right then, she knew he was wondering if she was someone he should stay away from. On the other hand, he didn’t want to look like a wuss in front of the other omegas—or the Albanians who’d come in while the two of them were squaring off.
Jayna was still waiting to see what Brandon would do when the sound of someone clapping cut through the tension in the room like a knife.
She turned to see Kostandin, Frasheri’s trusted underboss—or “Kos” as everyone called him—leaning with his massive shoulder against a doorjamb on the far side of the lobby, his big, scarred hands slapping together in a slow, deliberate show of disdain.
“Perhaps if the rest of you had balls as big as Jayna’s, last night’s job would not have failed so miserably.”
The man’s heavily accented words were softly spoken, but he might as well have thrown a hand grenade into the room. The Albanians and omegas who’d been hanging around the edges of the atrium melted away without another word. Her pack members and Brandon were still there, but Jayna could almost taste their desire to be anywhere else. She couldn’t blame them. She wanted to be someplace else too.
Even though Kostandin wasn’t a werewolf, he still scared the hell out of everyone, and that seemed to include the other Albanians as well. The man was Frasheri’s nephew, but the two couldn’t have been more different. While Frasheri’s every action seemed to be driven by a clinically detached desire to make the family richer and more powerful, Kos seemed to only care about one thing—hurting people.
She tried not to flinch when Kos walked over and put a hand on her shoulder, letting the tips of his long fingers graze her neck slightly as he squeezed possessively. “Good to see you back, she-wolf. I would have been very upset if you had died in that warehouse.” He turned to eye Brandon. “More upset than I am at the loss of all those platinum medallions. If Jayna had died, I would have likely been forced to kill those I thought were at fault.”
Brandon dropped his eyes to stare at the floor. Around Jayna, her pack was gazing at the marble floor just as intently. Good. That meant no one saw the shudder that passed through her body as Kostandin’s hand slowly slid down her back and dropped away. The way he looked at her sometimes reminded her of her stepfather.
Jayna had known Kos was a sick bastard the first time she’d looked in those cold, dark eyes of his. Since then, she’d seen him go out of his way to inflict pain on people before he killed them—shooting them in the knees, cutting off fingers, slashing faces with the wicked-looking knife he always carried—all so he could see the fear in his victim’s eyes before the end.