Page 144 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

"It's a D! And the N is absolutely a C. The I and the K are fine, I'll give him that, but it spells D-I-C⁠—"

Wraith's hand shoots out and smacks Whiskey upside the head without looking, almost knocking the tea out of Valek's hands. He catches it somehow, but not before it splashes over and hits Plague's cheek. Plague is up from his chair and clear across the room with a hiss.

Whiskey is now wheezing with laughter. "I'm framing this. I'm framing this and putting it on my wall⁠—"

Wraith reaches for him again and Whiskey leaps out of his chair to scramble out of range, still cackling.

Plague comes back, swiping the tea off his face with a clean wipe, and snatches the paper from Whiskey with a resigned expression. He reads it slowly.

Then he lowers the paper, looks at Wraith, looks at the paper, and sits back down in front of his laptop with a relenting sigh. "Should probably type it up," he mutters, already starting.

Line by line, Wraith's words emerge from the wreckage of his handwriting. When Plague finishes, he reads it once to himself. His fingers still on the keyboard.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment.

Then he turns the laptop toward Thane.

Thane opens his mouth to start reading it out loud, but Wraith's palm comes up, and Thane hesitates.

Not yet, Wraith signs.

Thane leans forward, studying his brother. "You don't want us to read it right now?"

Wraith shakes his head once.

"You want me to just read it at the press conference? Cold?"

A nod.

Thane holds his gaze for a long moment. There's some kind of brotherly telepathy passing between them, and the rest of us aren't part of it. I can feel Wraith's pulse against my back, faster than I'd expect from his stillness.

"Okay," Thane says quietly. "I'll read it cold."

He clicks to close the window with Wraith's statement on it and slides the laptop to the side. His expression gives nothing away, but I notice he doesn't look at the rest of us.

Now I'm fucking worried.

Whiskey, who has been uncharacteristically silent for the past thirty seconds—a personal record—opens his mouth.

"Don't," Plague says, without looking at him.

Whiskey shuts it.

I twist slightly in Wraith's lap, just enough to glance up at him. His blue eyes meet mine and soften, and he raises his hand to gently swipe his thumb along my cheekbone.

Tea.

There was tea on my cheek.

Whiskey bites his lower lip so hard he pulls a face and it takes everything I have to not laugh again. Thank the gods for the pack clown. It's not easy to spiral when Whiskey's in the room. Even when he's just existing.

Thane clears his throat. "Valek?"

Valek pulls Plague's laptop toward him. Plague makes a noise of protest, but Valek ignores him, typing as if he already knows exactly what he's going to say.

Two minutes later at the most, he turns the laptop back around to show me.

Ivy Byrne is my scent match and my mate. The force used was proportional to the threat presented by Wade Kelly, who had already attacked another member of the Ghosts' pack and was escalating aggression and threats toward our omega. I acted in her defense and would not hesitate to do so again.