Free Little Red (Not Quite the Fairy Tale #5) by May Sage

fine with it, all things considered. It sounded worse than it looked – bone crushing was a remarkably noisy affair.
    Oh well.
    “Tell me that’s our girl ripping that vile animal to shreds?” the Queen asked from the chair where she’d stayed, rather indifferent to it all.
    “Let’s put it this way: she may need a bath,” he replied, working on her restraints after he’d removed her blindfold. “What happened?”
    “From what I understood of all of his whining, his people turned on him – he heard that practically all of them had decided to leave the woods and go find our Little Red. So he decided it wasn’t fair – and his brilliant idea was to take back what he considered stolen from him. Typical villain shit.”
    Chase wasn’t certain that he’d ever heard his grandmother say shit. Of all things that had occurred today, this was the most shocking.
    “I was threatened, kidnapped, and bored to death by a psycho. I’m entitled to a few bad words, dear,” she said, pinching his cheeks as she did every time he walked close enough to allow her to.
    Lana shifted back to her gorgeous self; she walked to him, grabbed the metal chain he’d been fiddling with in both hands and simply pulled it until it tore. She did the same with the ones on Mimi’s other hand, and her feet, too.
    “You know,” he had to point out, “that’s ever so slightly emasculating.”
     
    Everyone prioritized: Chase needed to know how many of his servants had died, and do what he could for their families, his soldiers needed to go home and hug their relative, the Wilderlings had to help the rest of their pack – the three thousand shifters who were now leaderless – and Lana needed a shower.
    He would have expected her to be the first to go to the woods, but actually, she didn’t show any inclination to, and no Wilderling had even seemed to wish she would. The strangeness didn’t escape his notice, but frankly, he’d just embraced that life was weird now.
    “Fourteen people,” he sighed.
    That wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it also was fourteen too many. Chase stood there, wondered what he might say to the husbandless woman, the motherless children, the daughterless parents he would have to talk to, when he noticed that the sound of the shower had stopped.
    He’d led Lana to the bathroom in his own suite – he wouldn’t have had her anywhere else right now.
    The sound of a few steps made him turn, and he was so taken by the sight before him, he didn't even think to freak out about the fact that his hearing had never been that good.
    Fuck . She was dripping wet, and there didn’t seem to be anything under the white towel she’d wrapped around her chest.
    His brain short circuited as all the blood in his body converged to one particular point.
    “Working on anything?”
    Way to kill the mood.
    “I’m trying to decide what I should say to the families.”
    They’d agreed that the soldiers he trusted could be let in on the secret of the whole wolf thing… but the rest of the kingdom wasn’t aware of their existence. If their introduction to Wilderlings was on the nine o’clock news, next to the picture of a dozen of victims…
    “Tell them the truth. Tell them there are wolves. Tell them that one, amongst three thousand, four hundred and nineteen of us, became addicted to human flesh. Tell them another wolf put it down.”
    When she put it that way, it would work, actually. Especially if he mentioned in passing that that particular wolf had also saved the Queen, the Prince…
    And that she would become their sovereign just as soon as he’d convinced her to take him.
    Chase got up and walked right to her. She opened her mouth and there was a possibility that she might have wanted to say something he didn’t care to hear, so he didn’t let her get a word out, capturing her lips again.
    That felt so freaking right. Echoing his thought, she moaned out loud and that was all he could take.
    He was pleased they