Sharpened Claws: A Gay Werewolf Romance

by Peyton Bogue

  Sure enough, as Sage had suspected, the warrant gets approved by the judge at four o’clock, and Sage and Kai are back and walking into Hemera Magazine by five.

  The lobby as they step off of the elevator isn’t as busy or as chaotic as it had been earlier, and there is a stillness to the office space that wasn’t there before, as if a hollowness has now overcome the once vibrant atmosphere. The sudden change makes Sage feel off-kilter.

  “Nice to see you again, Detectives,” Minerva says when she spots them, giving them both a coy smile. She’s standing behind the welcome desk this time, and she leans against it with practiced ease as she eyes them.

  Kai smiles at her. “We have a warrant to search the beauty closet here.”

  Minerva looks taken aback as her cat-eyes narrow in confusion. “For what?”

  “Potential lethal poisons in the products in that supply closet,” Sage says, raising his eyebrows at her when she doesn’t move.

  Minerva shakes her head as she scoffs lightly, plastering a smile on her face. “Oh, honey, at least half of those products have artificial ingredients and colors in them that shouldn’t go anywhere near a person's face.” She winks at him, but motions for them to follow her. “I don’t have access to the beauty closet, but Caroline’s here, and she can let you in.”

  She leads them back to another glass room, an office this time, and doesn’t knock on the door before she pushes it open, causing the older woman inside to startle.

  “Good evening, Miss Sanders,” Minerva greets coolly. “These detectives would like a word with you.”

  “Detectives Tate and Kaelan, ma’am,” Kai says, holding out the warrant to her. “We’re with the Special Crimes Unit. I’m told you’re the one I should talk to about executing a search on the beauty supply closet.”

  Caroline Sanders balks at them, moving forward to grab the warrant and skimming it while Minerva says, “I’ll leave you to it,” and disappears a moment later with a wink.

  “Well,” Caroline says after a silent moment, tense. “The beauty closet is this way, if you’d like to search it.”

  “Thank you,” Sage says, holding the door open for his partner and the older woman.

  “Do you really think Eliana could have been poisoned by something from the beauty closet?” Caroline asks, skeptical, as she swipes a key card to open another set of glass doors.

  Sage turns to her, furrowing his eyes. "It’s just a preliminary search, Miss Sanders. We’re trying to figure out what happened, and since you’re the beauty editor—”

  “That is a hair product,” Caroline abruptly says, cutting Sage off as they enter the room, “not a body lotion.”

  A woman freezes as she removes her hand from a section of body products, her cheeks coloring scarlet in admonishment. She gives Caroline an embarrassed nod and turns behind herself to place the tube of product next to an array of cannisters of hairspray. She mutters a quick, chagrined "Sorry!" before she hurriedly makes her way out of the room.

  Sage watches her leave as Kai asks, “Does everyone get their samples from this beauty closet?” Kai moves to stand on the other side of a wide table, and Sage brings his eyes back into the room. There are a wide variety of skincare, body care, and hair care products on the table in front of them, and Sage trails his eyes over them in confusion. He has no idea what any of this stuff is.

  “If they’re nice to me,” Caroline replies to Kai’s question, moving to a sign in/out sheet at the other side of the table.

  “And everyone signs all of them out?” Sage asks, watching as she flips through the sheet.

  “And logs it. Do you have any idea how much these items cost?” Caroline asks, reaching across the table and straightening a misplaced bottle. “We don’t get common occurrences of theft here, but one can never be too careful, Detective.”

  Sage raises his eyebrows at that but says nothing, letting his eyes take a cursory glance of the room. There are shelves upon shelves of products just like the ones on the table. It’s a pretty spacious room, and by the way it seems to have dropped a few degrees when they entered, Sage would guess it’s also climate controlled.

  “So, Eliana Kell being promoted over you. . .” Kai starts, his voice sympathetic, “that doesn’t sound too nice.”

  Caroline tilts her head to the side, accessing Kai’s insincerity, and coolly says, “Alright, gentlemen, I think we’re done here.”

  She turns and walks out of the room, heading back towards her office, but Kai trails after her, calling, “Miss Sanders!”

  Sage watches them go cautiously before he glances back to the table, his eyes running over the products and the sign in sheet. He grabs the sheet, folding it in half and sticking it into his pocket before he turns around to follow after Kai and Caroline. He and Kai will come back here to start bagging up the beauty products after they’re done questioning Caroline.

  “Look,” Sage hears when he enters another office. Caroline is packing up her purse and files, clearly trying to force them out. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have an editorial meeting that started five minutes ago.”

  Kai is leaning against the doorframe of the office, but it’s not the same one they met Caroline in earlier.

  Kai turns to Sage, rapping a knuckle against the door, and says, “This is Eliana’s office.”

  Caroline scoffs. “This is the Executive Editor’s office.”

  Sage gives Caroline a patronizing look, replying smoothly, “So, you got that promotion after all.”

  “Not the way I wanted it,” she says sharply, before she looks up again, resilient. “Look, I may not have particularly cared for Eliana, but I didn’t kill her. Accusations like that can ruin a career. I was working all day yesterday, and I didn’t go home until almost eleven o’clock. I understand that you have a job to do, but think carefully before you go pointing fingers at innocent people.” A knock on the glass of the office wall startles her, and she turns back to Sage and Kai, before petulantly saying, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an issue to get out.” She moves towards the exit of the office, says, “I trust the two of you can find your own way out,” and walks briskly past Sage in the opposite direction they’d come from.

  “Yeah, we sure can,” Kai replies back sarcastically, giving her retreating backside an over exaggerated smile before he closes the office door quietly.

  There are still boxes of stuff in this office that, presumably, belongs to Eliana. They’ve still got a search warrant, after all, and might as well put it to good use.

  Kai walks behind the desk and uncovers a box, peaking into it. Sage follows suit, moving printouts and posters out of his way to reveal a wedding picture of Eliana and Lillian, multiple handbags that are bubble wrapped, and more family pictures, including ones of their daughter, Maia, and the family dog.

  A further dig reveals a box of prescribed pills, and Sage turns them over to see a bottle of birth control pills, flu medication, and two half empty bottles of chlorthalidone and metolazone.

  He holds them up so Kai can see, shaking the bottles so that the sound of the pills rattling around inside of the container will grab Kai's attention. “Blood pressure medication.”

  “And we know it doesn’t belong to Eliana,” Kai replies, stepping towards the box Sage is going through. “So, who does it belong to?”

  Sage flips the bottle around. “Label’s been scratched out.” He turns the bottle around again. “But there’s a serial number.”

  “Which means that Hazel can track it.”

  ◆◆◆

  Sage is just walking through he and Rhys’s front door that night when his phone rings and buzzes insistently in his hand.

  “Kaelan,” he answers tiredly, not even bothering to take a look at the caller I.D. He takes his briefcase off of his shoulder and sets his keys on the side table, wandering further into their apartment as he follows sounds of clatter into the kitchen.

  He passes multiple pictures secured to the brick walls as he walks, his eyes runnin
g over a portrait of his late mother, a photo of Rhys and his family when Rhys was sixteen years old, and even more pictures of the two of them together, Kai filtered in throughout the photos. There’s even some artwork that Sage had done years ago hanging off the bricks, just a few canvases he feels self-conscious about whenever he looks at them, but Rhys loves him, and he’d hung them up with a proud smile on his face when they’d finally gotten around to unpacking all of their boxes when they’d moved in two and a half years ago.

  “Hey, Sage, it’s Hazel, again,” Hazel says over the line as Sage walks into the kitchen, his eyes searching the room until he finds Rhys standing over the stove and stirring something in a saucepan.

  Rhys turns around and smiles at him, and Sage walks around the island to greet him with a hello peck before he asks into the phone, “Hey, Hazel, what’s up?”

  He moves back around the island to sit down onto one of the stools as Hazel responds, “I finished testing everything you and Kai bagged up from the beauty closet, and I didn’t find anything that indicated that Eliana was poisoned with any of these products. But,” she adds as Sage sighs in frustration, “I was actually calling to tell you that I ran another test on that hair from the Kell crime scene.”

  “Oh, what test did you run?” Sage asks, stifling his groan as his weight moves off of his aching feet. He’s tired, and he’s not overly enthusiastic about discussing a case when he’s supposed to be home for the night, especially when Hazel is partly calling with bad news.

  “Isotope ratios,” Hazel tells him, “so that I could see where the hair has been in the last few years.” Sage nods along to her as he watches Rhys pull a package of chicken breast out of the fridge.

  “What did you find?”

  “I can’t give you an exact timeline or anything, but it looks like our mystery woman has been doing some traveling. She’s been to Japan, Germany, and New York in just the past few months.”

  “So, she gets around?” Sage says questioningly, resting his head on his hand and continues to watch as Rhys carefully cuts up the chicken and places it into the saucepan, shooting Sage a confused glance over his shoulder.

  “Not exactly for pleasure,” Hazel continues, unbeknownst to Sage’s ire. “I also ran another tox panel with the new data. Every time she traveled, readings would spike in alkylating antineoplastic agents and antimetabolites.”

  Sage blinks, pulling the phone away from his ear and staring at it with a blank look, like that’s somehow going to make him understand what she’s just told him. He brings the phone back to his ear and says, “Okay. Can you dumb that down for me, Hazel? Preferably without all of the medical jargon.”

  “It’s cancer meds,” Hazel laughs at him. "Turns out Hamburg, Tokyo, and New York City all have hospitals that specialize in rare cancers."

  Sage’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wow. So not only does our perp have heart disease, but also a rare kind of cancer?”

  “My guess is angiosarcoma, which is a rare cancer of the endothelial cells that line the walls of blood vessels.”

  Sage whistles. “Wow, okay. Well, thanks, Hazel. I’ll talk to Kai and maybe we can go and interview that hospital you mentioned tomorrow. I’ll get more details from you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Talk to you later, Detective. Have a good night!”

  “You, too, Hazel.”

  Sage ends the call and pulls the phone down to his eye level so he can shut it off. He places it face down on the marble tabletop in front of him, puts his head down so it’s resting on his forearms on top of the marble, and groans loudly.

  He hears footsteps a moment later, and then close to his ear, Rhys chuckles lowly, “Sounds like someone had an interesting day at work.”

  Sage feels Rhys’s arms circle around his waist, and a second later, Sage is being manhandled off of the stool and into Rhys’s lap as he's pulled back into Rhys’s muscular chest.

  It always makes his heart flutter when Rhys manhandles him like this. Sage is a big and muscular guy. It’s not often someone can even take him in a fight, let alone pick him up like he weighs nothing, especially when he’s got more than six feet of muscular body to work with.

  Sage relaxes back against Rhys, sighing softly in contentment, and says quietly, “Hey, Ree.”

  “Hi, baby,” Rhys replies, tightening his hold on Sage and placing kisses on the back of his neck, before inhaling deeply. “You smell like roses.”

  “It’s probably from that magazine company,” Sage yawns, a wave of exhaustion washing over him. “The place was practically drowning in floral smells.”

  “Hmm,” Rhys mumbles back, his face still buried in Sage’s neck. “Bad day today?”

  Sage shakes his head. “No, not really. Just long. And it feels like Kai and I were all over Brooklyn today. I’m just glad to be home.”

  “Me, too,” Rhys says, placing a kiss on the sensitive underside of Sage’s left ear, causing him to squirm a little, and he smiles softly.

  “How was your day today?” Sage asks, turning around so that he’s straddling Rhys’s waist and can look him in the eyes.

  Rhys smiles a pearly smile at him, his eyes bright and open. “Good. Fixed up a nice Harley. Missed you like crazy.” Rhys leans in and attacks Sage's lips a second later, apparently done with talking, placing tender and sweet kisses on his mouth.

  Sage sighs into him, feeling his annoyance and stress leach out of him through Rhys’s lips, and works his hands into Rhys’s soft hair, tugging lightly.

  Rhys runs his hands up Sage’s sides and moves them to get his hands on the buttons of Sage’s shirt, carefully undoing one of them so that he has better access to Sage’s neck.

  Sage melts as Rhys continues to place soft kisses all over his neck and arches into him when Rhys bites down on the sensitive skin beneath his ear.

  It shouldn’t surprise Sage, really, that Rhys has a thing for biting, what with the whole being-a-werewolf thing, but it completely turns his insides molten when Rhys bites that sensitive spot and sends a thrill coursing down his spine.

  “Rhys,” Sage whispers, feeling Rhys shift so that he can place kisses on top of Sage’s clothed chest.

  They hadn’t been able to indulge each other last night, what with Kai sleeping over and Rhys already being asleep when Sage had gotten home, and his body is already beginning to react to Rhys's gentle touch as want and desire begin to unfurl beneath his skin.

  Rhys just drives him absolutely crazy.

  But then Rhys is pulling back all too soon, tilting his head lightly and literally sniffing the air. His eyes widen, and he says, “I think I’m letting the stir fry burn,” and then he’s standing with Sage still in his arms, who squawks lightly, and turns around so that he can gently place him back onto the stool and then moves around the island to stir the contents of the saucepan.

  Sage’s breathing is a little hitched and he pants slightly as he gawks at Rhys’s backside while Rhys turns the head of the stovetop down.

  “It doesn’t even smell burnt,” Sage says a tad childishly, leaning so that his elbows are against the tabletop and his hands are supporting his face.

  “It’s not. It was just starting to char before I got to it,” Rhys replies, picking up some kind of seasoning and sprinkling some of it on before removing the saucepan from the hot stovetop, setting it on a warming pad, and moving to grab two plates.

  “I’m glad you were thinking about the food burning while kissing me,” Sage grumbles, rolling his eyes playfully at Rhys’s very sensitive sense of smell. He knows how hard it is for Rhys to ignore the scents he smells, though, so he’s not really that put out.

  Rhys glances at him, smirking. “Don’t worry, baby. I wasn’t. I’m always thinking about what I want to do to you when I’m near you.” He spoons some stir fry out for Sage before turning around and winking, lowering his voice and saying, “Besides, you know how crazy I get when I can smell how much you want me.”

  And if that doesn’t send a wave of heat straight down Sa
ge’s spine.

  It’d been a shock the first time when Sage had found out that Rhys could smell his emotions. Rhys is always adamant that Sage smells like home to him, that Sages's natural scent calms his wolf and makes him feel safe, but Rhys can also pick up on the chemo signals of Sage’s body to tell what he’s feeling. He can tell when Sage is upset or anxious just by the sharp curl of his scent, which he says smells like burnt cardamom. Sage’s happy and content feelings smell like autumn, like the fall breeze carrying hints of spice and the changing of leaves. When he’s angry, Rhys says all he can smell is smoke. When he’s scared, he smells like fear, but Rhys isn’t too keen on what that excruciating scent smells like, just that it’s gut-wrenching and makes his wolf seethe and feel enraged at whatever’s making Sage smell like that.

  His arousal, though, smells like the heady scent of cinnamon and honey, the sickeningly sweet aroma swarming Rhys’s senses and driving his wolf insane, like it’s an aphrodisiac only Rhys can smell. It never fails to drive Rhys wild with arousal, and he always kisses Sage within an inch of Sage's life whenever he smells it.

  Sage suddenly takes a deep breath, steadying himself, and takes the plate Rhys offers him. Rhys’s plate is filled with a considerable amount of food, way more than Sage’s, but Sage knows that he’s probably made enough for a family of four—or, in their case, a hungry human and an equally hungry werewolf.

  They eat in comfortable silence as they sit next to each other at the island, sometimes talking to the other about their day, where Sage fills Rhys in on the case he and Kai are working on and Rhys tells him about the customers he’s seen down at the garage he owns while Rhys rests his hand on the back of Sage’s neck, idly rubbing his thumb over the soft skin in random patterns.

  Sage can only tell Rhys so much about his and Kai’s case because it’s an ongoing investigation, so they lapse into light conversation while they eat.