“The real question here,” continued the one named Zane—he struck her as the youngest of the group though he was no less impossibly large than the rest of them— “is how we’re going to proceed. And that’s completely up to you like Logan said.”
“How so?” The fact that they were all looking at her made her skin crawl. She wasn’t used to being studied by so many people at once, especially men who intimidated her with their sheer size and flawless bone structure. Was it weird to consider the bone structure of a man? Maybe, but it had been a very weird couple of weeks.
“For one thing, do you want us to stick around? Do you want us to help you with this? It’s your call,” Logan assured her. “We’re not in the business of telling people what to do, no matter the impression you might’ve gotten up until now.” Was it her imagination, or did he look at Sledge when he said that?
“The second question is,” Sledge continued for him with a very pointed look, “if you do choose to accept our help, do you want to stay here? Or would you rather stay in a safe house? We have a few such properties. Again, that’s your decision to make. Just know if you do decide to work with us and you do decide to stay here, we will install security cameras, motion sensors, the whole nine yards—whatever it takes to lock this place down.”
She looked at her hands folded in her lap. How long had it been since she’d had a manicure? Once the people around her started dying, certain habits fell by the wayside.
“I know it’s overwhelming,” Sledge added in a soft voice. “We’re here for you. Just know that, please. All of us are here for you. We don’t want to see you hurt by whoever this is, whatever reason they’re doing this for.”
“I appreciate that,” she whispered, and she did. She really did. They were only there to help her—knowing that, combined with how kind and patient everyone had been, made her feel terrible when she remembered how she’d treated Sledge in the hospital. She’d called him an ambulance chaser like he was nothing more than a slimy bottom feeder.
“Give it some thought,” Logan implored.
“And while you’re at it,” Braxton added, his entire attitude giving her serious angry dad vibes, “you might want to reconsider whether you can tell us who you’ve been doing business with lately.”
Logan shot him a dirty look while Sledge sucked air in through his teeth.
She raised her chin, looking at him squarely. “It’s not up to me. I can reconsider as much as I want, but I don’t have the final call. The papers I signed do. I don’t know if you guys could afford a lawsuit, but I can’t. Sorry to disappoint you.” She held his gaze, daring him to look away. There was something strange about him, about all of them, that she couldn’t put her finger on. Some wildness, some darkness.
It was almost enough to make her want to look away, but she couldn’t. When he looked at the floor, she wanted to cheer. That little victory meant nothing and everything all at once.
“Look. I know you think I’m trying to be difficult,” she sighed with a shrug. “I’m not trying to be. It’s just that this project is kind of a big deal, and I don’t want to do anything to mess it up.”
“Has it occurred to you that someone has already decided to mess it up, as you put it?” Logan asked, though he was a lot gentler about it than Braxton had been, more sympathetic. “It seems like whoever’s done this, whoever’s calling the shots, had ideas of their own. There’s going to come a time when you have to decide what’s more important: a nondisclosure agreement or your life.”
She rubbed her arms briskly, trying to calm down the goosebumps his words brought out. She knew he was right. She knew they all were, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“We can’t know who we’re after if you won’t tell us,” Sledge murmured. Funny how this entire exercise had brought her closer to him. He was the one she trusted most of all of them. She couldn’t help wondering if that was how this was designed, for him to end up being the good cop to their bad cops. Maybe she was being ridiculous, but her skepticism wouldn’t let her rest.
She knew what none of them did: that it was impossible for this to be the workings of the client she’d taken on—a client who’d offered more than she normally billed in an entire year for one single project. They weren’t capable of this. They couldn’t be.
Why would they already have paid so much upfront if their plan was to kill the people providing the information they were looking for?
She sensed the frustration in the room. She could practically taste it. These were men of action, men who didn’t like sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. She had never exactly been a fan of that herself, so she could understand.
“There’s one thing I can tell you,” she murmured, looking at all of them one at a time. “I want to stay here. I won’t give up my life. Isn’t that part of the whole intimidation thing? To make me feel threatened, afraid? To take me away from my surroundings so I feel lost and confused? I don’t want to give them what they want.”
Sledge grimaced. “I know we said it was your choice—”
“You did, and I plan on holding you to that,” she muttered, giving him a dirty look.
A look which he took well. Either he knew better than to fight or was too damn tired to bother. “And it still is your choice, but it has to be an informed choice as well. We would be wrong not to remind you that pride isn’t your friend right now. If you feel like you have to prove something to whoever this is, to whoever is making them do this, you’re wrong. You don’t have a thing to prove to anyone. Do whatever feels best to you, whatever would make you feel more secure.”
“I think my security is up to you, isn’t it? Can you keep me safe here?”
“Yes.” Those dark, brooding eyes met hers, holding her gaze, probing into her—at least, that was how it felt. She reminded herself not to give over to her imagination or to the lust he stirred which was so foreign. This wasn’t the time. “We can keep you safe in this house.”
“Then this is where I want to stay. It’s my home. I worked for it. It’s—” She turned her face away, careful to avoid looking at any of them. There was no way to say it out loud and maintain her dignity.
How pathetic would it make her look if she admitted her house and her company were the only two things she had to be proud of? They were her life, the fruits of her labor. No way was she about to walk away from either of them if there was the option of keeping them.
Was it kindness that kept all of them from asking her to finish what she’d started to say? Was it understanding? Or did they just not care? That was probably the truth. She wasn’t anything special, not to them. They’d served so many clients. She was one of many, nothing more than that.
“That means we start work right away,” Logan reminded her, and she nodded in agreement.
“Whatever you need to do.” The image of that screen upstairs wouldn’t leave her, just like the sound of Beth’s shriek haunted every quiet moment she spent. It was always there, always in the back of her mind, running on a loop.
She wasn’t about to tell any of them how to do their jobs after what she’d already seen and heard.
And suffered.
Chapter Eleven
“Are you sure this is the best place for those monitors?”
Zane looked up from his work, smirking. “Since when do you question my logic?”
“I’m not questioning your logic. I was only asking.”
“What’s the problem?” Zane stepped back from the monitors he’d set up on the desk in one of Marnie’s two spare bedrooms. Both bedrooms were fully decorated and ready for guests, right down to fresh linens on the beds. She had taken such pains to make this a home.
And all Sledge could do as he looked around was feel sorry for her. There was no one to sleep in those beds. He wondered if Beth had ever spent the night and guessed she probably had.
Now, the beds would be used by members of his team. Hardly what she’d had in mind at the time she set them up, he guessed.
He shrugged at Zane’s question. “We’ll always be right here, next to her bedroom.”
“Which is exactly why I chose this for the place to set them up,” his friend explained in a slow, overly patient tone like he was explaining something to a child. “We’ll be right here, next to her room if she needs help.”
“Expect pushback. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
“I always expect pushback,” Zane snickered. “Though usually I don’t get it from my teammates.”
“I’m not pushing.”
“No, you’re just warning me as if I need help with a job I’ve done for years,” he countered with more patience than Sledge probably would’ve exhibited under the circumstances. “As for our client, she can be as irritated as she wants. That’s not my concern. My concern is making sure our cameras pick up every bit of movement outside the house—unless there’s something else you think I should be focused on, instead.”
Sledge shook his head, wishing he’d never said a word. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have questioned you.”
“Oh? Were you questioning me? I thought you were warning me.” That was like him, never able to let a joke go. Though Sledge suspected this wasn’t a joke, that even the normally cheerful, jovial Zane didn’t appreciate feeling like his judgment was in question.
It was a better idea to leave the room and let Zane get his work done. It was better for all of them that they dealt with as few distractions as possible during this stage in a new mission.
Which was why he moved silently through the house, observing his team without offering any further questions or suggestions. He knew they knew why he was so concerned, why this meant so much. Granted, every one of their jobs meant a lot, but this was different.
They knew it, and it just about killed him. This was a weakness; this was a vulnerability. He hated looking weak, like a woman who probably didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds soaking wet could practically bring him to his knees with nothing more than a sharp look or an even sharper word.
And if there was anything she was good at, it was putting a man in his place. Exactly when his wolf had become a masochist was a mystery to him.
“Cameras are all set up,” Braxton announced as he entered the house through the back door. He washed his hands in the sink, glancing Sledge’s way as he did. “By the way, I hope Marnie doesn’t think I came off too harsh earlier. I got impatient.”
“Yeah, you did,” Sledge agreed. “Though it’s not like she would tell me if she thought so. We hardly sit around gossiping.”
“No, but you would be the one she’d go to if that was what she thought,” Braxton assured him.
“What makes you say that?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me. You’re the one she feels closest to, and I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be. None of us knows how this works, do we? Still, even without things being the way they are, you’re the one who reached the car first. You’re the one who spent the night at the hospital. You’re the one who was here when she discovered the burglary. You’re the one she’s attached to now.”
Yes, and she was the one his wolf had become attached to. Sledge cleared his throat, a question heavy on his mind. It wasn’t something he knew how to put words to, though. That was the problem.
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” he muttered, careful to keep their conversation quiet in case Marnie wandered in. She’d announced she was going up to lie down, to try to get some rest before she plunged back into work. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t change her mind and come downstairs to investigate, though. He would put nothing past that girl.
“What doesn’t?”
“The way all of these decisions are made for us. We don’t have any say in any of it. There’s no choice but to go along with what he wants.” The wolf, he meant.
Braxton pursed his lips, considering this. “I wouldn’t call it unfair,” he decided. “Strange. Sometimes uncomfortable. But not unfair. What’s unfair is doing something like this to guys like us who aren’t exactly used to listening to the orders of others—our time in the service notwithstanding,” he added with a grin.
“That’s true,” Sledge murmured. “They couldn’t have picked worse subjects for that experiment, could they have?”
“They had no idea, did they?” Braxton snickered. All those scientists had done was conduct their experiments on mortally wounded men. They couldn’t have known the personalities of the particular men whose injuries qualified them for the project.
Just as they couldn’t have known what the results of their project would be. They’d wanted to create a super army of sorts, one whose members healed from everything but the direst wounds.
They’d done that for sure. They’d also created men with the ability to shift into wolves. Even now, years later, it gave Sledge a sick sense of satisfaction to remember the horror in the eyes of those smug, self-satisfied men the first time they’d witnessed the change.
It wasn’t every day men turned into animals—especially wild, dangerous animals twice the size of normal wolves.
“Anyway,” Braxton concluded with a shrug, “it’s easier if you don’t question it too much. I know it’s not easy, but you just have to go with it. I know you don’t want to hear this, but sometimes instinct knows better than we do. There’s got to be a reason why you were the one who made it to the car first, why you were the one who became so attached to her. It was the same thing with Serenity and me. At first glance, I couldn’t stand her. I also couldn’t get her out of my head. What’s the use of fighting it? It’s a waste of time, and it’s exhausting. There are much more important things for you to spend your energy on.”
That was good sense, and Sledge appreciated it. He left Braxton in favor of stepping outside to examine the cameras.
He had to feel like he was doing something, anything to be of value to her. There wasn’t much he could do while she was lying down—if that was what she was really doing. There was no reason to doubt her or assume she was hiding something, especially with her world crumbling the way it was.
Logan was on his phone typing a message. He nodded to Sledge upon glancing up and noticing him, beckoning him with a jerk of his chin. “Val seems to think she might’ve found something,” he murmured.
Sledge’s pulse jumped. “About what?” he whispered, taking care to ensure they weren’t overheard. Standing on the back porch, they were directly under Marnie’s bedroom window. Granted, he would’ve heard her moving around up there thanks to the wolf’s hearing, but there were a lot of other sounds competing with anything coming from inside the house. The tweeting of birds, for one thing, and the buzzing of bees feasting inside the many flowers available in the garden.
“She hasn’t said yet,” Logan replied, never taking his eyes from the screen. “She’s going to call in a few minutes with a report of what she’s learned.”
A few minutes. It may as well have been a few hours.
Logan looked up, snorting out his barely suppressed laughter. “Calm down.”
“What?”
“I can practically hear him howling in my head.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “We all can, I’d bet. I know this isn’t easy. And God knows I know what it means to feel frustrated like you’re not in control of what’s happening around you. Every time I get a call from Val or Hawk or Doc, I’m waiting to find out we were hacked again. Even when you try your best and shore up all weak spots, there’s no telling what somebody else will find—something you didn’t know you needed to be aware of, something you couldn’t have been aware of until you learned you were falling short somehow. Know what I mean?”
“You don’t know something’s a problem until somebody else points it out and exploits it,” Sledge concluded. “So you can’t check on it in advance.”
“Exactly. Maybe we’ve been lucky over the last few weeks since the attack we suffered during Serenity’s case, or maybe they’ve moved on, whoever this hacker is. I have no way of knowing.”
He shrugged with a sigh, lifting the sunglasses from his eyes and perching them on top of his head. “Though I doubt it. Not after all the effort they’ve already put in. So I have to remind my wolf at least once every hour of the day to chill out and let things happen the way they will.”
“I’m sure he loves that,” Sledge snickered.
“It’s amazing I get ten minutes sleep,” Logan groaned. “I can barely remember what it felt like to only have me in my head.”
“Same here,” Sledge admitted with a wry smile. He then understood the whole purpose for Logan turning the conversation in this direction: distraction. Giving him something else to think about while they waited for Val to call. There was a reason he was their leader.
The phone rang moments later, and Sledge inserted his earpiece as Logan answered. “Good evening,” he grinned. “What do you have for me?”
Normally, Val would’ve come up with something clever to say—something about her skills, about how they owed her more than just a paycheck.
Clearly, this was not a normal situation. “Where are you right now? Are you at the house?”
The smile slid from Logan’s face. “Yeah, like I told you.”
“And you’re absolutely sure there are no bugs planted anywhere?”
Sledge could hardly hear over the pounding of blood in his ears and the snarling of the wolf in his head. Logan was right—remembering when he’d been the only one in his head was practically impossible now.
“We swept the whole place twice. What’s going on?”
“Like I said, I found information on her and on her company and who they’re working with currently. There’s only one client on their books right now, the only one who’s mentioned in recent correspondence.”
Sledge pushed aside the twinge of guilt he suffered knowing how Marnie would hate finding out her system was so easily hacked. Granted, it wouldn’t have been easy for anyone but Hawk, who was supernaturally gifted when it came to finding his way into impenetrable networks.
“Who is it?” Logan asked, his voice tight.
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 57