She saw them in her head, Dan and Alex. Good guys, both of them, very smart. The people who worked with her had to be smart. “I would trust them in any other situation,” she murmured, resigned.
“But right now?”
“Right now, there’s no way of knowing whether they’ll keep this to themselves unless they’re with me all the time.”
“Exactly. Remind them to watch their backs—maybe it would be better if they worked from home rather than going to the office—but otherwise, let us do our jobs. If you tell us everything you know about this group, we can find them quickly. We can shut this down.”
She would never have dared say it out loud, for fear of setting him off, but it seemed like there was hesitation in his voice like he didn’t quite believe himself.
What had changed?
Chapter Thirteen
“This couldn’t have anything to do with us, with our tests. Could it?” Zane looked around the room, searching for answers from the very people who had no answers to give.
“What are the odds of that?” Jace asked. “It’s rhetorical, but still. I mean, it’s impossible. It’s just not possible.”
“It might not have to do directly with us,” Logan assured them. “But it sounds like it’s in the same vein as what they did to us. This isn’t just your average, run-of-the-mill drug testing—not if whoever’s heading this project thinks it’s necessary to silence the people processing the results.”
“And it wouldn’t be about us,” Sledge muttered. “That was too long ago. They were supposed to have destroyed everything, weren’t they?”
“This doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other related experiments going on. I’m sure the entire group behind our testing didn’t shut down.” As Logan spoke, he typed a message into his phone.
“What’s going on?” Braxton asked, jerking his chin toward the phone.
“Val. She wants to know whether or not she should move on with this.” He sighed, lowering the phone to his lap. “I wish I knew the right answer. What happens if we dig too deep? What happens if someone notices? I won’t put any of us in danger if there’s a way of avoiding it.”
“I’m not going to abandon her,” Sledge reminded everyone in the room.
“No one thinks you would,” Zane assured him. “And none of us wants to do that, either.” The rest of them nodded in agreement.
Though Sledge noticed Zane’s choice of words. None of them wanted to abandon her, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t if push came to shove. “I understand we have to protect ourselves above all,” he sighed. “And if things did get bad, I would understand if we had no choice but to walk away. We can’t leave ourselves vulnerable.”
“Stop talking about things that aren’t going to happen,” Logan warned. “We’re going to exercise caution, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to walk away. She needs help. They all do, but something tells me she’s key. She’s the CEO, the one in charge. It was her car they tried to run off the road—the fact that she wasn’t driving probably hasn’t escaped whoever this is now that news reports have come out. She’s the one they’re going to keep coming for.”
“They’re going to want her silenced sooner rather than later,” Braxton murmured, analyzing the situation the way they’d all been trained to do. Sledge knew without asking that everyone in the room, including himself, was putting himself in the shoes of the people running this shadow project.
“Sure, because the longer they leave her alive, the greater the chance she’ll go to the media. They won’t want to give her the time to do that.” Jace looked sympathetic as he turned to Sledge. “She’s going to need constant supervision.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Sledge assured him. “I have no intention of letting her out of my sight.”
All of them cleared their throats, shifting their weight from one foot to the other when the door swung open just enough for Marnie to peek into the room. “Am I interrupting anything important? Something I’m not supposed to hear?” she whispered, looking around.
“Not at all,” Logan assured her, waving her hand. “It’s your house, still.”
“If anybody ever told me I’d have to ask permission to go from one room to the other in my own house, I would’ve laughed myself sick.” She grimaced as she stepped into the room, staying close to the wall like she was afraid to take up too much space. “I feel sort of sick right now anyway.”
“Here, sit down.” Sledge waved her toward the bed. She didn’t even think about protesting or pretending she was stronger than she was—just another sign of how shaken this left her.
“Did you get in touch with your other team members?” Logan asked.
“Yes, I spoke with Dan and Alex. I didn’t tell them anything specific, like we discussed, but made it sound like we were shutting things down for a little bit, which I guess we are,” she shrugged. “And I warned them to take precautions.”
The disappointment in her voice weighed heavily on Sledge. It was uncanny how tuned in he was to her emotions. Her disappointment left a bitter taste in his mouth. “It won’t be forever,” he assured her.
“No, but it will mean losing the biggest contract we ever managed to land.” She laughed softly, shaking her head. “Can you believe I still care anything about that? Even now, when I know it was never right from the beginning. No wonder they offered so much money—they weren’t planning on paying the balance. And here I was thinking we could move into a bigger office, hire more staff members. For all my talk of an executive team, it was only us. We were the company.”
“You still are the company,” Sledge reminded her. He wanted so much to sit next to her, to put an arm around her. Maybe both arms. He craved the weight of her head on his chest, the sweetness of her surrender to his strength.
“Not really,” she sighed. “Not with half of us gone now. How are we supposed to move on from this? How am I?”
“Those are questions you can handle later,” Braxton murmured. Sledge noted how careful he was now not to come off as abrasive or abrupt. “One thing at a time.”
“He’s right,” Sledge agreed with a grateful look toward his friend. “If you think about everything all at once, it will drive you crazy. You can only handle right here and now. Once this is over, you can think about rebuilding your business.”
“You’re right,” she whispered, looking at the floor between her feet. He hated seeing her this way. She was so much stronger than this, maybe even stronger than she gave herself credit for. She’d worked so hard. He tried to imagine how it would feel if he’d worked as hard as she had only for the big break she’d waited for to end up biting her entire company in the ass.
Whoever they were, nothing his team did to them could be worse than what they deserved. Whoever was behind this, whoever was pulling the strings or pushing the buttons. Whoever had decided this girl and her team didn’t deserve to live.
Logan grimaced before speaking, like he knew what he had to say wouldn’t be received well. “Marnie, I know this is confidential, and you don’t feel comfortable talking about it—”
She shook her head, her lips a tight line. “Don’t worry about that,” she assured him. “I’ll tell you whatever it is you want to know.”
“You’re sure?” Sledge asked, surprised.
“If this is their doing—and you all seem to believe it is, and it seems like you know better than I do about things like this—there’s no reason for me to maintain confidentiality. As far as I’m concerned, they broke the agreement way before now. Ask away. What is it you want to know?”
“Do you know anything about the sort of project you were analyzing the data for?”
She shrugged. “A lot of it was obviously coded—meaning, there were no actual names used but rather subject numbers. There were no drug names used either. Only the people running these tests were allowed to know. I know it had something to do with military service members.”
The room went deathly silent. At least, silen
t on the outside, as none of them said a word. Sledge would’ve bet none of them even breathed.
Their wolves, on the other hand, were hardly silent. All of them howled, snarling, reminded of what had been done to them. Sledge looked to Logan, who shook his head slightly. They had to get this under control. Jumping to conclusions wasn’t helping anyone.
“There was nothing specific about the use of test subjects?” Sledge managed to choke out.
She shook her head no. “But I think it had something to do with the effects of combat. I couldn’t help but try to piece things together—it’s just the way my brain works. It’s not enough to accept things at face value. It’s gotten me into trouble in the past,” she admitted with a bit of a smirk.
“I don’t think any of us is any good at accepting things at face value, either,” Zane offered.
“I told myself not to read too much into any of the data since I wasn’t supposed to know what they were trying to hide from us. On the other hand, filling in the blanks meant creating a better set of results. I wanted to be able to provide answers, processes these scientists could use in the future. That was the extra value I was trying to add. That’s how I want my company to stand apart from others. We don’t just process data and spit out results. I’ve always had a knack for putting things together in my head, seeing connections. I visualize things differently than people do in general. That was how I wanted us to be set apart from other companies.”
“That’s admirable,” Jace offered.
Her expression was one of bitterness. “Yeah, and it means I’m marked for assassination. Right? A lot of good it did me to try to go the extra mile.”
“That’s not your fault,” Sledge reminded her. The last thing he wanted to result from this would be the breaking of her spirit. He hated to see the light in her eyes go dim like she was already beaten by whoever had done this.
“Anyway,” she sighed, “I can’t really give you much more than that right now. Especially not when my laptop is in my office. I deliberately left there before going to dinner with…” Again, her gaze hit the floor, her chin trembling. His wolf howled, wanting so much to comfort her while thirsting for the blood of whoever tried to kill her.
“You wanted to leave work at the office.” Logan snickered gently, nodding. “I know how that feels.”
“Beth did the same thing,” she continued in a thin whisper. “She was the one who had more contact with the client than I did. It was extremely rare for her to leave her laptop at the office, but she did it that night. She wanted to step away from work for a little while.”
Sledge’s wolf howled louder than ever, though for a different reason now. “Do you have a security system at the office?”
“Sure,” she chuckled. “I might’ve overlooked it at home, but I’d never leave the office open like that.”
“How do you monitor the system?”
“On my phone. I get a message whenever anybody comes or goes, and if something or someone trips or disables the alarm, an alert comes through. Everything seems okay right now.”
“Just the same,” he murmured, “we should drop by there. Pick up your machine and anything else that seems like it might hold important information, anything worth stealing.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, eyes going round. “I never thought of that. How did I not think of that?”
“You can’t think of everything,” Logan reminded her. “That’s what we’re here for. We can go right now if you want.”
But it was late, and she was clearly exhausted. Even if Sledge wasn’t able to sense her fatigue, he would’ve noticed her swaying slightly back and forth. She might not even have known she was doing it.
“We can go on our own,” Sledge offered, though he knew the response he’d get.
She didn’t disappoint. “Absolutely not. No offense, I trust you guys, but how would it look for all of you to swarm into my office? I’ll go in the morning, first thing.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sledge assured her, and when it looked like she might argue, he shook his head firmly. “It’s not up for discussion. Consider the two of us joined at the hip until this is over.”
Though if the wolf had his way, it wouldn’t end then. She would be his always.
Chapter Fourteen
Just how she was supposed to get any sleep with men all over her house was a mystery.
Shouldn’t they make her feel safer?
They did. It was a lot easier to settle into bed knowing she wasn’t alone. Nobody had to tell her they’d take turns keeping watch, with Braxton and Jace offering to spend the night.
And Sledge. Sledge had already told her there was no getting rid of him, that they would be joined at the hip.
He had no way of knowing how that assurance interested her on more than one level. And she wasn’t about to tell him or show him, either—she still had at least a little self-respect to fall back on. There was no way, especially when the stakes were as high as they were now.
In the morning, Zane and Logan would go out to Alex and Dan’s homes, respectively, to watch from a safe distance as the two men went about their lives. Both of them had sounded shaken up on the phone, both understanding the stakes much quicker than she had. Was she dense? Was that the problem? Maybe neither of them had the same difficulty she did because this business wasn’t their baby. They could afford to take a more objective look at the situation.
Wasn’t she the one who was supposed to be so good at seeing the big picture?
She had failed them. She’d failed all of them.
Beth would tell her she was wrong, that she hadn’t failed anyone, that she wasn’t a mind reader, that she had no way of seeing into the future.
But Beth was dead, wasn’t she? Because of her best friend’s ambition. Because Marnie hadn’t been smart enough to see what was happening from the beginning. She could’ve gone to the police and asked for protection then, and that might’ve saved Beth’s life.
Even now, it was infuriating how there was still part of Marnie’s brain that refused to accept the truth of this situation. Part of her refused to believe there was something so sinister at work. Was it naïveté or stubbornness?
Probably neither. It was probably fear. Nobody wanted to believe they were so vulnerable. Nobody wanted to imagine what might’ve happened if things had gone in just a slightly different direction.
For instance, if there hadn’t been any other car behind them on the road. If Sledge’s team hadn’t witnessed their so-called accident. Things would be starkly different, wouldn’t they? And she would be completely screwed, on her own, not knowing who to trust.
Would she even have made the connection between her work and the so-called accident if it hadn’t been for Sledge? Maybe the police would’ve clued into it after a while, but the police would’ve left a big footprint too. Like Sledge had already pointed out, they weren’t exactly known for their discretion. His team had made it a point to do everything they could to make it look like business as usual at her house. They hadn’t even parked their cars nearby.
They were professionals. She was safe with them. She was safe with Sledge, who promised he would be right next door, keeping watch over the security monitors while she slept. Did he know how much it meant having him right there with only a wall between them?
No way was she about to give in to the fantasy of there being any deeper reason for him to want to be there. She was his client; that was all, and that was how it should be. It wasn’t right for her to feel so close to him when she barely knew him. She had to stop letting her imagination run wild the way it had been since their little meeting in the spare bedroom.
Obviously, he was going to feel closer to her than the rest of them did because he’d been the one to find her in the car. He was protective, the way an older brother would be to his younger sister. He felt like she was his responsibility.
Normally, she would’ve told him to stop thinking that way, would’ve reminded him she wasn’t his resp
onsibility. She was responsible for herself, and she could manage just fine on her own. Yes, her stubbornness and her pride would’ve led her to say things like that.
There was something to be said for relaxing and giving in. She had nothing to gain by fighting, by pushing him away and pretending she didn’t need the help he so generously offered. She needed it desperately, needed him.
But why? That was what she couldn’t figure out as she tossed and turned in the darkness. Why did it have to be him? She could just as easily have ended up with any of the five team members being the one to camp outside her hospital room, with any of them insisting on driving her home and examining the inside of the house for signs of an intruder.
Why was it his hair she wanted to plunge her hands into? Why was it his arms she wanted wrapped around her, his chest she wanted to lay her head against and finally relax, to really and truly let go of the stress and fear and grief and just allow herself to rest?
Why was he the only one who seemed capable of allowing her to feel secure? They were all capable men, intelligent and experienced.
Why was he the one she kept coming back to, then?
This was completely new. Sure, she’d had crushes before. She could remember them—usually older boys since she was always in advanced classes, if not in an entirely different grade, boys old enough to grow their pitiful excuses for mustaches, boys with deeper voices that made them seem so mature, worldly.
They were about as far away from her as the moon, so she’d learned to ignore her little crushes at a young age.
Only now, after her entire world had started to crumble, was she starting to revisit that part of herself, the part she’d shut down before she was even old enough to understand where it came from.
Sledge would never be able to relate. Not somebody like him. It was almost enough to make her feel sorry for the guy—there was no way he’d be able to understand why she’d feel so close to him so quickly. The best she could hope for now was to not make a fool of herself and embarrass both of them.
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 59