Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Listen. You know I’m not talking out of my ass. Don’t you think every single one of us would go out of our heads if we did nothing but think all the time? We’d never get anything done. We’d never get out of bed in the morning. We might not have survived those first days.”

  “You know the wolf would never allow us to end it.” There was a deep, strong core of self-preservation running through all of them. The wolf had to survive and would stop at nothing to make sure that happened.

  Sledge now knew there was something even stronger: the will to protect those the wolf cared for. There was even more of a reason to survive now since without him Marnie would be lost. It might not have been the honest truth, but it felt that way to the wolf.

  “You know what I mean though,” Zane insisted. “Too much navel-gazing isn’t good for none—especially people like us who’ve had really messed up things happen to them.”

  “I wouldn’t call what I was doing navel-gazing.”

  “Since when are you so touchy?”

  “Since I came as close to losing a client today as I ever have. Let’s start there,” he suggested. “And while we’re there, let’s talk about the fact that I got shot and she knows I did, and I have to wait around with a slug in my body until she’s asleep so Doc can cut me open and remove it. Let’s talk about how that slug would’ve hit her if it wasn’t for me getting in the way. And how she wouldn’t be up and walking around the way I am if that were the case.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. And I know I have no idea what it feels like to be you right now—though I can practically hear him howling from miles away,” Zane added.

  “You should be in my head. It’s a goddamn nightmare.” And it was with the wolf in a frenzy all day. Even now, hours later and miles from the scene of the assassination attempt, he was practically foaming at the mouth.

  Zane’s breath caught. “Oh, here we go. There’s a car pulling up in front of the house. Young guy, late-twenties maybe. Nerdy looking.”

  Sledge snickered. “That sounds like the sort of person who’d work with data all day, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, for sure. He was running errands—there are bags in the trunk.”

  “Does he look worried? Nervous?”

  “Not really. I mean, I don’t know him, but he doesn’t give me the sense of being afraid. He probably doesn’t expect anyone to come at him here at home.”

  “I wonder what it’s like to think that?” Sledge snickered.

  “I know. It’s like, must be nice to feel that secure. Do you think Marnie should talk to these guys, let them know how deep this can get?”

  “I’ve suggested it, but she’s nervous about opening this up to them. It’s touchy. And I get it. It would mean giving them the full rundown, which would mean trusting them with some tough truth.”

  “But it could spare their lives.”

  “I know it,” Sledge sighed. “And I was hoping that we’d be quicker tracking this damn assassin—if there isn’t more than one. Now that she’s given me the contact information and I’ve passed it on to Val, I’m hoping we can finally move forward.”

  It was easier talking about this sort of thing, getting away from personal feelings and focusing instead on the work.

  “If anybody can track them down using the contact info, it’s Val. If they offered a master’s degree in finding needles in haystacks, she’d graduate summa cum laude.”

  “Are you kidding? She’d be the dean of students,” Sledge tossed back. “What’s Dan doing?”

  “Going into the house. I sorta feel like a dick sitting here, watching him while I’m not doing anything to help him with all those bags.”

  “If that’s the biggest issue you’re dealing with right now, I’d say things are looking good.” He paused, wondering if he should give voice to his concerns. “It’s not going to be like this for long. They’re gonna have to be clued in. I need to talk her into coming clean with these guys.”

  “She’s already been as honest as she feels comfortable—”

  “Yeah, and how much worse is she gonna feel if something happens to either of them—something we could’ve prevented?” He ran a hand over the back of his neck, where hair stood up. Never a good sign.

  “You think I should go up to the house and talk to the guy now?” Zane asked. The skepticism in his voice was heavy, obvious.

  Which gave Sledge pause. “I don’t know. It seems like the right thing to do, but it might be just as well to watch the house from across the street.”

  “A lot of good it’ll do this guy, or Alex, if somebody comes through the back the way our would-be intruder tried before.”

  “Tried? They got in the first time, remember?” The more they talked about it, the more certain Sledge was of something being wrong. “What do you think Logan will say?”

  “I don’t know. He probably won’t be a huge fan of my doing anything without his go-ahead. I could call and check in with him first, though you’re lead on the mission. Don’t forget that. This is sort of your baby now.”

  He didn’t know if he liked the idea or hated it worse than anything else. Yes, he wanted to be lead. He wanted to be the only hero in Marnie’s life.

  But being lead came with a flip side, as everything did. If something went south, it would be his fault. Marnie could blame him just as easily as she could praise him for doing a good job.

  If she was still alive and well by the time this was over. He’d never met a challenge he couldn’t face and overcome—but the stakes had never been this high, either. He’d never cared this much for one of their clients. Or for anyone at all.

  “Yeah,” he decided and was glad to hear the firmness in his response. “Yeah, I say go up to the house. She’ll probably be pissed, but we don’t have time to worry about that. If she’s pissed, she’ll have to take it up with me.”

  “Remind me to be around if and when that happens.”

  “Shut it,” Sledge warned. He heard Zane open, then close the door to his truck.

  He then heard what sounded like the roar of a freight train. It was loud enough to force him to hold the phone away from his ear. “Zane? Zane! What happened?” he shouted, wondering if his friend could hear him.

  “Sledge?” Marnie ran down the stairs. “What’s wrong? I heard you shouting.”

  He held up a hand to silence her. “Zane? Talk to me, brother. What’s going on? Just tell me you’re okay.”

  “Oh, no,” Marnie whispered. He heard rather than saw her sit on the sofa. “No, no, not him, too.”

  “Zane!” he shouted, noting screams in the background. No way was this happening. No way was Zane…

  “I’m here.” Zane was breathless. “Holy shit. The whole place went up, knocked me flat. I was halfway across the street when it happened.”

  “Went up?”

  “I mean it exploded, man. It exploded. The house. It’s gone.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “He’s sure?”

  How many times had she asked that question? How many times had she rolled her eyes at herself for asking it? Not literally but inside her head. Over and over.

  “He’s sure,” Sledge said, just like he’d been saying for the last fifteen minutes. Probably the longest fifteen minutes of her life. “He was there when it happened. He was about to go up to the house to talk with Dan when it went off.”

  Zane could have been killed too. Maybe it was wrong, but that barely made a blip on her consciousness. How could it when she’d lost somebody else? A team member. Somebody who might’ve been a friend if she was a normal person, the sort of person who let people get close to her, who didn’t close herself off from the world.

  Dan was a good guy too, always friendly, always interested in her. Maybe he’d been more than professionally interested—the idea had occurred to her more than once, but she’d pushed it away. There were more important things to think about, to worry about.

  Besides, she wasn’
t the sort of person who would make a good girlfriend. She’d told herself this, that she was being kind to him by not noticing him that special way.

  “It was wrong of me not to tell him,” she muttered to herself, disgusted. “I should’ve told him. I should’ve told them both.”

  “Alex is fine. Logan got him out of there, giving him just a few minutes to pack up his things. He’s in a safe house now. He’ll be fine.”

  But Dan wouldn’t. Dan had gone up with his house, probably blown into a million bits. What had his final moments been like? All things considered, she guessed the best they could hope for was that it had been quick. That he hadn’t known what was coming.

  Tears coursed down her cheeks, tears that she didn’t bother brushing away. Why bother when the tears never stopped flowing? Besides, there were other things to do with her hands.

  Such as grabbing anything he could think to take with her and shove it into a suitcase.

  “How is Zane now?” she thought to ask, pulling T-shirts from a drawer at random while Sledge watched from the bed as she slowly lost her mind.

  “He’ll be fine. He went to headquarters so Doc could check him out, but he seemed okay when I talked with him. He had only just gotten out of the car—he wasn’t that close to the house yet. Maybe another thirty seconds or so and it could’ve been a different story.”

  She dropped a pair of socks on the floor and had to force her hands to stop shaking so she could pick them up. “That would’ve been my fault.”

  “No, it wouldn’t have, and if you said that as a way of testing whether I would’ve blamed you had that happened, let me ease your mind. I wouldn’t blame you because you wouldn’t have been the one to rig whatever explosive blew the house up. That wasn’t you. You didn’t do this.”

  She didn’t have it in her to respond. She only shook her head, mumbling to herself, asking where she’d last seen her favorite pair of jeans, where her pajamas had ended up after them out of the dryer. It was so hard to fold things, to get them just the right way so she wouldn’t look like a mess the entire time she stayed at the safe house.

  What a freaking joke—caring how she looked while she hid out in a safe house like there’d be TV cameras on her or interviews or any contact with anybody who wasn’t a member of Sledge’s team. Was she losing it? Was it finally happening?

  “Marnie. I mean it. None of this is on you.”

  “Eventually, I’m going to have to believe it is. At least this part. No, I didn’t rig the explosive.” She stopped what she was doing for a moment, turning to him. There was pain etched in his face, and she took that on herself too. There was no use running away from her guilt this time. “I should’ve trusted him. I should’ve trusted him and Alex both. I was playing a game with their lives. The minute I found out about the burglar, I should have told them to go someplace safe, to get as far away as they could until this blew over, but I didn’t because I didn’t trust them enough. I trusted them to work with me. I trusted them with our clients and their information and all that.”

  “Right.”

  “But I didn’t trust them when it counted, and it cost Dan his life.”

  “Dan didn’t have to stay home,” Sledge pointed out. “He could’ve read this for what it was and gotten out of town on his own. These are supposed to be smart people you’re working with. He could’ve been smarter about it too. Now, I’m not trying to blame him,” he added when Marnie shot him a look. “Still, it was up to him. He chose to stay. He might’ve chosen to stay even if you had painted a clear picture of what was going on.”

  “I guess we’ll never know, will we?” she asked, miserable.

  “No, we won’t. Come on, you need to hurry up.”

  Normally, she would’ve smarted a little at his brusqueness. This was not an ordinary situation, however, and she saw the truth in that reminder. They had to hurry up. They had to get her to a safe house just as soon as they possibly could.

  A safe house. Not her house. Not hers.

  Her house meant so much. Years of work, years of dreaming, months on end trying to get everything to look perfect just like she saw it in her head.

  A lot of good it’d do her if she ended up dead.

  The idea that the house could blow up just as easily as Dan’s had, whether or not she was present for it, lingered in the back of her mind as she tossed a pair of sneakers into her suitcase. Whoever was behind this could do it just to send a message. She might never step foot inside ever again.

  It was surprising, the way this notion didn’t do much to upset her. It barely made a dent on her at all, barely registered. Maybe part of her didn’t believe it was possible, didn’t want to imagine something that terrible.

  But maybe, just maybe, certain things were beginning to crystallize. It took an unimaginable crisis like the one she was going through to put things in order, to clear up what was important and what wasn’t. Sure, her home was important, but she could always find another one. If she had to, she could move anywhere—years of being frugal had left her with other options.

  There were times when a person had to let go of the things that used to be so important, even the center of their world.

  If she lived through this, her life would never be the same, and she knew it. In a way, no matter how this turned out, part of who she thought she was would die. It just had to. How could she go back to the way things were before, to the way she saw life before this?

  Sledge waited for her downstairs while she grabbed a few things from the medicine cabinet and the vanity, tossing them into a small carry-on sized bag before running downstairs. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes since the explosion, yet here she was already packed up and ready to leave. Sledge’s group worked fast, even when one of them had almost lost his life.

  The ride passed by in a blur. She wasn’t exactly trying to pay attention to where they were going, guessing it might be better for her not to know exactly where they ended up—not that she even needed to know.

  Even now, in the middle of the longest nightmare she’d ever suffered through, she saw the humor in that. The ultimate type-A personality, the girl who’d jumped up and down and clapped her hands when her best friend got her a label maker for her birthday, the one who always had to do the planning, who always had to be in charge, didn’t care one way or another if she knew where she was going.

  Beth would find this hilarious.

  When the car stopped in the middle of a back road flanked on both sides by sparse woods, she sat up and took notice. “What’s happening?” She hadn’t exactly expected a cabin in the woods.

  Sledge didn’t say a word, choosing to nod out the windshield. It was then that she noticed a little compact car sitting maybe fifty feet farther ahead. Out of the car came Jace, and he didn’t look happy.

  “We’re switching cars here.” Sledge didn’t give her a chance to catch her breath before he was out, reaching into the backseat to grab her bags. Of course, somebody might be trailing the truck. It made more sense to continue their drive in something less conspicuous.

  The two men exchanged a few tense words before exchanging keys and going their separate ways. The tension was palpable—and why wouldn’t it be? They’d almost lost one of their own.

  Marnie had the feeling it was more than that. Dan hadn’t been one of their clients, not technically, but they were trying to look after him, and he died. Maybe they were asking themselves if they’d been wrong to listen to her, to follow her wishes. She had to wonder whether they would ever give her a say in their plans again.

  She realized it didn’t matter. Her judgment about this entire situation had been wrong from the get-go. She clearly didn’t have a clue how to navigate this situation. It was better for them to take over.

  They continued the drive in silence, their new car much smaller than Sledge’s truck. It meant his arm brushing against hers over and over—he was so big that it was impossible to avoid coming into contact with him without pressing herself a
gainst the door. “Sorry,” he muttered at one point after bumping her with his elbow when making a turn.

  “You don’t have to apologize. You’re saving my life.”

  “Let’s hope, anyway.”

  “Please, don’t start doubting yourself now,” she murmured with a soft laugh. “Where would I be without you?”

  “Honestly, until we find whoever’s doing this, I can’t bring myself to have much faith in my skills.”

  “Says the man who just saved me from being shot to death earlier today.”

  “Even so. We can’t keep putting Band-Aids on the wound. We need to put all of this to rest for once and for all.” It was practically a growl. He might as well have been an animal, something wild and fierce and murderous—murderous not because it wanted to be but because it had to be.

  “You’re not going to get an argument out of me,” she assured him with another soft laugh. There was no humor in it—how could there be? She was more terrified than she’d ever been in her entire life. Just when she thought she couldn’t possibly be more afraid, something happened to prove her wrong.

  “I just want you to know that I appreciate everything you’ve done,” she murmured, staring down at her folded hands because she couldn’t bear to look at him. She would cry if she did, and she was so tired of crying. She doubted she had any tears left.

  “I appreciate that,” he murmured back in that low, growly voice of his.

  It wasn’t another five minutes before he turned into a cute little cul-de-sac. If she’d plugged the words All-American neighborhood into a search engine, it probably would’ve brought up an image like the one she was currently in the middle of. Modest, two-story houses, all of them painted white or pale yellow or light blue, all of them with porches and some with American flags out front. There was a basketball hoop in one driveway, a pair of bikes lying on their sides in another. She could see a swing set in the backyard of the house whose driveway they pulled into.