Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  There was no time to fire off a smart response or any response at all. He left it at that, swinging the door shut behind him, leaving her alone.

  What was with these guys? Had she lost her touch? She must have, or else why wouldn’t they believe her? It was one thing for that Zane person to scoff or roll his eyes. He hated her; it was obvious.

  She hadn’t gotten that feeling from Logan, but he hadn’t believed her either.

  Maybe she’d finally met her match.

  The thought made her heart sink as she slid down the bed until her head hit the pillow. She stared up at the ceiling, wondering if this was the end of the road.

  And if it was, where she was supposed to go from here?

  Chapter Three

  “Her name is Aimee.”

  Zane stared at his team leader, who’d just announced this with all the pride and ceremony he’d expect from someone announcing they’d just cured cancer like it was such a huge deal for her to have shared her name.

  “Okay,” he murmured when it was clear Logan was waiting for a response.

  “I just thought you would want to know since you insist on being the person to deal with her.” Logan took a bottle of water from the fridge, silently offering one to Zane, who shook his head.

  “I don’t like the way you’re making me sound,” he admitted.

  “How am I making you sound?”

  “Like a little kid who refuses to listen to his elders.”

  Logan snickered after drinking half a bottle at once. “I don’t know that I would take it that far.”

  “Even if that’s not how you mean to sound, it’s how you sound.”

  Logan leaned against the counter, and he wasn’t snickering anymore. “Are you sure this isn’t because you feel guilty for something?”

  “What do I have to be guilty over?” Zane asked, looking around like he was confused. “Last time I checked, I wasn’t the one who went around killing a bunch of people, then acted like I deserved a freaking award because my conscience got the better of me. That’s her. She’s the one doing that.”

  “We never imagined this would be easy,” Logan reminded him in a quieter voice. “And for the record, I think Sledge was right to want to bring her here.”

  “What difference does it make if we never learn anything from her?”

  “We’ll never know unless we manage to get through to her, will we? There’s still a chance. If she wasn’t with us, they would be no chance. You see what I mean?”

  Yes, he saw with Logan meant—but he didn’t have to like it. “So what you’re saying is I’m making a mistake with her.”

  “I think you need to calm him down if you can.” No need to explain who he meant.

  Was that the problem? His wolf? Zane nodded in acknowledgment. “Yeah. He doesn’t like her very much.”

  Logan’s eyes widened. “You sure about that? Because from where I’m standing and from what I’ve heard in my head, it’s the opposite.”

  “Wait. What? What are you trying to say?”

  Logan held his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, I don’t know if he wants to rip her in half or…” He snickered. “… Rip her in half. It’s deafening. You don’t hear it?”

  “I mean, yeah, I do.” And it was enough to give him a headache. “But trust me, he’s not interested in that. Neither of us is.”

  “You’re sure? You’re not just telling yourself that?”

  It was infuriating. “And if I was? What does it matter? She’s up there. She won’t talk, and I’d be just fine if we left her on the side of the road somewhere and forgot she exists because she’s not doing us any good, lying there, acting like we’re here to wait on her hand and foot.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Logan admitted with a grimace. “I can’t even say whether I believe her name is Aimee or not.”

  “It probably isn’t.”

  “Just the same,” Logan continued, giving him a look, “let’s try to keep an open mind. We have to try to build up some trust with her. Remember, no matter the façade she puts on, no matter how she wants to tease you and match wits, she’s terrified. This is all an act. We have to tap into that fear, remind her of how she felt after she crashed her vehicle. She was desperate, begging for help. She knew they would come after her next, especially after what she’d done. Remember that. Remind her, flat out, if you need to.”

  Oh yes. He would remind her. He would rub it in her face. After everything she’d done, to sit there and act coy, to laugh in his face. The balls on this woman. She should’ve been on her knees thanking them from the bottom of her heart for saving her life.

  “What are you thinking?” Logan asked. “And don’t even think about making up a story because I can see it on your face.”

  “Then why bother asking?”

  “I’m just curious. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s nothing very nice.”

  “I was just thinking how nice it would be to see her suffer the way she’s made other people suffer.”

  Sledge entered the kitchen, nodding. He must’ve heard on his way in from the backyard. “You know I can’t disagree with that,” he grimaced.

  “Just promise me you won’t do anything until I get back,” Logan sighed. “I’ll try to be back as soon as I can.”

  “What, you think you need to be here to oversee us?” Zane tried to joke, but even he could tell it fell flat.

  Logan only shook his head. “Not exactly, though it couldn’t hurt.”

  Zane turned to Sledge, who could only shrug. “It seems like just when I feel like I’ve gotten a grip on this life, something happens to throw everything out of whack. It’s like starting all over again from square one.”

  “I know what you mean,” Zane agreed, just about as close to misery as he’d been in recent memory. “It’s like starting all over. I have no idea how to navigate this. By all rights, we should hate her. Right? I mean, she’s the enemy. She’s who we were after all that time, the one responsible for everything Marnie went through.”

  He thought for sure Sledge would agree, wholeheartedly, that he had an ally—though why he should’ve thought of someone on his team as being anything other than an ally was completely new. They were brothers, linked by shared experience and trust and the fact that they were a pack. True, they hadn’t chosen to be—though did any animal choose to be a member of its pack? Or were they born into it? None of them had been born the way they were, exactly, though the blood used to turn them into what they’d become had more than likely been drawn from a single shifter.

  Which made them family, blood bound.

  Still, Sledge was the only one of the lot who understood even a fraction of Zane’s mixed feelings toward the girl upstairs. No, not a girl. He couldn’t think of her that way.

  She was an assassin, a cold-blooded killer who did what she did to make a lousy buck. Or maybe a lot more than a buck. He imagined the people she worked for, the ones behind the murders of Marnie’s team and the experiments conducted on him and his team, paid through the nose for such services.

  Though they probably went and stopped the processing of any pending money transfers once they’d gotten all they were going to get out of a particular contractor. Why waste money that would never be spent?

  He was still thinking of those people—nameless, faceless, no easier to pin down than smoke—when Sledge pointed out a cold, hard truth. “She’s not the one we were after. Not her in particular. It’s them. All of them. The people responsible for this, for us. She’s a cog in the machine, nothing more.”

  “A cog that pulled a trigger. Repeatedly.” Zane fixed him with a hard look. “I know you haven’t forgotten about that or the bullet Doc pulled out of your back.”

  Sledge growled, deep and low in the back of his throat. “You think I could forget about it? You’re not the one who went through that shit.”

  “Right. It’s just that I’d think, you know, you’d be better inclined to want her dead.”

  To his surprise,
Sledge laughed at this. “I wouldn’t go that far. Not yet. We do need her, whether you like it or not. Hell, I don’t like it either. None of us does—and none of us has to. It isn’t our job to like it. It’s our job to get the job done. Getting the job done right now means getting the information we need from her without letting ourselves get all wrapped up in our opinion of what she does for a living.”

  “I know, I know,” Zane grumbled.

  “You sure you should be the one taking point on this?” Sledge studied him, eyes narrowing. “You know I could easily step in.”

  “What? You think I’m not capable of managing this on my own?”

  “Never said that.”

  “You flat-out offered to step in.”

  “Not because you can’t handle it,” Sledge insisted. “Because it seems like this is taking a bigger toll on you than you’re ready to admit. Hey, I get it. I do. Which is why I’m offering.”

  It still got under his skin, the thought of his team doubting him. And all because of her, lying up there, probably plotting how she’d screw with his brain the next time he questioned her.

  A handful of cold water over the back of his neck helped cool him off, but not entirely. Not even close. “No,” he grunted, leaning over the sink, applying more water. “No, it’ll be fine. I just have to figure out the angle of attack is all. She’s slippery, but she’s also scared—I know this. If we were to throw her out, they’d be on her like vultures on a carcass. The point is how to get that through to her.”

  “You’ll find a way.” Sledge slapped him on the back, a reassuring gesture, before grabbing water from the fridge and heading for the yard. “Meanwhile, I’ll go back to helping in the garden because it evidently matters whether the roses are fertilized or not. How did it come to this?”

  Zane had to laugh at his friend’s dirt-stained jeans, the soil caked under his nails. “Just think: if we ever split up, you could get a job at a nursery.”

  “Might be a nice change, all things considered.” Sledge was whistling as he stepped outside, and Zane could barely hear the low, affectionate tones of a conversation between him and Marnie.

  How could any of them act like this was just another day when it was anything but?

  How could any of them even think straight with that killer under the same roof?

  He tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling as if that would let him see through the wood slats up into the room beyond. What was she plotting? How could he get through to her quickly?

  And why the hell wouldn’t his wolf shut up?

  Chapter Four

  “It’s time for us to get serious.”

  Aimee looked up from her book. Granted, she hadn’t seen a single word since she’d heard him coming up the stairs, but it was crucial that she affect an air of relaxation like she couldn’t have cared less that he’d come in the room or that he thought it was time to get serious.

  It had been hours since their last encounter, hours in which she’d tried to distract herself by reading. No matter how hard she concentrated on the book—a paperback mystery, dogeared and worn at the edges—there was always a little voice in the back of her head reminding her he’d be back.

  Just how she’d known it would be Zane in particular and not one of the others was a mystery. Instinct, maybe, or plain common sense.

  “Serious about what?” she asked, sliding a bookmark between the pages to keep her place. She was deliberate in setting the book down on the nightstand before turning to him.

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “Who’s playing games? Does it look like I’m playing games? I’m lying here in bed because I was in a crash two days ago, thanks to you. This might be the furthest I’ve ever been from playing a game.”

  “You’re deliberately evasive.” He closed the door before leaning against it, folding his arms over his chest. Big arms. Bigger chest. One thing she’d never figured out was how all the guys in the agency or firm or whatever they called themselves were so damn big. Did they hand out steroids after every meeting? Maybe their meetings were held in the gym.

  Why not? None of them seemed particularly bright or else they would’ve done a better job protecting their client. Dragging her out in the middle of a hurricane when the roads were closed was hardly the brightest idea.

  They might’ve had physical strength, but they didn’t have intelligence. She had that on them.

  “No offense, but I don’t owe you the things you wanna know,” she shrugged. “And I’m not new to this whole process. You weren’t my first assignment. So if you expected me to fold up after the first question, I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

  “Don’t waste your breath.”

  “Suit yourself,” she shrugged again, settling back against the pillows. It was a nice room, really. Pretty. Comfortable, too. Not exactly a suite, not like some of the places she’d stayed in while on assignment. But homier.

  “We need to know what you know. It’s pretty simple. You wanna stay here? Get taken care of? Fine. But you can’t lie around, all smirky and innocent like we don’t all know you for who and what you are.”

  Her chest went tight, but she didn’t give any hint of it. “Is that supposed to make me feel bad? Is that what this is all about? I’m lying here, reflecting on what terrible things I’ve done and wondering if there’ll ever come a time when I can make up for all the wrong I put out in the world?”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” he asked, one eyebrow quirking up like he didn’t believe it.

  “Is that what you want?” she challenged. “Because if it is, no.”

  He chuckled. “Okay, fine. Nobody’s asking you to be repentant. But we need reciprocity. We need to know about you, what you were doing, who you were doing it for.”

  “Why?” she asked, her head tipping to the side. “You saved your girl from getting killed, and you hid the last member of her team someplace nobody’s been able to find him yet. At least, that’s how it was as of my last update. So what’s the big deal about who was doing it? You won.”

  “You consider this winning?” he asked, frowning like he didn’t believe it. “You said it yourself in the car when you were begging and pleading for somebody to help you, pitifully, because you were on your own and you knew your life was as good as over if one of your friends caught up to you. They’re not going to stop—not until they get what they want—which means you’re screwed just as much as we still are.”

  He tipped his head to the side, studying her. “Then again, maybe you’re screwed worse because you’re a traitor.”

  “But dead is dead. You can’t kill one person any worse than you kill somebody else. So it doesn’t matter if a person is a traitor or just a target. Dead’s dead. And they want you dead for whatever reason.”

  Another quirk of the eyebrow. “You don’t know why?”

  “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

  “You don’t know,” he grunted, rolling his eyes. “Stop playing. If you knew, you’d tell me so.”

  “Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t.”

  “Stop that,” he snapped, his face red now.

  “Don’t worry,” she snickered. It was almost funny how easy it was for her to cut through him. Did he have any idea how easy a target he made himself out to be? “They already know all there is to know about you. All of you.”

  What did she expect? How did she imagine him replying? Questions? Demands? Would he break out in a cold sweat, glaring at her, ordering her to tell him everything?

  Or would he try to be the good guy? Would he try to tap into her softer side—assuming she had one? He would, too. Men normally did. It was a last-ditch effort most of the time when all else failed. Surely, she had ovaries and a uterus and all that stuff, so it meant she had a heart of gold underneath all the layers she’d wrapped around herself over the years.

  It was almost painfully predictable.

  Only this guy wasn’t predictable. He didn’t beg. He didn’t try to get through to her so
fter side.

  No. He crossed the room in roughly two strides, took her by the shoulders before she had the chance to even know what was happening, hauled her off the bed like she weighed nothing and shoved her against the closest wall.

  The impact knocked the wind from her lungs—not that she could breathe that easily in the first place with him being so unhinged.

  Even the dim fear which sparked in the back of her mind—yes, it was there; she was still capable of fear—was nothing compared to a brighter, warmer flame. He was interesting. This was interesting. For the first time in forever, something had changed.

  Only the firm knowledge that these guys needed her just as much as she needed them kept the fear from taking over. He couldn’t go too far with this little game of intimidation or else he’d risk his chance of getting any information. She wouldn’t be much good to him or any of them if she was unconscious or worse.

  So she knew she had the upper hand.

  At least, that was what she told herself, pressed head-to-toe against a wall with a man who had to weigh twice what she did looming over her, practically baring his teeth. If he’d licked his chops, it would’ve completed the image of the big, bad wolf menacing the little girl.

  Except she wasn’t a little girl, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been menaced which was why she smiled up at him. “You must’ve missed school the day they taught diplomacy,” she observed brightly, which of course only got her an extra little shake, a little reminder of who was in charge.

  “What? You think this is some kind of game?” he growled, breathing heavily. “You think this is funny?”

  “I don’t think any of this is funny,” she assured him, the smile sliding away. “Not even close.”

  “So why are you acting like this? Why pretend this is a joke? You’re wasting time. We don’t have endless amounts of it to waste.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “Why, then? Is it because you’re scared of them?” His snarl turned into a smirk. “You wanna drag this out as far as you can all because we’re protecting you? Is that it?”