Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  She saw the logic in this, and it was enough to make her wish she had never tried escaping from Marnie’s. There she went, trying to do the right thing by someone else, and look where it got her.

  “You know, you think I would know better by now,” she breathed, suddenly very tired and disappointed in herself.

  He frowned, clueless. “What are you talking about?”

  Oh. She’d said it out loud. “You think I would know better than to try to help somebody. It always bites me in the ass in the end.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  She managed to avoid making a comment about him being slow on the uptake, but it wasn’t easy. “If I hadn’t tried to help Marnie by leaving, none of this would be happening.”

  Understanding finally dawned on his face. “Oh, I get it now. And what did you just say to me? Not to think of myself as a hero? You might want to take your own advice.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “We were going to have to move you sooner or later. You know it. Staying at Marne’s was never meant to be a permanent solution. So don’t go thinking you got where you are right now because of, I don’t know, some generous self-sacrifice.”

  “Yeah, fine. Still. If I hadn’t done it, I might be able to sleep alone, right?”

  He lifted a shoulder, a smirk playing over his mouth. “Who’s to say? It was all fine and good to leave you alone at Marnie’s when there were so many of us there.”

  Rather than engage him any further, she stretched out on the bed with a sigh. There was no point. He had her this time.

  “I’ll be right here,” he informed her, spreading a blanket on the floor before tossing a pillow on top. If she wanted to get out of bed, she would either have to shimmy her way down to the foot or step over him.

  He looked up at her, found her studying his arrangement. “And don’t even think about stepping on me,” he warned, and he wasn’t playing. She pulled her eyes away, focusing on the ceiling.

  It was ridiculous, really, the fact that out of everything she had to think about—and there was a lot of it—the one thing she kept returning to was the presence of this man on the floor. She felt jittery suddenly like she’d had too much coffee. She tapped her fingers against the mattress, still stretched out on top of the comforter, chewing her lip. How was she supposed to get any sleep like this?

  “You okay up there?” he asked, and she heard him still arranging himself on his makeshift bed.

  “Just fine. How about you?”

  “Never better,” he grunted, clearly uncomfortable and more than likely frustrated. She couldn’t help but smile.

  “You know you don’t have to sleep there.”

  “Don’t even bother trying to talk me out of it. Again.”

  “I’m just saying. Let’s be reasonable. You have the keys to the car. No way am I escaping from this place on foot. It was one thing back at Marnie’s where she had actual neighbors and the gas station just down the road. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, practically.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And you have the keys to the car. So I couldn’t possibly steal it.”

  “The very fact that you felt it necessary to say that tells me you would be able to take the car somehow. What—are you into hotwiring? Is that something you were trained to do?”

  “I was trained to do all sorts of things,” she snapped, glaring at the ceiling instead of glaring at him.

  “Check and mate.” He sounded so pleased with himself, so sure he’d won this time. How hopelessly full of himself he was.

  “Grow up,” she muttered.

  “Shut up,” he countered. “Some of us want to get some rest.”

  And she would’ve made a bet he never slept very deeply. How did she know? Because she didn’t either. Certain habits never left a person, not habits that were hammered into their heads.

  Which reminded her of something. “How’s your head?”

  “Fine.” She waited for something else, but nothing came. Either he really meant it and she hadn’t done any damage, or he was joking. Come to think of it, there didn’t seem to be much of a wound when he’d looked up at her from the floor. She had a perfect vantage point from there, but she hadn’t seen anything. Or maybe she’d been too busy wrestling the inexplicable horror the announcement of his sharing her room had brought up.

  It was like she was a teenager again, hopeless and helpless, awkward all because somebody was on the floor next to her bed. Somebody very large, who smelled very good.

  And who’d tied her up to a chair, who’d said things to her that almost made her cry. Sure, the tears she’d put on in the kitchen were an act to draw them closer, to remind him how dangerous it was to underestimate her.

  But real tears hadn’t been too far away. She’d fought them back but just barely because so much of what he said was right, so much of it was what she’d known all along.

  “I’m not going to apologize for that,” she muttered, sliding an arm beneath her head. She rolled onto her side, facing side of the bed he was beside. “You know, in case you were expecting one.”

  “Trust me. I wouldn’t make the mistake of expecting an apology from you.”

  “How long do you think this will keep going on?”

  “You mean this endless conversation?”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  For a while, the only thing audible was the frogs outside the house. They were going crazy, those frogs, singing up a storm. She wondered what they had to be so happy about.

  “You have to know what I’m going to say to this,” he finally replied. He sounded tired, frustrated. She knew how it felt. “It’ll last as long as it will last, but it won’t take as long if you’d be a little more helpful.”

  “I’m telling you. There’s nothing else I can do to help. I don’t know their names or where they live or where they work or anything. That’s just not how this kind of work is done.”

  “Then we’re going to be at this for a long time. I guess there’s nothing to be done but wait for them to come for us again.”

  Her chest tightened. “I’m a sitting duck.”

  “So long as they really don’t know the location of this house, you’re okay.”

  “They don’t. At least, not because I told. I know they were going crazy trying to figure out where Marnie had fled to after leaving her house. That much, they did manage to clue me in on.”

  “You mean, not like the whole floodlight situation?”

  She stiffened, a sour taste filling her mouth. “I guess I should’ve expected her to tell you about that.”

  “Don’t blame Marnie,” he was quick to say. “She was the one who theorized that your bosses or whoever were keeping things from you. None of us saw it, but she did.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  He snickered. “Trust me, I’m not overly interested in your feelings. You don’t ever have to wonder if I’m trying to make you feel better. Odds are, I’m not.”

  The bitterness in him took her aback. She actually cringed the way she would have if he’d raised a hand to hit her. Anyway, that was what it felt like he’d done, like he’d reached out and given her a good smack in the back of the head, reminding her to not get too friendly with him. Nothing good could possibly come from it.

  “So, you all sat around and tried to figure out how was so easy to capture me. Right?”

  “Something like that,” he confirmed, sounding cheerful. “Like I said, she was the one who thought of it first. And you were the one who brought it up to her, so it’s not like she was devious, trying to pry information from you.”

  “That’s true,” she admitted in a soft voice. The more she looked back, the more embarrassed she was by how she’d mishandled this entire situation. And why had she done so? Because she’d let her feelings get in the way. The feelings Zane went out of his way to make sure she knew he cared nothing about.

  That was the differe
nce between this job and every other job.

  “There’s something that’s always fascinated me,” she whispered, staring past where Zane rested, looking straight out through the window opposite her side of the bed. It was closed, and thin curtains were drawn in front of it, but there was enough light now in the first minutes past dawn to give her a view of the world outside. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was better than a blank ceiling.

  “What’s that?” Zane asked, not bothering to hide his boredom. He even yawned, loudly, just in case she’d forgotten how little he cared. The child.

  Well, he insisted on sleeping in the same room with her, so he could put up with her ramblings. “Throughout history, and I mean going way back, there are always stories about people who were told not to do something, that everything would be just fine so long as they didn’t do this one, tiny little thing. There’s the whole tree of knowledge thing in the Bible, right? The garden of Eden would’ve been a paradise forever and ever if only Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten from the tree of knowledge. They had one job to do, but they couldn’t manage to do it. Then, there was a lady who got turned into a pillar of salt because she wasn’t supposed to look back at the city being destroyed, where her family was fleeing from. She couldn’t resist. I mean, they were free and clear, having escaped the city before the destruction started. And she knew she wasn’t supposed to look back. She had a husband and daughters, so the stakes weren’t exactly lacking. But what did she do? She turned around, and she looked. Boom. Salt. The end.”

  “Okay…”

  She chose to ignore his obnoxiousness for the time being. “And Pandora and her box. She wasn’t supposed to open it, but she did. And she unleashed all sorts of bad things onto the world. And on and on. I seem to remember a fairytale about a woman who wasn’t supposed to ask for something or do a certain thing or else her baby would be taken from her. I don’t know, it’s late and I’m tired.”

  “Actually, it’s early, and I’m tired, too,” Zane reminded her. “What’s your point?”

  “I’m just the latest in a long line of people who knew they weren’t supposed to do something. I never did before, you know. I never broke the rules. In my whole life, I don’t think I’ve ever broken the rules. Not because I’ve ever been overly fond of authority figures, mind you—I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about me.”

  “Oh, trust me. I would never assume that about you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “But, you know, rules are set for a reason. And it isn’t like anybody had to specifically tell me, like flat-out and openly, not to learn too much about the people I was assigned to. It was one of those instinctual things, you know? I didn’t want to know that there was a person on the other end of my job, that I would be ending an actual person’s life. That was just a complication, and I couldn’t have that. So for the longest time, I stuck to the rules. I played it smart.”

  She let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Until this job.”

  He was quiet for such a long time she thought he might’ve fallen asleep. Rather than say anything and risk the possibility of waking him up—and having him get annoyed with her—she pushed herself up on her arms and leaned over the side of the bed as quietly and carefully as she could.

  And she found him staring up at her. He didn’t look away or act like he was embarrassed at being discovered. There was no moment of awkward tension, both of them clearing their throats or chuckling softly.

  All they did was look at each other. The gray, thin light coming through the window seemed to carve his already sharp jaw into something otherworldly, to turn his eyes into pools of amber liquid like a fine whiskey.

  And if she stared into them for too long, they might have the same effect on her that whiskey would.

  She had to look away first. “Anyway,” she murmured as she settled herself back into her old, favored position, “that’s what makes this job so different. After I ran Beth and Marnie off the road, I couldn’t help myself. I tuned into news reports to see if they would say anything about the crash—I didn’t actually see it, mind you, but I heard it. And… I don’t know. It stuck with me. I couldn’t forget it. Usually, I go home, make myself something to eat or a cup of tea. It wasn’t like I had to work very hard on this one. It wasn’t like gaining entry to her house or a place of business. I only had to drive a car.”

  She closed her eyes, ashamed of herself. This was new; it was all so new. Those feelings might have existed, deep own in her brain, but she’d never given them the chance to take root and bloom into something so… painful, so all-encompassing. It was enough to make her curl into an even tighter ball than usual and wish she were anybody but herself.

  “You could actually go home and fix something to eat after carrying out an assignment?”

  If she thought he was even slightly judgmental, she wouldn’t have answered. She would’ve closed her eyes tighter and pretended to be asleep, and that would’ve been the end of it. She probably would’ve cursed herself for being stupid enough to open up this way, but she eventually would fall asleep and would then never say a word about it upon waking up. It would’ve been just one of those things, a mistake, not worth mentioning again.

  He wasn’t judgmental, though. She didn’t know how she knew. She just did. He was asking not because he thought there was something broken in her, but because—just maybe—he’d never met anybody like himself.

  Which was why she answered with confidence. “Sure. It isn’t that I didn’t care. But, you know, there was never any room to think about the people involved. I knew it would be a mistake, always, to think about them. So I didn’t. I told myself my work was done for the day the way anybody who worked any sort of regular job would do. And yes, depending on if I was hungry or not, I would fix something to eat. Maybe I’d read for a little while or have a glass of wine instead of tea. Maybe I would go to bed early.”

  “And let me guess. You slept straight through the night without any trouble.”

  “I’ve never had trouble sleeping,” she admitted. “I never sleep very deeply, and I guess that’s an old habit that refused to die, but I never had trouble falling asleep.”

  She was practically shaking, she realized when she finished speaking. Why? What did it matter what he thought of her? It wasn’t like she would fall any further down the ladder of his esteem. He hated her, so there would be no love lost. But even knowing that, there was no calming the shaking in her core that reverberated out through her arms and legs as she held her pillow close, feeling stupid and vulnerable and like she should’ve left well enough alone.

  “Me too.”

  That was all he said before the rustling of the blanket told her he was turning over, ready to sleep. Even if he wasn’t ready to sleep, the conversation was over. There didn’t have to be an announcement for her to know it.

  Funny. She was so tired when she first laid down on the bed, and it wasn’t like the fatigue left her. It was still there, weighing down her limbs, making her head sink deeper into the pillow all the time.

  Still, she managed to contradict what she’d confessed to Zane in those early morning moments. It took forever to fall asleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Everything’s quiet here,” Zane murmured into the phone, one eye always on the closed bedroom door.

  “Where is she?” Sledge asked.

  “Sleeping. I don’t think either of us fell asleep until it was past dawn.”

  A knowing snicker. “Really? What were you doing that kept you both up?”

  “Enough,” Zane warned. “As if I would.” Though really, now that Sledge mentioned it, his wolf seemed to latch onto the idea.

  It seemed neither he nor his wolf knew what to do with this girl. What to think of her, how to act around her. Whenever he thought he had her figured it out, she threw him another curveball like she had earlier, opening up, confessing her vulnerability.

  “I thought you were supposed to be with her all the time.”

  “I can’
t just lie there all day. Don’t worry. I’ve checked on her twice, and she was out cold.” So much for being a light sleeper. She hadn’t stirred when the door opened, her soft snores never skipping a beat.

  “You must really have knocked her out.”

  “I swear to God, one more comment like that—”

  “Okay, fine. I’m only kidding. You’re usually pretty good at taking a joke.”

  “I guess I’m not in a joking mood.”

  “And I guess, with the way our luck has been running, she still hasn’t told you anything of value.”

  While Zane knew exactly what Sledge was getting at, he couldn’t help but think of the personal things she’d shared. No, they weren’t of any use to the team, and they wouldn’t get anyone any closer to the end of this painfully long mission.

  And yet, they meant something to him. Not as the person holding her captive, both protecting her and holding her hostage, but as one person relating to another because until that morning, he’d been sure he was the only person alive who could go home and fix something to eat after killing another person.

  All this time, he thought he was broken. Sure, he could laugh and tease; he could find the humor in just about any situation all because he wanted everyone to think he was easy-going, that the fact of their work not affecting him too badly was because he never took anything too seriously and not because something inside him was irrevocably broken.

  She hadn’t known that about him. That wasn’t the sort of thing that could be included in a file, something she might’ve researched at the instruction of her handlers. It couldn’t have been something she said just to get a little closer to him, to earn his trust. She’d been sharing with him, opening herself up, and it just so happened that what she shared rang a bell.

  “No,” he replied before thinking twice. “Actually, that’s not completely true. She left the laptop here, Marnie’s computer. Rather than take it with her, she left it on the coffee table where Marnie left it. That jives with she told us about wanting to help Marnie rather than wanting to find her and report her position back to whoever these people are. I mean, right? It makes sense. She could’ve taken the laptop and sent files to these people or whatever it was they wanted. It seems like coming here to find her was her decision, not theirs.”