“No?” he asked, sounding surprised. “If there’s anything holy in the world, I’d think it’s that. There’s nothing so pure, and I don’t think I’ve ever, ever been as right with the world as I was about thirty seconds ago.”
“You make a good point.” She raised herself off him with a groan, then collapsed. He joined her a moment later, flopping on his back.
He was even more glorious now that she’d been with him, now that she knew him in a way she hadn’t before. She could’ve looked at him all night.
One quick look at his face told her he wasn’t thinking along the same lines. “What is it?”
“I was just thinking.” He reached out, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. “Wouldn’t it be just my luck to find you now, to find this, just for you to be taken away?”
“Don’t even think that!” she gasped.
“It’s just that there’s no telling what’ll happen now. What if this is war? What if they come at us harder than ever? I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Nothing will happen to me.” She grabbed his hand, clasping it in her own. “I know them too. I know how they think. They made a bad enemy, babe. And with Logan meeting the hacker, the odds are looking better all the time. We’ll get through this.”
She flopped down on her back next to him. “And then we can start talking about getting you in touch with your family again.”
There was a catch in his throat when he whispered, “I love you.”
She smiled, satisfied, knowing she’d just taken the first step toward the life she never dared dream of before now, before him.
PART V
Chapter One
“I don’t like this.”
Logan snickered softly, keeping his head lowered so he wouldn’t be quite so obvious to anyone passing by the almost too-cute sidewalk cafe. The whole point of this little exercise was to give the impression of being alone. Unobserved.
In other words, nonthreatening.
“No more than I like it,” he murmured, touching a finger to the earpiece through which the voices of his team members poured one at a time as they confirmed their locations around the café where Logan had agreed to meet someone whose identity had alluded him for so long.
“Last time I checked, we don’t make deals with terrorists.” Serious as always, Braxton snarled in frustration.
“Don’t you think the word terrorist is a little over the top?” Zane asked, trying to add the levity he normally did in situations such as this. He chuckled lightly. “He’s just a hacker, whoever he is.”
“A hacker capable of hacking us,” Logan reminded them. “Which makes them dangerous and unpredictable.”
“That’s true,” Sledge murmured from his position several tables away from where Logan waited. He was just visible in the periphery of Logan’s vision, flipping through a book. His ball cap was pulled low, concealing eyes that Logan knew would scan the area again and again to ensure their safety. “Who could have predicted them sending helpful files to us?”
Yes, and that was something Logan still couldn’t wrap his mind around. From the beginning, ever since this intrepid hacker had started screwing around with them, he imagined they wanted something from Wolf Shield Investigations. Information, classified stuff.
Classified information about him, his people. He’d always imagined there would be a bounty on their heads, one put up by the very people who’d forced the group to run, to flee the lab in which they’d been kept for months, the lab in which they’d been turned from normal men—elite soldiers, yes, but still average humans—into what they currently were, what they would always be until the day they died.
Logan’s wolf paced in his mind, growling all the while. It was like having his own personal thunderstorm in his brain. He sniffed the air, the scents of coffee and pastry, fried potatoes and eggs wafting his way. So many people, all of them enjoying brunch on a crisp morning in late summer, an unusually beautiful day for that time of year.
This was always the sort of weather Logan liked best. Summer’s heat and humidity would soon be a thing of the past. He felt energized, clearheaded.
A shame he couldn’t actually enjoy it, however, seeing as how he’d been lured to this café in order to meet the hacker who’d been driving them to distraction for months.
He’d been given an order to come alone. No surprise there; anyone would make the same demand. He imagined this hacker knew them well enough by now to know their order would not be followed. Members of his team didn’t leave their brothers alone unprotected. They weren’t only brothers in combat.
They were a pack. The pack was only as strong as its weakest member. None of them were weak; none of them would even have considered backing down from a challenge, and they didn’t leave each other alone, especially not in situations like this one.
Whoever the hacker was, they were crafty. He of all people knew what it had taken to create what was supposed to be a hacker-proof network. He’d spared no expense, had taken no precautions, and he wasn’t too proud to know there were things he simply didn’t know. He couldn’t be an expert in everything. That was where Hawk came in, one of the most highly skilled and respected technicians in the world.
It took a special sort of person to work with Wolf Shield. Military service was always a plus, along with honor and discretion. Hawk was one of the few people they trusted with their secret, along with Val and Doc.
It was Doc who’d hooked him up with the computer whizzes who ran the office, performing feats of wonder, finding the unfindable, hacking the unhackable. While the five wolf shifters who comprised the team, Logan included, put their lives and safety on the line every time they accepted a new client, it was the people who worked behind the scenes who were always responsible for their success. Logan knew he never could have gone as far in his business without them.
Was all that in jeopardy?
He shifted in his chair, suddenly uncomfortable and not because the seat was not cushioned. These people relied on him, depended on him for their livelihoods and their lives. Whoever this hacker was, they were onto something big, something that could change the entire trajectory of their futures.
He was the one charged with making the call. Could this person be trusted? And whatever they’d found, would it be worth pursuing?
The fact was they didn’t have much choice.
“How are my eyes in the sky?” he asked, careful to keep his gaze downcast so as not to give away the position of the assassin on the roof.
Ex-assassin, he supposed, since it seemed Aimee had turned over a new leaf. She didn’t want to kill anyone, not ever again if it could be helped. Her skill as a sniper would come in handy should this hacker stop playing nice, however, and she’d agreed to do whatever it took to keep her mate and his pack safe. It was always good to cover every base.
“All clear from up here,” Aimee murmured. She sat above him, over his left shoulder, at the corner of the cafe that overlooked the entire intersection to Logan’s left.
He checked his watch. Eleven twenty-five. He had another five minutes to wait, minutes that he knew would stretch out into eternity.
His phone was set on the table before him beside his latte and a half-eaten croissant. The screen lit up a moment after he checked his watch, drawing his attention immediately. I said I wanted to see you alone.
“Shit.” His eyes darted around. “They’re onto us.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Zane snarled. It took a lot for him to drop his happy-go-lucky attitude—he’d only just gotten it back, in fact, once he’d decided it was easier to accept Aimee as his fated mate that it was to hate her for nearly getting him killed.
“Okay, okay, we expected this,” he grunted. There were times like right now when being the level-headed leader wasn’t the role he wanted. He wanted to overturn his table, to let the wolf burst free of this human skin and tear the café to pieces.
Instead, he drew a deep breath. “Val, any hit on who
sent the text?”
“Give me a second,” she whispered, and he imagined her seated at her desk back at headquarters. She was hooked into his phone, anticipating something like this.
“Whoever they are, they’re sharp,” Sledge muttered. He was still looking down at his book, but Logan knew his eyes would be tuned more sharply than ever to anyone who appeared out of place.
“They know what to look for, what to expect,” Logan murmured, his lips barely moving. He picked at his croissant, doing everything he could to appear casual. Unrattled. “I’m still going with my original theory that they’re military like us. They’ve got that sort of mind, the ability to anticipate our next move. It tells me they’re used to thinking this way.”
“Wouldn’t it be a kick in the head if I’d crossed paths with them sometime?” Hawk asked. He would be at Val’s side, no doubt, the two of them working together the way they always did. It was like they shared a brain sometimes—enough to make Logan wonder if their relationship was purely romantic or if they somehow got a charge out of competing with each other. They constantly pushed each other to be better, quicker, smarter.
He envied that.
“You mean if you trained the same time they did?” Braxton asked. He was across the street, sitting with a cup of coffee and a newspaper on a bench near the curb.
“Message them back, Logan,” Val murmured. He could hear the clicking of keys which her fingers must be flying over. “I want to see the ping when the message is received by our new friend.”
Even with the heavy sarcasm in her voice, Logan shrank away from her use of that word. This person wasn’t a friend. If they were and if they had information which might help his team, they would’ve come right out with it. Friends didn’t play games of cat and mouse, not if they had any understanding of the stakes involved which he could only imagine this person must.
After all, they’d sent the information on Aimee’s mother and her supposed disappearance years earlier. They must have known of her involvement with the shadow group that Logan and his team had run from and were still running from. If they knew of her involvement, it stood to reason that they knew what the group was all about—and it stood to reason further that they would conclude Logan’s group ran from them because they’d been screwed over.
Though the term screwed over didn’t come close to scratching the surface. It was nowhere near the truth. Their lives had been destroyed, completely upended, and what did they get in return?
They were marked for termination. The screw-ups at the top of the food chain had called the shots, deciding their screw-up couldn’t be left out in the open—as if they weren’t dealing with people, as if it wasn’t their fault that human lives had been irreparably damaged.
He could only imagine that the hacker, whoever they were, was aware of all of this, that this was the reason why they’d called for this meeting to finally meet face-to-face after so many months of hide and seek, to announce once and for all that they were well aware of the nightmare life had become after those painful, confusing, horrifying weeks in the lab.
He picked up his phone as Val instructed and fired back a quick message. Not much I can do about the other people around, he typed before hitting send. “Sent,” he whispered for Val’s benefit.
“Yes, I see it,” she whispered. He still found it amusing, the fact that she whispered as if anybody could hear her. He practically had to sit on his hands to keep himself from demanding she work faster, to tell him who it was who’d received his message and where they were located in relation to him.
It burned him up knowing they were at the mercy of this unseen, unknown person—a phantom up until then, a phantom who was about to become very real. How many times had he tried to imagine what this person must look like? How many times had he tried to put himself in their place, to think as they did?
And where had it gotten him? Absolutely nowhere. Failure wasn’t something he took well—it wasn’t in his nature to grin and bear it. He supposed there weren’t many people in the world who would hold up well under what he and his team had already experienced.
If anything, they were practically superheroes for adjusting as well as they had and even more so for the fact that they’d chosen to use their talents and skills to help others rather than allowing a cruel twist of fate to harden them against the rest of the world.
Careful there, a voice rang out in his head. Try not to break your arm patting yourself on the back. He knew the voice, had heard it since he was a kid. At least, he heard it in his head; the person the voice belonged to hadn’t been alive for a long, long time. They tended to pop up at the least convenient moments.
“Crap.”
Val brought him back to the present moment in a hurry. “What do you have?” he asked.
“It’s hard to believe, but it seems like they’re right next to you. I can’t pinpoint it down to the very spot, but they’re at your right.”
His heart nearly stopped as he glanced around. At one table, there was a young woman with a stroller parked beside her. She sat on her phone, taking photos of her coffee and herself, occasionally glancing down to look at the swaddled baby hidden beneath blankets.
At another table, there sat a young man who wore a pair of those enormous, ridiculous headphones that covered his ears and brought no one to mind as much as Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies. He was typing furiously on a laptop, deep in his work. There was a nervous energy about him, bringing to mind somebody barely restraining themselves.
“What are you thinking?” Aimee asked from above. “The guy at your two o’clock?”
“Affirmative,” he muttered, one eye on the guy at all times.
“I’ve got him,” Aimee assured him.
“Take your time” Braxton whispered, watching from across the street. “We’ve all got your back.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he muttered. It was all the people around them, including the baby in that stroller. He considered warning the young woman away for the sake of her child, but there was little chance of doing that without blowing his cover. He would need to rely on his skills to keep the guy calm, to keep him talking, to put him at his ease. The last thing he needed was for this person to feel threatened, cornered.
His phone went off again. You know I’m not talking about the rest of the patrons here. There are eyes on us everywhere. I guess I would be disappointed if you hadn’t disobeyed my request.
Stop playing games, he texted back immediately without first relaying the message to the rest of the team. We don’t have much time, which I’m sure you know. He glanced up at the guy with the headphones, waiting for him to react. Not even the world’s best poker player was able to completely conceal what they were thinking. Surely, he would react somehow, giving himself away.
Another message. Why do you keep looking at that guy?
His eyes nearly bulged when he read it, and in the back of his mind, he laughed at himself. There he was, doing exactly what he expected the headphones guy to do, reacting visibly to this latest surprise.
Again, his phone buzzed. Don’t you know you should never rely on appearances?
Understanding finally dawned in his thick, slow brain. Instead of looking to Mr. Headphones, he turned his head slightly so he could meet the gaze of the young woman with the stroller.
A stroller that he suspected now held nothing but blankets.
Chapter Two
Really, for a bunch of supposedly elite soldiers, these guys were world-class idiots.
Not that it came as such a surprise. She was used to being smarter than everybody around her. She always had been, and the fact that she was a woman worked in her favor—people underestimated her, assumed she would be easy to manipulate.
Maybe she was at one point in her life. Maybe she was too innocent, naïve, painfully gullible, overly trusting.
Those days were gone.
She glanced up from the table, catching Logan from the corner of her eye. Boy,
was he shocked. He had absolutely no poker face whatsoever. She made a mental note to ask if he’d like to play a game of cards sometime.
She then glanced up at the roof of the café where there was most definitely a girl with strawberry blonde hair tucked under a knit cap. That would be Aimee, who had just recently lost her mother for the second time. Jenna knew how that felt, and her heart could almost go out to the girl. She’d been used for so long.
Something they both had in common.
But this wasn’t the time for sympathy, and it wasn’t the time to rehash old hurts.
Logan locked eyes with her, and she knew it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t help it. She wiggled her fingers in a little wave, offering a faint smile. Let him come to her. She’d been the one doing all the work up to this point, after all.
His buddy with the long hair gave a little start of surprise when Logan got up, muttering something into that earpiece of his. Maybe to the untrained eye, this would look completely normal, unremarkable. Was that what they expected of her? That she wouldn’t know the first thing about this sort of operation? Then she was as good as she thought because that would mean they hadn’t found a single thing about her.
And they would’ve tried. They most definitely would have tried.
His shadow fell over the table, and she looked up with a sunny smile. “Hi,” she offered.
“Hello. Is this seat taken?” He gestured to the empty chair next to him, across from where she sat.
“It is now,” she grinned. “Please, feel free.”
He settled himself in the chair, giving her the impression of an adult sitting in a child’s desk at school. Then again, he would give that impression just about everywhere. He was huge, outrageously so, and for the first time, the tiniest twinge of doubt touched Jenna’s heart.
He could break her in half without even the slightest effort.
But he needed her. They all did.
“Come here often?” he asked with a wicked smile. She had to smile back. He was recovering nicely from the surprise she had just dealt him. No doubt none of them had ever imagined there being a girl behind all of this. No, a bunch of testosterone-driven veterans would of course assume she was a guy, probably overweight with poor skin and hygiene, sitting in a darkened basement playing games for shits and giggles.
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 99