License to Kill

by R. J. Blain

  I remembered Mason; he worked within the FBI, like most of the Thomas’s pack, although he didn’t work in the field. He analyzed data for field agents, and the few times I had interacted with him, he’d been good at his job.

  Jake had told me Mason was the pack’s submissive wolf, someone who managed to calm most in the pack just by being in the room.

  I hadn’t been invited to meet most of the pack.

  “This will complicate things,” Jake’s father muttered.

  The Fenerec holding my leash shrugged. “It was already complicated. She’s been in the wild for six months.”

  Had it been that long? I leaned back against the leash and bared my teeth despite the muzzle. Maybe with another six months, Jake’s betrayal wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe in a year or two, I’d be able to forget.

  “Let’s get her loaded in the van. We have time to figure out what to do with her.”

  It took three of the Fenerec working together to drag me away from the river’s shore, and I chittered threats at them, clawing at the snowy ground in my effort to pull away. The Fenerec cursed, hauled me to a black FBI-marked van, and forced me inside.

  Two of them held my head down while the third used a locking d-ring made of inch-thick steel to clip my leash to a steel loop on the steel floorboard. I struggled to raise my head, but I couldn’t even budge it.

  “She’s secure,” the Fenerec reported.

  Jake climbed into the back and crouched beside me. “Struggling is pointless. That’ll hold even old Fenerec. All you’re going to do is tire yourself.”

  I flattened to my belly, lifted my hind paw, and hooked my claws into the back of the muzzle in an attempt to pull it off my head. I couldn’t even budge it.

  “That won’t work, either.”

  I gave up and angled my body away from Jake, revealing my teeth in silent warning.

  Jake’s parents jumped into the back of the van, too. I flattened my ears, straining against the collar. If I couldn’t escape them, I would ignore them, so I turned my head and stared at darkened window.

  “Well, this isn’t going well,” Sebastian muttered.

  Had he truly been expecting anything different?

  Nine

  That’s not what I want.

  The snow and ice clumped to my fur didn’t have a chance to melt before we arrived at a private airstrip, where a small plane waited. Like the van, the plane’s small cargo bay was equipped with metal rings embedded in the floor, and three Fenerec pinned me down while Jake handled locking the d-ring.

  They left me alone. Too tired to struggle, I flopped to the floor and closed my eyes. While sleep would have provided an escape, the plane rumbled to life, and the roar of the engines and vibrations through the metal kept me awake.

  I decided the best thing to do was play dead. No one could question me if they thought I slept, not that anyone had asked me for my opinion at all. If given a choice, I would have returned to my den and been content if I never saw any of them ever again.

  Turbulence and a rough landing turned pretend unconsciousness into a real knock to the head, one that bought Jake’s pack enough time to lock me in a cell furnished like an upscale hotel room.

  I had no recollection of shifting from fox to human, and I resented the choice being taken from me almost as much as the locked, barred door. The only clothes they left for me were the pajamas someone had dressed me in.

  Why would they waste silk on me? With nothing else to wear, I kept them on, although I was tempted to wrap in the blanket and reject everything they offered.

  In the six months I had spent as a fox, my hair had grown out to black marked with white tips, just like my fox’s tail. The length hadn’t changed much, falling a little below my shoulders, long enough to tie into a tail if I wanted.

  Maybe if I just signed the divorce papers, they’d let me go. Then I could return back to being a fox and vanish back to my den and mountain. I hadn’t bothered anyone, avoiding humans and their herds.

  As a fox, I hadn’t ever become truly bored although I’d been lonely. When I wasn’t hunting, I slept or dug out my den. While comfortable in human standards, there was nothing for me to do beyond sit and wait. The kitchenette would have given me something to do, except it had been stripped of everything useful.

  Even the refrigerator was barren of anything interesting, offering vegetables as a snack. What sort of fox wanted vegetables?

  I had no idea how long I waited, but by the time I heard the door click, I’d gone from infuriated to numb. Jake stepped into the room with his parents at his heels.

  “If you want me to sign the divorce papers, just give them to me so I can get out of here.” While soft and hoarse from disuse, my voice emerged better than I thought it should after so long without speaking.

  Jake frowned. “Can we talk?”

  Hope was a funny thing. I hadn’t realized I had been clinging to some vestige of it until his words hammered the last nail in the coffin that had been us as a partnership. “There’s nothing to talk about. You like Amelia, and she’s the right species. Be happy with that. Just give me the papers so I can sign them and leave.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  Well, I gave the point to Mellisa; she’d figured Jake would want to salvage something. Unfortunately, all time in the wild had done was convince me I was better off alone.

  Being alone hurt a great deal less.

  “That’s the bed you made, so lie in it alone.” I knew all about being alone. The memory of the hospital hadn’t faded, not even after so many months. The deep cuts hadn’t healed, either. While there was nothing wrong with my body, nothing about me felt well. “I don’t care what you want anymore.”

  Jake sighed. “I made a mistake. I was wrong.”

  Once upon a time, that sort of confession would have signaled the start of a talk to rectify the real issue. I stared at him for a long time before shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter. You made your choice. Live with it. I was living with it until you and your pack hunted me down.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth, and Jake’s cheek twitched at the venom in my voice.

  “I want you to come home.”

  Before our last fight, I would have given my right arm to hear those words, to feel like I actually belonged, to feel wanted. Too much had changed. He had been seeing women at work, work he’d never talked to me about. He had wanted a proper bitch over me, and no pretty speeches would change that.

  It was easy to forgive Amelia.

  She had been honest with me from the start and had needed the same exact thing I did. She wanted a mate and a pack.

  “There’s a proper bitch waiting for you, one who is the right species, who won’t bother your precious pack. I’m not some damned safety net for you to come back to when you go sniffing some bitch’s tail and it doesn’t work out for you. Did you think I’d just be sitting around waiting for you?”

  Judging from his expression, that’s exactly what he had thought.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Go make a home with a proper bitch. We’ve determined I’m not it, or have you forgotten already? I haven’t.”

  There would be no kits, no cubs, no puppies, no children, and no mate in the den I had built for a skulk I would never belong to. Maybe he hadn’t taken our vow seriously, but I had.

  Maybe other women would have snatched for a chance to take back what had been lost, but I wasn’t one of them. I could put one foot—or paw—in front of the other and keep moving forward, but I’d never been very good at turning around and changing course.

  I wasn’t very good at forgetting, and I was tired of being abandoned.

  “I was wrong. I should have done better. I should have been more considerate of what you needed. I should have found a way. I never said the right things.”

  “That changes nothing. You still would have thought the wrong things. You still would have believed them. Not saying them doesn’t change how you feel. It won’t change the future,
either. We’re through. We were through when you decided you wanted a proper bitch for a partner. We were through when you abandoned me like everyone else. We were through when you decided to bench me like everybody else. We were through when you came home smelling of other women. I hate you. I hate your wolves. I hate everything about all of you. Leave me alone so I can get on with the rest of my life already—a life without any of you in it.”

  When I refused to say another word, they eventually left, locking the door behind them.

  I didn’t care who had sent the psychologist, but I hated him the instant he walked through the door and invaded the cell thinly disguised as a suite. He wore a suit, the type many within the FBI liked to wear, and he stared down his nose at me. Thumping a briefcase onto the table, he sat and made himself comfortable while I watched him from the armchair where I spent the vast majority of my time.

  “You have a very interesting file.”

  He viewed me like an interesting challenge and a curiosity. I wondered what he had been hired to accomplish. It didn’t take me long to decide it didn’t matter. “Was it the highlighting, the underlining, or the psychotic break that you found interesting?”

  The way he hesitated told me more than I thought he wanted me to know; he hadn’t expected such an answer from me.

  Mellisa had been right about a lot of things, and I wondered which way my story would end. Would I endure until I withered? Would I go for a long swim when I finally tired of everything?

  How long could the numbness stave off the inevitable?

  “All of it. Before your psychotic break, as you call it, you were a highly accomplished field agent. For your gender, that’s a remarkable accomplishment. I’m Dr. Howards, and I have been assigned as your psychologist.”

  “Ah. You’re old school.” He seemed young to have developed the mentality.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re old school. You’re the type who doesn’t believe women have a place in the field, that they should be doing quiet, safe desk jobs. Well, you can put your worries to rest. My career in the FBI is over.”

  “Upper management thinks otherwise.”

  I had to give her credit; Pauline Thomas didn’t know when to quit. At least Mellisa had already given me every piece of the puzzle I needed to put any delusions of me returning to the service to rest once and for all. “Upper management is wrong. I have no desire to return to the field. I have no desire to continually watch my own back. I have no ambitions to return to CARD. I also have no ambitions for working as a desk jockey. If I’m going to work as a secretary, I’ll find a better paying job within a corporation.”

  “Would you care to elaborate on your lack of ambition?”

  “No, but I’ll tell you exactly what will happen if you put me in the field. I’ll do my job. I’d probably do it well, since that’s a part of who I am. In that, they’re right. But one day, I’ll just get tired. I’ll see the gun pointed at me, I’ll be ready to fire, too, but I won’t. I’ll wait. One, two, maybe three seconds. That’s all it takes. I’ll wait, thinking it’d just be better for everyone if I hadn’t gone back into the field in the first place. Then everyone will find out if I was right or wrong.” I mimicked holding a gun and firing. “That’s the problem with you old school agents and shrinks. I’m just a statistic.”

  “I see we’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us.”

  “That’s your second problem. This only works if your patient wants help. It works a lot better when your patient actually wants to return to the field. I don’t. I want a life where nothing reminds me of anything dealing with the FBI.”

  Alone in the woods was far better than solitude in a crowd. I could be alone as a human, too. I’d only be hunted as a fox. I’d adapt, somehow.

  “Humor me, then. I’m here. You’re here. It’s not like either of us has anything to lose.”

  “You’re right. I don’t have anything left to lose. Maybe you should ask me a better question. What do I have to gain? What do I have to gain that I actually want? Not what your employer wants—what I want. If I’m actually something more than a statistic to you, you’d care about me, the person, rather than your goal, the result you’ve been hired to achieve. Until then, don’t waste my time. That’s the only thing I do have.”

  “So, what would you like to do with your time?”

  I gave his question some thought. The days of wanting to be useful were long behind me. While I’d never fully abandon the idea of helping children return to their families, the thought of even trying to do the work was enough to sicken me.

  Those days were gone.

  I wouldn’t be the one to change the world one violent crime at a time, not anymore. What did I want to do to fill the minutes, the hours, and the days? I doubted I’d ever step into a kickboxing ring again.

  There were too many memories on the mat, and all of them hurt.

  “I’d like to go to the library and read books.”

  “Then we can help each other. You can talk to me, and I can arrange for you to do just that. It’s a fair bargain.”

  It’d probably be the only bargain I’d get, so I shrugged. “It’s not my problem if you don’t like what you hear.”

  “That’s fair.”

  I shrugged. Fair or unfair didn’t matter; nothing would change because circumstances were unfair to someone.

  “While I’ve read your file, I think I’m going to change my initial thoughts for how to address your circumstances. Why don’t we start at the very beginning?”

  “I was born, and then I was abandoned.”

  If the psychologist hadn’t wanted the details, I could have told him the entire story of my life with those eight words, but since the nitty-gritty was so important to men like him, I started all the way at the beginning and explained how a black couple from Georgia had wanted a child to replace the son taken from them, and they’d gotten me.

  I kept to the old story instead of talk about how my ma had probably gotten rid of her boy because he, like me, had been inconvenient due to a disease she could have treated if only she’d loved him a little more and her picture-perfect life a little less.

  It was easier than I thought to cut away the emotions and report the circumstances leading up to my enrollment in the FBI, every gunshot, every rape, every failed partnership, and every last failure. The successes made their way in, too, but like with everything else, I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything at all for what I had done.

  It took a week to tell him everything, and when I finally finished, he left me with a promise to return, one I didn’t believe for an instant.

  I waited in silent solitude.

  Dr. Howards returned the next day, and his presence startled me enough I stared at him, wondering what else he could possibly want from me. As he had every other session, he set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and pulled out papers.

  “You weren’t expecting me.”

  “You’re correct,” I agreed.

  “I thought we’d take some time to discuss your future.”

  “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “I’ve done the work hard for the future game, Dr. Howards. I’m done. If my future ended five minutes from now because someone figured out it doesn’t matter to me if I have five minutes, five years, or five decades left, I’d be fine with that. I don’t care if I don’t have a future. Preparing for the future is just a pretty way of setting myself up for disappointment.”

  “And what about those you’d leave behind?”

  “That’s their problem, now isn’t it? They left me first.” ‘They’ could mean so many people, and of them all, I could only think of one who had actually cared enough about me to give me half a chance. I wondered if I’d see Mellisa again. “I’m tired of people pretending they care about me and abandoning me when I’m no longer convenient or easy to have around. I’m tired of people pretending they care about me until I need something before turnin
g their backs on me. I’m tired of being stupid enough to actually think I might be important enough to be fit in their little box. I’ve always been expected to make my box fit the needs of others. Maybe I just wanted someone to make a little space for me in their box. But it’s the same story with everyone who has been abandoned, isn’t it? We don’t want a box to call our own. We want space in someone else’s box, with the security of knowing that space will always be there when needed.”

  “But what if there are people willing to give you space in their box?”

  “Do you know the difference between a box and a prison?”

  “What?”

  “I can leave the box.”

  Dr. Howards’s eyes widened, and for the first time since he’d walked into my cell, I got the feeling he understood.

  As I had with Jake and his parents, I fell silent with no intention of speaking another word. There was nothing left to say.

  Dr. Howards insisted on returning every day, and when he couldn’t get me to say a word, he did the talking, telling me the latest news, both local and international, and filling me in on what I had missed during my time spent as a fox. Most of it meant little or nothing to me, although I learned one important thing: those behind the Greenwich kidnapping still hadn’t been caught.

  I’d done a lot of harm to the group behind it, but we hadn’t gotten them all, and we hadn’t nailed the mastermind of the plot.

  I almost reminded Dr. Howards I was no longer in the business of hunting down criminals, but I remained silent.

  I had already played my part.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out trust was a two-way street. I didn’t trust him, he didn’t trust me. He planned his visits in such a way he could confirm if I ate and what I ate. No matter what was left for me, I found no enjoyment in it. Half the time, I didn’t even notice or care who brought which meal.

  When I did eat, I didn’t really taste anything at all, and I only picked at it enough to keep the worst of the hunger pangs at bay.