by Paige Tyler
Zane sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, his muscles twitching like there was a living thing inside him trying to escape. For a few moments, all he could smell was the acrid scent of smokeless gunpowder mixed with the nearly overwhelming stench of sweat and blood. His heart hammered in his chest as he realized he was lying in bed in the two-story cottage in Hempstead he and Sienna shared.
It was the same nightmare every time, reliving the night his friends had died. It always ended right before the rescue party arrived, so he never got to the moment when he realized he was going to live.
Zane breathed deeply, letting the scents and sounds of Afghanistan and the battle slowly fade away. His throat was raw from growling, and he had the coppery taste of blood in his mouth from where he’d bit himself with his fangs.
He knew he was dealing with PTSD from everything that had happened to him in Sangin. He couldn’t make sense of the fangs or the growls, though. Sometimes, he thought he was going insane.
He glanced at Sienna’s side of the bed to find it empty. That wasn’t surprising. She tended to leave the room when he had a nightmare. A quick glance at the clock told him it was barely past two in the morning, and he considered lying back down, desperate for more sleep. But it’d be a waste of time. There was no chance he’d be able to get any shut-eye tonight. He’d rather check on Sienna anyway.
He didn’t bother with shoes or even a shirt, slipping into the hallway in the shorts he usually slept in. Well, the shorts he slept in now. He and Sienna used to sleep naked all the time; that had changed since he’d gotten back. A lot of things had.
Zane glanced down the hall toward the bathroom, wondering if Sienna was in there, but a soft noise from downstairs convinced him she wasn’t. He listened for a moment, expecting to hear the murmur of the telly. Instead, he picked up on the subtle tread of bare feet on wood in the kitchen downstairs. He headed for the steps, not bothering to wonder how he knew something like that. His weird hearing was merely another thing he had no explanation for.
The lights in the living room were off as he moved down the stairs, but the soft glow coming from the kitchen was more than enough to light up the entire first floor of the house.
He slowly padded the rest of the way down, hearing Sienna moving about in the kitchen, likely making cocoa. The thought of his fiancée dressed in her long, blue bathrobe and fuzzy, pink slippers, standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of chocolate, brought a smile to his face. Things hadn’t gone the way they’d planned upon his return from Afghanistan. Instead of squeezing their wedding into a few short weeks of leave time, Zane had spent endless days in the hospital recovering from wounds that should have killed him. When they didn’t, he’d been promptly and efficiently separated from military service. The official cause was “combat-related disabilities.” The real reason was because the doctors thought he was a fucking nutjob.
He and Sienna had postponed the wedding while he dealt with his issues. Considering the number of issues he had, he wasn’t sure when things were going to get back on track, but Sienna seemed willing to stick with him through them. He had no idea why. It certainly wasn’t anything he deserved. He’d be the first to admit he was a bloody mess.
He was still smiling as he reached the bottom of the steps. But when he caught sight of the two suitcases by the door, his heart started to thud hard in his chest. Then he saw the engagement ring on the coffee table.
Zane was still processing the scene when Sienna walked in from the kitchen. Instead of her bathrobe, she was dressed in a skirt and blouse, a pair of low heels dangling in one hand, her red hair up in a bun. She saw him standing in the shadows of the stairs and froze in her tracks.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“You’re leaving,” he pointed out.
The realization of that was like a wound spreading across his soul. He wished he could say he was surprised, but he wasn’t. A part of him had known.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking like she genuinely meant it. “I wish I was strong enough to be here for you, but I’m not.”
Sienna walked over to her suitcases, then turned to look at him. “You push everyone away. Your family. Your friends. Me. You won’t let anyone help you.”
He supposed that was true, so he didn’t try to deny it. He gestured at her suitcases. She’d done a good job of packing quietly. He hadn’t heard a thing. “So you were going to leave in the middle of the night without saying anything?”
At least she had the decency to look chagrined. “I was going to leave you a note.”
He didn’t respond. Because really, what was there to say?
Sienna gazed at him, her gray eyes sad. “You’re different than the man I used to know. The one I fell in love with. The one I wanted to marry.” The softly spoken words felt a lot like the bullet wounds he’d received in Afghanistan—painful but muted. “I don’t know what happened to you over there because you won’t tell me. You won’t tell anyone. But you’ve changed into something I can’t recognize. It’s like you’re some kind of…”
Her voice trailed off as though she couldn’t quite put a name to what it was he’d become.
Zane considered the reflection he’d caught in the mirror after he’d woken up from one of his nightmares and gone into the bathroom. He’d seen what he was now. Sienna had obviously seen it as well.
“I think the word you’re looking for is monster,” he said quietly.
Sienna stared at him, emotions roiling in her eyes. But she didn’t disagree.
Sighing, she slipped on her shoes, then opened the door and picked up her suitcases. She hesitated for a moment, as if she wanted to say something more. But there weren’t words for a situation like this. She must have known that, because she turned and walked out without saying anything, closing the door behind her.
Zane heard her footsteps tapping away across the sidewalk and parking lot. A few moments later, a car started, then drove away. Damn, he really hated how good his hearing was now.
Walking over to the coffee table, he picked up Sienna’s engagement ring and stared at it. He remembered picking it out with her before the deployment. She’d been absolutely gaga over the thing. He wanted to be angry with her for walking out, but he couldn’t find it in himself to blame her. She was right. He’d pulled so far away from everyone that sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t even living in the real world. It was like he was floating around the edges of it, waiting for something to come along and convince him there was a reason to keep going.
He’d thought that something would be Sienna, but apparently he was wrong about that.
Zane rolled the ring back and forth in his hands for a while, then flipped it across the room and into the fireplace, where it was lost in the ashes of the smoldering fire.
Like everything else in his life.
Chapter 1
Los Angeles, California, Present Day
“This isn’t music,” Zane said to fellow werewolves and SWAT teammates Rachel Bennett and Diego Martinez, practically shouting to be heard over the throbbing beat coming out of the club they were heading toward. The sign above the entrance read Attitude in big, bold, splashy letters. “I’m not sure what the hell it is, but it’s definitely not music.”
Rachel laughed. Tall and athletic with long, blond hair she always wore up in a ponytail, she was the newest member of the Pack. “My grandma used to say, ‘When the music starts to get too loud, you know you’re getting old.’”
Rachel seemed to have a lot of sayings from her grandma, but that merely went along with her relaxed, southern twang. Zane frowned at her over his shoulder as they passed the long line of people waiting to get into the club and walked straight to the door. The crowd complained loudly—some of them more vocal than others—wanting to know what was so special about him and his friends. Zane ignored them.
“I didn’t say it was too loud,” he pointed out to his pack mates. “It’s that bloody backbeat the LA clubs add to every song they play
. It makes my teeth ache.”
Diego laughed as he and Rachel moved ahead of Zane. Originally from southern California, his dark-haired pack mate had a unique way of appearing intense and laid-back at the same time. “Do you think the reason he can’t stand the music is because he can’t dance?”
“You might be onto something there,” Rachel said, slowly rolling her hips to the sound coming out of the big doors as she walked. “He’s just mad because he doesn’t have any rhythm and the rest of the Pack does.”
Zane snorted. He was used to his pack mates on the Dallas SWAT team ragging him because he couldn’t dance. He’d never fancied dancing anyway, so it wasn’t like he cared, but his pack seemed to think it was an insult to all werewolf kind. Like being able to gyrate your body around a crowded dance floor in time to a crappy song was some kind of valuable skill. He much preferred focusing on abilities that had some purpose in his life—like being able to run down a speeding car full of bad guys. Or having complete control over his fangs and claws. Fortunately, those were things he excelled in.
“Do you think there’s anything we can do to help him?” Diego asked thoughtfully, acting like this was a serious problem that needed to be fixed.
Rachel shook her head in fake despair as she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Unfortunately, no. I think we’re going to have to accept that there’s no chance for a recovery. Zane will never be able to dance.”
“Very funny,” he grumbled as he and his friends approached the two bouncers standing guard at the door.
The guys were big and no doubt imposing to a normal human. Zane and his friends weren’t normal or human.
One of the men moved to block their path, but a low growl from Zane made him rethink that decision. The bouncer glanced at Rachel and Diego, then at Zane again before stepping aside. The people at the front of the line protested, saying they’d been in line for an hour, but Zane ignored them, too. The suspect they were after had gone in the club. Zane and his pack mates didn’t have time to wait in line.
Once inside, Rachel and Diego went their own way. They were pretending to be a newlywed couple in LA for their honeymoon, while Zane was undercover as a lone British tourist. This was the third club they’d been to in as many nights. Their target’s routine was becoming seriously repetitive.
Zane wandered deeper into the club, nearly gagging from the myriad scents assaulting his nose. There must be five hundred people in there, drinking, dancing, and sweating out dozens of different illicit drugs. Even if he weren’t a werewolf with a nose good enough to pick up the scent of a rabbit from a thousand feet away, he would have been overwhelmed.
He tried to block out as many of the scents as he could, pushing them to the background one by one. He momentarily picked up on one that was decidedly pleasant, and any other time, he would have liked to follow it. But meeting the woman giving off those pheromones wasn’t in the cards tonight. He reluctantly pushed her scent out of his head and kept walking. He picked up another one as he went that was somewhat familiar, but there were too many competing smells to nail it down clearly, so he dismissed it as well.
“Our guy and his crew are standing at the far end of the bar,” Diego’s voice came over the earpiece Zane wore.
“Copy that,” Zane said.
Turning, he headed that way, skirting the dance floor. Several women eyed him with looks that could only be called hungry as they gyrated to the music. One of them, a tall, slender brunette in a tight dress that didn’t leave much to the imagination, grabbed his left bicep through his leather jacket with both hands, giving it a squeeze and trying to drag him onto the dance floor. Searing pain shot through his arm, almost bringing him to his knees, and it took every ounce of control to keep his fangs and claws from coming out. So much for always being in control. He wasn’t as successful at hiding the growl that escaped. The woman couldn’t possibly have heard the sound over the noise, but the look on his face was enough to scare her off. Releasing his arm, she quickly retreated and went back to dancing with her friends.
Zane stopped in his tracks, waiting for the throbbing pain in his arm to recede. Taking a deep breath, he wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead with the back of his hand. It was difficult to believe that after two months it could still hurt so damn much.
“What’s Stefan doing?” Zane asked into the mic clipped on the inside of his shirt when the pain finally became a dull ache.
“Same thing he’s done every night since we started following him,” Rachel answered. “Staring at people like a frigging pervert. He makes my skin crawl.”
When Zane finally got to the far side of the club, he found Stefan Curtis leaning back against the bar, regarding the crowd of people on the dance floor with an appraising eye. Four big guys stood guard, two on either side of him. They looked vigilant, even though the vibe they put off was enough to keep everybody far away from their boss.
Based on the way many of the women eyed Stefan, they obviously considered him attractive. With his perfect blond hair, classic features, and tailored suit, he could have easily been a model for GQ or Gentleman’s Journal magazine. But at the same time, Zane could understand why Rachel’s skin crawled when she was around the guy. It was difficult to put into words, but there was something unsettling about the way Stefan looked at people. Like he was mentally dissecting them to see what made them tick. It made Zane’s fangs ache to come out, as if his inner wolf instinctively recognized a threat when it sensed one.
That wasn’t surprising, considering Stefan’s uncle was Randy Curtis, the former chief of police of the Dallas PD and current member of the FBI’s top ten list of fugitives. It was tough to get your name on there, but trying to murder an entire SWAT team, as well as their friends and family, was a good way to do it.
Six months ago, no one in the Pack even knew what a “hunter” was. But in September, they’d learned that groups of men roamed around the country, killing any werewolf they stumbled across. Within weeks, werewolves had shown up in Dallas looking for protection. No one thought the hunters would be bold enough to try anything in a city guarded by a pack as big as the Dallas SWAT team. Seventeen alphas strong at the time, equipped with weapons and tactics only SWAT cops possessed should have been more than enough.
But in November, the hunters had attacked them, almost killing several members of the Pack, including Zane. He was still missing a major chunk of tricep muscle from his left arm and likely always would, regardless of all the experimental drugs the Pack’s doctor had tried. But as bold as that assault had been, it paled in comparison to the blatant attack on the SWAT compound in December. It had been a miracle any of them had survived it.
Knowing there were people who wanted to kill werewolves simply because of what they were was bad enough, but it had been even more crushing to learn their own police chief had been in league with the hunters the whole time. Zane and his pack mates had no clue what his connection to the hunters was or why he wanted the Pack dead, but they’d tracked him to LA three weeks ago and had been searching for him ever since.
They’d learned a lot about Randy Curtis in that time, though nothing to suggest his current location or his connection to the hunters. But they had discovered why he’d run off to LA. Turns out this was home for him and the entire Curtis family. Zane came from a large one himself, but the Curtis family tree put his to shame. There were dozens of brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, and various in-laws who called this city home. And all of them worked for the same international conglomerate based in LA—Black Swan Enterprises. Eric Becker—the Pack’s resident hacker—had spent hours digging through the company’s computers and still had no idea how far their financial reach might be. But it was obvious that whoever ran Black Swan Enterprises was filthy rich and powerful as hell.
Zane wondered why Randy Curtis had become a cop in Dallas instead of working for Black Swan like the rest of his family. If Curtis had come back here asking his relatives to hide him from the authorities, they’d d
one a bloody good job of it. In fact, Zane had begun to think this whole trip to LA was a waste of time when they’d stumbled across Curtis’s nephew, Stefan.
While Stefan had gone to the same Ivy League college as the rest of the Curtis clan, he didn’t have a position on the Black Swan board. And while he had money, fancy cars, and high-priced security, he didn’t work for the company. As far as Zane could tell, the man wasn’t connected to Black Swan Enterprises at all.
Stefan also had a police record with multiple charges of assault, battery, attempted rape, larceny, and burglary. He’d never made it into a court of law because he had the best attorneys money could buy, but it was obvious he was the black sheep of the family. Like his uncle.
Who better than a black sheep to hide another black sheep?
Zane and his teammates had assumed Stefan would lead them to Curtis at some point, but he and his crew spent every evening out crawling around the city’s underbelly from nightclubs and backroom gambling dives to drug dens and strip joints. The funny thing was, Stefan didn’t partake of the entertainment in any of those places. Instead, he stared at people—and skeeved Rachel out, of course. If Stefan wasn’t here to hook up, why bother? And why did he always travel with security?
“We might have something,” Diego murmured in his earpiece, distracting Zane from his musings.
That’s when he realized Stefan had moved away from the bar and was now talking to two young women. They seemed a little nervous, but Stefan must have turned on the charm—or maybe gave them a compliment—because after a moment, they both smiled at him. Identical twins, they were tall, slim, and attractive, with big, expressive, blue eyes and long, straight, platinum hair. The girls looked like they couldn’t be more than eighteen. It made him wonder how the hell they’d gotten past the bouncers.
Over the radio in his earpiece, Zane heard Rachel curse as Stefan leaned in close to one of the girls and whispered something in her ear.
Zane moved closer, so he could step in if Stefan tried something. That’s when he caught the same familiar scent he’d picked up before and immediately realized it was coming from the twin girls. He stared at them for a few minutes, testing the air, unsure what he was picking up on. Then it hit him as he remembered where he’d smelled that unique scent before. Selena Rosa, his best friend’s mate, put off the same scent during the first few days of her change, when she’d still been more human than werewolf. Bloody hell, those two girls were brand-new werewolves, probably only days into their change.