by Paige Tyler
For half a second, he considered telling her the truth—or at least confirming what she already seemed to know. He had no idea why he’d even contemplate doing something like that, especially when he realized the risk it would pose to his pack mates. Alyssa was more than a little dangerous if she could make him think about doing something like that. Cursing his own foolishness, he shoved the idea back into the darkest corner of his mind and told it to stay there.
What should he tell her then? Well, as he’d learned in the SAS, when you find yourself in an ambush, the best course of action is to figure out where the gunfire is coming from and go there.
“Speaking of dead bodies, I couldn’t help but notice that all those places you’ve been to over the past year seemed to have a lot of them,” he said. “Funny that no arrests were ever made. If it didn’t sound ridiculous, someone might think your whole purpose for going there was to make things disappear. No muss, no fuss. Just another example of Big Brother in action.”
When her heart rate spiked, he knew he’d struck a nerve.
“So we’re doing this again?” she said. “I ask a question. You ask a question. I ask another one, but neither one of us answers?”
Zane shrugged. He didn’t know why he felt so shitty about playing that game with her, but he did. “It’s obvious we both have things we can’t talk about. So, yeah. It seems that’s how this is going to go.”
As an uncomfortable silence filled the room, Zane finally gave in and bit into his cream-filled donut. It didn’t have enough cream for his liking. On top of that, his bloody tea was cold.
Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with two competing desires. One told him to get up and leave. The other wanted him to get up, pull Alyssa into his arms, and kiss her until she told him every secret she possessed. Or passed out from lack of oxygen. Bloody hell, maybe he’d just kiss her until her clothes fell off. How long could that take?
Zane finished that donut and reached into the box for another—cinnamon cake this time. As he chewed, he decided kissing her would be a very bad idea. He couldn’t walk away from Alyssa, because he needed her help to figure out what the hell Stefan was involved in and so his team could find Stefan’s uncle, but he wasn’t stupid enough to try and kiss her. She’d probably kick him in the balls.
He wasn’t thinking straight, that was the problem. He knew why, too. At least, he thought he did. There was the terrifying possibility Alyssa was that one-in-a-billion soul mate he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with and being near her was making him stupid. Or there was a chance he was having an adverse reaction to the latest batch of drugs the Pack’s doctor had sent him to help regrow the muscle in his injured arm. Saunders had been shipping him a different cocktail of experimental drugs every few days the whole time Zane had been in LA. None of them seemed to work and almost always came with unpleasant side effects. Maybe the latest combination was making him insane.
As unsettling as that thought was, Zane decided he still preferred that explanation to the first possibility.
“So, what happened with Stefan?” Alyssa suddenly asked. “Last night after your teammates followed him, I mean.”
Zane recognized an olive branch when he saw it. Alyssa was trying to move the conversation to safer ground. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
“Unfortunately, he went straight from the club to his fancy home in the Hollywood Hills, where he remained the rest of the night.” Zane helped himself to another donut. The cake kind with pink icing and sprinkles. “He wasn’t too happy when those muscle heads called and told him they lost the girls.”
Alyssa looked up from her donut in surprise. “How do you know that? Do you have his phone bugged?”
Zane shrugged. “The FBI isn’t the only one with high-tech toys.”
She made a face. “What did they tell him?”
“Oddly enough, they talked mostly in code, like they were worried someone was listening in. They told him there was ‘trouble with the product’ and that they ran into some ‘unknown players.’ Stefan immediately shut the conversation down and said the subject would be discussed during the next scheduled meeting.”
She did a double take. “That’s kind of weird. I assumed Stefan would be the type to get pissed and throw things when stuff didn’t go his way.”
“Oh, he was mad,” Zane said. “After he hung up, he cursed for a good five minutes. Then he threw things.”
She lifted a brow, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. “You have his house bugged, too?”
“You know what they say—in for a penny, in for a pound.” He smiled. “A cliché I’m allowed to use, by the by, since I’m British.”
Alyssa snorted but didn’t point out all the laws he and his pack mates were breaking with their illegal wiretaps and listening devices. If it wasn’t for the fact that none of her cases seemed to ever reach a courtroom, Zane would have been worried their actions would torpedo any case the feds put together against Stefan. That raised the question as to what the FBI planned to do with the guy, assuming Alyssa ever found those missing girls. Considering all those dead bodies she seemed to leave in her wake, maybe Stefan would simply end up in an unmarked grave somewhere.
Then again, maybe Alyssa was lying about being in LA to find those missing girls. Maybe she was really here to confirm Zane and his pack mates were werewolves—maybe those twins, too. Then all five of them would end up in an unmarked grave somewhere.
Wasn’t that a cheery thought?
He was still imagining the trouble Alyssa would have stuffing him, Rachel, and Diego in the boot of her rental car to dispose of the bodies when she spoke.
“Those two girls Christine took to the hospital are okay. But for some reason, they want to talk to you. In fact, Christine said they were insistent about it, threatening to take off if I didn’t bring you to see them.”
The girls must have figured out he was a werewolf, he mused as Alyssa pulled the box of donuts closer. Or maybe the one who’d woken up for a few seconds had smelled something familiar and wanted to talk about it.
“Are they still in the hospital?” he asked.
Alyssa scanned the selection. She glanced at his sprinkled-covered one enviously, then settled for the plain glazed. He didn’t get that. What good was a donut if it didn’t have cream, frosting, and/or sprinkles? Maybe plain glazed was the diet version or something.
Donuts and diet. Fairly close together in the dictionary. Miles apart in reality.
“Yeah. They slept straight through the night, not coming to until early this morning. Christine is in the process of moving them to a hotel as we speak, but from the text she sent to me a little while before you showed up, those girls freaked out when they realized they’d been drugged and nearly kidnapped.”
“I take it Christine was able to keep it all quiet without anyone reporting it to the police?”
If some random cop decided to pay Stefan a visit, asking why his security team tried to kidnap two girls, that could tip him off he was being watched.
“No police report,” Alyssa confirmed. “The girls were scared and more than a little pissed that Stefan played them with some stupid line about being a Hollywood producer, but more than anything, it seems they want to put this incident behind them. Other than talking to you, of course. Not sure what that’s about.”
He smiled. “Probably the accent. It does it for everyone. So what’d you get from the tracking device you put on their car?”
Surprise flashed in her eyes. What, did she think he’d forgotten?
“Truthfully, I haven’t had a chance to check yet,” she said. “Let’s take a look,”
Setting her donut down on a napkin, she got up and walked across the room to grab her laptop from the desk where it had been charging. Coming back over to stand beside his chair, she set the computer on the table, then opened the lid and booted it up. There was a map of the city on the screen with a little, blinking, green light sitting off of South Broadway, halfway in between New Downtown
and Little Tokyo.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
He wasn’t familiar enough with the city to know where exactly the car was. All he could say for sure was that the car wasn’t parked in the middle of LAX or the Pacific Ocean.
She used her long, nimble fingers to enlarge that part of the map on the screen. “The car is in a parking garage near the middle of town, where it’s been sitting since about three o’clock this morning.”
Zane leaned closer to her, trying hard to ignore the mouthwatering scent she put off. He wondered if he could get away with licking her neck. He could say he was trying to clean a bit of glaze from the donut off…
She’d probably shoot him. She had been quick to remind him that she had a gun and knew how to use it.
“You think they abandoned the car there?” he asked, deciding to keep his tongue in his mouth where it belonged. Getting shot hurt at the best of times. If Alyssa shot him, it would hurt even more.
She nodded as if she’d been thinking the same thing. “Likely.”
He sighed. “There’s only one way to know for sure. We could go check on it after we see the girls, if that’s okay with you? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“We?” She regarded him thoughtfully. “You honestly think it’s a good idea for us to work together?”
“Why not?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer. “That was why you asked me to come over here this morning.”
“Why not?” Alyssa snorted. “I think Dr. Phil would say it’s because we have trust issues. Maybe it would be better if I check out the car on my own and call you when I learn something.”
The thought of Alyssa going anywhere near Stefan and his crew without backup made his inner wolf howl. He knew she could handle herself—all those awards and commendations Becker had told him about, not to mention the way he’d seen her move last night, proved that—but the idea of her being in danger made his chest tighten up so much it was hard to even breathe.
Zane refused to examine why she made him feel that way and focused on dealing with the present situation, pushing everything else to the background.
“I guess we’re just going to have to work through those issues, because whether you like it or not, we’re joined together at the hip for the time being,” he said. “At least until we both find what we’re looking for.”
Alyssa considered that, then finally nodded. “Okay, we can work together. But there’s one condition.”
He let out a snort. “Only one?”
“Yes. And it’s important. I’ll work with you, watch your back, and trust you to watch mine. But I need your word that you’ll be honest with me. If you lie to me, it’s over.”
“What would I lie about?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Like you said, we both have things we can’t talk about. I can live with that. But I’m trusting you to tell me if there’s something I need to know to do my job. Anything that has to do with getting those missing people back safely. Anything that involves my safety. Anything you know I wouldn’t be able to overlook. As a federal agent and as a human being.”
Zane knew he was going to lie before he even opened his mouth. He felt badly about it, but it wasn’t like he could tell her that he was a werewolf. She was a fed, which meant she was the last person in the world he could trust with information like that. Even if she already knew what he was, he couldn’t admit to it. Despite the possibility of her being terrified when she learned he was a monster, like his former fiancée had been, he still had an almost overwhelming urge to tell her everything. But this wasn’t only about him. This was about his pack, too. And he’d do anything to protect them. Even lie.
“I’m not keeping anything from you, and I won’t,” he said.
Alyssa regarded him thoughtfully for a few uncomfortable seconds, like she was going to call him out, but then she nodded. “Okay. Let me check with Christine and see if she’s still at the hospital or has already moved the twins to the hotel, then we can get out of here.”
Chapter 4
“What do we know about the girls so far?” Zane asked as he and Alyssa walked along the hallway on the second floor of the Fairfield Inn and Suites.
Alyssa shrugged. Before they’d left her hotel, she’d changed out of her T-shirt and shorts into jeans, a simple top, and a jacket. Even though she’d covered up all that perfect skin, she looked just as delectable.
“Not a whole hell of a lot,” she answered. “They’ve told Christine that their names are Zoe and Chloe—they wouldn’t give up their surnames—that they’re eighteen years old, and that they’re from Utah. Other than that, they’re not very forthcoming with information. And they didn’t have ID on them, either. They’re extremely eager to talk to you, though.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “You must have made one hell of an impression in those three or four seconds that one girl was conscious.”
Zane chuckled. “Don’t take it too hard. I have the same effect with puppies and kittens, too.”
Alyssa laughed, and he got goose bumps from the sound. Crap, he was such a wanker.
Zane could pick up the extremely slight werewolf scent before they even reached the door. Christine opened it as soon as Alyssa knocked. Not quite as tall as Alyssa, she had straight, dark hair and a no-nonsense way about her.
The twins were sitting on one of the two queen beds, eyeing him and Alyssa curiously as they stepped inside.
“Since we didn’t have the time for formal introductions last night, I guess I should do it now,” Alyssa said. “Christine Howard, Zane Kendrick…and vice versa.”
“Nice to meet you,” Zane said, shaking the woman’s outstretched hand. “Thanks for all the help last night. I know it was late when we called.”
She laughed. “Hell yes, it was late, but for Aly and her adventures, I don’t mind losing a little sleep. I was happy to hang out with Zoe and Chloe. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
The twins stood, both of them regarding him intently with their big, blue eyes as he shook their hands. While they might have been eager to meet him, Zoe and Chloe also seemed to be a little nervous. Up close, they looked even more fragile and…lost…than they had in the club last night. How the hell had they gotten into that place? That probably wasn’t the question to lead with today, of course, but he planned to get to it at some point.
After the introductions were out of the way, the twins moved over to sit on the couch, while he and Alyssa leaned back against the counter of the small kitchenette and Christine took the chair by the desk.
Zane waited for the girls to say something, but they only continued to gaze at him before exchanging looks with each other. One of the twins—Chloe, he thought—tilted her face up a little like she was testing the air with her nose, then looked at her sister again.
“So, Christine said you wanted to talk to me?” he finally said, figuring if he didn’t break the ice, they never would. “I was hoping you could tell us your full names and where you’re from in Utah so we can help you get back home to your family.”
“We can’t go home,” Zoe said firmly. Even though they were twins, Zane considered her the older of the two girls. Maybe because she tended to place herself in front of her sister, like she was the protector. “We don’t have anyone to go home to.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Our parents were killed a week ago this past Friday,” Zoe said softly, her eyes haunted. “We don’t have any other family to go back to in Provo. Mom and Dad were all we had.”
Zane cursed silently. When he’d seen the twins in the club last night, he’d thought they were two local girls out for a night on the town hoping to slip into a Hollywood party so they could meet someone famous. Then, over dinner with Alyssa, he’d agreed with her that maybe they were runaways. He definitely hadn’t seen this coming.
Alyssa and Christine looked just as surprised as he did.
“What happened to your parents?” he asked gently.
Zoe reac
hed up to wipe a tear off her cheek. “Chloe and I went to the movies that night, and when we came home, there were four men in hockey masks waiting for us in the living room. Mom and Dad were already…gone.” She took her sister’s hand, holding on to it tightly as tears filled Chloe’s eyes. “We tried to run, but the men grabbed us and shoved rags over our faces. We woke up in the back of an SUV. It was still dark, so I figured we couldn’t have gone that far. The four men weren’t around, so Chloe and I managed to get each other untied, then ran. We didn’t realize we were all the way in Santa Fe, New Mexico, until the next day.”
While their story was heartbreaking to hear, even harder than hearing the words was seeing Chloe’s expression while her sister spoke. It was like the poor girl was reliving the experience all over again.
“If you were in Santa Fe, how did you end up in LA?” Alyssa asked. “Why didn’t you go to the cops there?”
Zoe glanced at her sister as if silently communicating with her. A moment later, she turned her attention back to him and Alyssa. “When we got out of there, we just ran and couldn’t stop. We had to keep going.”
Zane had no doubt seeing their parents’ bodies, getting kidnapped, then being forced to run for their lives was the thing that had turned them into werewolves. He could see the trauma in their eyes. And considering how slender and lithe they were, he also had no doubt they were beta werewolves.
“Isn’t there anyone back home for us to call?” Christine asked, her distress clear. “Cousins, uncles, aunts, close friends…somebody?”
The girls shook their heads in perfect synchronized rhythm. It was a little disconcerting how connected they were. Betas were really close anyway. He couldn’t imagine what they’d be like after they’d fully turned, then found an alpha.
That thought bounced around in his head for all of two seconds before coming to a dead stop. Bloody hell, what if the two girls were here looking for their alpha?