Kami entered through the basement. But she always got to approach the building across the main courtyard like everyone else. It had a fountain with some kind of metal art in the middle of it. Right now the wet snow falling from the sky seemed to be collecting on the strange angles and flat spots in irregular splotches. It was cold against Kami’s cheeks and was quickly soaking her hair. The sculpture actually resembled some weird science fiction computing machine that sprayed water out of a futuristic-looking computer cable. Hideous. But nobody had asked Kami her opinion.
Bypassing the fountain and heading for a narrow staircase that seemed to disappear into the ground near the corner of the building, Kami exhaled a sigh of relief as she finally slipped beneath an overhang and got away from the wet amorphous snowflakes plopping out of the sky. The last two steps were icy thanks to the gathering moisture and the dipping temperature and Kami made a mental note to put some salt on the steps before her coworkers started coming in. Kami was almost always the first to clock in, but she had her reasons for that.
This route was so familiar that Kami nearly did not have to use her brain to do it. She used her keys and unlocked the janitor’s closet in the basement hallway not five feet from the building’s entrance. She grabbed an ancient and rarely used bag of Sno-melt from the shelf and headed back outside to sprinkle the white salty stuff on the icy steps.
Once that chore was done, she eagerly maneuvered her enormous rolling trashcan from the closet. There were dusters and bottles of cleaner and rolls of paper towels stashed in every nook and cranny of the set-up. It was Kami’s personal use can and she kept the thing stocked with her preferred tools for the job. After ten years she could pretty much do what she wanted. There had never been another worker who had lasted longer at the cleaning company. Not even the supervisors.
By the time she reached the elevator, Kami’s heart was pounding. Her pulse was leaping just below her ear and she felt lightheaded with excitement. She pushed the button for the tenth floor and waited for the doors to close.
The ride up was interminable. She figured it always had been. At least for the last four years. That was when the secret had started. Four years ago this Christmas. And when the bell finally dinged and the doors whooshed open onto the darkened foyer and reception area of the corporate offices of King Security Solutions, Inc, Kami eagerly pushed her trashcan out of the elevator. The clock above the receptionist’s deserted desk read four-thirty. She was right on time.
Kami took the left-hand hallway and went to the second to the last door all the way down. Reaching for the knob, she moved to open it. The knob did not move. It stuck fast. She tried again, but nothing happened. It took her a full minute to realize that the door was locked.
Locked. But why? What could have happened and how was she supposed to find out? Turning in a circle, Kami looked around at all of the offices that needed cleaning and felt helpless as a sense of drudgery fell over her like a shroud.
Chapter Two
“This is stupid,” Devon King told his brother Zane. “You act like I have nothing better to do with my time.”
“It’s four in the morning,” Zane murmured without turning away from their quarry. “What else could you possibly have to do?”
“Work.” Devon grunted the word because it was the only one that he could say out loud. The rest of him was pretty sure that there was currently a young woman yanking on his office door and wondering where in the hell he was. But he could not say that to his brother. Zane knew too much already. “You know, that think people do to earn money,” Devon teased Zane. “You should try it sometime.”
Zane reached out and punched Devon in the shoulder. “Hush.”
The two brothers were some six blocks from the house in Vickery Meadow that Zane shared with his fiancée, Landry Fisher. In the last few years the neighborhood had seen a steep rise in vandalism perpetuated by young people in their late teens. For some reason that Devon still could not fathom, Zane had taken it upon himself to keep an eye out for these young people.
They were currently wearing all-black athletic clothes and crouched behind some garbage cans on a very quiet city street. The busses had started picking up their schedule as the regular Friday workday began in earnest.
They had been sitting here for what felt like hours. Or maybe it had been actual hours. Devon didn’t know. He’d left his cell phone in his car back at Zane’s house because his brother had told him to. Now he was thinking he should have brought it with him so he could at least dial into a morning meeting.
“Do you see them?” Zane breathed. “The little bastards are getting ready to set those trashcans on fire. Do you see?”
Devon was inclined to believe that his slightly younger brother was more paranoid than anything else, but he could not deny that there were, in fact, three young people dressed in enough black clothes, silver chains, and spikes, to outfit a Hot Topic store. They did look as though they were attempting to do something to the trashcans, although Devon would not have been comfortable actually claiming that they had pyromaniac tendencies.
But it was too late to argue with Zane. Beside Devon, his younger brother had already started to shift from his human to his wolf form. The huge charcoal gray wolf took shape with alarming speed. Considering the King brothers were the only shifters in the general area, there wasn’t a whole lot of fodder for comparison. But Devon had no doubt that it would have taken him several minutes longer than Zane to shift into his wolf form had he been inclined to do so, which he wasn’t.
“Zane, what are you doing?” Devon spoke the words, but his brother never heard them.
Zane was already sprinting down the street. His enormous strides were eating up the ground between himself and his targets. His claws scraped the pavement and his sleek coat shone damp in the wet snow falling from the early morning sky. He really was a beautiful sight. Right up until the moment Zane pulled his lips back from his teeth and snapped at the teenagers as though they were sides of beef he had decided to rip apart.
“Dammit, Zane,” Devon muttered to himself.
He was undecided. Should he shift himself and help his brother? It wasn’t healthy to be out here solo like some lone wolf on a hunt for blood. But Devon didn’t care to engage a bunch of teenage vandals on some misplaced vigilante mission. It just wasn’t his thing. The only reason he was out here this early in the morning was because he and Orion had been arguing about whether or not Zane was really the enormous animal running all over Dallas that they had dubbed Bigfoot Wolf. Devon had his proof. Now he could go to work. Right?
Screams shattered the early morning air. The pavement was slippery from the mix of freezing rain and snow falling from the angry December sky. But there was no time to pause and evaluate the novelty of actual snow in Dallas. Kids were trying desperately to get away from Zane. Of course the wolf had an easy time of it on the slippery street. The pads of his feet gripped the pavement without much trouble and offered a whole lot more traction than the trendy boots worn by those kids.
“Hey!” Devon gave up trying to stay out of it and found himself running as fast as he could down the street in his tennis shoes, which did not have the kind of traction his wolf feet would have. He struggled to stay upright as he careened toward the five teenagers scattering from the scene of their trashcan crime. “Hey! Kids! Run to a house. Quickly! Run to one of the houses and call the police!”
“Hell no, mister!” One of the girls held up her cell phone. “I’m getting video!”
Devon held out his arms to aid himself in braking fast on the wet terrain. “Video? You’ve got some crazed beast trying to eat your legs and you’re worried about posting it on YouTube?”
As if the beast heard Devon’s words, which he probably did, Zane bolted right for the young woman and her phone. He hit the girl’s hand so hard that the phone went flying. The young woman screamed. She’d been silent to this point watching her friends scatter. Apparently the key to freaking her out was doing something nefariou
s to her phone.
“Hey!” Devon shouted. “Get out of here! What are you doing?”
But she wasn’t listening to him. She was trying to turn back and slip in behind Zane. There was no doubt in Devon’s mind that she was trying to get her phone.
“Get out of there, you nitwit!” Devon snarled. “Leave. Now!”
But Zane had guessed her intention too. Before Devon could intervene, Zane snapped up the phone from practically right under the young woman’s fingers. The enormous charcoal wolf chomped his teeth down hard on the little glass and metal device. The sound of it breaking was almost unmistakable.
The young woman moaned in obvious horror. “You ass! You broke my phone! Oh my God, my Dad is going to kill me!”
“But he isn’t going to care that you’re out at four in the morning trying to start fires in trash cans?” Devon shouted. “Go home!”
Maybe it was the tone of Devon’s voice. Maybe it was the way that Zane the wolf could almost be seen grinning as he chomped her phone and spit it out at her feet, but the young woman finally followed her friends as they all hightailed it down the street.
Zane maybe gave them a five second head start. Then he began trotting after him. Devon reached out at the last second and caught his brother’s tail. He yanked hard enough to slow the big wolf down, but even for Devon’s preternatural strength it was a stretch to hold back another shifter.
“What are you doing?” Devon growled the words from between his gritted teeth. “Let them go!”
But Zane had no intention of doing that. None at all. He was already after the teenagers as though he were a wolf on a mission. Although, as Devon watched his brother he realized that there was absolutely no hurry to Zane’s movements. He was certainly trotting along as though he were a wolf with places to go, but he wasn’t actually giving chase.
He’s following their scent home to see where they live or where they stay.
This was intriguing and as much as Devon hated to admit it, this was a smart move to make. With a quick glance around, Devon shifted from human to wolf. He didn’t do if very often. He was probably the least in touch with his shifter heritage of all the King brothers. It felt like it took forever for the change to happen. It went in slow degrees and Devon felt every single strand of fur erupting from his body and each and every adjustment in his joints.
Finally he was loping down the street after his brother. Devon did not share Zane’s charcoal coat. Devon’s hair was blond in his human form and his wolf pelt was a pale version of gray that sometimes made him look like some crazy version of the legendary white wolves that people often read about. And of the five King brothers, Devon was the only one who had blue eyes in both his wolf and his human form. Since nobody ever saw the King shifters in their wolf forms, nobody had ever been able to tell Devon whether or not this was highly unusual or just a recessive trait.
At least the moisture falling in ever increasing sheets of what was turning into straight-up rain felt much less cold and annoying in this body. His wolf pelt was uniquely designed to repel water. It never ever reached his skin.
The night was still dark even though it had to inching closer and closer to five o’clock. There were now lights on in a good number of the windows on both sides of the street. They were leaving the small neighborhood of very tiny homes where Zane and Landry lived and moving into the denser populated areas of Vickery Meadow where apartment buildings of every shape, size, and style dominated the skyline in every direction.
The only indication from Zane that he knew Devon had shifted and was now tagging along was the slight shift in Zane’s posture that suggested he knew he wasn’t alone. Devon didn’t say anything and Zane did not either. Not that they could say much in this form unless it was in a series of barks or yips.
The two shifters followed the scent of those five teenagers until it seemed that their scents converged in a place where three of them broke off from the first. Zane followed their scent trail all the way up to the doors of an apartment complex.
Instead of following his brother, Devon trotted over to the complex’s sign and read it over. Vickery Commons. A simple enough name. Devon could not help but feel that there was more than just a little stupidity involved in those young people vandalizing homes less than six blocks from their own apartment. But maybe kids were different these days. The world was so big and yet it was miniscule as well because everyone was tied together with social media. It would not matter if the kids went to a neighborhood several states away, they would still be right next door on Facebook.
Zane was still standing at the complex’s front door as though he were actually considering the possibility of going inside. Whether he did it in his wolf body or his human form, it would be a bad idea.
Devon yipped once and then put his nose to the ground. He picked up the secondary scent with no problem. That told him the kids were smoking some pretty serious weed on a regular basis because it had been easy-peasy to find and Devon wasn’t the greatest when it came to using his nose. Leaving Zane behind, Devon moved on at a quick ground-eating trot to follow the second scent trail.
It did not take long for Zane to leave Vickery Commons behind and follow Devon at a pretty high rate of speed. In fact, Zane blew past Devon with such speed that he nearly slipped and fell on the wet street. If Devon had been able to laugh in this body he would have been rolling on the ground with the force of it. As far as Devon was concerned, it would serve the silly show-off right to slip and fall on his ass.
The brothers blew past multiple apartment complexes before the scenery underwent a drastic change. Their trail led them out of the suburb of Vickery Meadow. They trotted underneath the highway and into a neighboring area called Preston Hollow. There were more cars. They were having to duck lower and lower behind shrubs and heading through yards as the number of people increased in the larger shopping areas. This was not a neighborhood where bad things happened. It was a neighborhood where wealthy people went shopping and ate at upscale restaurants.
Soon enough the trail turned into a nice neighborhood full of large houses. Then it just sort of ended. Devon stopped trotting along and took shelter behind a copse of huge bushes. The rain was really coming down now. It probably helped the brothers stay hidden, but it was still cold and wet and downright unpleasant. Devon was thinking longingly of his office. That was where he wanted to be. As it was they weren’t that far from their family home in bordering University Park.
This was the end. That much Devon knew. But he could tell from Zane’s behavior and his body language that he was still itching for more. He wanted a fight or something. Perhaps that was just going to have to be Zane’s problem for now.
Devon knew from long association that there was absolutely no way to change Zane’s mind when he had completely focused on one thing, especially when he was in his wolf form. Zane was athletic and determined, and unfortunately, he seemed incredibly passionate about this particular mission.
But that was Zane. Devon had other motives for being here altogether and he wasn’t going to get them accomplished standing around staring at a five hundred thousand dollar house and wondering if the residents had some bored teen-aged children in their family.
So without another word to Zane, Devon left the neighborhood in Preston Hollow and loped off toward his family home in University Park where he still lived. It would be easier to do things this way and have Orion take him back to Zane’s for the car later on.
What a wasted morning.
Chapter Three
Kami glanced left and then right. It was ridiculous to worry that someone was going to see her. There was nobody in the office building. Or rather, there were probably people around somewhere. The mail room. The accounting floor. Internet Operations down on the fifth and sixth floors. Hell, those nerds never left their desks anyway. But the notion that someone was going to just randomly stumble onto the corporate offices floor of the King building before about ten in the morning was preposterous. Kami ha
d been doing the cleaning for these people since she was eighteen years old. She knew their habits and nothing she knew about them thus far suggested that anyone was going to see her going into Devon King’s office.
Entering the familiar space, she pulled her trashcan in behind her and closed the door. Fumbling on the right-hand wall for the light switch, Kami flooded the room with a soft overhead glow. It illuminated the huge desk and the bookshelves that covered almost every wall that was not already taken up by the wide windows that offered a view of the city skyline.
This was silly. Kami had a key to this office just like she had a key to a dozen others because she was authorized to be in here cleaning. But that authorization did not involve closing the door so that she could snoop and that was exactly what she intended to do.
Where was he? A quick glance at the clock told her that it was already quarter to five in the morning. It was Friday. That should not have made a difference. Devon hadn’t said anything about being gone today. So where was he? Kami could not help but wonder if she was getting a glimpse of what was to come. The brush off.
“He can’t brush me off that easily,” Kami told herself firmly. That wasn’t the way it worked.
Feeling emboldened by her negative thoughts, Kami approached Devon’s desk from the back where his big leather executive chair was positioned still half facing the back of the room as though he had just gotten up to leave. Sinking into the chair, Kami exhaled a shaky sigh. She inhaled deeply of the familiar scent. Devon had always been unique. She loved the way he always smelled like the outdoors. Sandalwood and wood smoke and the spicy aftershave that he always wore. Devon King was unlike any other man that Kami had ever known. He was more. Much more.
Kami stared at the office from the same vantage point that Devon did each day. She looked at her ugly trash can and wondered to herself what he actually thought of her and her job. She knew what he told her. But in the last few weeks he had been distant and she could not help but think that he was hiding things from her.
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 73