by Vivi Andrews
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” Keeping up a steady litany, Grace slapped her computer closed and ran out of her office. The duty roster and health report would have to wait. Her parents were understanding of her pride duties, but they’d never forgive her if she missed another family function.
She sprinted through the main compound, grateful the pathways weren’t very crowded at this hour, and wove her way toward the larger, family bungalows on the south edge. Possession was a fluid thing in the pride, with even houses looked on as community property that was traded according to need, so her parents were somewhat unusual in that they still lived in the same house they’d moved into when the twins were born, a sprawling—by pride standards—six-room bungalow with its own kitchen.
Grace had only lived there with them for one year before joining the pride soldiers in the barracks, but all five of her younger siblings still lived at home. The house was always loud and bright—and Grace always felt a little out of place there. An only child until she was twelve, part of her still viewed the Calaveras family baby boom as an invasion.
It didn’t help that she seemed to be the only member of her gene pool who had any sort of warrior tendencies. Her parents often looked at her as if they couldn’t quite figure out how she had turned out the way she did. Grace tried not to hold that against them—but it didn’t exactly make her want to rush home at every opportunity.
Her mother was standing on the long, low-slung front porch, sipping tea with one of her aunts and two of her cousins as Grace jogged up. At her approach, the others made their excuses and slipped inside, leaving her mother alone on the porch when she climbed the steps.
“I suppose we should be grateful you made it at all.” Her mother sighed.
“Happy anniversary.”
“Thank you. Your father’s inside. I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you.” Her mother eyed her from head to toe. “You look healthy. Are you getting enough rest?”
Pushing thirty and her mother was still trying to force naptime on her. “When I can. It’s been hectic lately.”
Her mother nodded, eyes flicking toward the heart of the pride compound. Robert and Malin Calaveras had never been political by any stretch of the imagination, but even they couldn’t ignore the uproar in recent weeks. New Alpha. New Alpha’s mate. Refugees arriving daily from the south—both trying to evade Organization capture and escaping from Organization facilities. Even if they avoided knowing exactly what Grace did for the pride, they had to know that her plate would have been full lately.
“Well,” her mother murmured. “Try to remember to make time for yourself.”
Which was code for would it kill you to date? Grace just smiled, determined not to be a brat at her parents’ party. “Shall we go in?”
The main room of the house was jammed with people, most of them family and all of them lions, if she had to guess based on scent alone. Not that her parents were against mixing—they’d both seemed genuinely pleased when Patch and Roman had announced their mating—but in general they veered more toward the traditional keep-to-your-own mentality.
Grace tended to think the traditions were bullshit. Just another way she was the black sheep of this lot.
She heard her father’s laugh and threaded her way through the crowd to his side to give him a hug.
“Gracie! You made it!” He squeezed her, and then rocked back on his heels to take her in.
They were exactly the same height, but that was where the resemblance ended. For a lion, he was quite soft and his brown curls and gold eyes gave no hint where her own straight blonde hair and blue-on-blue eyes could have come from. Her mother insisted Grace looked just like her maternal great-grandmother, but there were no pictures to verify the resemblance.
“Happy anniversary,” she repeated dutifully.
He beamed, his eyes searching out her mother in the crowd. “Thirty years, can you believe it?” He laughed. “I feel too young to be mated for thirty years.”
Normally Grace would make a crack about the shotgun marriage aspect of the whole thing—she’d been born only four months after their mating ceremony—but for once she went for tact and kept her mouth shut.
“By the time your mother was your age, she’d been mated ten years,” her father chortled. “What are you waiting for, Gracie, my girl?”
She forced a smile. “Oh, you know how it is. I can’t imagine settling for anyone who isn’t as great as my dad.”
And he was great. Even if he didn’t understand the first thing about what mattered to her.
Her father smiled, something disconcertingly sly entering his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Right is closer than you think.”
Oh dear God.
This was a set-up. Of course there was someone here they wanted to pair her off with.
“Dad, you know how crazy things are right now. I barely have time to think, let alone date.”
Her mother appeared on her other side. “Lots of pride soldiers have relationships, Gracie. Families, even.”
“I’m a lieutenant. And a medic. It’s three times as much work as being a perimeter soldier.” And she had to work harder than everyone else to prove she belonged because no pride had ever had female lieutenants before.
She lived and breathed her job and that was how she liked it. She was the pride. And she was far too busy to be lonely. Her parents were hopelessly codependent, but she liked being self-sufficient. And if she wanted sex, well, that was easy. Thanks to a standing no-strings arrangement she had with Kelly Mather, the pride’s resident flirt, an easygoing lion who never demanded more of her. Instant gratification, no relationship fuss.
Just then the crowd shifted and she saw a familiar profile, crowned by a familiar cowboy hat, across the room. Kelly Freaking Mather. Damn it. What the hell was he doing here?
Her parents followed the direction of her gaze before exchanging a conspiratorial smile.
Of course. Her set-up. Joy.
Did they know she’d been screwing him off and on for years? Ugh. Things she did not want to think about her parents knowing. That had to top the list.
Kelly was talking to one of the twins. Honor was only eleven, but she was female, so of course Kelly had her wrapped around his little finger. All he had to do was flash those dimples and anyone without a Y chromosome melted at his feet—and a fair number of people with Y chromosomes as well.
The smug happiness radiating off her parents was reaching suffocating levels, so Grace excused herself and threaded through the crowds, exchanging passing greetings with various friends of her parents and distant relations as she made her way over to Kelly and Honor.
“Gracie!” Honor squealed when she noticed her approach.
Grace caught the projectile launched at her chest that was her sister and gave her a squeeze before dropping her back on her feet. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Did you know Kelly knows how to French braid?” Honor asked, twisting to display the braid that Grace could only assume was Kelly’s handiwork.
“I did not, in fact, know that.” Though an intricate awareness of how to repair women’s hairstyles after fooling around was probably a useful skill for the Cowboy Casanova.
“I’m gonna show Faith. She doesn’t have a French braid,” Honor said with the haughty enthusiasm that only came from the ability to lord something over a sibling. Then the girl plunged into the crowd and vanished, leaving Grace alone with Kelly—if she didn’t count the speculative gazes of everyone in her parents’ social circle.
“Come get some air with me,” she snapped.
If Kelly was fazed by the sharp order, it didn’t show as he lazily rolled to his feet. But then, nothing much fazed Kelly. It was a large part of his appeal.
They threaded through the crowd in the kitchen to the door to the side porch, which was smaller and much more private than the sprawling one out front. Grace told hers
elf she was paranoid and that the lions around them were not all humming the wedding march in their heads, but her temper was on a hair trigger by the time they stepped outside and the door shut behind them.
She rounded on him. “What are you doing here?”
Kelly propped his shoulders against the side of the house, crossing his ankles. “Your parents invited me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Seemed rude to say no.”
“Kelly. You know they’re trying to set us up.”
“Yep.” He tipped his head so she couldn’t see his eyes beneath his hat.
“And you’re totally fine with that?”
“Actually, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Thank God. A normal explanation. He probably had pride business to discuss. And now she felt guilty for snapping at him. “Sorry. I know I’ve been crazy busy. What did you need to talk about?”
“I don’t want to have meaningless sex anymore.”
“Oh.” She blinked. Wow. Man-whore Kelly Mather was turning over a new leaf. “Okay.” It wasn’t entirely a surprise. Beneath the layers of flirtation and cheerful debauchery, he was a good guy and she’d always figured he would settle down and become a one-woman man someday. She’d just thought she’d have a few more years of uncomplicated sex first. Kelly was several years younger than she was. She hadn’t expected him to catch the monogamy bug so early. It was moderately inconvenient that she’d have to find someone else to scratch her itch, but her smile was genuine when she said, “Good for you.”
“I think we should date.”
“Oh…” Shit. Alarm bells—too late, damn it—began blaring in her head. Danger, Will Robinson! “Kelly…”
“I know you don’t want a relationship, but I do. And I want one with you. I understand your life is crazy right now, but I can be accommodating. And I felt like I should warn you that I’m going to be trying to convince you to give me a shot.” He grinned. The infamous dimples flashed. “Prepare to be romanced, Grace Calaveras.”
Well. Shit.
Chapter Four
Mateo’s bunker was a two-story cement box of a building not far from the center of the pride compound. Dominec made himself invisible in the shadows near a side door, waiting. The building was one of the few in the pride with security, and though he could have gone around to the front, pressed the buzzer and argued his way in via the intercom like everyone else, he preferred a more subtle approach, saving his powers of persuasion for when he got inside.
Lurking in the shadows and watching had taught him the rhythms of the pride. He only had to wait about twenty minutes before the side door opened and one of Mateo’s little minions exited. Dominec hadn’t bothered to learn her name. He just knew she was the blonde one who always left at the end of her shift via this door, invariably with her head bent down over her phone, utterly oblivious to the shadow that slid along the wall and through the door before it had time to swing closed behind her.
As a shifter, she really ought to have smelled him, even if she hadn’t heard his carefully silent footsteps, but shifters were no better than humans when it came to zoning out the rest of the world and falling into the pit of technology, their natural instincts swallowed up by those distracting ones and zeroes—yet another reason Dominec didn’t have a phone.
Another example of that distraction waited for him as he made his way upstairs to Mateo’s main office. The leopard shifter didn’t even twitch when Dominec opened the door and slipped inside, and while he’d love to take that as a sign that he was just that stealthy, he knew the real culprit was Mateo’s absorption in his work. Or perhaps his apathy.
The boy was slim, his refined features almost pretty when his face wasn’t marked by the heavy shadows it carried now. He bent over one of his many computers, wearing a pair of jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with some mice and a giant number 42 on it—a shirt which the smell indicated he hadn’t changed in at least two days, possibly more. Though Dominec vaguely remembered him wearing something else during the raid this morning. Something darker.
Dominec knew shit about psychology, but wondered if putting the dirty shirt back on meant something significant about the leopard’s mental state. Something he could exploit.
“I already encrypted them.”
For a moment, Dominec thought the tech kid was talking to himself, then something about his posture—though he hadn’t looked up from his screen—alerted him that Mateo might not be as oblivious as he’d originally thought.
“What are you talking about?” Was Mateo trying to warn him off, telling him not to bother stealing the schematics because he wouldn’t be able to get at them anyway?
“Your files,” Mateo said, still not looking away from the screen in front of him. “I encrypted them the same day you asked me. No one can look at them without the password.”
Dominec’s shoulders shot through with tension. He’d forgotten that the last time he’d been in here, it had been in an attempt to bully Mateo into destroying the Organization’s records on Dominec that had been on one of the three hard drives the Hawk had stolen. Mateo had refused—opposed to destroying any information that might prove useful at some future date—but he had agreed to encrypt the information on Dominec before he duplicated the records and began passing it around to the pride’s lieutenants.
Dominec had already checked up on Mateo by “borrowing” Xander’s tablet with his copy of the Organization’s files. He’d searched it for any mention of Dominec or his family. If he’d found any, he would have had words with the wiry leopard, but the search had come back clean. No one who didn’t have the first fucking right to know about his past was going to learn anything from the data on that hard drive.
But it wasn’t that hard drive he’d come about.
“Thank you,” he said, the words tasting like a salt lick. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“I can’t get you back on the incursion team,” Mateo said, his fingers never pausing in their rapid movement across the keys. “That isn’t my call.”
“I don’t want back on the team. I want the other hard drive. The one with the locations of all the Organization outposts.”
Now Mateo’s fingers did lift from the keys and he slowly spun his desk chair to face Dominec.
He didn’t need to say what he wanted them for. Mateo was no fool. But his face was carefully blank.
Dominec played his trump card. “Tell me which facility held your sister and I’ll kill them first.”
Mateo flinched.
There weren’t many members of Lone Pine who hadn’t been directly impacted by the Organization. Dominec had made a point of learning those pressure points. When Mateo had arrived at the pride years ago, his sister had already been missing for over a year. The leopard had made no secret that he wanted to use the pride resources to try to track her. It was only recently they’d learned so much about the Organization that was responsible for nearly all the mysterious shifter disappearances over the last two decades.
And only a few weeks ago Mateo had cracked the hard drives and found the Organization files detailing what had happened to whom—and learned that his sister had been dead for months.
He was functioning remarkably well for someone whose entire purpose in life had been ripped away in a tide of grief. But then, Dominec knew all about that. About the automatic impulse to survive, how it would carry you through the motions of living until another purpose could be found. A purpose like revenge.
“The ones who hurt her will die bloody,” he promised Mateo. “Just say the word.”
The shadows that had fogged Mateo’s eyes cleared and he focused on Dominec, a slight, bitter frown pulling at his mouth. “I saw what you did this morning. The doctor—Rachel Russell? They’d attached an explosive device to her leg to keep her from being able to leave her lab and they needed someone
who could deprogram it in a hurry, so Kye sent me down to the basement. You left quite the trail of bodies.”
“That was just the beginning. Tell me where—”
“It didn’t make me feel better,” Mateo interrupted. “I thought it might. Giving them what they deserve. But it didn’t. It didn’t bring Cari back.”
“If it stops them from taking even one more Cari, then it was worth it.”
Mateo nodded absently. “Maybe. But did you look to see if any of the others had those anklets? The bombs attached to their legs to keep them in line? How do you know you didn’t slaughter a bunch of prisoners who were no more free than you were when you were their favorite pet?”
Dominec growled. “You weren’t supposed to read my files.”
“I promised you to hide them. Did you think I wasn’t going to make sure there wasn’t something valuable in them first?”
Dominec forced himself to unclench his fists. “Are you going to give me the list or not?”
Mateo released a soft, humorless laugh. “None of you ever know what you’re asking, do you? Wave your magic wand, Mateo, and give me a list. Do you have any idea how fucked up the data we have is? How freaking non-intuitive the whole fucking system is? The Organization is beyond paranoid about security. The entire system has an airwall—none of their computers have ever been connected to the Internet. They don’t even use consistent security protocols across their own records. I had to design half a dozen programs just to get all the roster files into a single searchable format. And the schematics? All written on proprietary software and all uniquely fucked up. It’s like they reinvented the wheel every fucking time. I thought I was paranoid about security, but these people? They don’t even let their people have cell phones in the buildings—because they know that as soon as you have a line out to the net you’re allowing a line in—so every single one of their outposts is a closed system. The moles who put those hard drives together for Dr. Russell and the Hawk must have physically gone to each site and downloaded the files they needed from the site server. The Organization is using deliberately antiquated technology, in conjunction with some seriously advanced shit, in order to create a system that revolves around secrecy. You lose one node, all you lose is that node. There is no central server to hack. No way to take out the brain because there is no fucking brain. It’s all little nerve clusters and we have no idea how they’re communicating with one another. For all we fucking know it could be with carrier pigeons.”