by Vivi Andrews
Dominec followed about a third of what the computer tech was ranting about, but kept his mouth shut, hoping the bitching would resolve into something he could work with.
“Do you know what I was doing when you came in? Trying to make some fucking sense out of the data we got from the raid today. Trying to find something useful in the scientific babble that seems to be about all that particular post produced. Trying to find some fucking answer key or code breaker or something to make all the rest of the piecemeal shit we’ve gathered make sense. And, you know, as badly as I want to punch the asshole who came up with this shit, part of me has to respect the technique. Up until a couple months ago we didn’t even know these assholes existed. All we had was rumors, because they are that good at keeping their secrets. And as someone whose entire job used to be keeping our secrets, I know exactly how difficult that is.”
Mateo shook his head. “My team is working overtime now, doing my job as well as theirs because I’m the only one cleared to deal with this Organization bullshit. And I am working flat out to make the information accessible for Kye and Roman and you, because we need this. Because I owe it to my sister. But I am exhausted and so far behind there is no catching up, and I am not going to take time out from what needs to be done to feed your crazy. If you want back on the team, take it up with Grace. I’ve got nothing for you.”
He swung back to his computer and his hands settled immediately on the keys, resuming their rapid tapping.
Dominec frowned at his back. People almost never turned their backs on him. Especially not after telling him no. But no matter how tempting taking a swipe at Mateo with his claws might be, the little punk was protected by the fact that he was the only one who could do what he did. And Dominec still needed him.
He slipped out of Mateo’s office without another word and walked on silent feet down the stairs and out into the night. The moon had come out from behind the clouds and sat fat and bright above him, casting a silvery light over the pride like some mystical fairy land.
Dominec stripped quickly and shifted, too irritated to hold his human skin. The night air that had been biting was now pleasantly cool against the fullness of his thickening winter coat. Unlike the lions, his kind had been designed for the cold and it sharpened his thoughts now as his animal side—sometimes his more rational side—clicked into control.
His wide paws crushed the short, frost-hardened grass, but he wasn’t worried about leaving tracks. Not here.
He circled around, coming at the low bungalow that housed Grace’s office from behind, but the caution quickly proved unnecessary. The pride pathways were all but abandoned at this hour of the night and he could tell by scent that she wasn’t inside.
He gathered his feline bulk and leapt onto the roof of the single story hut, taking care to land lightly—in a spot where the shingles were already worn from his previous visits. He stretched out on his belly on the roof, curling his tail around his haunches and lowering his head to rest against the shingles as he waited. This was one of his favorite spy perches. Few shifters had ever looked up to see him up there, watching and listening to everything that went on below, and something about the vantage point had always soothed him.
He could stand to be soothed now.
He’d been good for years. Listening. Watching. Accumulating every tiny scrap of information about the bastards who had destroyed him. He’d held himself in check until that moment of beautiful action, the release of everything he’d been containing as he waited, and now this. Locked out of the action. Unable to go out on his own without the information Mateo refused to give him.
Which left him where? Forced to be good? Calling on a patience he’d already worn to tatters?
A low growl tried to rise up his throat but he swallowed it to silence. There was a scent on the breeze. A very familiar scent.
He heard the low voices before he saw them.
“You know we’re good together. It’s okay to let me make you happy.” Male. With a lazy drawl.
“I am happy.” Grace.
Dominec’s ears pricked forward.
“Then what’s the problem? Nothing has to change. It’ll just be a little more official.” The man again.
“And if I don’t want more official?” Grace, irritation tightening her voice.
“Then give me a good reason why more official is bad.”
They came around a curve in the path then and Dominec saw them. Grace walking swiftly with her ground-eating stride and the man at her side almost trotting to keep up, a cowboy hat tilted low over his brow. Kelly Mather. Lion with a shit-eating-grin. Dominec felt his hackles rise.
“You’ll split my priorities,” Grace snapped. “You’re already taking up time and mental energy that could be dedicated to the pride.”
“Grace, I know you. You fight for the pride to protect the people you love. So add another loved one to the list—and maybe a few more, in a few years, when we’re ready. But you don’t have to worry that I’m going to ask you to give up being a lieutenant.”
“And if I don’t want kids?”
“Then we don’t have to have kids.”
“Oh please,” she snarled. “You know you want to be a daddy. It’s all over your face every time you’re with the pride cubs.”
“I want you, Grace. And I’ll be as flexible as I need to be to make that happen.”
“Maybe I don’t want flexible.”
Kelly tossed his hands up. “Now you’re just being difficult.”
“Exactly! Why would you want to be with someone as difficult as I am?”
“Maybe because I’m crazy about you?” They were past Grace’s office now, nearly out of sight again up the path toward her bungalow. Kelly caught her arm, spinning her around to face him. The muscles in Dominec’s haunches tensed, readying to spring.
“If you’re trying to scare me off, you’re going about it all wrong. Because in all your arguments, I’m hearing a lot of logistics, but I haven’t once heard that you don’t want me.”
Kelly’s mouth swooped down to kiss her and Dominec’s claws snicked out to dig gouges into the shingles. His tiger was a creature of more instinct than thought, and the sight screeched across his nerves like nails down a chalkboard, inexplicably wrong and violently shrill.
Grace shoved the lion away before Dominec could move. “I don’t want you,” she said, monotone flat.
Kelly laughed. “You’re going to have to be more convincing than that.”
She groaned—the sound all exasperation and no actual pain or the tiger would not have been able to stay put—and began striding up the path again. “You’re impossible.”
Kelly gave chase, and Dominec held himself tense and still on the roof long after they’d vanished from sight and beyond the range of his hearing. He breathed in the scents of the pride, his hackles slowly falling.
Until the wind shifted and another scent lifted to his nose.
The sterile, medicinal tang, mixed with human sweat. Organization.
The prisoners.
He leapt from the roof before the wind could change again, bounding after that elusive scent. The hunt was brief, ending at a barn that had seen better days just beyond the main pride compound. There were guards posted at the doors and even if the scent hadn’t been enough to give it away, the distinctive rustling and moaning of the humans inside would have.
So this was their prison. He was unimpressed.
He could easily dispatch the guards and probably take out all of the prisoners before anyone arrived to stop him—but that wasn’t going to incline Mateo to make time to give him that list and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get him back in Grace’s good graces.
He crouched in the shadows at the edge of the path. It would be easy. Temptingly easy. And he’d always thought it was better to apologize after the fact than ask permission beforehand—but th
at habit hadn’t done him any services at the last raid.
Be good or kill them all? He knew which one sounded more appealing, but he held himself still and silent. If only there was a way to ensure vengeance against those Organization sadists without incurring Grace’s wrath.
He shuddered, his fur shivering—with excitement not cold. There was a way. He wasn’t the only one the Organization had hurt. He wasn’t the only one who wanted vengeance. This spot was quiet, isolated. Many of the members of the pride at large wouldn’t know about today’s raid, or the prisoners here. They wouldn’t know that those who had made their lives hell were being protected only by thin walls.
Dominec could still be the good guy. But good guys didn’t have to keep secrets like those from their beloved pride mates. Didn’t they deserve to know about the monsters in their midst?
The tiger rose, padding into the night.
Chapter Five
A knock on the doorframe made Grace lift her head. Her office door was propped open and Kye stood on the threshold, one hand raised to rest on the frame. He was shorter than she was by a good two inches and possessed the sleek, compact grace of the smaller predatory cats rather than the bulk of the lions and tigers—which made sense since he shifted into a nimble snow leopard. His presence tended to be unobtrusive, fading easily into the background, with none of the authoritative power of the alpha cats who seemed to eat up all the oxygen in a room just by entering it. Kye was good at being invisible—which was part of what made him so dangerous. It wasn’t a coincidence that he had been chosen to lead the Task Force to bring down the Organization.
“Hey,” Grace said by way of welcome, flipping closed her laptop to give him her full attention. The updated guard rotations were almost done anyway.
Kye didn’t take the tacit invitation to come in and toss himself into one of the overstuffed couches crammed into her office. She’d made an effort to make her office as comfy and welcoming as possible when she became a lieutenant, so pride members would feel comfortable coming in and flopping down and unloading their problems.
“We’re expected up at the mansion,” the leopard said, nodding slightly in the direction of the Alpha’s residence. “The Hawk is bringing Dr. Russell in for debriefing.”
Following the raid the day before, the infamous Hawk—a former military sniper and bird shifter named Adrian Sokolov—had taken Dr. Rachel Russell to a cabin that was on pride lands but well beyond the main compound. Grace trusted Adrian—he was a good guy and he wouldn’t hurt Rachel, no matter how angry he was with her for the months he’d spent in captivity because of her—but she had still planned to make an unscheduled visit later today to make sure Adrian wasn’t doing anything to the good doctor he would later regret. Just another thing on her never-ending to-do list.
But it looked like that trip wouldn’t be necessary if Adrian was bringing Rachel to the main compound for debriefing. Grace could look the doc over and make sure she didn’t seem frightened or damaged in any way.
She shoved her chair back and rose. “Are any of the other prisoners talking?” she asked as she rounded the desk.
Kye somehow managed to make his shrug convey a negative as he fell into step beside her. “How did Dominec take the news that he’s banned from future strikes?”
Grace mimicked his shrug, hers not nearly as eloquent. “He didn’t attack me, so that’s a win.”
Kye remained silent—his usual tactic for getting more information—and Grace obligingly filled the silence with the details.
“He thinks we aren’t being aggressive enough. Not going after them hard enough or fast enough.” The pride pathways weren’t crowded at this hour of the morning, but neither were they abandoned. Grace lowered her voice, pitching it for Kye’s ears only as her long strides ate up the ground. “I’m not convinced he’s wrong,” she admitted. “If he wants to commit suicide by going after the Organization like a one-man wrecking ball, maybe we should point him in the right direction and stand back.”
Kye grunted softly.
“I’m not saying we should be reckless,” Grace argued. “I just wonder if we could be doing more.”
“With what army?” Kye asked softly.
Grace grimaced. It was entirely too good a point. The pride had swollen in recent weeks to nearly two hundred members—and she could count the number of shifters with actual military experience on one hand. The Hawk had been an army sniper, but his control was unusual. Most shifters would shift during times of intense stress—like, for example, battle—and couldn’t risk joining the human military and exposing the shifter secret.
Grace herself had always had uncanny control—but she was female and female cat shifters went into heat three times a year, becoming ravening sex monsters with claws for a week at a time. So enlisting was out of the question. She’d trained as an EMT, and taken courses in combat and as a field medic, but the courses had always had to be strategically timed to miss her breeding cycles. Most shifters only knew as much about warfare as they could pick up training at the pride—which left them largely untested.
The current incursion team consisted of eight shifters—now that they’d lost Dominec, and the Hawk had declared he wouldn’t be going on the next strike so he could guard Dr. Russell. They were training new recruits to guard the perimeter and bulk up the security forces, but they were too green to take against the Organization.
They might all be predators, but they weren’t an army by any stretch of the imagination.
“Have you and Mateo picked the next target yet?” she asked as they began the climb up the hill to the Alpha’s mansion.
“Not yet,” Kye murmured, and she heard the worry for their friend underneath the words.
“I don’t know what to say to him,” she said. Mateo had always been a sweet kid, quick to laugh, but driven by a single consuming desire to find his sister. Now that the Organization files had revealed he was too late to save her, he hadn’t shattered completely, but there were a thousand brittle cracks in him as if he could at any moment.
“Leave it,” Kye said softly. “He’s getting the job done. He was great on the mission.”
“He’s only great when he’s working.” Grace reached for the front door of the Alpha’s mansion, holding it open for Kye and following him inside. “He isn’t sleeping.”
Kye let his silence speak as they jogged up the sweeping staircase that dominated the entry to the large conference room above.
“I know no one else can do what he does, but just keep an eye on him, okay?” Grace asked. “If he collapses, we’re all screwed.”
Kye grunted an affirmative and got the door for the conference room. As soon as it cracked open, the hum of conversation greeted them. The Alpha and nearly a dozen other lieutenants and advisory council members for the pride were already crowded around the long conference table.
The lumbering bear shifter Hugo spoke quietly with Tarron, one of the older lions, both of them carried over from the previous regime. Xander was kissing up to the previous Alpha, Greg, and his mate Lucienne. They were only attending in an advisory capacity, but Xander couldn’t seem to stop sucking up to them, even though it was now Roman in charge.
Roman himself was bent over a tablet with two other lions, pointing to something on the screen. Mateo sat at one end of the table by himself, huddled over a tablet of his own, his fingers flicking rapidly over the surface.
Grace moved in and took an available chair, stretching her legs beneath the table and leaning back with her arms folded as she studied the boys’ club gathered around it, alert for any warning signs of disquiet.
They all had shifter hearing, but it was Kye who tilted his head to the side and murmured, “They’re here.” Conversations died away and everyone took their seats, leaving one empty beside Roman and two empty at the opposite end. Moments later the conference room door opened again and Patch preceded th
e Hawk and the good doctor into the room. She moved to take her place beside her mate, but Grace kept her eyes on Rachel Russell.
The woman really was a stunner. It was no wonder Adrian was so obsessed with her. She had the kind of beauty that made it her defining characteristic—even if she was also a brilliant reproductive specialist and anti-Organization shifter-smuggler.
The Hawk hovered over her as they made their way to the two remaining chairs. He was tall and angular, with a naturally stooped posture, seeming to curve over her protectively as they moved. The doctor displayed no fear—either in her expression or her scent—and Adrian looked like he would rake his talons across anyone who looked at her wrong. At least that was one less thing to worry about. The good doctor was in good hands.
Now to see what she had to share…
Chapter Six
The Lion’s Den was never completely empty, no matter the day or night. The pride’s only bar, it was the one place a shifter could go to let loose without worrying about whether the humans would discover their secrets. Those shifters newest to the pride were unused to the luxury of being able to get wasted somewhere it didn’t matter if they got furry—and those recently released from Organization captivity were the most likely to need to drown their sorrows. So even though it was only one in the afternoon, the Den was the perfect place to stir up the kind of trouble Dominec was looking for.
He paused in the doorway, taking in the scarred hardwood floors, battered and mismatched tables, and the tilted pool table. He wasn’t a regular here. After being drugged by the Organization for years, he’d lost his taste for losing control. He hadn’t touched alcohol in years and wasn’t the sociable kind to hang out in bars, but the Den was perfect for his purposes.