Wolf Unleashed

by Paige Tyler

  He thought for a moment that she might listen to him, but then she backed up further. He couldn’t keep from following this time.

  She threw up her hands as if to ward him off. “Stop! Don’t come near me. I don’t know what the hell I just saw, but I know it wasn’t normal. You…you had fangs, Alex!”

  “I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it to save you.” He took a breath. “I can explain, if you’d just listen.”

  She shook her head, backing away even faster. “I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to talk. I just want to go home and process this. I need to think—alone.”

  Alex nodded. “Okay, I get that. Let me take you back to your car, at least. You shouldn’t be out here alone, not with Bensen’s men running around.”

  She shook her head again, tears starting to run down her face. “I can get to my own car. Don’t come any closer. If you do, I’ll scream, and I don’t care who comes running.”

  With a sob, she spun around and took off down the street, heading away from the junkyard. Alex followed, hanging back far enough that he wouldn’t panic her but staying close enough to keep an eye on her. Three blocks up, she turned into a used car parking lot and jumped into her car. Tires squealed as she sped away.

  He stood there on the side of the road. A few minutes later, Remy came up to stand beside him. His teammate looked almost as bummed as Alex felt.

  “That could have gone a whole hell of a lot better,” Remy said.

  Understatement there. “She saw everything.”

  “I know. I heard.”

  “What the hell am I going to do?”

  Remy shrugged. “There’s not much you can do. You just have to give her some time to get her head wrapped around everything she saw and trust that she’ll do the right thing.”

  Alex swallowed hard. “You don’t think she’ll tell anyone, do you?”

  God, he hoped not. They’d had to deal with that situation back when Gage and Mac had first gotten together, and it had almost ended up with all of them leaving the country. He really didn’t want to leave Dallas. He liked it here. He liked Lacey.

  “I don’t think so,” Remy said. “But if she does, we’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Great. “Do you think we should tell Gage or Xander?”

  Remy winced at that. Alex didn’t blame him. He wasn’t thrilled about telling either his team commander or his squad leader that he’d accidently exposed their secret.

  “Maybe we should tell Cooper first,” Remy suggested. “He’s really good at fixing crap when one of us fucks up.”

  * * *

  Lacey’s head was spinning so fast, she wasn’t even sure where she was going until she pulled into a visitor’s space along the front of Wendy’s apartment building. How the hell had she gotten here?

  She should turn the car around and go home. It wasn’t like she could tell Wendy what had happened tonight. She didn’t even understand it herself. But that logic didn’t keep her from getting out of the car and climbing the three flights of stairs to her best friend’s apartment. Her feet continued to do their own thing until they reached Wendy’s door, then she was ringing the bell before she could stop herself.

  Lacey cringed as the noise echoed inside the one-bedroom apartment. She shouldn’t be here. She should be home checking on Kelsey, then going straight to bed. Maybe she should stop at an all-night convenience store on the way and grab a bottle of wine—or two. That would certainly help.

  She was still standing there when Wendy opened the door a few seconds later, wearing an oversized Texas Longhorns sleepshirt. Once again, Lacey told herself she shouldn’t be here, but she knew it was too late to flee now.

  Wendy blinked the sleep out of her eyes, then looked around the hall as if she expected someone else to be with her. Alex probably. “Lacey, what are you doing here so late?”

  Lacey tried to answer, but all she could do was stand there and sob like a baby, something she hadn’t done since her dad left and her mom died. No matter how hard she tried to make the tears stop, they wouldn’t. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying. She should have been screaming in terror. She’d just learned that the guy she’d been falling for—the guy she’d slept with—was a monster.

  Wendy grabbed her hand and tugged her inside, then shut the door and pulled her into a hug. That’s when the waterworks really started.

  “It’s okay,” Wendy soothed. “Tell me what happened. Is Kelsey okay?”

  Lacey sniffed and shook her head, pulling back to look at her friend. “It’s not Kelsey…it’s…” She hesitated, then forced the words out. “It’s Alex.”

  Wendy’s eyes widened. “Oh God, what happened? Is he hurt?”

  Lacey swallowed hard, not sure what to say. Finally, the words came spilling out just like her tears had earlier. “He’s not hurt. He’s a…a…monster!”

  Wendy looked confused for a moment, then understanding dawned on her face, quickly replaced with fury. “Did that big, stupid son of a bitch try to force himself on you? If he did, I’ll kill him!”

  Lacey was taken aback at the anger in her friend’s voice, and it took her a few seconds to catch up to what Wendy was talking about. She shook her head again. Why was this so hard to explain?

  “No, he didn’t try to force himself on me. We’ve been sleeping together for the past two days.”

  Wendy frowned in confusion. “Then what the heck are you talking about? If he didn’t attack you, what do you mean he’s a monster?”

  Lacey groaned in frustration. This was why she hadn’t wanted to say anything in the first place. It was making her sound like a lunatic. She was too frazzled to keep doing this.

  “He’s a monster,” she snapped. “You know—with claws, fangs, and glowing yellow eyes. That kind of monster.”

  Wendy opened her mouth, then closed it again. Finally, she sighed and shook her head. “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying, and you’re scaring the hell out of me. Maybe we could sit down so you could start from the beginning? What happened tonight?”

  Lacey moved over to Wendy’s big, overstuffed couch and flopped down. She hadn’t realized how tired she was until just then. She guessed the adrenaline she’d been riding high on for the last hour was finally running out. Or maybe it wasn’t adrenaline she’d been riding on. Maybe it was good, old-fashioned fear. After everything that had happened tonight, everything she’d seen, she had every right to be terrified.

  “I went to Bensen’s junkyard out on 20 again tonight,” she said, eager to get the confession part out of the way and move on with the important stuff, namely the part where Alex had come running out of the darkness like some monster in a horror movie, but she didn’t get a chance.

  “Wait a minute,” Wendy interrupted. “Why the hell would you go there again? I told you to stay away from that man. He’s psychotic.”

  “You don’t have to tell me he’s psychotic—I already know that,” Lacey said. “I’m the one who found all those dead dogs and that poor girl last night. The police can act like they don’t know who the hell was involved, but I do. It was Bensen. I went there to get something I could use to convince everyone I’m right.”

  Wendy looked like she wanted to say something more about that but thankfully held her tongue. “I still think you’re an idiot for sneaking into Bensen’s junkyard, but let’s forget about that for the moment and get to the important stuff. Where does Alex, this monster, and you standing on my doorstep crying fit into this?”

  Lacey closed her eyes, thinking back to the moment Alex had first appeared in the junkyard, the moment everything she’d thought she knew about the man had changed. How had she missed something like that? She should have known he was too good to be true.

  “When I got into the junkyard, I tripped over something and ended up knocking a bunch of stupid car parts,” she said. “Guys with guns ran o
ut of the main building like they were under attack. I thought for sure I was dead.”

  Wendy’s eyes widened again. Lacey thought cops were supposed to be better at controlling their facial expressions than that.

  “I was just about to get shot by one of them when Alex came out of the darkness, running faster than any human had the right to, and slammed into the guy, practically knocking him into next week.”

  “So he saved you?” Wendy shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m not seeing the monster part yet—or the problem.”

  “Yes, he saved me. Then he turned around. That’s when I saw…everything.”

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  “Wendy, Alex’s face had changed. It was wider…and longer. And there were frigging fangs nearly two inches long sticking out of his mouth. His eyes were glowing so bright that I swore they were on fire. And he had claws, really long freaking claws.”

  Lacey didn’t realize her voice had crept up a few octaves until she was done. She forced herself to stop and take a breath. Beside her, doubt was written all over Wendy’s face.

  “You said it was dark,” her friend pointed out. “Maybe you just imagined that you saw all those things. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. Maybe you were in shock or something.”

  Lacey shook her head, not surprised her friend doubted her. Hell, Lacey had doubted what her eyes had been telling her too, and she’d been right there, ten feet away from Alex, when it happened.

  “It wasn’t a trick of the light, Wendy, and it wasn’t shock. Alex had claws and fangs,” she insisted. “But there’s more. When the other guards started running our way, he picked me up like a toy and ran with me—faster than any human can run, with or without carrying anyone in his arms.”

  “Alex is really big,” Wendy pointed out. “And muscular as hell.”

  “Wendy, he jumped to the top of one of those industrial storage racks Bensen has all over his junkyards. Those things are, like, fifteen feet tall, maybe higher. He jumped to the top with me in his arms. I don’t care how big and strong he is. A normal person can’t do that. And they couldn’t jump over the big security fence around Bensen’s junkyard either, but Alex did that too—with me still in his arms.”

  Wendy didn’t say anything for a long time. Instead, she sat there regarding Lacey as if trying to decide whether to believe her. Finally, she sighed.

  “What happened then?” she asked. “Did he say anything to you?”

  Lacey shrugged. “He tried, but I have to admit I wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind to have a meaningful conversation. I was in the middle of a nightmare. I pretty much bailed after that and ran to my car. I just left him standing in the street.”

  Wendy nodded as if that had been the perfectly rational thing to do. Had it? Lacey had no clue if it was or not. She’d been operating on plain, old-fashioned, fear-induced panic. Driving away from Alex had made her feel like crap, but she’d been so scared. She didn’t know what else she could have done. The guy she’d been sleeping with—the guy she’d let into the house with Kelsey—was a monster. Not the metaphoric kind of monster, but an honest-to-goodness claws, fangs, and violent rampage kind of monster. For all she knew, he’d killed that guard in the junkyard.

  “I take it you believe me then?” Lacey asked, unable to take the silence anymore. “About Alex, you know…being a monster?”

  “I don’t know about the monster thing,” Wendy admitted. “But I believe you saw what you say you saw—the claws and stuff. I mean, people have said for a while…” She stopped as if she thought she shouldn’t say anything else, but then continued. “Cops talk amongst themselves, you know? A couple of people I know and trust have mentioned that the guys on the SWAT team are a little…different. They’ve done things that maybe they shouldn’t have been able to do or probably should have gotten them killed. I even know a female cop in the narcotics division who was out with a couple of the SWAT guys a week ago, and she told me that one of them…well…tackled a car. He hit it so hard, he almost knocked the damn thing over.”

  Lacey waited for the punch line, for her friend to laugh and say she was joking, but Wendy was staring off into the distance, lost in thought.

  “Wait a second.” Lacey leaned forward. “What are you trying to say…that the whole Dallas SWAT team is a bunch of monsters?”

  Wendy looked at her sharply. “I didn’t see what you saw, Lacey, but even if I had, I’m not sure I’d call them monsters. I don’t know why Alex was at that junkyard tonight, but he saved your ass. The SWAT team has saved a whole lot of asses in the past few years, including more cops than I can count. You can call Alex a monster if you want, but I think I’m going to hold off using that particular word until I have more information.”

  Lacey sat there, her face warm from being chastised so blatantly. Yeah, Alex had saved her, she knew that. But she’d slept with the man. Shouldn’t he have told her that he was some kind of…whatever he was? Didn’t sleeping with a man gain you that much trust at least?

  “What are you going to do?” Wendy asked quietly.

  Lacey thought about that for a while. “I don’t know. What can I do? If I tell anyone besides you, there’d be a race to either put me in jail for breaking into Bensen’s junkyard or fit me with one of those nice white jackets with wraparound sleeves. Even if neither of those things happened, I really don’t want Bensen to know I was there. I honestly think he was involved in that woman’s death, and I don’t want him setting his sights on me.”

  “I don’t blame you there,” Wendy muttered, though whether her friend was referring to her ending up in jail, a psych ward, or on Bensen’s hit list, Lacey wasn’t sure.

  “I guess it comes down to what you really think you saw,” Wendy said. “Alex with claws and fangs…or a monster?”

  Lacey knew what Wendy was trying to say, but right then, she wasn’t sure if she was ready to make the distinction as easily as her friend seemed to be able to. Maybe it was simply because Wendy hadn’t seen Alex change the way she had, but it was hard to think of him the same way now. Part of her insisted that was stupid, considering he’d saved her life. But another part pointed out that he was the first guy she’d ever started to believe in and trust. That belief and trust just didn’t seem to be there anymore.

  “You know you don’t have to decide anything now, right?” Wendy said. “Why don’t you go home and think about it for a while?”

  “And then what?” Lacey asked morosely.

  It wasn’t like she could imagine ever being with Alex again. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to look at him without seeing all those teeth and hearing that growl of rage that had shaken every building in the junkyard.

  “Then you do what comes next,” Wendy told her. “Whatever that might be.”

  Chapter 11

  Alex sat on the couch in his apartment, the glow of the morning sun streaming through the windows as he stared at his cell phone, not sure if he was doing it because he was hoping Lacey might call him back or because he was damn close to calling her again.

  He desperately wanted to call her, just to hear her voice and convince himself that she was okay. But he knew he couldn’t. She already thought he was a monster. He didn’t want her thinking he was a stalker too. He almost laughed at how stupid that sounded.

  By all means, go ahead and scare the crap out of the woman you love by sprouting fangs and claws in front of her, but don’t offend her sensibilities by violating the three-calls-a-night rule.

  He tossed the phone aside on the couch beside him with a curse. He’d already called and left two messages on her cell and one on her home answering machine. That would have to be enough. She would either call him back…or she wouldn’t.

  Alex let his head fall back onto his couch, replaying last night’s events in his head for about the hundredth time as he tried to figure out if there was something he could h
ave done differently. He couldn’t come up with anything, of course. He hadn’t been able to do so all night. Lacey had been in danger. He’d done the only thing he could think of at the time to save her. And he had saved her, probably at the cost of their relationship.

  Alex had scared Lacey—really, really scared her. It probably wasn’t a stretch to say she’d been far more terrified of him than she’d been of that man in the junkyard with the gun. The way she’d backed away from him in complete fear had torn at his insides like nothing he’d ever felt before. He’d rather be stabbed fifty times over with a dull knife than feel the kind of pain he was feeling right now.

  The worst part had been watching her drive away. It had felt like something was being physically ripped out of him. In some ways, he supposed it was. He’d accepted a while ago that Lacey was truly The One for him. He supposed the horrible sensation he’d felt was that amazing link between them being torn apart. The legend of The One had been clear that the connection between a werewolf and his mate could never be denied. The fact that it could be destroyed had never come up in conversation.

  Even though Remy had told him to give Lacey some space to come to grips with what she’d seen, his first instinct had been to chase after her. He hadn’t done it, of course. He was smart enough to know that the harder he chased her, the faster she’d run. Besides, it had taken over two hours to get himself disentangled from the damn surveillance operation at the junkyard. Rodriguez had freaked out when they’d called him, thinking they’d done something stupid to blow their cover. That was only partially incorrect. They’d done something stupid, but it hadn’t blown their cover, not completely anyway.

  Luckily, he and Remy had been able to convince Rodriguez that they had nothing to do with the commotion at the junkyard and it had just been a wild dog running through the area. Thankfully, Vaughn had backed up their story—in return for them putting in a good word for her with Brooks. By the time they’d gotten the surveillance van back to the police equipment yard, it had been after three in the morning. That’s when he’d called and left those messages for Lacey, saying he was sorry for scaring her and that they could talk any time she was ready.