by A. C. Arthur
When she didn’t respond Eli took a deep breath, letting it out in a whoosh and dragging his hands down his face. “I’m going to grab a shower,” he said, turning away from her and heading to the bathroom door. He had no idea why he stopped and couldn’t really bring himself to turn around, but before going inside he said, “I don’t know if I can protect you if you go back to your room. If you need me in the middle of the night … I just don’t know,” he admitted, his voice so quiet he didn’t even think she’d heard him.
“Ask me to stay, Eli,” she replied.
He gritted his teeth then, his cat scratching at his insides as if eager for his human mouth to let the words slip free. He didn’t know how to ask, what to say, how to do this male-and-female dance with her. All Eli knew for certain was that when he came out of the bathroom, he wanted to see her sitting on his bed. When he lay down to go to sleep, he wanted to feel her beside him. And when he awoke in the morning, he wanted to roll over and see her there.
“Stay,” he finally replied, not waiting for an answer but going into the bathroom and closing the door quietly behind him.
Chapter 11
“This is where the signal stops,” Brayden said, coming up to the bushes at the backside of the estate they were looking for in Prince George’s County.
“Do you know who lives here?” Aidan asked, walking around his brother, flattening his hands on the brick structure and leaning forward to look into the window. “Lights are on in this hallway but I didn’t see any cars in the driveway.”
Caleb stood back from the others, tilting his head upward to look at the second floor of the structure. “No lights on upstairs. Probably some type of alarm system though. We’d have to disarm it before going in. Either that or get in and out in about ten minutes before the alarm company can dispatch the police.”
Eli stood farthest from the brothers, looking around the entire space. To his right was a thick line of trees about forty feet away, lush grass all around. To the left was the same scenario. Directly in front of them were patio doors, the windows Aidan had looked through, heading to the left side of the house. Above was a deck that wrapped around the right side. Behind them, an in-ground pool, more grassy acreage, and a thicker line of trees, tall and full for privacy. The driveway was in the front, going to the dead end part of the block, where they had parked and walked down. This was a pretty secluded neighborhood, high-end, but not gated. Dumbasses.
“We’ll take our chances,” Eli told the group. “Let’s go in.”
He knew exactly whose house this was as he walked closer to the patio door where Caleb had already begun picking the lock. In seconds they were in and sure enough, the shrill buzzing of an alarm went off. The shifters moved with stealth, not speaking but using hand signals to split up and head in different directions.
Eli took the main level, heading up the basement stairs and moving through the expansive space on quiet feet and using his nocturnal vision. There was an office and he immediately slipped inside, heading straight to the desk and the computer. Running his hands along the sides he searched for flash drives. He wanted all of them. There weren’t any, but when he opened the first drawer he smiled as a clear box with four flash drives inside came into view. He ditched the box and stuffed the drives into his pockets, not worried about leaving any fingerprints, since Shadows didn’t have them.
When he was satisfied the desk was clear and knew that their time was winding down, Eli was just moving around to the front of the desk when something caught his eye. He grabbed the piece of paper quickly and ran out of the room. Aidan had been coming from the upstairs, giving Eli a thumbs-down signal as they passed in the foyer and then headed back down the basement stairs.
Brayden was coming from the garage and joined them on the descent. Caleb had stayed in the basement and shook his head when they ran into him. But Brayden held up a small plastic black bag and smiled. They rushed out of the house, moving quietly and quickly down the street to where they’d parked the truck. While the alarm still blared there had been no movement or lights going on at either of the neighboring houses. He considered they might still be asleep since it was only around four in the morning and the sun had yet to rise.
“Cut through that clearing down there,” Caleb yelled from the backseat up to Aidan, who was driving.
“This street has no outlet. You have to turn around,” Brayden interjected.
Aidan tossed his brother a sly smile. “I can make one.”
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Caleb yelled as Aidan took a hard right.
The truck rocked back and forth as its wheels rode up over the curb and onto the grassy property of the third clueless neighbor. They went straight through their backyard, coming out on another street and speeding away from the scene of the crime, while sirens blared in the distance.
Caleb and Aidan were high-fiving, Brayden was scowling, and Eli was trying not to smile at the younger shifters’ antics. That hidden smile turned into a frown the moment his phone vibrated in his pocket.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“Press conference is cancelled,” Ezra said gruffly.
There was a minor relief that was quickly followed by intense foreboding. “What happened?” Eli asked him.
“Rimas was killed sometime during the night. Papplin just arrived at the hospital for his shift and heard the news. Nurses went into the room to check his vitals at three a.m. and he was unresponsive.”
Eli’s teeth clenched as he listened, his cat awakening to press persistently against his spine. “What else?”
There was more, Eli was positive of that fact.
Ezra sighed heavily. “On a hunch, Papplin went to the room where Rimas was found. He picked up a rogue scent.”
“Fuck!” Eli yelled, and the background chatter in the interior of the truck ceased.
“Don’t go there, Eli,” Ezra warned immediately. “Wherever you are right now, head back to Havenway. Don’t go to the hospital or to your shop. Police are swarming both places. If you show up they’re going to question you and Nick doesn’t want you alone when they do.”
“I’m not going into hiding,” Eli countered.
“We’re all going to be in hiding soon if we don’t get a hold on this hybrid issue. Now that somebody’s clearly out to expose us, we don’t need to help them by flying off the handle and shifting right in front of them.”
“Is that what you think I did? You think I flew off the handle and beat the crap out of Rimas?” Eli asked.
“I think the man was trying to kill you and when Nivea showed up his assault on her pushed a sensitive button. I’m not blaming you but I’m warning you not to put yourself in a situation you can no longer control again.”
“Because I can’t possibly control myself due to the poison that I voluntarily breathed into my body the way you can now?” The words were bitter and matched the complete distaste for everything he and Ezra had been forced to do back in the Sierra Leone rain forest.
Ezra was silent and Eli was annoyed as hell.
Ezra’s revelation that his mate, the human named Dawn, had been his savior from Dagar’s tainted smoke, was a sore subject between the two. Eli refused to believe that relinquishing control of his feelings to a female, again, was necessary to live a normal life. The last thing he needed, after Acacia and Leanne, was to let another female claim any part of him. Besides, Eli wasn’t sure the symptoms he was experiencing had anything to do with the shaman’s potion, after all, Ezra had never complained about seeing things that weren’t presently right in front of him.
Yet even as he pressed the button to end the call with his brother he knew that he’d already made a possibly deadly mistake. He’d slept with Nivea Cannon. Not only had they had sex, acting on the attraction that had been brewing between them for years, but he’d actually slept in a bed with her curled into his arms last night. He’d fallen asleep with her scent permeating his senses and awakened to the same. And dammit, it had felt fuckin
g fantastic!
Thrusting his phone back into his pocket, he filled the Sanchez brothers in on what was going on. “I need you to be my eyes and ears down there,” he told them. “Go to the hospital and see if you can get a lead on the rogue scent. Stop by the barbershop to see who might be there. If a rogue’s responsible for Rimas’s death, the question is why? If the answer is what I think it is, then we’re all screwed!”
* * *
Agent Dorian Wilson sat on the back deck of his older sister Miranda’s D.C. suburb house. On this early fall afternoon, he stared out at the two trees that were barely in their prime, yet already had golden leaves falling to the ground. The swing that his niece, Jasmine, loved to go higher and higher on, sat idle, as today was a school day. Miranda and her husband, Eric McCoy, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Division, were at work. They’d graciously welcomed Dorian into their home when he’d shown up in the early morning hours two weeks ago.
He hadn’t dared go back to his apartment. Wasn’t sure who was watching him now, in addition to the tail he’d already known he had. Taking a pull off the Budweiser he held in his right hand, Dorian recalled how he’d come to be in this place at this time.
A little over two years ago he’d begun investigating a money-laundering scheme originating at the Reynolds & Delgado law firm and stretching down to South America. At the same time, Eric had the murder of Senator Baines and his daughter on his hands. The connection had not come immediately to Dorian, but eventually he’d put some of the pieces together. Kalina Harper, the ex-cop turned wife of Roman Reynolds, hadn’t been able to come up with any hard evidence against the man or his law firm—no surprise there once she began sleeping with him. But talking with his brother-in-law one day at his office, Dorian had come across some strange pictures. He’d copied them and taken them back to his house where he’d begun his own investigation.
As if it had been yesterday, the images played back through his mind. It was of a man—the body, face, legs, arms of a man—with the claws of an animal. Dorian wasn’t naïve, he knew all about Photoshopping pictures and airbrushing images. But something told him this image wasn’t a fake. Or at the very least, if the claws were fake, they’d still been used in the commission of a crime.
Months later there’d been another murder, Diamond Turner, a stripper from Club Athena’s. The business card of Xavier Santos Markland found in Diamond’s purse had given Dorian another crack at Reynolds and his gang. Unfortunately, he’d hit another dead end. At that point he may have been willing to concede that he was chasing the ghost of a story, but then he’d seen it for himself. The eerie, glowing eyes of the female that had begun watching him on a daily basis. After much thought he’d finally figured out what the eyes reminded him of—a big cat. That revelation had pushed Dorian in a whole new direction with his investigation into Reynolds and as things began to unfold throughout the States, pieces of the puzzle that had been an enigma to him for the last two years had finally begun to fall into place.
In the last two months Dorian had been in touch with other agents across the state and just two weeks ago they’d finally agreed to meet at a clandestine location, to compare notes on the cat people and the connection to Roman Reynolds. There’d been reports as far out as Sedona, Arizona, where just a month ago there was a break-in at a government lab and one of Roman’s friends’, Sebastian Perry’s, resort had been burned to the ground. All amidst reports of animal roaring and vicious deaths.
The meeting location had been brilliant, a civilian-owned cabin in the western Maryland mountains. Nobody within the Bureau would find them there, and nobody else would be looking for them.
Dorian had been wrong. And he’d almost been killed.
One of the agents had stood up just a few minutes after their meeting had begun and started shooting. His name was Kegan Charles and he was stationed in Dallas. They’d just finished introductions and were each about to pull out their own files compiled on what had been going on in their jurisdiction when the shots rang out. Dorian had quickly rolled to the floor, clutching his Redweld to his chest. He’d crawled into one of the back bedrooms and escaped through a window. But not before seeing her again.
Nivea Cannon, graduate of George Washington University and otherwise unemployed. She was the one with the cat’s eyes, the one that had been following him for months now, and she’d been at the cabin with one of Rome’s bodyguards, Eli Preston, owner of two Southside barbershops in D.C. Taking a leave of absence from the Bureau and using these past days to dig deeper into the background of these new players had been how Dorian spent his time.
This case, these people, had been Dorian’s focus for almost a year now. At first it had just been another case, but once Kalina had entered the picture it had taken on another layer. The moment he learned that Kalina was sleeping with Roman Reynolds and had subsequently married the guy, Dorian knew without a doubt he had to find out what was going on. He’d never told Kalina how he felt about her and doubted that it mattered now, but if there was something he could do to save her life and possibly the lives of others, it was his sworn duty to do it. No matter how long it took.
With that in mind, this afternoon he was mulling over the loose ends, trying to piece it all together in his head before he could formulate a plan to expose them. Because now it wasn’t only a matter of his reputation but also of his sanity.
Speaking of which, Dorian had just taken another long swallow of beer when he saw her. He lowered his arm slowly, until the glass bottle clinked onto the metal top of the table sitting beside the deck chair. He blinked, not wearing his shades and wondering if the unseasonably high summerlike temperatures they’d been having the past couple of days were causing him to hallucinate.
No, she was real and she was gorgeous. So much so, his dick twitched as he watched the sway of her hips while she came closer. The high heels of her shoes clanked on the wooden steps leading up the deck, long tanned legs bringing her closer to him as if he’d beckoned her from some long-lost wet dream. She wore her skirt short enough to make his mouth water. Her top was tight, like a second skin hugging breasts he knew would spill out of his now sweaty palms. Her hair was pulled back from her face, long dark brown tresses that fell in a sexy tumble of curls down the center of her back. And when she was finally on the deck, standing right in front of him, she looked at him, bringing her hand up to slip the wide-framed shades she wore down her nose a couple of inches until he could see her eyes.
“Agent Wilson, I have something you desire. And you can help get me what I want. I’d say that makes us a perfect team,” she said boldly. Sky-blue eyes too bright to be contacts and just eerie enough to be real, glistened against her sun-kissed skin.
Chapter 12
First Lady Kalina Harper wasn’t one to give in to pressure or stress. She’d survived growing up in an orphanage, a sexual assault, an undercover operation that had changed her life, and the realization that she was a Shadow Shifter. To say she was resilient was an understatement. But watching her mate deal with the biggest battle to ever face the shifters was rubbing her the wrong way.
For months she’d stood by Rome’s side as he’d taken on one bad announcement regarding the shifters after another. They’d both stood shaken to the core when they found out that Shya Delgado had been kidnapped and that the damiana inadvertently slipped into her bloodstream during her mother’s pregnancy might possibly kill her. Nick was one of Rome’s best friends so Shya was like their own child, and knowing she was in danger had led to countless sleepless nights for both of them.
Today, however, in the midst of everything that was going on around them, Kalina had desired at least an hour of normalcy. She wanted to have lunch with her mate, to sit at a restaurant with him and talk about their day like two normal humans.
That apparently was not to be.
“You’re hardly eating,” Rome said, snapping Kalina out of her reverie. “Lunch was your idea, remember?”
Giving
up the pretense and letting her fork fall to the side of her plate, Kalina looked at her mate. “I scheduled lunch for one thirty,” she informed him. “It’s now almost three.”
He sat back in his chair, already finished with the North Carolina mountain trout entrée he ordered each time they visited the District Commons restaurant. Kalina’s first thought was how deliciously handsome this man was, all day, every day. From the root beer tone of his skin, to the broad build of his body that wore the custom-made suits like no other man she’d ever laid eyes on, to the way his eyes grew even darker when he stared at her hungrily, her heart did a flip-flop every time she looked at him. The cat inside purred with the knowledge that he belonged to her.
“I told you the meeting ran over, I had no other choice but to push our lunch back. Now, why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you, because I know it’s not about the lunch that you’re not eating being a couple of hours late.”
Kalina inhaled deeply, watching him with eyes that were familiar with every inch of his body. He looked at her similarly, as if there was nothing she could hide from him, ever. And yet, there was.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Rome.” She took another breath, hoping to steady herself, to gather that confidence she was known for and to get this over with.
“I know that there’s been a lot going on with getting the Assembly Headquarters ready and all that’s been happening with these hybrids and Shya. I swear it feels like I’ve been on a roller-coaster ride ever since the first moment I met you.”
“Are you regretting that?” he asked seriously. “Do you wish we’d never met?”
“No,” she replied hurriedly, shaking her head as if to solidify the answer. “Never that. I just mean that it seems like we haven’t had a moment’s peace. I keep trying to think of the last normal dinner we had when you returned from the office, but they’re usually turned into meetings with Nick and X, or with the guards. And since Elder Alamar has taken up residence at Havenway and he and Baxter have been walking around whispering like conspiracy theorists, I haven’t had a moment alone with you.” Kalina sighed this time, feeling like this wasn’t going the way she’d wanted.