by Holley Trent
“You mean without leaving behind any evidence or being seen.”
Sarah let out a ragged breath. “Obviously, we’d prefer to take him alive so we can make him call off his dogs. We’d like everyone to know that the empire of terror and narcotics he’s built is crumbling now, and that all the illegal dealings that he set up when he was in charge are no longer going to be tolerated.”
Dana eased around Sarah and slid the menu onto Drea’s desk. “Probably best to order the sampler box with a variety of cream cheeses. We can keep whatever’s left of them in the fridge.”
“I’ll get the order in right now.” Drea reached for her desk phone’s handset. “He’s not going to give up all that information about his accomplices and business partners,” she said to Sarah as she dialed.
“You don’t think so?”
Drea shook her head. “A guy like him…he’d make something of that network even from prison.”
“Well, we don’t plan on sending him to a normal prison.” Astrid joined the group and plopped into the armchair in the corner nearest the door. “We have a special place for him.”
“Too bad it’s not filled with flames and brimstone.” Tamara entered the space, too, with Maria on her heels. “What we have prepared for him will do fine, though.”
A worker at the bagel shop came on the line, and Drea quickly put the order in and asked for someone to walk it over. As Dana had speculated, they were happy to do so.
Drea turned to the ladies milling around her desk. “So, you said something about a meeting? We could move to the conference room. Might be more comfortable there.”
The Shrews shared a complicated five-way look. They did that a lot. It was rarely a good sign.
“Oh, no. Did something happen?”
Dana shook her head and put her hands up. “Okay, look. We’re not trying to be weird and secretive—at least, no more than usual. We just have a lot of things to run down, and I imagine we’re all wondering what order we need to do them in.”
“Are some of those things of a…personal nature?” Drea asked.
Dana shared a look with Tamara, and then fixed her gaze back on Drea. “Yes.”
“I see.”
“Listen, you don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to. Tamara has told us a little, but we need to hear from you, too.”
“You mean about Peter?” Please don’t make me talk about Peter. If she talked about Peter, she was going to cry.
He’d been right there within her grips—almost her mate, but they’d left things undone. He could get over her, still, and find someone more suitable the next time the season came. Perhaps a nice Romanian girl like Tamara who had the right attitude to be the mate of an alpha Bear. Someone who wouldn’t have waited until she was in her twenties to decide that something was wrong with her and that she should do something to fix what was broken.
Drea had wasted so many years feeling useless and disjointed. She felt so much better, but undoing past decisions she’d made out of fear would take some time.
“Not specifically about Peter.” Dana sat on the corner of the desk. “Though that topic may come up again later. We’re talking about you.”
“Me?”
“Mm-hmm. How are you feeling?”
Drea shrugged. “Tired. Hungry. Restless, because I need to be making myself busy, you know?” Also a little lovesick, and maybe a lot horny. She wasn’t going to share that information with the ladies, though.
“Tamara says getting a read on you is harder now. You’re not as psychically present to other born-Bears as you were before. I guess you’re not hitting their radar anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I knew there was a chance that would happen, but I didn’t see where I had a choice.”
“We’re not blaming you for what you had to do. If you’re happy, we’re happy. We just need to make sure that you’re happy, and discerning when you need a boost is going to be harder for us now. You’ve always been one of those people who smiles through misery, so we can’t tell when we need to intervene. You’ve got to help us help you.”
Drea stared down at the foam wrist rest in front of her keyboard and fiddled with the fraying corner. “I’ve never been very good at that. I’m so used to being the weak link, and I learned to keep my mouth shut about how I couldn’t keep up a long time ago. Otherwise I would have always been asking for help.”
“We don’t work that way,” Maria said. “Not well, anyway. Trust me, I know what it’s like to bottle things up because you don’t want to burden people with one more issue after they’ve already helped you so much. But the thing is, we have to ask, because if we don’t, we’ll never get any better. We learn something every time we have to ask for help. Eventually, we figure out which problems we can solve on our own and which ones we shouldn’t even try to tackle without help.”
“Don’t be afraid to need us a lot right now,” Astrid said.
Sarah nodded and rocked from side to side, settling her fussy, teething baby. “We know better than anyone the shit you’ve been through, and remember—there are five of us. This isn’t like when all you had was Bryan and you stopped wanting to burden him. You can come to one or all of us with any issue, large or small, and we’ll find a solution.”
“Just consider us your second clan,” Dana said with a chuckle.
“A second clan.” Drea nodded and met her gaze. “I like that. I…need that.”
“Good.” Dana reached over and gave Drea’s shoulder a squeeze. “Now, with that out of the way, we need to talk about business stuff. I’m hesitant to move into the conference room just yet because we’re expecting visitors.”
“Who?”
“A potential new hire and couple of independent contractors we’re considering bringing on short-term. I need you to run background checks on a couple of Coyotes.” Dana looked down at her new watch—one just like Drea’s. “They should be here in about ninety minutes. Before that, we’re expecting Maria’s sister Marcella.”
“She’s interested in seeing what the company is about while she’s in the area,” Maria said. “She may have a skill set suitable for the job.”
“Oh. Well, I’d love to have a longer chat with her. You ladies have been so overcommitted lately. It’d be nice to have some extra personnel on hand so you could take some time off.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Dana said. “I’ve got to make a phone call. You ladies shoot the shit for a few minutes until the bagels get here. This shouldn’t take me long.”
As soon as Dana disappeared down the hallway, the main entrance buzzer sounded.
Drea cleared some of the open windows on her computer and squinted at the security camera’s feed. “Oh. It’s Doc.” She cringed. “Oh. It’s Doc.”
Tamara chucked low. “You know how she is. She’s going to want to get her poking and prodding time in.”
“You called her, didn’t you?”
“No, Peter did.”
“What?”
Tamara shrugged. “He’s curious, I guess.”
Because he’s changed his mind?
Drea didn’t regret doing what she’d had to do, but she’d understand if Peter had decided some other Bear would be a more suitable mate for him. Him cutting his losses early could possibly prevent them both from being miserable down the road. As badly as she wanted him, she didn’t want to be kept if he were only going to keep her for a little while.
She put on a smile for the Shrews, anyway, and pulled her corporate coffee mug closer. She hit the unlock button for the outer door, and stood. “Be right back. I’m going to go fill this before Doc sets her sights on me.”
The Shrews blocking the hall stepped back to make a path for her, and Drea didn’t let her smile fall away until she was in front of the sink and rinsing her mug.
She didn’t want to think it would have been so easy for a Bear to turn off his affections. Were-bears mated for life. But, given the circumstances, maybe the Bear goddess had seen fit to give Peter a
n out.
She dried the sides and bottom of the mug and set the cup in front of the coffeemaker.
Drea didn’t want an out, though. She wanted Peter.
Why does everything have to be up to him? Don’t I get a say?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Too clean,” Peter said, and settled lower down in the seat of a van he, Soren, Bryan, and Astrid’s brother, Eric, had parked amid so many other vehicles at a county fairground. There was some sort of agricultural show going on, and Soren had surmised they’d be less suspicious parked there than elsewhere in the small town where there was little to no traffic. Everyone was at the fairground.
Everyone except Gene, anyway.
They knew were Gene was. He was holed up in some ex-girlfriend’s house—not a Bear—and rarely ever stuck his head out the door. They needed to lure him out, which they could do any number of proposed ways, but they still hadn’t figured out what to do with him after that.
Soren had proposed a single bullet to the forehead from a distance—sniper-style.
Peter thought that was too kind an ending for him, especially with all the messes the disgraced alpha had left outstanding. A quarter of the Ridge Bears were recovering from illicit substance addictions, half were in therapy for one disorder or another, and many had physical concerns as a result of abuse. They all had a long way to go in finding the path back to happiness. They hadn’t been on it since before Gene had taken over.
Bryan grunted and put one booted foot up on the dashboard. “I’ve always fantasized about doing to him what he did to Drea so many times.”
Peter growled low.
“Follow him around. Jump out and rough him up every time he turns a corner. Maybe when I get bored, I’ll force him to shapeshift and make him do circus tricks, being sure to stab him with tranquilizers every few hours, of course, so he’s nice and compliant.”
“You’re better than that,” Eric said from behind the wheel. The van belonged to him—his lodge, rather. He and his sister Astrid co-owned the mountain inn, and he usually used the conveyance to pick up guests from the airport in Asheville or to drop them off at ski venues, but the vehicle served the current purpose fine. Normally, they would have traveled more discreetly—there was little chance that anyone connected to Gene wouldn’t have known by then that the Falks were aligned with the Shrews and the Ridge Bears—but Bryan didn’t care anymore if Gene knew he was nearby. He wanted him to know—wanted him to be anxious about the unpredictable, just like Gene had made so many Bears feel over the years.
“You say that,” Bryan said, “but right now, I don’t feel particularly moral. You weren’t there to see some of the sick shit he had me doing when I was one of his lieutenants. He had me tying up stupid shifter kids who made the mistake of stumbling too close to Bear territory so he could scar them with heated silver blades. Only in the past few months have I stopped hearing those kids screaming in my dreams.”
“You’re right, Peter,” Soren said. “A bullet in the head is too good for him.”
Peter fondled the handle of his switchblade and stared out the window at the comings and goings on the fairground. Folks were out with their kids, working and playing. Being so damned normal. He wondered what that was like. With his family’s nomadic lifestyle during his early childhood, “home” had always been such a nebulous concept. “Home” was wherever they had keys to at the time, and often that meant hotel rooms or furnished rentals for long stretches. That lifestyle was why Peter still hadn’t bothered acquiring many more possessions than what could be stuffed into a couple of duffel bags.
He was sick of living like that. Sick of never being comfortable and not being able to visualize a future.
He pulled the blade out only to click it back into position again. Then again.
“What’s wrong?” Soren asked. “Your melancholy is bringing down my inner bear.”
Peter shrugged. “I don’t know.” He slipped the knife into his pocket and took out his phone instead. “Do you ever get tired of living like this?”
Soren pushed up a dark eyebrow. “What? This job?”
“No. Everything. The hopping around from one lily pad to the next but never making it back to shore.”
“Oh, hell.” Soren closed his heavy-lidded eyes and rubbed them.
Peter didn’t have a good frame of reference, but he suspected Tamara might have dosed Soren with some sort of long-acting tranquilizer before letting him make the trip. Peter couldn’t explain otherwise how Soren wasn’t fighting to get back to his mate.
The only reason Peter wasn’t fighting to get back to his at the moment was because he couldn’t shake the belief that she’d be better off without him. She deserved a little house with a fenced-in yard to let her mutt run around in. And more than that, she deserved a man who hadn’t paid the majority of his bills to date by spilling blood. He didn’t want to let her go—he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything, in fact—but she’d already been through too much shit. Peter wasn’t a sure bet.
“If you’re speaking in metaphors,” Soren said, “that must mean the mating fever has rotted your brain.”
“Maybe.”
“I understand what he’s saying, though.” Eric leaned in the seat to look into the next row. “You’ve got a compulsion to carve out your own little territory and build it up and make it nice. Then, you don’t really want to leave unless you have to, because your girl is there, and you know that home is a safe place.”
Peter nodded. He liked the “safe place” idea. He also liked the idea of having his girl there. “I’m ready to just be still for a while,” he said low.
“Anywhere in particular?” Bryan asked, glancing back.
“I haven’t decided.”
“Gene just left the house,” Eric said, tossing his phone into the cup holder.
He yanked his seatbelt across his body and then turned the key in the ignition.
The rest of them sat up and reached for their belts.
“Who tipped you off?” Bryan asked.
“The ex. She emailed a friend and had her send me a text. I guess Gene took her phone. Look at my cell.”
Bryan snatched it out of the cup holder. “Where the hell is he going?”
“I doubt he would have told her,” Soren said. “If I were him, I’d be on my way to jump into someone’s car and try to race us out of here.”
Eric scoffed and backed out of the spot. “He could certainly try.”
“Hey, yeah,” Bryan said into Eric’s phone. “My name is Bryan Ridge. You just sent my friend a text.”
Eric got them on the road toward the ex-girlfriend’s house, and Peter leaned forward, trying to catch snatches of the other end of the conversation.
“Uh-huh,” Bryan said. “No, no. Don’t worry about that. We haven’t done anything yet because we don’t want there to be any collateral damage. Where’s the kid who brought you the news?”
Peter furrowed his brow.
“Okay, good. Nah, just hold onto him. I’m glad word is getting around within the Bears in the area that folks should refuse to deal with him. That’s making what we have to do easier, so spread word to them to keep that up. I know they’re afraid, but we’re trying to get him off the streets as soon as we can. Did she say where he was going, by any chance?”
Bryan turned around and shook his head at Peter and Soren, and mouthed, “He left without saying anything.”
He turned back around. Eric had picked up enough speed that the van was listing at frightening angles as he took sharp curves.
“No, we’re not going to try to stop him. We’re not so naive that we’d think he isn’t carrying some weaponry that could knock out even a born-Bear. We’ll chase him out of the area and try to pin him somewhere where there’s no one around to get hurt. All right. Bye. Oh—and thanks.”
No sooner did he disconnect did Peter’s phone vibrate in his hand. He squinted down at the screen, reading it twice to make his brain understand the name comi
ng up in caller ID. Andrea Ridge.
“Andrea…” he whispered.
What could she possibly want?
He answered. “Andrea?”
“Um… Peter?” She sounded stronger than she had when he’d left her, and some of the tension he’d been carrying around in his gut unfurled.
“Yes. What’s wrong? Are you well?”
“Oh! I’m okay. I’m at the office. We were talking about some things, and I started wondering.”
About me?
“I have a list that some of my Bear friends helped me make,” she said. “I wrote down the names of all the women Gene showed more than a superficial interest in for as long as we’ve been aware of him. The list probably isn’t complete, but depending on where you are, knowing their locations will help. He used to brag about how they’d never say no to him. He tried to make everyone think the women were so in love with him, but I think they were just afraid of him. Bear women aren’t so great at saying no sometimes.”
True. Otherwise, Andrea would have said no to him.
“How did you know we were in touch with one of his girlfriends?” he asked.
“I didn’t know you were. If you’ve already thought of this, I’m sorry for bothering you. I thought the list would help.”
“No, don’t misunderstand me. We’re in Delaware right now tracking him. He’s been holing up with someone we identified only yesterday as being an ex-girlfriend, and we only got that name because his mother thought she’d be a likely target.”
“Who is that?” Bryan asked.
“Andrea.”
“Put her on speaker.”
Peter hit the button. “Andrea?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before. Thinking is a little easier for me now, so…”
He would have paid richly to know what else she’d been thinking about, but it wasn’t the time for her to assuage his ego. They were on a job. “Are there any women within an easy drive of here on that list?” he asked.