Wolf Hunt

by Paige Tyler

  Alina turned her attention away from the photos on the wall to give him a sheepish look. “Yeah. When I was growing up, Friday was pizza night at our house. Mom and Dad made a big event out of it, so I always associate pizza with family and good times.” A smile curved her lips. “Now, it’s my number one go-to comfort food. My freezer is stuffed full of them, and the front of my fridge is covered in magnets from all the local delivery places.”

  Trevor sipped his iced tea. He’d always considered pizza the ultimate food. “Were you being serious yesterday when you said your parents don’t know what you do for a living?”

  Alina’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she shook her head. “I was just messing with you. Of course my parents know I worked for the CIA. Though to be truthful, they refuse to talk about it.”

  He was about to ask for details, but their server came over with their pizza just then. It was an absolutely drool-worthy collection of cheese, pepperoni, and excess grease. In other words, perfect. The woman placed the big pizza on the table between them along with plates, utensils, and a load of napkins.

  Trevor contained his curiosity about Alina’s family while they each helped themselves to their first slices of pizza. He watched in amusement as she used some of the paper napkins to soak up the excess grease, then practically emptied half a bottle of Parmesan cheese on her slice.

  “You plan on having any pizza with that?” he teased as she poked the slice a few times with a fork as if she thought that would help all the added powdered cheese stay in place.

  Alina shrugged. “I like Parmesan cheese on my pizza. Is that a crime or something?”

  “Nope, not a crime at all.” He picked up his slice and took a few bites. “Back to your parents. What’s the story behind them refusing to talk about you being in the CIA?”

  Alina hesitated long enough to take a bite of her own pizza before answering. “My family is what you’d describe as politically active. They’ve been involved in state and city politics for generations. City council, state senate and assembly, state cabinet positions, campaign management and fund-raising—you name it, and someone in my family has done it. With my background, everyone assumed I’d go into politics, too.”

  He snagged another slice of pizza and sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on it. “You didn’t want to?”

  “Actually, I did. I never saw myself running for office, but I thought about doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, maybe managing a campaign or working on someone’s staff. I even went to college for political science.”

  “How did you go from being a poli-sci major to joining the CIA?”

  She ate a few more bites of her pizza, nibbling all the way down to the back of the slice but not eating the crust there. When she was done, she tossed the pizza bone to the side and got another piece, drowning it in powdered cheese.

  “There was a small Agency recruitment effort on campus,” she explained. “A lot of my friends didn’t want to have anything to do with them, but I went and listened. This was sometime in 2003, and the intelligence failures of 9/11 were all anyone talked about those days. What they told me changed my entire outlook. I signed up a few months later and went straight into the CIA right after graduation. With my background, I thought I’d be doing analyst work, but I ended up in the field instead.”

  Trevor had still been in the army at that time and clearly remembered what those years following 9/11 were like. Those events had changed a lot of people’s outlooks.

  “What did your family think of your career choice?” he asked.

  Alina sipped her iced tea. “My brothers and sister weren’t thrilled, but they respected my decision. But when I told my parents I was joining the CIA, well, let’s just say they were disappointed. I think they had visions of me running around the world, inciting coups, toppling governments, kidnapping people, and assassinating world leaders. There was a period of time in the beginning when both of them stopped talking to me.”

  Trevor winced. “And now?”

  “It’s better,” she admitted. “But now, when I visit for the holidays, my profession is strictly off-limits. I don’t talk about what I do, and no one brings it up.”

  Damn. That sounded really screwed up. “Must make for some tense dinners.”

  She laughed. “Not as bad as you might think. I love my family to pieces, but sometimes they act as if the real world doesn’t exist. They’re comfortable believing everyone and every situation, anywhere in the world, can be handled through reasonable political debate and a nice, civil voice. You and I both know that, sometimes, things don’t work out like that. My family would simply rather not talk about those things. They’re comfortable not knowing what I do, and I’m comfortable not telling them.”

  Alina might have seemed cool about the whole thing, but the slight elevation in her heart rate told Trevor she wasn’t as chill with her family’s opinion of her chosen career as she might try to suggest. He could get that. Family was family. If you knew they were disappointed in you, it was hard to act like it didn’t matter.

  “Are you from the DC area, or did you move here after the DCO hired you?” he asked.

  “I grew up in Sacramento, but the Agency had me based out of DC for the past five years. I have an apartment in Del Ray, near Reagan National.”

  He reached for another slice of pizza. “Del Ray? That’s practically at the end of the airport runway. You don’t mind living near all that noise?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that bad. I don’t even notice it anymore. Besides, it was really convenient while I was in the Agency, since I practically lived in the airport.”

  He chuckled. “I feel ya. Sometimes I think it’d make more sense to live in an RV. That way, I could park it at the airport whenever I go somewhere. Any plans to move closer to the DCO training complex at Quantico so you won’t have to deal with that morning commute?”

  “No. I like my apartment, and my neighbor is my best friend. No way am I going anywhere.” She shrugged. “Besides, I still have no idea if this gig in the DCO is going to work out. It would be stupid to move then find out I don’t like the work that much.” She motioned at him with her half-eaten slice of pizza. “How about you? Do you live near Quantico?”

  “Yeah. I have an apartment in Woodbridge that I was lucky enough to get into called Kensington Place. I can stumble to my car ten minutes before work and still make it there in time.”

  She blinked. “I’ve heard of that place. It’s kind of fancy, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a little pricey, I admit. But shifters do get a bonus over the regular GS wage scale. The DCO actually found the place for me.”

  She laughed. “The perks of having fangs and claws, I guess.”

  Trevor didn’t sense a trace of bitterness in her words, which was what he usually got from a lot of the other regular agents working in the DCO when they found out that the freaks got paid more than they did.

  “Okay, now that you know all about me, what’s your story?” Alina asked. “How’d you end up in the DCO?”

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “It’s a long story.”

  She gestured at the pie in the center of the table. “We still have half a pizza left to polish off, so feel free to take your time.”

  “Well, in that case, I suppose I should start with the fact that I was born to be a cop,” Trevor said, grabbing another slice.

  Alina lifted a brow. “That seems like a tough burden to put on a newborn, don’t you think?”

  He chuckled. “I’m serious. My dad, uncle, all three of my brothers, and my sister are all cops in Portland, so I’m not exaggerating when I say my life was planned out for me. From the time I was ten years old, it was a given that I’d either go in the army and serve as an MP, then get out after my first tour so I could become a cop like everyone else in my family, or I’d go to the local junior college and get my associate’s degree
in criminal justice, then get a job as a cop like everyone else in my family.”

  Alina made a face. “Crap. And I thought my life had been tightly scripted out for me. That had to have been a little claustrophobic.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” he agreed. “But it turned out that in my case, I had even fewer options than that. See, I was a wide receiver for our high school football team, and I was good enough to get some attention from the local universities. I got a couple of looks from recruiters at both Oregon and Oregon State during my junior year, and everyone was talking a full scholarship if I could make it through my senior year without getting injured. I have to admit I was kind of psyched about going to a big school and playing in front of thousands of fans. Unfortunately, my mom and dad weren’t planning on letting me get near any of the big schools. They’d already locked their sights on Western Oregon University. It was only an hour and a half from home, and it offered a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a full scholarship. Dad was practically salivating at the thought of his youngest son hitting the detective ranks before the age of thirty. So at that point, even the military was off the table.”

  “I’m hearing a but coming,” Alina said, taking a bite of pizza.

  “Yeah. It was definitely coming.” He waited for their server to refill their teas and leave before continuing. “Because in between my junior year and senior year of high school, I went through my first shift. In a flash, my whole life changed.”

  Alina stopped chewing and swallowed quickly. “Wait a minute. I naturally assumed you were born a shifter. It didn’t happen until you were seventeen? Did something happen to bring it on or whatever?”

  “I was born a shifter, but shifter abilities usually don’t start appearing until sometime in our late teens.”

  She nodded in interest, pizza apparently forgotten. “Did you freak out that first time?”

  He snorted. “Hell yeah, I freaked. I thought I was turning into a werewolf or something.”

  “So how did it happen?” she asked, her eyes bright with anticipation. “Did you wake up in the woods naked under a full moon, or was it something really scary like finding yourself raiding the fridge and eating raw meat in the middle of the night?”

  Trevor laughed. Those were exactly the kind of snarky questions he would have asked if she was the shifter and he was the curious normal guy.

  “You watch way too many movies,” he said.

  Her cheeks took on a slight flush, and he had to remind himself this was his partner he was talking to, not a woman he was dating. That was tough to remember, since he couldn’t help but notice how damn sexy Alina looked when she blushed.

  “It wasn’t anything that dramatic,” he finally said, taking mercy on her. “I woke up in the middle of the night dripping with sweat. Every muscle in my body was worn out like I’d just finished running a marathon in full pads and a helmet. I went into the bathroom to throw some cold water on my face. Then I looked in the mirror and…well, I guess you can imagine how seeing fangs and claws could be a little tough for a seventeen-year-old to deal with.”

  “Did you tell anyone? Your parents or brothers or sister…a friend?”

  He shook his head. “No. I thought I was turning into a monster. There was no way in hell I was going to tell anyone.”

  She frowned. “That must have been difficult to keep secret.”

  “Tell me about it.” He washed a bite of pizza down with a swig of tea. “When you first shift, it can take a while to gain control. I was on the verge of sprouting fangs and claws whenever I smelled a girl, got nervous or frustrated or angry, even when I got hungry. I hid it the best I could and tried to act like nothing was going on, but everything went to crap when I showed up for football practice and blew past the fastest cornerback on our team like he was standing still.” He shook his head, remembering it like it had been yesterday. “That’s when I knew I couldn’t play anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because someone would have figured out something was going on with me. Or assumed I was on performance-enhancing drugs. Plus, it seemed wrong playing football when there was no one who could keep up with me.”

  Alina looked at him in surprise. “Wow. That’s a mature way to look at the situation for a high school kid. There’d be a lot of seventeen-year-olds who would have tried to take advantage of those physical abilities to make themselves look good.”

  “Yeah, that was me,” he quipped, “very mature for my age.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “What could I do?” He transferred another slice of pizza from the tray to his plate, then reached for the Parmesan cheese. “I dropped out of football and started hitting the science classes pretty hard, hoping to figure out what the hell was happening to me. When that didn’t work, I made the decision to get the hell out of town before anyone noticed how much I’d changed. I joined the army and headed to basic training the day after I graduated from high school. I signed up to be an MP, which was something of a consolation prize for my dad. My mom was a little freaked out, though. This was back when everyone thought Iraq was hiding nuclear and chemical weapons and the UN inspectors were being denied access to all kinds of suspicious facilities. Mom thought we’d be going back to war any day and was sure I’d get pulled into it. That didn’t happen, but she was a mess at the time anyway.”

  “I think it’s nice that your mother worried about you so much.” Alina’s voice took on a wistful tone. “My mom knows what I do is dangerous, but since we don’t talk about it, she treats it like a tree that falls in the forest.”

  “If there’s no one there to hear it, did it really fall?” Trevor finished for her.

  “Exactly.” Alina sipped her tea. “How did you manage to keep your shifter side hidden in a whole unit full of cops?”

  “It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be.” He took a bite of pizza, chewing before answering. “Being completely exhausted throughout basic training helped, but mostly, I got better at controlling both my abilities and my emotions.”

  “How long were you an MP?”

  “A few years,” he said. “As I got better with my abilities, I started getting good at figuring out when people were lying to me. They start sweating, their breathing gets all erratic, their heart rate spikes, their muscles tighten up—stuff like that. When I was assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado, I ended up catching a couple of high-vis bad guys, including a contractor who was trying to drive out the gate with a trunk full of classified documents. My commander put my name in for a transfer to CID—the army’s criminal investigative command—and the next thing I knew, I was reassigned as an investigator at Redstone Arsenal, a big R&D base in Alabama, where they had me watching for civilians and contractors trying to steal government secrets.”

  “O-kay. Don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds boring as hell.”

  “Some of my coworkers thought it was,” he admitted. “But for me, it was always about getting into that other person’s head and trying to figure out what they were going to do before they even decided to do it. Besides, my dad was over the moon about it. He figured I’d get out of the army soon, and he’d be seeing a detective in the Maxwell family in the very near future.”

  “I hear another but coming,” she said.

  Trevor chuckled. “You’re getting good at this. Yeah, my skills got me noticed by some people in DC, and I was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency without ever being asked whether that was something I wanted to do. I was put on a team responsible for tracking down traitors selling military intelligence and the foreign agents trying to recruit them.”

  “So basic counterespionage and counterintelligence?”

  He nodded. “Yup, spy versus spy.”

  She nibbled her pizza down to the crust. “What did your dad think of that?”

  “He wasn’t thrilled. I liked it, though. Up until
that point, I’d been limited to one little base, waiting for a government employee to do something stupid. But with the DIA, I went all over the world, anywhere there was a threat against the Department of Defense. I enjoyed the freedom to pursue just about anyone I wanted. And as a shifter, I was very good at finding those people.”

  “What changed?” she asked. “How did you end up in the DCO?”

  “What changed? Nothing really. That was the issue.” He shook his head. “No matter how many criminals I caught, no matter how much good I did, I knew in the back of my mind that I could never be myself. I was a freak, and I could never let anyone know it. I was alone in a sea of people. That was a shitty thing to have to live with, and there was a part of me that was unhappy as hell. I was seriously close to saying the hell with all of it and moving back to Portland to be the cop that my parents always wanted me to be.”

  “And then?” Alina prompted.

  “And then John Loughlin found me.” Trevor tried to ignore the stab of sorrow that came with saying his boss’s name but wasn’t very successful. “He found me and helped me realize that I wasn’t a freak, that there were other people like me, and that I didn’t need to keep living in secret. It was the most amazing thing anyone had ever done for me.”

  Alina’s face clouded. “And then someone killed him.”

  He swallowed hard. “Yeah. Someone killed him. The only reason I’m still at the DCO is so I can figure out exactly who did it and make sure they pay.”

  Chapter 6

  Alina fidgeted in the passenger seat of the big Suburban as Trevor waited for an opening in traffic, then changed lanes. It was well after rush hour, but I-95 was still packed.

  “Does the dress fit okay?” he asked, glancing at her.

  She fought the urge to squirm again. “Yeah. It fits fine. It’s just that this is the first time I’ve worn a dress like this on a mission. I’m so used to working in pantsuits that wearing a dress feels…odd.”