Lover Wolf (Shifter Falls Book 2)

by Amy Green

  20

  “He says his name is Tyler,” Chief Tucker said when they met him at the police station.

  “He’s lying already,” Heath said. “No one is actually named Tyler.”

  Tessa fought a smile. They were standing in the small front room of the Shifter Falls police station, which contained exactly three desks—all empty—adorned with ancient computers and land line phones. A stained coffee maker sat in a kitchenette against one wall, looking like it had last been used sometime in the early nineties, and a few small offices opened off next to it. The only thing on the back wall was a heavy door, by far the most modern thing in the room, with a modern stainless steel lock.

  “We put him in the back,” Tucker said, ignoring Heath’s attempt at wit. Tucker was tall and burly, yet graceful, his black hair cut just slightly long, his sharp eyes missing nothing. Tessa had seen him a few times in the Black Wolf, most notably on the night he’d gotten drunk and gotten into a grizzly fight with his brother Edgerton. He’d cleaned up his act since then, and the Donovans had given him the job of police chief when the last chief—one of Charlie Donovan’s minions—had fled town.

  “He’s in one of the cells,” Brody Donovan added. He was standing at the police chief’s shoulder, his features dark and serious beneath the brim of his baseball cap. His eyes traveled to Tessa and took her in as he spoke. “He’s our only prisoner at the moment.”

  “So let’s talk to him,” Heath said. “He must be healed by now.” He looked pretty calm for a man whose bar had just burned down, including his apartment with all his belongings. He was wearing jeans, boots, a dark gray t-shirt, his leather jacket. His hair was damp from the rain. His gray eyes were calm, intelligent, and his scruff of beard was handsome on his perfect jaw. Tessa knew what that scruff of beard felt like now, and she liked it. She had never seen anything so badass as Heath walking into that fire like it was nothing, and then walking out again.

  She didn’t have any idea what was next. Except for the borrowed house they’d just left, Heath was now as homeless as she was. He didn’t have a bar anymore, and Tessa didn’t have a job. Both of them had the clothes on their backs and not much more.

  Tessa didn’t think she’d ever felt so alive.

  She had Heath—all of him. They had the bag of money they’d stashed in Heath’s truck. They had the pack. They had a borrowed house they’d go back to at some point, and she’d get to pull all his clothes off him again and he’d do all the things he knew how to do that made her feel so incredibly good, as many times as they wanted. What else did a girl need?

  Brody and Tucker were already looking at her differently. They sensed that she was Heath’s mate now, of course. It would be as clear to them as a neon sign. She had a minute of embarrassment—everyone would know exactly what she and Heath had been up to for the past few hours—and then it disappeared. No one smirked or made jokes. No one acted like Heath had made a conquest. Instead she was treated with simple respect by every shifter they came across. She was starting to get the idea that being a Donovan mate didn’t mean she became a piece of werewolf property. It meant she became a full-fledged Donovan in her own right.

  The door behind them opened and Ian Donovan walked in. He was soaked to the skin, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, his short black hair wet with rain. His green eyes were intent and watchful. In an alternate world, Tessa had to admit that Ian Donovan was a pretty sexy werewolf. Now that she knew what she did about werewolf mating, she could see why Anna Gold had given up her life in Denver for him.

  “I came as soon as I could,” Ian said. “I was up in the mountains and—” He stopped when he got to their little group, his gaze going to Tessa as he caught the same scent the others did. “Okay,” he said slowly. “This is interesting.”

  “Are you surprised?” Heath asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Ian took a breath. He looked between Heath and Tessa, then back again. Then he did something she’d never seen him do—he smiled. A real, big, genuine smile. “Hell,” he said. “You two. This is fantastic. Congratulations.”

  Heath stared at his half brother in surprise, but Tessa felt herself smile back at him. “Thank you, Ian,” she said. “How did it go at Xander Martell’s campsite?”

  “Easy,” Ian said, getting back to business. “I torched the whole thing, and Sheriff What’s-Her-Name is out there now with two of her deputies. It’ll take them a while to get back down the roads when they’re done. Has anyone heard from Devon?”

  “No.” This was Brody, taking over. “He isn’t answering his cell, though that doesn’t mean anything. There’s no reception out there. If he was hurt, or dead, we’d know.” He shrugged. “We just have to assume he’s still doing his job, tracking this Silverman.”

  “About that,” Chief Tucker said. “I did a basic records search, but without a real name I can’t find much of anything. I don’t know who the Silverman is, or where he lives, or even what he looks like, which means I can’t send anyone out to pick him up. I can’t even put out an alert.”

  “Which is why we need that punk in lockup to talk,” Brody said. He turned to Ian. “One of Martell’s. He turned himself in to Heath. Wanted it to look real, or so he claimed. He thinks Xander Martell is watching somehow.”

  Ian nodded. “Should we go back and rough him up?”

  “Beatings don’t do much good on shifters,” Tucker pointed out. “We heal fast and we don’t scare.”

  “True, but it might be fun,” Ian said.

  “I have a better idea,” Heath said. “As much as I’d like to do some damage to this kid for torching my bar, I think we should send Tessa to question him.”

  Brody crossed his arms. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “She’s Xander’s half sister, and now a Donovan. The kid might talk to her.”

  “Plus, she’s Tessa,” Heath said. He motioned around their circle. “This kid’s a teenager. As lovely as we all are, I don’t think any man, shifter or not, can resist being questioned by a gorgeous blonde.”

  Tessa put her hands on her hips. “I’m more than just my looks, you know. I’d do a better job than any of you because I’m smarter, not because I’m blonde.”

  “I completely agree,” Heath said, making her anger deflate a little. “You’re the best choice, for every reason. So let’s do it.”

  “I’m in,” Brody said frankly. “I suck at interrogations, and so does Ian. Heath would just piss him off, and Quinn is a cop. Tessa’s got us all beat.”

  “Fine with me,” Chief Tucker said. “I just want answers.”

  “Can he hurt me?” Tessa asked.

  “He’s in the cell, you’re outside of it,” Chief Tucker said. “It stays that way. We don’t use normal interrogation rooms for shifters—they can do too much damage if they get violent. When we arrest a shifter, we just dump ’em straight in a cell. But the rest of us will be watching through the closed circuit.”

  “Fine,” Tessa said, taking a breath. No way to go but forward. Keep it together, Tessa. “Send me in there. You’ll get your answers.”

  The kid—Tyler—was lying on the bench in his holding cell, his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He lifted the cap when she walked into the corridor. For a second his eyes widened and he gave a surprised, appreciative growl at the sight of her, then he went still.

  Tessa leaned a shoulder casually against the bars. “Hi,” she said.

  Tyler sat up, still staring at her. “Holy shit,” he said.

  “I guess you know me, huh?”

  “You’re Tessa Keefe.” She heard the soft sound of his inhale. “You mated a Donovan. Xander is going to lose his shit.”

  “Not that you care,” Tessa said. “Because Xander isn’t your leader anymore. Is that right?”

  Tyler lifted his cap and scrubbed a hand over his forehead. “I had to get away,” he said. “It started out as a good idea, but it’s gotten… crazy. Xander is out of control. He’s going to get all of us killed.”

  Tessa nodded, t
hinking she needed to ease him in to things a little. “Back up. Why did you join him in the first place?”

  “A lot of us are unhappy in California,” Tyler explained. “Martell runs his pack like a dictator, not an alpha. What he says goes and that’s it. He doesn’t have any close advisors, any trusted council of pack members. There’s just him.” He shrugged. “It also means the young pack members can’t take part in the pack, or move up through the ranks, or even learn about how the pack is run. There’s just Martell and nothing else. The rest of us are expected to follow orders. Xander hated it most of all. When his father cut him out of the pack—out of the succession—he said he was going to branch off, do things differently. It sounded good to me.”

  “And me?” she asked.

  Tyler licked his lips, then stared down at his sneakers. “He said we should go to Colorado,” he said. “The Donovans’ alpha was dead, he said, and the sons were fighting over it. They were weak, and we’d be able to take territory. And you were there. He said we’d recruit you.”

  Tessa felt her eyebrows go upward. “Recruit me?”

  “Bring you in with us. We’d be taken seriously if both Xander and you—Christian Martell’s only two offspring—were united. We’d be able to form a new pack, one that was more democratic, one that was fair.” His cheeks flushed and he shook his head. “What a load of shit that turned out to be. Xander never wanted any of that. He just wants power.”

  She felt a chill down her spine, but she crossed her arms and didn’t show it. “How do you know that?”

  Tyler sighed. He looked up at her, then down at his shoes again. “He wanted to kill you, not recruit you,” he said. “When we got to the Falls, it all became clear. He brought out your ex-boyfriend—he’d kidnapped him, threated to kill the guy’s parents if he didn’t do what he was told. Xander made him go to the bar where you worked and drug your drink so they could take you more easily. When it didn’t work, he had the Silverman kill the guy.” He raised his gaze back up to Tessa’s. “We didn’t sign on for that,” he said, distressed. “Kidnapping, murder. That wasn’t what any of us agreed to.”

  The words choked Tessa’s throat. Scott. Oh, my God. He’d been kidnapped, threatened. And now he was dead. Because of her. He’d lost his life because of her. She was going to carry that forever.

  “The Silverman did it?” she managed to say. “The murder?”

  “He terrifies me,” Tyler said. “Xander said that he was paying him, we shouldn’t worry. He didn’t camp with us, and we didn’t see him often, but we knew he was there. Always watching. We didn’t like it. Then, when we got here—that hiker. He did that.” Tyler swallowed. “He used a—a kind of hook to tear the guy open, make it look like a werewolf had done it. He did the same thing to your ex. That was when we all realized this was going out of control, that everything we’d been told was a lie.”

  “Why?” Tessa’s voice was a hoarse croak. “Why did he kill that first hiker?”

  “Xander wanted to bring trouble to the Donovans,” Tyler said. “He wanted the law to come down hard, arrest the Donovans, take them out of commission. He thought the brothers would start accusing each other to save their own skins if the heat turned up. His way of weakening the leadership.” His voice turned bitter. “But he didn’t even have the guts to do his own killing. He just ordered the Silverman to do it. The killing is bad enough, but he should at least have done it himself.”

  God. She wondered what the others were thinking, on the other end of the closed circuit camera feed. “That hiker was innocent,” she said. “The Silverman was fine with killing an innocent human?”

  Tyler shook his head. “One dead human is nothing to the Silverman.”

  “But who is he?” Tessa asked. Xander was nuts, but the Silverman had shot Heath, nearly killed him. “What’s his real name? Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know any of those things,” the young wolf answered. “I’m not sure anyone does, even Christian Martell. The story is that the Silverman likes to hunt werewolves—like a sport. In human form or wolf form, he doesn’t care. From what I hear, the Silverman was picking off our pack members until Christian Martell managed to call a truce. He made a deal with the Silverman that he’d stop killing us in return for being on the payroll.”

  “And someone as crazy as the Silverman just agreed?” Tessa asked.

  “I don’t know, man. But I do know that pack members have disappeared over the years. Usually members who have had a run-in with Christian Martell, or who disagree with him, or cause him trouble.” He scratched his arm, agitated. “Rumor has it Martell sends anyone who’s a pain in his ass to the Silverman. Like tribute. Throwing them to the lions, you know.”

  Jesus. Heath had had a close call with this psycho. Tessa thought of Devon Donovan, still in the mountains somewhere, tracking the Silverman down. She wasn’t sure anymore that Devon was going to win. “So Xander lured the Silverman away from Christian,” she said.

  “Yeah. I assume he promised him werewolf blood in return.” Tyler scratched his arm again. “I really don’t know anything else about the Silverman, I swear. I never go near the guy if I can help it, and I’ve never talked to him. I’ve never even seen him up close. I just know he’s human, and he’s been with the pack for a few decades. So he’s not a young guy.”

  Tessa tried to rein in her thoughts, think about what the others would want to know. “So you didn’t agree with the killing, and you put together a fake capture for yourself,” she said.

  Tyler nodded. “The bar was payback for torching the camp. Xander is big on payback. He made me set the fire, because he was concerned about my loyalty. He said it was a test, to see if I was really committed.”

  “Why the Black Wolf?”

  “Because it belongs to Heath Donovan,” Tyler replied. “He’s thinking about torching Brody Donovan’s house, too, and Ian Donovan’s apartment. He was talking about getting to Ian Donovan’s mate, but that was all talk. Even Xander wouldn’t do that, go for a Donovan mate.” He looked Tessa up and down, his expression wary, though she could see he also thought she was hot. “I guess you already know that, since you mated with Heath.”

  Tessa paused, startled. That had all been part of the plan—mate with Heath, keep herself safe from the Martells, give the Donovans a bargaining chip in this war. But when Tyler laid it out, it sounded crass, insulting. It sounded nothing like what was really going on between her and Heath.

  This wasn’t just cold-hearted strategy. Not anymore. Not with a man that made her weak in the knees, made her pulse throb, made her excited to be alive no matter how bad things were. A man she wished was standing next to her right now.

  But she had to keep focus. “He’s going to guess,” she said to Tyler. “Xander, I mean. That your capture was a fake, and that you’re talking to us now. From what you say of him, he’s going to guess all of that.”

  Tyler gave a humorless smile. “I know that. Right now, I feel safer in this cell than I did with Xander. Though I’m not stupid. I know this cell isn’t going to keep me alive if Xander really wants to get to me. I’m not safe anywhere. I never thought otherwise. Not since this all began.”

  “You’re right,” Tessa said. “He’s going to kill you if he can. He’s not going to quit.”

  Tyler looked down at his shoes again.

  “You only have one option,” she told him. “Tell us where he is. Where the rest of them are. Tell us where he’s hiding, and the Donovans will handle it. Me. My mate. His brothers.” She watched him carefully, steadily. “We’re your only hope of survival, Tyler, especially now.”

  “I don’t like killing,” Tyler said after a minute. “Promise me you won’t kill him.”

  “Not if we don’t have to.”

  The young wolf looked up at her. “You mean it? The others… they don’t like things any more than I do. They were lied to, too. They don’t deserve to die.”

  Tessa held his gaze. “Then they won’t die,” she said quietly. �
�You have my word.”

  He looked into her eyes for a minute, then looked away, his cheeks going a little red. He has a crush on me, Tessa thought. She didn’t have to be a werewolf to know that. So she waited for him to speak.

  “He’s been using an old theater on the east side of town as a sort of base within the town limits. He moved operations there now that the camp is burned.” He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “It’s like, a porn theater.”

  She rolled her eyes. That was the Sky-Hi Theater. Everyone in town knew that place. There was a reason Shifter Falls had a reputation as a dangerous, down-and-out town. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Sit tight. Something tells me this is all going to be over soon.”

  “I know.” Tyler looked at her hopefully. Now that he’d unburdened himself, he looked almost cheerful. “Say, is there any way I could get a Sprite?” he asked. “Setting that fire made me freaking thirsty.”

  21

  “The Sky-Hi Theater,” Heath said, pouring cream into his coffee. “What a place to use as a hideout.”

  They were in the Four Spot Diner—Heath, Tessa, Ian, and Brody. Quinn Tucker had stayed behind at the police station to keep an eye on their prisoner. The Donovans were ordering food and doing a strategy session before planning their next move. Heath glanced at Tessa and saw that she was digging into her club sandwich as if she hadn’t eaten in days. In fact, the last time either of them had eaten was the snack he’d set out between their first and second rounds of vigorous sex.

  Had that been only hours ago? It was dark now, and he felt like he hadn’t had sex with her in weeks. Hadn’t touched her in weeks. Just watching her eat a sandwich was distracting him, turning him on.

  “Well, when you think about it, it’s not a bad choice,” Ian said, cutting into the steak he’d ordered. “No one goes to the Sky-Hi anymore.”

  “Someone must,” Tessa said, licking a dab of mayo off her finger and making Heath’s pulse jump. “I mean, it’s still open, right? Someone must go there to watch porn.”