by Joyce, T. S.
Finn had gone bat-shit crazy over the footage—yelling, calling superiors, and filing formal complaints, but the cold, hard fact was that her relationship with Kirk wasn’t illegal. Marriage and claiming marks were, but she hadn’t told anyone she bore his scar, so she was free to date him all she liked. At least for now, until the government tried to strip the next round of rights from shifters.
So far, the footage hadn’t damaged public perception of shifters that Cora could tell. In fact, she’d told Harrison the silverback battle had boosted curiosity on shifter culture, and her pro-shifter website had been surging with hits and questions. Harrison’s relief had been almost tangible. They hadn’t taken a giant step back in public relations and now, at the Boarland Mobile Park, Alison was utterly happy. But here at the post, Finn worked very hard to drain her.
For the last two days, she’d kept the fact that Kirk found the cameras a secret, waiting for some kind of reaction from Finn, but so far, he showed no signs of suspicion. Her mind had immediately gone to her partner when Kong had tracked down five cameras, all pointed at her house, while the woods behind Finn’s house boasted none.
Alison opened her palm and glared at the small black device she’d disabled. Someone had been watching her, but maybe Finn didn’t know about them. She hoped he didn’t. That betrayal would sting like a lash if he did. He was an anti-shifter jerk, but he was also her partner who was supposed to have her back.
“Finn?”
“No.”
She’d expected that clipped response. It was his go-to whenever she tried to talk to him. Alison screwed her face up with concern and pitched her voice higher. “Look what I found in the woods.”
He dropped the tennis ball and turned in his chair, his eyes flashing with worry. And for an instant, when he locked eyes on the device on her palm, there was a spark of recognition. Mother fucker.
“Where did you find that?”
“In a tree. Finn, someone is watching us. Why do you think they would do that? Who would do that?”
His bright blue eyes tightened at the corners, and he stood and retrieved his ball. “Hell if I know, Holman.” Now he wasn’t meeting her gaze, and she had to hold back huffing a breath. Un-freakin-believable. She didn’t know why they were really stationed here, but that didn’t mean Finn wasn’t aware.
He wasn’t her partner at all. Maybe he was the one sent to babysit her. But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.
“Do you think there are more?” she asked, still feigning worry. This was the part she was good at. Acting scared, acting stupid, wondering out loud. Ask a human a direct question and their instinct was to answer. Every time. Too bad for Finn she was almost as good as a shifter at sniffing out a lie. Years undercover had honed her instincts for people.
“Probably not. It’s probably Damon keeping tabs on us.”
If Finn really believed it was Damon, he would be pitching a way bigger fit and searching the woods for more. He was full up to his eyeballs with bullshit.
“Sooo,” she drawled out, “this is nothing to worry about?”
“I don’t know, Holman. I mean, shit! Do you expect me to know every answer in the goddamned world?” Defensiveness—a huge counterpart to lying. Get angry and take the focus off the fib. “What are you so worried the dragon will see, Holman? Your boyfriend sneaking in here to fuck you like an animal every night? Huh? You worried he’ll see you drying your laundry, drinking a beer, or taking a fucking hike?”
She leveled him with an empty smile. “I didn’t tell you where I’d found the camera, Finn.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the whites in his eyes said he knew he was busted.
“I drink an occasional beer on the back porch. I keep the back door unlocked for Kirk to come spend time with me as he pleases. I hike in the back woods and dry my laundry on a line out behind my cabin. And somehow you knew where the camera was placed.” He knew where all of them had been placed. She wanted to strangle him for whatever betrayal he was pulling. “Good fucking guess, partner. Get out.”
“This is my post too—”
“Get out of my cabin!” she screamed, shaking with rage as she jammed her finger toward the door.
Finn stood, hate in his eyes, teeth gritted like he loathed the sight of her. The feeling was mutual. “Our superiors have to watch you to make sure you don’t fuck up again, Holman. They’re making sure you’re safe to be in the field. I’m here because you can’t be trusted not to go psychotic again.”
Lies.
Finn strode to the door and opened it wide, allowing the saturated afternoon light in. “If you hadn’t fucked everything up, if you hadn’t been a colossal failure, neither of us would be up here in this hell. The cameras are here because you’re a worthless undercover cop who can’t be integrated back into society without parameters. PTSD.” Finn spat on the wooden floor. “Fuckin’ weak.”
He slammed the door behind him so hard it rattled the cabin. Alison squatted down and covered her ears with her hands as an anguished sob wrenched from her throat.
Lies, lies, lies!
Finn was blaming her because he was busted. This wasn’t her fault. Not her fault. Riggs’s gasping face slashed across her mind, and she shook her head hard to rattle the vision away. His eyes had been so scared, but he’d shaken his head slightly. Don’t help me. They’ll kill you. Don’t blow your cover. Don’t do anything.
And she was supposed to allow his murderer to kill the last good parts of her, too? No. She didn’t regret going cold. Didn’t regret going numb. Didn’t regret choking the life from that man. She’d done it tearless because she’d seen too much by that time to feel pain anymore, emotional or otherwise. Kirk had watched Kong tortured, and he’d said he went dead inside…well, she knew that feeling intimately. Knew what it was like to snap. To have enough and not want to feel pain anymore, so she’d turned it off. Her feelings, her humanity, all of it. And now, her flashbacks were always the same. Riggs’s face. Riggs’s pain. She barely remembered killing his murderer, and for the life of her, she couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty.
Oh, she knew what that said about her. She’d taken a life remorselessly.
She wasn’t Ghost. She was Monster.
Finn was good at games. He knew which buttons to push. Mock her pain, mock what she’d been through, and suddenly she was falling apart instead of focusing on what she’d just learned. If he didn’t place the cameras, he knew who did. Well, fuck him and whatever sketchy mission he was on.
Alison stood and strode for her room. Where there was fire, there was gasoline. Cameras wouldn’t be the only thing she had to worry about. She wiped the sleeve of her hoodie over her cheeks and rifled through her drawers, turned over the bedside table, searched the lamp, the mattress, the bedframe, her suitcase. After turning her room upside down, and then the rest of the house, she found three bugs, which meant someone had been listening to every word she said to Finn. Every word she said to Kirk when he’d spent the night in here with her. They’d listened to Kirk’s first I love you. They’d stolen private moments from her, and for what? There was no reason for her and Finn to even be here! The shifters posed no threat to anyone. They never had.
She slammed her hiking boot down on the bugs and crushed them to dust, and then she pulled her knife and cut the lining of her suitcase. She hadn’t come into this weaponless. She’d come to this job just as she had any other because she would never taper her instincts again. She wouldn’t feel safe as long as she was working this job.
With trembling fingers, she pulled the burner phone from the lining and turned it on, then dialed the number of someone she knew she could trust.
“Porter,” her handler answered.
“It’s hot as hell in here,” she murmured darkly. He would get it. He always had. Porter needed to get his hands on a burner phone quick and call her back because if she was being spied on, so was her handler.
“Give me five,” he muttere
d, and the line went dead.
She paced the tossed bedroom, chewing on her thumbnail as her mind raced. Was this about her, or about the shifters? Was it about a case she had worked? She’d built up a mass of enemies, but as far as she knew, she hadn’t been outed. Her tats were a giveaway, but she hadn’t gotten them until the Chicago job. Fuck, what was Finn into?
Her burner rang, and she rushed to answer. “I’m here.”
“What’s gone wrong?” Porter asked.
“Something’s not right. I’ve felt it since they assigned me the job. I’m sitting here, doing nothing, waiting for something I don’t understand. And then I found five cameras in the woods, all pointed at my cabin, and none around Finn’s house. I thought, okay, maybe it’s just security for the post, but I just asked my partner about them, and he gave me a whole lot of bullshit reasons I’m being watched. And I just disabled three bugs that were in my house.”
“Shit. Did you get them all?”
“Yes. I searched every inch of this place. Can you look up Finn Brackeen’s file?”
“Hang on.” The sound of typing clicked over the line. Porter sighed an irritated sound. “He’s clean.”
“Clean? No, he had sexual harassment reports. Three of them from female officers in his precinct.”
“No, Holman. If he did, that information has been wiped. In the system, he’s clean as a whistle. Hang on.” More typing. “Holman, you won’t believe this.”
“What?”
“You’re in the system. Still active duty undercover.”
“No, no, no, I’m not in any system. That’s the fucking benefit of being undercover.”
“You are, and it has no mention of your discharge, your break, the self-defense case, none of it.”
Alison backed up slowly until her shoulder blades rested against the bedroom wall. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make her look clean. “What does this mean?”
Her handler was quiet.
“Porter, we’ve been working together for a lot of years. Tell me straight. What does this mean?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted low. “I really don’t. I have to get off this phone. I’ll look into it more. How do I get ahold of you?”
Her mind raced around like a hurricane. “Let me think.”
“No time,” Porter said in a rush. “I’ll figure it out. Be careful.” The line went dead, and she yanked the burner from her ear, stared at it in horror.
With a trembling breath, she dialed Kirk’s number. No answer, which made perfect damn sense because he and the Boarlanders were up at the Gray Backs’ landing today, rushing to make their final numbers for the last day of logging season. They would be working until dark, maybe beyond.
Her instincts were kicked up like dust in the path of a tornado. All the fine hairs had risen all over her body, her stomach was in knots, and there was this little voice at the back of her mind that was saying, Time’s up. Run!
Alison yanked her suitcase out of her closet and tossed it onto the bed. Fingers shaking, she called Kirk again from the burner phone. No answer. Shit, she didn’t feel right going to Boarland Mobile Park for sanctuary without the shifters’ permission. If she had Damon’s number, she would call him.
Should she even go into his mountains knowing what she knew now? They had enough on their plate without an undercover cop on the run. No, Kirk would want her to stick around. She was a Boarlander, and even if that meant nothing in the eyes of human law, it meant everything to her, to Kirk, and to the crew.
A messy armload at a time, Alison shoved her clothes from the drawer into her suitcase. A couple pair of panties fell onto the floor, but fuck ’em. Run, run, little ghost.
She called one last time, and certain Kirk wouldn’t pick up, she put it on speaker phone and set it on her bed so she could shove a knee on her overflowing suitcase and zip it up.
“Hello?”
“Kirk!”
“Ally? What’s wrong? Why are you calling from this number?”
“Are you up on the landing?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I just took a five minute break to get some water and see if you texted me. Ally, you sound panicked. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Something’s wrong.” She searched for words. What could she really tell him? He already knew something was off from the cameras he’d found, but explaining her flighty instincts were tricky. She lowered her voice and explained, “Finn knew about those cameras, and when I confronted him, he—”
The bedroom door swung open so hard it banged against the wall. Alison startled hard.
Finn looked around the room with hollow-looking eyes, blinked slowly, and dragged his fiery gaze to her. His veins were sticking out on his neck and forehead, and his face was red. He was dressed in all black, and his bullet proof vest covered his chest.
“Finn, why are you dressed in your gear?” she asked loud enough for Kirk to hear her over the phone.
Finn’s hand brushed the gun at his hip, and he gave her an empty smile that failed to reach his eyes. Slowly, he pulled her holster off the peg by the door and tossed it into the room behind him. “So you don’t get trigger happy on me, Holman.”
Frantic, Alison scanned the immediate area for a weapon, but came up empty. Finn approached her slowly, step-by-step. He was big, and the all-black attire and fitted vest made his shoulders look wider, his waist narrower. She’d never given much thought to Finn’s strength before because she’d never felt the need to size him up as an opponent. But as he pulled a capped syringe from his pocket, those days were long behind her. Finn, her own damned partner, was the biggest threat she’d ever faced.
Alison ripped the lamp off the nightstand, the cord flying forward as it pulled from the outlet, and chucked it at his head. Finn ducked, but not fast enough, and took the brunt of the shattering glass on his elbow. Alison bolted, dropped down and slid across the wood floor between his splayed legs. Glass cut her hands, but she didn’t care about that. Cuts would heal, but everything in her body screamed that whatever Finn had in that syringe would be the death of her.
Help from Kirk was out. He was too far away, so it was on her to keep breathing. To keep moving. To keep fighting whatever treacherous plan Finn had hatched.
Eyes trained on her discarded holster, she lurched forward and pushed off the floor. Finn’s grasp wrenched her backward by the hair, and she screamed at the unexpected pain. The arc of the syringe flashed out of the corner of her vision, and on reflex, she jammed her hand upward and hit his wrist. Alison used the second she’d bought herself to twist in his grasp. Eyes watering from the pain at the back of her head, she jammed her knee upward and racked him, and as Finn hunched over with a grunt, she slammed her forehead against his nose. A sickening crack sounded, but she wasn’t done. Alison went down with him, straddled his stomach, and pummeled that broken nose with her fists. Finn curled into himself, blocking her with his forearms, and the syringe rolled across the uneven floorboards, coming to a stop in the shallow crevice between two planks.
Finn stopped defending his face long enough to grab the side of her neck and slam her against the floor beside him. In an army crawl, he scrambled toward the syringe, but Alison was faster, and gripped the body of it. It was empty, or at least it looked like it. What the hell? She scrambled away from Finn’s desperate grabbing and shoved the plunger down. A tiny capsule slid from the thick needle.
“Fucking bitch!” Finn screamed. “Now you’ve made it worse for yourself. That was your shot to go quickly!”
Go quickly? Alison’s head was ringing as she shoved off Finn. He meant die quickly. Horrified, she bolted for the capsule and stomped her shoe on top of it. A crunch sounded, and she stood back. In horror, she gasped. The wood under the green splattered liquid was disintegrating. In a rush, she scrambled to unlace her hiking boot, but her foot was on fire. She screamed as her nerves sparked with agony. She threw the shoe and it landed against the wall, the sole dissolving completely.
And now she knew who
Finn was. No, not who, but what.
She turned slowly to where Finn was lurching upward, hand over his gushing nose.
“That’s an IESA kill switch. You aren’t a cop. You’re IESA.”
Finn stood up straighter and lifted his chin, looked down at her like she was nothing. “Clever girl.” He stalked her, backed her into the corner.
Alison’s head felt like it had been crushed, her muscles shook from the adrenaline dump and fight, and her foot hurt so bad she couldn’t even bring herself to look at it as she limped backward. But all the pain cleared in the moment Finn pulled his Glock from his hip.
“Tell me why,” she rasped out, her shoulder blades hitting the wall. “You owe me that much. Why are you doing this?”
“Because we can’t touch the fucking dragon with no proof he takes human life!”
“I don’t understand.”
Finn lowered his hand from his gory face and smiled. “You aren’t here to keep peace, Holman. You’re here to incite a war on these mountains. Everyone in the country will back us when they hear what Damon did to you.”
“Damon hasn’t done anything to me!”
The low rumble of a plane motor rattled the cabin, and the roar of a tidal wave sounded against the roof. Outside, it was near dark, but she could make out the rush of water hitting the yard, dropped from above. A pungent, chemical smell burned her nose. That wasn’t water. It was some sort of lighter fluid, and everything became clear in an instant.