Stalking His Mate: League Of Gallize Shifters

by Dianna Love

  He’d never believe her again.

  Better to take her chance at freedom and finding Baatar on her own than place her hope for the future on Hector honoring his word.

  At the back corner of the building she paused before stepping away from the building where lights were on, which would make her visible to anybody.

  Easing around the corner, she saw a man fighting with a guard. When the light hit his face, she recognized him and those flashing gold eyes.

  What was he doing here?

  He fought hard, but he limped around on a bad leg. Why wasn’t he shifting? He’d heal and be stronger to fight.

  She looked to her right where a path with two rutted lanes led into the woods. That could be the way to the highway or maybe ... where they’d parked a vehicle.

  With keys in the ignition.

  There was her fantasy imagination. She’d never been behind the wheel of an automobile, but might as well wish big.

  A grunt of pain jerked her head back to the fight.

  The guard had knocked Golden Eyes down and had his foot crushing the injured leg.

  That turned her stomach.

  The guard shouted to someone else who came walking over, grinning. He held a syringe.

  Oh, no. They were going to inject the shifter on the ground, the one who had saved her from jackals. The wolves wouldn’t kill a shifter they could knock out and take captive.

  Baatar was going to kill her himself if he ever found out about the decisions she’d made, but she couldn’t walk away from this.

  Baatar would tell her it was shifter-on-shifter, so who cared?

  She did, dammit.

  When the second guard stepped around the first one to inject Golden Eyes, the wolves had their backs to her. She had her opening.

  She rubbed her hands together, hoping for her rogue energy.

  Nothing but sweaty palms. Damn!

  Go to Plan B.

  As the guard bent down to stab the syringe, she ran at top speed and plowed into the standing guard. It all happened so fast. She hit the first one, he knocked into the second guard and she landed on top of both of them.

  A claw swiped her side. She cried out, but a hand gripped her arm and pulled her off those two.

  “What the fuck are you doing again?” Golden Eyes yelled at her.

  She yanked her arm away. “That is it! I will never save your sorry ass again, you ungrateful jerk!”

  He shoved her behind him and faced the two guards, but another man showed up and growled loud like a bear. He lifted those two wolf shifters by their necks and slammed their heads together.

  Looked as if Golden Eyes and his buddy had everything under control.

  She started easing backwards and bumped into someone who grabbed her arms. Shit.

  “You lose something, guys?” the one who had her in his grasp asked.

  Golden Eyes turned to her with a look of disbelief. “Were you going to run again?”

  “What do you think? You didn’t need me with all your shifter friends,” she shot back.

  Golden Eyes grabbed his head. “Have you not realized how dangerous it is out here alone? If you are this determined to get yourself killed, then it shouldn’t take long.”

  She gave him a pissy look. “Well, thanks for the encouragement, Mr. Doom and Gloom.”

  The one that had growled like a bear, now spewed a breath trying to stop laughing as he mumbled, “She’s got your number.”

  “Stuff it, bear,” Golden Eyes said, confirming her guess. She snatched her arms from the loose hold of the guy behind her.

  The bear spoke softly as if talking to someone not here, but she didn’t think he was communicating with ghosts. Golden Eyes had been wearing a communication device when he rescued her from the bounty hunters, so the whole bunch probably wore them.

  Golden Eyes stalked over to her.

  A muffled boom shook the ground, stopping him in his tracks for only a moment before he continued to her.

  She took a step back and hit that wall of muscle behind her again. The man grunted and moved away. Lifting her nose to her grouchy white-knight shifter who kept turning up like an unwanted houseguest, she said, “Who the hell are you and your friends?”

  “We’re part of a domestic counterintelligence group. We protect humans and shifters from the Black River pack. We were told you might be here, and if so, we had to extract you before they harmed you.”

  “What agency?” She pinned him with a fierce look, then realized she was showing her eyes and immediately dropped her gaze.

  “None you’d know and why are you hiding your eyes?” he asked. “I already know they don’t match.”

  She was suddenly tired of being asked, pushed and ordered. Lifting her gaze to his face, she said, “Fine. It no longer matters anyhow. You’ve pretty much screwed any chance I had of getting free.”

  “We’re here to save you, dammit,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Maybe I didn’t want you saving me ... dammit.”

  The bear shifter came over and said, “We’re clearing out.”

  Golden Eyes asked, “Did we get the leader?”

  “No. He and some of his guards fled through a tunnel booby-trapped with C-4 to implode the path. None of ours were hurt, but we can’t follow them.”

  “Got it.” Golden Eyes turned back to her. “Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “Shit. What now?”

  She slapped her hands on her hips. “You expect me to go with you and I don’t even know who you are?”

  “I told you, we’re ... ” He took a couple of deep breaths and said, “I’m Rory. What do I call you?”

  His change of tone from snarling to something nicer surprised her and softened her irritation. She said, “Siofra.”

  The guy she’d bumped into said, “Sheer-uh?”

  “No. Sheef-rah,” she said, exaggerating it for him. Then she asked, “How did you know to look here for me?”

  Golden Eyes answered, capturing her attention again. “After we saved the shifters you were captured with, the same person who had sent us after the bounty hunters found out you were in a hospital and wanted you picked up. By the time we got there, our contact learned you’d been kidnapped. Between that original resource and our ability to track almost anything, we ended up here. We have specific instructions to rescue you and deliver you to headquarters.” He paused with a thoughtful look.

  Headquarters? Where was that? She asked, “Are you accusing me of a crime?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re not going to let me go free, are you?”

  “We have orders to bring you in, but it’s for your own safety.”

  She was supposed to be happy about that? She didn’t even know these people.

  Some new concern entered those golden eyes. He said, “Wait. You just said maybe you didn’t want to be saved. You were a captive, right?”

  Oh, crap. She’d said that in the heat of the moment, because she couldn’t seem to keep her thoughts straight around this guy. She had been a captive at first, but at the end she’d been negotiating to work with Hector’s shifters.

  Admitting that would probably land her in jail.

  She had to be careful how she replied to get around this shifter who would smell her lie, but she also had to avoid being locked up at all costs or she’d never find Baatar. “Those wolf shifters sent two magic users to the hospital to grab me, then they brought me here and these shifters threatened me.”

  Golden Eyes and his friends said nothing.

  This was going downhill fast. “I-I want a lawyer.”

  “You’re not getting one,” Rory said with absolute certainty. “We’re taking you in, then you’re talking to our boss before you go anywhere else.”

  “Is he a shifter ... like you?”

  “No.”

  Thank goodness. She felt her chest relax until Rory added, “He’s a far more powerful shifter than any of us.”

  She’d thoug
ht Hector was her greatest threat ... until now.

  Chapter 13

  Rory rode in the back of the van with ... Siofra.

  Was that even her real name?

  It hadn’t smelled like a lie when he heard it, but she hid secrets for sure. From the terrified look and obvious exhaustion, he could understand her not spilling her guts to strangers.

  Vic drove the van that bumped along the dirt road as they left the Black River Pack compound. The whole van stank of wolf. Once Vic delivered them to a private airport in the area, Hawk would pick up Rory and this unusual female, then fly them to headquarters.

  Hawk should arrive by eleven, as Rory had explained to Siofra.

  After Cole shared Hawk’s ETA in military time back at the compound, the nymph asked why they were talking in code.

  The Guardian wanted her returned immediately and had specified that Rory be the one to escort her.

  By the time he’d herded the despondent woman to the van left behind by the wolf pack, the rest of the team had scoured the building for all the electronics and any bit of intel they could glean.

  Most of that was piled back here with him.

  And her.

  Rory had argued against binding her wrists, while at the same time making it clear there was no question she’d leap out of a moving vehicle to escape.

  Justin had given him a look of death and demanded, “If you don’t want to secure her physically, then what the hell do we do with her, genius?”

  Cole stepped between them and suggested Rory ride in the back as her guard since the boss wanted him to return with her.

  Even Ferrell voted in favor of riding with her.

  His agitated jaguar had been sending him a flurry of bloody images since Rory had failed to shift when the wolf shifters attacked him.

  Agreeing to ride with Siofra calmed Ferrell and allowed Rory the chance he’d been waiting for to get some answers.

  Now he just needed to convince this frightened woman to talk during the short ride to the airport.

  She’d been staring him down with those beautiful eyes, and the bruise on her cheek and jaw had him wanting to rip a wolf apart. She still wore a damp hospital gown, but he’d given her a blanket to wrap up in and a bottle of water she currently squeezed into an hourglass shape.

  He’d had Vic flip on the rear interior light. Rory didn’t need it with his keen shifter eyesight, but the dim yellow lamp allowed Siofra to not be entirely in the dark.

  A thousand questions rolled around in his head, but the top one was about her energy. During the few seconds he’d touched her when he pulled her off the wolf shifter she’d bowled over, he’d felt a jolt of that energy bleed into him through his hands and feed down to his leg. Again.

  His damaged limb had stopped aching and started healing a tiny bit in that one moment.

  He desperately wanted to find out if she had the power to heal his leg, or maybe even the issue with his animal.

  But he couldn’t very well take her into custody then ask her to heal him. She wasn’t under arrest, but she was right about not being able to walk away. In her shoes, he wouldn’t be happy either. For now, what he could do was find out what the hell was going on with her and what the Black River pack wanted with her before they got separated.

  Actually, this conversation had to happen before they reached the local airport where they’d be flown to Spartanburg.

  Rory would not hold any truth against Justin when he filed his report. Just like he’d told his friend, Rory would take full responsibility for pushing the extraction plan timeline. That move would have screwed them all if the woman had not been on site when they entered the compound.

  She had been, just as Rory had known with his sixth sense, but the Guardian had no tolerance for lack of discipline on a mission.

  If the team switched directions halfway through every mission just because someone had a feeling, people would die.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d say to his boss, but he’d felt pulled to go in immediately to save her.

  Would she talk to him? “How’re you doing, Siofra?”

  She grumbled, “I’d be better if I was free.” She glanced over at him. “Why do you always yell at me?”

  The question threw him a curve, forcing a defensive reply. “I don’t.” Any of his teammates would have called him on that lie.

  “Yes, you do,” she countered. “And you do it whenever I’m helping. You have no right to be angry with me.”

  He couldn’t argue that point. He did feel bad about yelling at her, but she kept racing into battles where claws ruled. “Okay, you’re right, but I wasn’t angry with you.”

  The wary expression on her face questioned his words.

  He explained, “I’m sorry it sounded that way. I admit I was furious, but not at you. I kept seeing you jump into battles between shifters and you weren’t a shifter. That makes me crazy every time I think about it.”

  “Why?” Her soft question pushed him to talk when he hated trying to explain himself.

  But he didn’t want her to think he hadn’t appreciated her selfless act. He said, “I don’t like seeing you hurt. I don’t want you sliced up by razor-sharp claws or killed by a shifter fist to the head. Hell, your face is swollen and turning color from someone hitting you. I bet a wolf did that, right?” Just thinking about it had his insides torn up and Ferrell growling.

  She touched her cheek. “I failed to lower my eyes when I spoke to their alpha. One of the guards backhanded me to fix my attitude.” She gave a sad smile. “Didn’t work. ”

  “Which wolf?”

  She dropped her hand. “Why?”

  “Because I will find him one day. When I do, he won’t harm another woman ever again.”

  Sitting back, she studied Rory for a long time until finally saying, “That’s nice.”

  The fury inside him that had been bubbling since they climbed into the cargo area subsided a little.

  Using his medic’s bedside manner voice in an attempt to keep her hackles down, he asked, “How’d you come to be caught with the shifters the bounty hunters had in cages?”

  “Why?”

  Adversarial little thing. “I’m trying to understand how you eventually ended up captured by a division of the Black River pack.”

  “Men.”

  “Men? I need a little more.”

  She chewed on the side of her lip, looking like she was doing all she could to keep from screaming at him. With a glance to the side, she whispered as if speaking to a different person. “Not now.”

  If she thought he hadn’t seen her lips move or heard those words above the noise of the diesel engine, she was wrong. Who had she been talking to? Asking about that would only sidetrack her attempt to communicate.

  Brushing her white hair off her face in a tired motion, she leaned back with her arms crossed. “Men, as in men are the bane of my life. They live for the sole purpose of destroying any chance I have for happiness. They always want, want, want something from me. No one ever gives a damn about what I want.”

  That was a mouthful for her, but it hit him in the heart.

  What life had this woman led before now? She sounded like she’d had a relationship go bad and she spoke as if all men had conspired to destroy her life.

  Giving him a pointed look, she said, “Just like you and your buddies. I appreciate you coming to save me, but the only thing I’ve asked you for—twice—is to let me go.”

  She had him there.

  But what could he do? He was obeying orders. More than that, he had this burning need to protect her, even if that meant protecting her from herself. She had a determined streak that said to hell with risk.

  “Where’d you grow up?” he asked, trying again.

  “A slave under a man’s thumb.”

  Had she been a captive before? Undeterred by her distant attitude, he kept pushing. “Where were you before you met up with the female shifter and her son on that bus?” He had the route the long-distance b
us had taken from Texas, but she could have switched buses.

  “Texas.”

  Truth. “Where were you living in Texas?”

  “Somewhere in South Texas. I caught a bus in Columbus.”

  “Are you running from someone?”

  She rubbed her forehead and looked away, debate playing out in her expression. She didn’t answer, instead slashing her unusual gaze back at him when she asked, “How’d you hurt your leg?”

  He got that she wanted a break from questions, and that was fine. She’d answered a few. He’d learned from being a jaguar shifter that patience paid off when in pursuit, especially one as nervous and untrusting as this one.

  She lifted her eyebrows as if to challenge him for not replying.

  He swallowed a chuckle.

  That she could be surrounded by monsters and hold her own was downright sexy. She might be nervous, but she had plenty of fight in her.

  He explained, “During our first meeting, after you ran off, I got attacked by two jacked-up wolf shifters. One shredded my leg to the bone.”

  She sat up and tiny lines formed at the bridge of her nose. “Were you shifted?”

  “Yes. I won the fight, but my leg came out on the short end in that one.”

  Easing back against the wall of the van as it bumped onto a smoother road and jostled them, Siofra said, “That was a day or two back.” She stopped as if trying to determine the day, then shook it off. “Have you shifted to heal?”

  She seemed fairly clued in about shifters, which was another piece of her makeup that churned his curiosity. But he hadn’t planned to share as much as he had. He tried to make it sound standard, which was not the case.

  Shrugging, he said, “I shifted, but this just happens to be a slow recovery.” Admitting that raised his dread at seeing the Guardian, because Rory’s leg had not healed any further. It would take only one look for the Guardian to make good on sending him to Wyoming or putting Rory into an unconscious stasis.

  Thinking about injuries, Rory asked, “How’s the wound where that jackal cut you with his claw?”

  Moving her hand to her stomach, she said, “Fine. Getting better.”

  “Lie. I saw your midriff when you ran from the bounty hunters. Your skin had healed completely in minutes. Your bruises from where they hit you tonight are already fading, and your arm is almost healed where that wolf clawed you.”