Savage Security

by Ellis Leigh

  Savage Security

  A Dire Wolves Mission

  Ellis Leigh

  Copyright © 2018 by Ellis Leigh

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For inquiries, contact Ellis Leigh at ellis@ellisleigh.com

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-944336-51-6

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-944336-52-3

  Contents

  There’s no escaping a Dire Wolf on the hunt...

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Also by Ellis Leigh

  Have you met Kristin Harte?

  Don’t forget London Hale

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  There’s no escaping a Dire Wolf on the hunt...

  Dire Wolf Deus likes his quiet, regimented life. He might live in the big city, but interacting with humans isn’t his favorite thing, so he spends most of his time behind the screens of the computers and tech gadgets he loves. At least, when he’s not handling research and missions for Luc, the Dire Pack Alpha.

  Zoe follows two rules in life—never trust a pack wolf, and take what you can get. She spends her days living the high life in New York City, but at night, this little wolf becomes a cat. Cat burglar, that is. Her services are for hire, but her heart isn’t. Period.

  One soldier living a life behind the screen, one woman hiding from the shadows of her past, and a chance encounter that takes them across the country and beyond. In the world of the Dire Wolves, the man behind the control panel is considered an asset. But when a mission requires a personal touch, Deus will have to leave the security of his world to travel to another, more dangerous one…and not just because he’s met the woman the fates think is perfect for him.

  One soldier, one fight…one chance at forever.

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  Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all. Ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge are all founded on lust.

  Marquis De Sade

  1

  Deus moved through the streets, avoiding the pools of light thrown by the streetlamps overhead and sticking to the shadowy stretches. Dressed in dark jeans and a hoodie, he blended into the night well. His choice of wardrobe—the need to disappear into the black—had been an intentional act on his part. His wolf preferred not to stand out, and when the animal instincts he’d been born with bothered to make a judgment against something as trivial as clothing, Deus listened. He’d long since learned never to doubt his inner beast.

  The city sat as silent as it ever did, which meant hardly at all, though humans probably couldn’t hear the same things he could. Animals scratching their way into garbage bins for their dinners, the scrape of footsteps from people sneaking around in the alleys or hurrying their way past them. The constant droning of television shows, radios singing something soft and sweet, the slow cadence of conversations between friends, and the rough rhythm of fucking—he heard it all coming from the buildings he passed. The city was a veritable symphony of life, bars of birth and death, the bridge of those years in the middle where the majority of living happened. And he…well, he felt more like a spectator than a participant. An audience member watching it all play out.

  He preferred it that way, too.

  The snick of a lighter caught his attention, and he whipped his head in the direction it originated from. Could be someone enjoying a smoke on their fire escape—could be someone casing an apartment to break in to. Deus was fine with the first, not so much with the second. He didn’t fancy himself a vigilante, but he kept his neighborhood relatively safe. Kept an eye on the local riffraff, the con men, and the worse ones. In the six square blocks Deus thought of as his, a woman could walk home without the fear of being raped, though she might get her purse stolen.

  Even a thief needed to eat, as he knew well.

  By the time he ferreted out the man with the lighter—a neighborhood guy Deus knew by scent and sight outside grabbing a smoke—he was close enough to his favorite Cantonese takeout restaurant to change his path. The neighborhood seemed safe enough, and he could watch the camera feeds he had access to later to make sure. Technically, he’d stolen that access, but he figured it was for a good cause. Like the legend of Robin Hood or some shit—he stole from the rich to give protection to the not-so-rich. He also stole to make a point, stole to pay his rent, and stole to keep his skills at stealing sharp, but those had nothing to do with his neighborhood. Much like a bear, a wolf never shat where it ate.

  Bypassing his usual circuit, Deus headed across to the Cantonese joint. It was time to go back to his apartment. He needed a meal in his belly and a few hours of relaxing in front of his screens. Even a quiet city could get on his nerves.

  “Ah, Mr. Jones. The usual?”

  Deus nodded at the little man behind the counter, taking a spot leaning against the wall. Jones—such an innocuous surname. One he’d picked nearly three centuries before for a birth certificate. All those years later, and he could still use it without fear of being tracked down. There were simply too many Joneses in this country to get very far. First names came and went, but that surname had longevity.

  Much like the humans around him, Deus pulled out his phone to pass the time while he waited for his food. A few taps, a quick verification that his VPN was running correctly, and he logged in to his account. Out of habit, he checked his tracking program for his six Dire brothers. Nothing unusual there—everyone seemed to be where they should. Even Luc, their taciturn leader, held steady in some remote Alaskan village Deus had never heard of. Luc had been up there for the past few years, traveling from place to place. Never holding still long enough to make sense. Deus had long since been convinced the man spent his time hunting for something specific, but Luc never confirmed that theory. Hell, Luc never spoke much to begin with.

  If anything was wrong, Deus hoped he or his Dire Wolf brothers would know before Luc got himself into the sort of trouble he couldn’t get out of. Not that he’d ever been unable to get out of sticky situations. The beast of a man was lucky as hell, but luck only lasted so long. Deus had a feeling Luc’s would be running out sooner rather than later.

  “Okay, Mr. Jones. That will be thirty-two even.” The owner set a bag on the counter and smiled.

  Deus handed him a fifty and grabbed his bag. “Keep the change.”

  Ten minutes and a quick stroll past the park by his house later, he pushed inside his building and headed to the stairs. Humans tended to take the elevators to the upper floors—even in the shorter, squatter pre-prewar buildings that dominated his street—but being trapped inside a moving, mechanical box never had sat quite well with Deus. He preferred to run up the three stories to his top-level apartment. He slipped inside once he reached his door, securing the locks behind him. Wouldn’t stop another shifter from getting inside, but the locks would give any human a difficult time. And in the grand scheme of things,
humans were far more dangerous than any shifter he knew.

  Door secured, he took a deep breath and let the peace wash over him. The calmness. The quiet. Home, his human side thought as his wolf echoed him with den. Either word fit—they had made it to the place where they were most comfortable. Time to relax.

  Shoes off, he padded across the hardwood floors for the living room. The place where he spent most of his time. Deus had fallen in love with his apartment when he’d come to the city for the first time nearly two centuries before. A Jones had lived there ever since, the ownership of the unit passing from one family member to the next. At least, according to the official real estate records.

  Big windows overlooking a park, a sweeping view of both open land, trees, and skyscrapers in the distance…and an entire wall of television monitors for him to sit in front of and work. Twelve in total. Perfection for a man in his profession.

  Food in hand, he settled into his zero-gravity chair, pulled his worktable across his lap, and looked over each and every screen. Three were broken into different camera feeds from around his neighborhood—some belonging to the city, some to store owners or residents who thought their feed was private, and some from cameras he’d installed as he’d discovered blind spots in his surveillance. Another set played his favorite twenty-four-hour news channel. Nothing interesting there—he’d been through civil wars, world wars, genocides, and population decimation a hundred times over. Fighting was one thing humans tended to excel at, and it was something he’d grown tired of many moons before. Same shit, different day and all that.

  A moving dot on another screen caught his attention as he dug into his noodles. Bez—his signature color showed the man in Texas but not at the coordinates for his ranch. His mate, Sariel, wasn’t with him, which meant the brother had a job to do. One that would be too dangerous for her. Bez would never let Sariel out of his sight if he could help it. Deus typed a quick note to double-check on that in the morning, as he had nothing on the docket for the shifter. No sense interrupting the man’s work, but he’d need to log a report so they all had a record of whatever happened. A history of their pack for when events came back up. Because the thing about history was, it never truly ended or died. It repeated over and over again. You just had to know what to look for.

  Deus double-checked the rest of the dots on the screen. All his brothers and their mates were exactly where they should be, save for that one dot indicating Bez off doing whatever he was doing. Deus’ pack was safe and secure—nothing out of the ordinary going on. Nothing for him to worry about in terms of protection. Perfect. Time for fun.

  The middle screens on his wall displayed three things—a chat forum on the dark web where he found and offered work, the backdoor functionality files of an online first-person-shooter game site he’d built and hosted for a number of years, and the game itself, his player ready to rush into battle in a world he allowed a select few gamers to join him within. Deus settled in, spread his food out on the table before him, and grabbed his keyboard.

  “Time to play, fuckers.”

  As the hours passed, he kept an eye on the dark web chat room. Someone had noticed the completion of a particular job—a transfer of money from very bad, very rich men to not so bad or rich ones. It’d been a long-term heist, taking months to move pennies at a time from hundreds of accounts. The chatters had gotten wind of the fraud and were speculating who could have pulled that off. Deus simply shook his head. He could sniff out undercover federal investigators’ usernames faster than most. He wasn’t about to brag and draw attention to himself. Besides, even if he did, there was no fucking way they’d find him. He’d buried his info too well, and the dead ends surrounding his screen name were something Deus monitored often.

  As the chat moved on—the Robin Hood references growing as people theorized where the money went—Deus kept playing his game. Other players had joined in, but not the one he wanted to see. At least, not until he was on his fourth soda and had already eaten the leftovers from his meal. He’d been in the middle of a particularly tricky part of the game when the name popped up at the right side of the screen. Deus lost his focus, his eyes zeroing in on one word. Birdfoot.

  The other players welcomed Birdfoot to the game, joking about why he was late and what he’d been doing. Jacking off seemed to be the consensus, though one gamer threw out that maybe Birdfoot had a date. Typical stuff. But the others didn’t know what Deus did.

  Birdfoot wasn't a he at all.

  Deus couldn’t remember the exact moment he’d figured out the player had to be a female. That realization likely came from little things in the style of play, the words she used. The cadence of her sentences. When you were around humans for a thousand years or so, you learned to spot the things people wanted to hide. She wanted to hide her gender and blend in with a room filled with males. Considering how female players were attacked and belittled by their male counterparts, he couldn’t blame her, but he had the feeling it was more than simple avoidance of gender stereotypes going on. The question of her reasonings drove him mad, made him focus on her in a way he had never thought about another human before. He didn’t know why, but something about her called to him. Made him want to know more. Made him watch for her every night. Made him wonder if she’d ever be up for a little private chat in one of the naughty rooms in the game.

  As he contemplated the last time he’d had sex with a woman that didn’t involve screens and keyboards—almost twenty years prior at that point—his phone rang with a distinctive tone.

  His Alpha.

  “What’s up, boss?” Deus checked the dots on the map screen, zooming in on where Luc had been hanging out for the past few weeks. Still there. Not moving.

  “I need intel on Anuktu, Alaska. It’s in the Brooks Range region.”

  Deus minimized his news screen and pulled up his server. He also opened a browser window and searched that way for the town, just in case the official Dire records didn’t show anything. Neither were much help. The place barely existed.

  “Population smaller than the staff at Merriweather Fields, no real news stories, pretty well off the grid. What am I looking for here, man?”

  Luc growled. “I’m not sure.”

  That didn’t sound like his boss. Deus checked his screens again almost out of habit, looking for something off. Something to tell him where the problem was. Birdfoot still played, joking with the other guys in the room. She’d also asked where Deus had disappeared to. That was new—her interest in him—but not the sort of distraction he needed right at that second. Later. Definitely later.

  “You need backup?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from the woman in question and looking over what little information he could find on Anuktu.

  “No. I’m trying to stay as far outside the town as possible to avoid interaction but I need more intel. I’m pulled to the pack out here, and I want to know why.”

  Luc’s intuition was the stuff of legend in his group. The man knew before they did when something was going on in his brothers’ lives and whether the something was wrong or right. He’d known about the matings of his five Dire packmates before they’d happened, not that Deus or Luc would ever tell their brothers that. Especially not Deus. Let the men feel only fate could have known about the females in their lives—Luc didn’t need the glory of saying he’d seen the women coming. And Deus…well, he knew how much Luc relied on him and only him. There would be no breaking the trust of his Alpha, so the man’s secrets were safe in his hands.

  If Luc felt a pull to the Alaska pack, there was something wrong with it. A sickness in its midst. The man could sense evil a continent away, and he did everything in his power to eradicate it. Eradicate or inflame, really, depending on his own mood when he arrived. It was the curse of his gift—the dark balancing the light. Too close to evil, and his energy fed it. Too far away, and the sense of it festering ate at him until he exploded. That’s where danger lurked…when mistakes could happen. Deus worked his ass off to make s
ure Luc never made a mistake. Obviously, he needed to work a little harder.

  “I’ll dig deeper,” Deus said, already marking pages and search terms to research.

  “Do it fast. Something isn’t right up here, and I have no access to anything other than my gut.”

  In all their years together, he’d never heard Luc so worked up. So…uncertain. “Are you sure you don’t need backup? I’ve got Thaus close enough to you to be there in a few hours, and I can follow him as soon as I can set up a flight.”

  “No. I’ve got this one for now. You worry about your world and situation. I’ll worry about mine.”

  Deus’ world involved data, coding, and clandestine conversations about wealth and the proper distribution of it. Luc’s tended to be more…primitive than that. He preferred tooth and claw to keyboards and data. Something Deus had seen firsthand over the years.

  But apparently, not for this job. Or at least, not yet. “Understood. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  A grunt was the only response he received.

  Call ended, Deus dove into research mode. National archives, state history, legends and native histories of the region…anything that might shed light on Luc’s premonition needed to be found and examined. A simple story of a ghost in the woods could be the answer they needed, so he delved deep. He’d been a researcher for centuries, long before written records were even kept. He had the skills to search for info and split his attention between that and his game. Not that he was playing anymore, just watching. Keeping an eye on Birdfoot. The girl was kicking ass, and he wished he could be playing alongside her on that run.