by Selena Scott
“Uh. Hey, boss.”
The Director frowned. “What is it.”
There was a pause that further annoyed him.
“We’ve got a little bit of a problem with Phoenix.”
“Tell me.”
“Apparently there’s a girl.”
“You’re telling me that the problem with our potential million dollar investment is as simple as a woman?”
There was a long pause while the agent gathered his thoughts. He might not be quite as bright a star as the other agent the Director had in the field, but he wasn’t a total idiot either. He knew he needed to tread softly here. “It’s not as simple as you’d think, boss. Phoenix thinks he’s in love with her. He wants to abandon his plan of heading back into the wild. He wants to stay here in Portland with her.”
The Director said nothing, letting his disapproval ripen in the silence.
The agent cleared his throat. “He’ll be harder to recruit if he’s got attachments to humans.”
Recruit, brainwash. Tomato, tomahto. But of course, the Director, who’d personally brainwashed all of his agents wasn’t going to say that out loud. “I still fail to see how this is my problem.”
The agent was obviously uncomfortable now. He’d called to talk about how the situation had become complicated and accidentally started airing out his own failures instead. “It was easier when it was just attachments to his family. They were a bonus. This woman, she’s just dead weight.”
“You know the operative word in that sentence, agent?”
“Sir?”
“Dead. The operative word when referring to this woman is dead.”
Now the silence on the other end of the line was defined by shock more than anything. “Sir, you want me to… kill this woman to get her out of the way?”
“I wasn’t aware you were such a delicate flower, agent.”
“You’ve never asked me to kill anyone before.”
The Director frowned. This would all be so much easier if he were talking to the other agent, his favorite agent. Though, he had to admit that murder may have been a steep step for any of his agents. “Agent, when I recruited you, I asked you a question. Do you remember what it was?”
“You asked me if there was anything I wouldn’t do for my country.”
“And what was your answer?”
Pause. “My answer was no. I said there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for my country.”
“I believe this is included under that umbrella.”
“I— yes, sir.”
The Director grinned a cruel smile. All it took to get these idiots to do their jobs was to remind them of their training. All it took was to remind them of why they’d been recruited. They, like all humans, had had to have their weaknesses prodded and poked in order to become the tools that the Director used them as. If he remembered correctly, this particular agent’s weakness was a particular member of his family. “I wouldn’t want this to get in the way of the search for your sister.”
“Of course not, sir,” the agent said in a hurry. “It won’t. You know that finding her is my priority. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to find her.”
“Then you know what you have to do in this case, agent. If there is an issue that is keeping us from recruiting Phoenix Wolf and his family, eliminate it.”
“Right. Yes, sir.”
The line clicked dead.
***
Phoenix had accidentally discussed his decision to stay with Ida with Diana the day before when he’d gone into work. She’d started pressing him about how long he thought he’d hold the position. She was a confusing lady. Delicate in some ways, shark-like in others. He hadn’t intended to tell her that he was going to become a permanent resident of Portland, Oregon, mostly because his conversation with Watt was still rolling around in his head. But also because he hadn’t spoken to the most important people about it yet.
Namely, he hadn’t talked about it with Orion or Dawn.
Also, he hadn’t really talked about it with Ida. He was a novice at this whole being-human thing. And he was even more of a novice at the relationship thing, but even he knew enough to know that making a promise during sex wasn’t actually the same as planning out a very important aspect of their lives.
But a lifetime of prioritizing his siblings had him headed back to Wren’s house after work instead of finding Ida. He felt that, in a way, he needed Orion and Dawn’s blessing before he and Ida made a single plan.
He found them both in the kitchen. The sight made Phoenix smile. Dawn sat at the little table for two under the window, sun over her dark hair, her chin tucked as she worked away at something with paper and a pen. Phoenix knew she’d been taking reading lessons with Quill and taking them very seriously. It was strange to see his sister writing and reading, but also, something about it just looked right.
Orion was sniffing something from a jar and then slathering it onto two slices of bread. A sandwich expert, his brother was becoming. Always hungry, as usual.
It was still a strange sort of shock to see his siblings in their human forms after all these years in wolf form. And not just in their human forms, but in their human forms in a human kitchen, using human utensils, wearing human clothing, doing human things.
It looked right to Phoenix. But it also looked wrong. His brother and sister had come to the human world because of him. They’d have been content to live out their lives in the wilderness if not for their devotion to him. His stomach hurt when he thought about telling them that he was staying here, in this world, without them if they chose to leave.
“Wanna sandwich?” Orion asked, spotting Phoenix lingering in the doorway of the kitchen.
Dawn jolted at the sudden noise, being acclimated as she was to spending long stretches of silence with her brothers. But she smiled when she saw Phoenix there in the doorway. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. The last one he made for me had something called ‘egg salad’ on it. Slimiest thing I’ve ever eaten.” She shivered in disgust and went back to her paper.
“I didn’t know you were supposed to boil the eggs first!” Orion protested. He turned back to Phoenix with a confident little shrug. “You live you learn. And this one is good. I promise.”
But Phoenix shook his head. “I’m not hungry.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Will you guys go on a walk with me?”
Orion and Dawn exchanged a look full of meaning but they both immediately rose up, setting aside their projects and joining him out the back door of the old house. It bordered a stand of trees, the way many houses did in this part of Portland, and that stand of trees bordered a mossy strip of trails that weren’t wilderness by any means, but would do in a pinch.
“You’re not bringing your crutches?” Dawn asked as they started off into the woods together.
“No.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve made a lot of improvements lately.”
Orion snorted. “I wonder why that is.”
Dawn looked between her brothers. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s just say our dear brother has had a lot of motivation to get his ass into full, working order recently.”
“Ah,” Dawn said, the confusion clearing out of her expression. “Because he wants to have sex with Ida. I understand.”
Phoenix nearly swallowed his tongue as he put his hands on his hips and turned toward his sister. “What do you know about sex?”
She put her hands on her hips and matched his pose. “Do you really want me to answer that question?”
Phoenix clapped his mouth closed and turned to look at Orion. But Orion merely lifted his palms and took a step back, signaling that he was definitely staying out of this particular argument.
Dawn laughed and leaned forward to clap Phoenix on the shoulders. “Don’t worry, big brother. You can wipe that horrified look off your face. I’m only telling you that I’ve been in the human world for six months and unlike my brothers, I pay attention. Humans are practically swimming in sexual reference
s and innuendos. It would be impossible not to have learned about sex since we moved here.”
Phoenix didn’t know what an innuendo was but it sounded gross. Either way, he had bigger fish to fry right now than quizzing Dawn on what she’d learned about sex.
He dropped his hands from his hips and the three of them started walking again. He played with Dawn’s words in his head. “You said ‘since we moved here’.” His eyes flicked to hers. “Like you two had a choice to come to the human world.”
Dawn shrugged, hopping up onto a fallen log and dancing graceful down the length of it, completely at home in the woods, even in her human form. “It wasn’t like we sat down and formed a decision as a committee, Phoenix. It was a little bit more of an emergency than that. You would know if you hadn’t been unconscious. And maybe, if you hadn’t been injured, yeah, we wouldn’t be living in the human world right now. But it’s not like living here has been a death sentence for me. It feels like we’re just in a new stage of our lives. One where we try out the human world for a little while.”
His stomach, which had been rising and rising with hope as she spoke, plummeted back to earth.
For a little while.
Dawn was talking about returning to the wilderness as wolves. Which had always, always been their plan. Until now.
“Right.” He took a deep breath. There was no sense in pushing this off any longer. “I’m not gonna go back. Not the way that we were at least.”
Both his siblings stopped walking and stared at him. Dawn with a look of shock and slight horror on her face and Orion with a sly little smirk.
The silence between the siblings was accented by the slither of the wind through the leaves. Autumn was in full swing now and there was a bite to the air. They were surrounded on all sides by mossy, old growth forest, but they weren’t more than fifty feet from the neighborhood. They could smell the exhaust from cars, dogs in backyards, someone burning toast not far away. This was nothing like their rolling, secluded mountains where they kept completely to themselves. The mountains he’d just told them he wasn’t returning to.
Orion was the first to break the silence. “Congratulations, brother,” he said, stepping forward and pulling Phoenix into a great, back-cracking hug.
“For what?” Phoenix asked.
“For falling in love. Finding your mate, as you so obviously have.”
“You’re staying for her?” Dawn asked. “For Ida?”
Phoenix nodded keeping his eyes on his sister’s dark gaze. All at once she sat down on the log and dropped her head into her hands, fat tears rolling down her face.
“Dawny!” Orion sat next to her, his big frame dwarfing her as he tucked her into his side. “It’s gonna be okay.”
She lifted her face to Phoenix and he forced himself not to look away. “I like Ida a lot. I do. But you want to stay here forever?” she asked in a small little voice that reminded Phoenix of when she was a child.
“Yes,” he whispered truthfully. “No,” he followed up, just as truthfully. “It’s not because I love the human world so much. It’s because I love Ida. Because I can’t just leave her. And she’s not cut out for a life in the hills. She’s human. She’s social. I couldn’t ask her to do that.”
“So instead you’re giving up your wolf for her?”
“Don’t be dramatic, Dawny,” Orion said, surprising them both with his stern tone. He so rarely was anything but lighthearted. “Phoenix is both man and wolf. Just like me. Just like you. Well, you’re woman and wolf, but you get it. It makes sense that he should straddle both worlds instead of living completely in one. He can’t ask Ida to straddle both worlds. She’s not a shifter. She’s human. Fully human.”
Dawn dashed her tears away. “What do you mean straddle both worlds?”
“I haven’t figured it out with Ida yet,” Phoenix said. “But I think I’d want to spend time in both civilization and wilderness. I wouldn’t be abandoning you, Dawny.”
“But it wouldn’t be the way it was,” she said in a hushed voice.
“No.” There was nothing to be done but acknowledge her point. She was right. There’d been a wildfire, he’d been terribly injured, he’d met a woman, and now nothing was going to be the same.
“But would you want it to be?” Orion asked after a long minute. “Would you really want to keep living on the mountain with your brothers for the rest of your life? No one else to talk to but us?”
“I hate talking to people.” She brushed at more tears.
“Okay, then, but how about all the reading you’ve been doing? You couldn’t do that on the mountain.”
She frowned but stayed silent, apparently unwilling to either deny or concede that point.
“And Quill,” Orion offered. “He’s becoming your friend, isn’t he?”
Dawn gave him a dry look. “I don’t know what Quill is, but I wouldn’t call it a friend.”
That statement struck Phoenix as odd and he was about to ask her about it when the wind changed and they caught a scent all at the same time.
“Your girl’s here,” Orion said, though he didn’t have to explain that to Phoenix, who would have recognized Ida’s scent from across the grand canyon. “We better go say hi.”
Dawn rose up from the tree where she sat and grabbed for Phoenix’s hand. “I’m just surprised is all,” she whispered. “I’m not trying to be a baby. I’ve just been looking forward to going home. Somewhere, in my heart, I think I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I saw you with Ida. I saw Orion with… yeah. I just knew we weren’t going back to the way things were.”
Phoenix scooped his sister up in a hug. “I meant it when I said I wasn’t going to abandon you.”
“I know that,” she sighed. “I just have to get used to it here, I guess.”
They broke through the tree line and came around the side of the house to the front yard. Ida had parked well down the block and was walking toward them, one hand lifted when she saw the Wolfs waiting for her in the front yard.
Phoenix could feel her smile from there. The warmth of it. Her personal heat. The love she just sort of emanated everywhere she went. He knew, in his heart, that Dawn was going to love her if she gave it a chance. He just had to make this work.
He looked down at his little sister, about to say something along those lines to her when the screeching of wheels caught his attention.
Phoenix looked up, his blood turning to jagged ice in his veins, in time to see a huge, unmarked vehicle pull to a stop in front of Ida, a door open, and then she was being dragged inside.
NO.
He wasn’t sure if he’d shouted it with his voice or his heart, but he was watching the woman he loved get locked into a car and taken away. He was sprinting toward her before he could think twice. But the vehicle was reversing fast, a man in a mask in the front seat. It spun on its wheels and was gone.
Leaving Phoenix standing in the middle of the road, yelling.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“What the hell was that?” Quill shouted as he pulled up next to the Wolfs, who stood scattered in the road, staring in horror at a van speeding away.
“Ida,” Phoenix shouted, pointing at the van. “Ida was in there.”
“Ida just got taken in that van?” Quill asked. The blood ran out of his face. This was horrible. This was… not the way this was all supposed to go. He’d just known that this would all get screwed up. He’d just known that the Wolfs were not going to make this easy. What should he do? What should he do?
“Should we call the police?” Dawn asked in that voice of hers that was starting to surface in his dreams, her soft hand reaching through the window of his car to land on his arm. She was touching him. Willingly. She was asking him for help. She was destroying his world, she was making this so hard.
He shook off her hand and didn’t bother checking her reaction. He needed to get ahold of himself and quick. “No. We’re not calling the police. I’ll go after her.”
His passenger door wa
s nearly wrenched off its hinges as Phoenix threw himself inside. “GO. NOW.”
Quill saw from Phoenix’s expression that there was not going to be any talking him out of this. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was his back two doors being wrenched open and the other Wolf siblings jamming themselves in his car.
“NOW!” Phoenix shouted.
Quill jammed on the gas, trying to recalibrate all of this in his mind. Someone had taken Ida and he was pretty sure he knew who it was and why. He needed to stop him before anything bad happened to Ida, but he knew it was going to be futile trying to shake off the Wolf siblings right now. He knew that he was just going to have to bring them along and hope like hell his cover didn’t get blown.
He jammed on the gas and sped down the road at twice the speed that the van had. He couldn’t believe this stooge had taken Ida. What an amateur. If he screwed up years of hard work for Quill…
Quill looked up in the rearview mirror and was momentarily pinned in place by a quiet, knowing, green gaze staring at his face, taking him in. Seeing every detail of his black heart. All the details he’d tried to keep hidden for so many years.
For a moment, just one, staring into Dawn’s eyes, Quill almost didn’t care if everything got ruined. His years of hard work. Because then he could lay down this terrible job and finally rest. Finally be free. Maybe, just maybe, those eyes of hers were giving him a reason to live a clean life.
But then the Director’s voice played in Quill’s ear, it triggered all the years of pain and suffering and literal torture he’d endured in the internment camps. Who was Quill kidding thinking that someone like Dawn might want him, might make his life soft and sweet again. The world was too cruel for that. His family was gone. Dead and disappeared. He’d known nothing but imprisonment and pain for most of his life after he’d been interned in the shifter camps. And now, all he knew how to do, all he wanted to do, was destroy the people who’d taken his life away from him. And the Director was going to help him do that. He just needed to be a good little agent and help the director.