by Zoe Chant
The warehouse was a hundred yards or so off the road, down a nearly-invisible dirt track through the woods. They came up to it completely silently, the security team in the lead, their tranquilizer guns pointed in all directions.
There were a few guards stationed outside the building, and just as one of them spotted the team and grabbed for his radio, tranquilizers dropped them all, almost exactly simultaneously. Shoshanna was impressed with RGS’s security training.
Then they were inside.
There were more people than Shoshanna had been anticipating—fifteen or twenty, all moving at once. They were outnumbered.
That didn’t stop Max’s people for a second, and they had the element of surprise. The lab’s thugs were caught flat-footed, and the hiss of tranquilizers filled the air. The numbers started evening out fast.
Shifted, Shoshanna and Max were less vulnerable than any of the security team, but they were bigger, more obvious targets. Shoshanna kept herself moving; cheetah speed was more than any of these guys had ever had to deal with in target practice, and she was able to pounce and disarm one guy before he knew what hit him.
Paws on his shoulders, claws flexing, she stared into his eyes. The man’s pupils had contracted to pinpoints, and his chest was heaving. When she sat back, loosening her grip for a moment, he tore away and bolted out of the building.
Pleased, she turned to find another target...and instead found herself facing the barrel of a gun.
A real gun, not a tranquilizer. It was pointed directly at her forehead.
“Shift,” the man holding it said calmly. “My finger’s pressing down on the trigger. If you move, I’ll fire before you get away. If someone else shoots me, odds are my finger will twitch and I’ll hit you involuntarily. Shift back to human form or I kill you.”
Shoshanna knew she should’ve been afraid. She could die right here, right now. Even shifter healing couldn’t compensate for a bullet to the head at point-blank range.
But she wasn’t. Because she knew what was coming.
Max hit the man from the left, all of his immense power focused on a single goal. The man didn’t even have time to be surprised: one moment he was staring over the gun barrel at Shoshanna, and the next moment he was gone.
Max pinned him to the ground, all five hundred pounds of his lion form keeping the man from twitching a single muscle. Shoshanna looked around—the RGS security had decisively won the fight, with most of the Elite men on the ground unconscious.
She shifted back to human. Then she walked over to where Max had the man pinned to the ground, and crouched down. “Sorry,” she said to him. “You never stood a chance.”
***
Max looked around the warehouse with a feeling of satisfaction.
His own team had subdued Elite’s people despite being outnumbered. No one had been killed, and overall there had only been minor injuries—most people had been taken out with tranqs.
And Shoshanna was all right.
Seeing that man holding a gun on her had filled Max equally with terror and rage. The possibility of her being hurt, being shot, being killed—he’d launched himself at the man without any thoughts in his head beyond protect his mate.
And he had. Shoshanna had looked at him after he’d shifted back to human and said, “I wasn’t even afraid. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. I felt you coming.”
He’d taken her hand and kissed it, too overwhelmed with emotion to put it into words.
Although she was all right—although he’d made sure she was all right—part of Max couldn’t help but wish Shoshanna had been willing to stay somewhere safe instead of coming with them.
His instincts were to protect her, after all, and he didn’t think that had ever go away. In an ideal world, he could solve all of her problems for her, wrap up the solutions in tastefully expensive paper, and present them to her tied with a shiny bow.
But that wasn’t Shoshanna’s ideal world. Shoshanna would never be happy sitting at home and waiting for someone to do things for her.
And Max couldn’t be happy if she wasn’t happy.
Besides, it was only a part of him that wanted her home safe. A very protective part.
The rest of him was filled with triumph at the victory he and his mate had achieved. From Max’s car accident, Tom’s death, his humiliating crawl, injured and drugged, to her doorstep...they’d come back and defeated the people who’d done that to him, the people who wanted to do worse to many, many others. And they’d done it together.
And that was truly satisfying.
Shoshanna appeared by his side. “So,” she said, “I went downstairs with some of the team to clear the bottom floor.”
She’ll never be happy waiting for someone to do things for her, Max reminded himself, when his instincts rebelled at the idea of Shoshanna going anywhere in this warehouse without him. She wasn’t going to sit around until Max was done talking with his men. She was going to keep taking care of business.
And it wasn’t like she’d gone alone. There had been a whole group of security personnel with her, and the security cameras had already been checked to make sure there wasn’t another troop of thugs waiting in any crevices. It had been perfectly safe.
“What did you find?” he asked her.
“They’ve got a lab down there,” she said. “With cages. Not even cells, like we had in Colorado. Cages.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “But there was also an office. And I found someone hiding inside it.”
She looked over her shoulder, and Hernandez, the head of Max’s security team, came up to them. Behind him, he was hauling a man that Max recognized immediately.
“Well, well,” Max said. “Mr. Goring. What a pleasant surprise.”
Goring was glaring at him. “How the hell did you survive that car accident? My people said that there was no way anyone should’ve walked away from that. The driver’s side was completely caved in.”
Shoshanna’s whole body went tense. “This is the man who staged the accident?”
“And poisoned my coffee,” Max confirmed.
Shoshanna started growling. Goring jerked in Hernandez’ grip, wheeling around to stare at her.
“You obviously don’t know much about shifters if you weren’t aware that we can heal,” Max said calmly, pulling Goring’s attention back to him. “But you must have known I was one, or the drug wouldn’t have worked. How did you find out?”
“Heard about your lab breakout earlier this year,” Goring said sullenly. “I know that’s what Hendricks did with the money he embezzled. Got hold of a video from that day, everyone running every which way. You turned into a goddamn lion.”
Max made a mental note to assign a tech specialist to find the video in Goring’s files and figure out where he’d acquired it from.
“So yeah, I knew you were a freak,” he continued. “And when you came sniffing around us, it was no question what you were after. So I had to put you down.” He grinned. “Like an animal.”
Shoshanna glared at Goring. “He’s not an animal.”
“You’re all worse than animals,” Goring spat. “And we’re still going to take you down. What are you going to do? You can’t tell the cops we wanted to experiment on freaks. That would mean telling them you exist, and you’re not going to do that.”
“No,” Max said thoughtfully, “but I think we can come up with a solution that doesn’t require that.”
“Sure we can,” Shoshanna said. “Did you see that they have your car?”
“I did,” Max said. “And one of these security people must know where Tom’s body is buried, and be willing to tell us in exchange for leniency. We’ll do a sweep of the place, remove any evidence of shifters, retreat with your guards to somewhere anonymous, and inform the police that Elite Enterprises has been engaging in corporate espionage, and their board and head of security should be investigated for murder and attempted murder.”
Goring’s mouth opened and then closed.
Max took a
step closer to him. “You killed an innocent man,” he said, keeping his tone mild. Judging by the expression on Goring’s face, though, Max wasn’t keeping his murderous feelings out of his eyes. “You wanted to kill me, and you killed him instead. That was a mistake. You should have gotten it right the first time, because now I am going to end you.”
As Max stepped away, leaving Goring in the hands of his security, the man slumped in Hernandez’ grip.
“I think he’s finally starting to understand what’s coming his way,” Max said to Shoshanna.
She looked around the warehouse. “I almost can’t believe that we did it,” she said. “After...the other lab, the idea of a place like this is so huge in my head. Like there should be no way to stop it, no possibility of defeating it. But we just did.”
“We still are,” Max told her. “I was serious about involving the police.”
“Will any of the charges actually stick?” she asked dubiously.
“It’s possible. Particularly to the thugs whose fingerprints are likely all over my car. Goring, certainly—there will likely be more charges against him even than Tom’s murder, depending on what the police ultimately find in his office. The CEO and the board, probably not. They’ll have much more plausible deniability.”
“So what do we do to them?” Shoshanna asked, her mouth set with determination.
Confident. She was confident that they could do it. Max’s heart swelled with pride in his mate. “Just watch,” he said.
This was something he could present to her tied up with a bow.
***
Shoshanna felt...amazing.
They’d descended on Elite in force, and now no shifters were ever going to wake up in those cages down there. They’d done that. They’d stopped Elite from experimenting on shifters as though their lives weren’t worth anything, as though their pain didn’t count.
The whole experience had quieted a little part of her mind, a part that was hurt and angry that she’d been so helpless in Hendricks’ lab. That she hadn’t been able to do anything, to save herself, to save Kevin and the others.
Now she’d helped.
And Max had helped her.
There was something about having him with her. Shoshanna was so used to fear. To that low-level awareness that there were bad things in the world, and those bad things could happen to her. That they had happened to her, and might happen again.
She knew that was still true. Anything could happen at any time.
But she no longer believed it would. She didn’t have that sense of a sword hanging over her head. A man had pointed a gun at her, and Max had happened to that man.
She had Max by her side now. Max would do everything in his power to make sure she stayed safe, and everything in his power was a lot.
After all, he was CEO of Rowland Global Solutions.
That fact was becoming more and more real to her, now that they’d left her house and were out in the world. It wasn’t like she hadn’t believed it before, but it had sort of gotten pushed to the side in the face of more pressing concerns. But now...
Her mate was the CEO of Rowland Global Solutions.
She was going to have to figure out how she felt about that.
The mate in question appeared at her side. “Everything’s done but the clearing out, and the security team can do that more easily if we’re not here taking up attention,” Max said. “Shall we go?”
“Where to?”
Max hesitated. “Well, eventually we will have to go back to New York City, in order to put the last phase of the plan to take down Elite into motion. But that won’t be effective until the police have done a certain amount of work, and that work has had time to be filed and work its way through the bureaucracy. So, tomorrow at the earliest.”
“So...you don’t want to go back to New York tonight?” Shoshanna was a little surprised; she would’ve thought that urbane, wealthy CEO Max Rowland would’ve gotten sick of being out here in the country by now.
Particularly considering the circumstances. Drugging, attempted murder...
“No,” Max said decisively. “No, I would rather go back home with you. Unless you have some pressing reason to go to the city this afternoon.”
Shoshanna could feel a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Nope,” she said. “No reason at all.”
“Excellent,” said Max. “Except we do need to make one stop first.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“A clothing store,” Max said firmly. “I refuse to wear this any longer.”
Shoshanna couldn’t help the laugh that broke through. “What,” she managed, “you don’t like the fashion statement you’re making in Kevin’s sweats? Are you sure?”
“How about we leave now,” Max suggested frostily.
Shoshanna followed him to her car. “There is one positive thing I have to say about the sweats,” she told him as they got in.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“They make your butt look amazing,” Shoshanna told him seriously.
She was expecting him to roll his eyes and tell her to drive, but instead he leaned over to her and said, “In that case, let me remind you that the faster we get to a clothing store and make some purchases, the faster you can see it without anything in the way.”
Shoshanna gunned the engine.
***
There was something about Shoshanna’s house, Max reflected.
They were making dinner. They’d bought him some respectable clothes, first—“Not a suit,” Shoshanna had said. “You can’t wear a suit around the house,” so he’d bought jeans and a navy blue sweater Shoshanna had picked out for him, and he was strangely enjoying the sensation of wearing clothes his mate had chosen for him.
After the clothes, though, Shoshanna had stopped at grocery store, and they’d wandered around picking up what looked good. Max hardly ever cooked, and the staples that he needed at home he had delivered with a grocery service. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone grocery shopping in person, with an eye toward cooking the food he bought that evening.
They’d bought chicken, chorizo, olives, onions, wine, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes...everything was so obviously ingredients. Nothing pre-made.
And then they’d gotten home and Shoshanna had set everything up in the kitchen and said, “Okay, we’re making empanadas from scratch like my grandma used to, are you ready?” and it had become clear that this was going to take some time.
Max was amazed at how much he enjoyed it. Making dough, letting it chill, chopping onions and olives, dicing chorizo, starting the chicken braising. Rolling out the dough, cutting it into circles, and constructing individual empanadas to go in the oven. Stealing kisses in between steps. He never worked with his hands like this, and it was humbling how satisfying he found it.
“Your grandmother did this?” Max asked cautiously at one point. Shoshanna hadn’t talked about her family once yet.
She nodded. “My mom wasn’t...” she waved a hand. “She wasn’t much of a mom. My dad left when I was a baby. So I spent a lot of time being baby-sat by my grandma. She had a complicated heritage—Mexican, Native American, Polish, Russian—and she said that she liked to think that meant that she could cook anything she put her mind to. I used to cook with her all the time while I was growing up.” She was quiet for a moment. “She passed away when I was a teenager. Now when I cook, I always remember her.”
Max kissed her temple. “You’ll have to tell me about her, then.”
So Shoshanna told him stories about her grandmother as they cooked—a tough old woman, it sounded like, who had weathered many, many trials in her long life and come out the other side determined to keep going.
“She sounds like you,” Max said as they put the empanadas in the oven.
Shoshanna smiled, her eyes distant with memories. “I hope so.” She glanced at him, seeming almost shy for the first time in Max’s memory. “I’ve always hoped that when the time comes, I can inspir
e my own family half as much as she inspired me.”
My own family.
Max had never thought much about having children. After all, the company was his legacy.
But the idea of a tough, dark-haired little girl or boy running around this house, playing out in the woods, being tucked into bed in one of the bedrooms upstairs...
Max found that he really, truly wanted the chance to be a better father than his own had been.
“I know that you will,” he said to Shoshanna, and kissed her sweet mouth.
“Mmm.” Shoshanna wrapped her arms around his neck. “Max...having you here feels right. Remember when you were saying that you thought wanting to live here said something about me?”
“I remember.” Wanting to live in a warm, beloved home like this just showed how much of a warm, loving person Shoshanna truly was, no matter how she saw herself.
“Well, the same to you, then.” She grinned at him when he pulled back. “I see you in here, and I know you want to belong here.”
He hadn’t thought about that.
While that was still echoing around his brain, Shoshanna squeezed him close and said, “I love you.”
The words hit Max hard, especially after everything else she’d said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard them from anyone—his siblings had learned from their parents to be reticent about their emotions. His father had certainly never said it.
Hearing it from Shoshanna was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Like safety and security. Like the future he’d been imagining, where he lived here with her, and there really was a child running around their feet...maybe that could be real.
“I love you, too,” he whispered, and kissed her again. And again. He couldn’t get enough of her taste, her scent, the feel of her body against his. He pulled her close, kissing her fiercely.
Shoshanna ran her hands down his sides, and then up under his sweater. “I love this sweater,” she told him between kisses. “It looks fantastic on you. But it needs to come off right now.”
Max stripped it off over his head and dropped it on a nearby chair. “Upstairs,” he suggested.