“Oh, yeah. I’m good. I’d rather be the one to get shot than Ceres anyway. It’s a small price to pay.”
“That last guy won’t be using what’s left of his hand for much.” The corner of Ceres’ mouth rose.
“I’ll tell the police to keep an eye on local hospitals then,” Ian said. “I can’t thank you enough for coming to their rescue.”
“No problem, man. We’re going to hang around in this area and camp out. My cell is nearby, so we’ll ring you if anything happens.”
“Feel free to use my house if you need anything.”
Ian fed a super condensed version of the story to his grandmother. By morning, it would probably be all over the news that a robbery had been foiled on a veteran’s home in the country.
Ian hadn’t fooled his grandmother, and he hadn’t fooled me either. The problem was trying to determine who he’d meant to convince with the story.
“Go have a soak in the tub, baby. I’ll get Sophia her bottle and put her to bed.”
Trusting him with my baby, I indulged in an hour-long soak until my skin became pruney, as if I could wash the terror of the day down the drain, too.
Ian wasn’t in bed when I emerged from the bathroom, but Sophia was fast asleep with Petunia curled up beside her playpen. I found him on the porch, leaning against the rail with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and his phone in the other. I recognized the contemplative expression on his face.
“You smoke?”
Wearing a guilty expression on his face, he ceased swiping mid-text and glanced away. “I used to when I was a lot younger,” he explained while tucking the device into his pocket. “While you were in the shower, I found Gram’s stash. She tries to hide it, you know.”
I nodded. “I smell it now and again mostly out here on the porch, so I sort of guessed she indulged.”
Ian chuckled and set the pack on the porch railing. “Hell, she’s over ninety years old. I figure she can do what she wants by now if it makes her happy, but she thinks it upsets me.”
“Does it?”
“A little.” He took a step closer to me and wrapped one arm around my shoulders. With one sweet kiss, my husband assuaged my worries and chased away the remnants of my fear. “Before you and Sophia came around, Gram and the team were all I had. I didn’t retire from the Air Force because the career tired me, Leigh. I left because after Russel’s wife died, I realized how fragile human life can be. I wanted to be around for her last years. She’s... she is my mother. As close as I’ve ever had.”
“I think Betty is too stubborn to leave you any time soon, Ian.” I hugged him then leaned back to peer into his golden eyes. “Why are you out here alone?”
“Thinking.”
“That much is apparent.” I cupped his face in both of my hands and skimmed my thumb over the soft, silver-peppered scruff on his jaw. “If I’m going to be your wife and your mate, you need to trust me with the things troubling you. What’s happening, Ian? I deserve to know as much and why someone tried to shoot me in my own home. Were you texting Russ? Is Dani okay?”
My husband dragged in a deep breath then guided me inside from the porch to the guest bedroom. Grateful to have him with me, I crawled beneath the sheets and tugged him in to join me. Sophia slept peacefully in the playpen beside us.
“Now spill it.” Moving closer let me set my head on his shoulder, fanning my hair over his bicep and the pillow.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Something is going wrong in this town, and I think the drug problem runs deeper than a few misguided kids dealing Xanax bars after school. It’s worse than teens picking narcotics from the medicine cabinets of senior citizens. Someone put a hit out on me because I’ve been digging around in their business.”
A hit. It was something straight out of one of his movies. The news should have terrified me, but instead, I felt a rare surge curiosity. “Are you going to clean up the town?”
“We’re going to try. I made contact with a few people I work with. I don’t trust the local police or the county boys.”
“You don’t think—”
“Maybe,” he said. “Ceres bit someone hard enough to sever a blood vessel and some tendons. If they check into a hospital, I’ll know about it. This problem in Quickdraw has gone on long enough.”
“Is that why you decided to run for sheriff?”
“Partially. Everything I said about that before was true. If our own department is corrupt, then it needs to be cleaned out, top to bottom.”
“I should be terrified right now, but...” A strange sense of levelheadedness pervaded my emotions, imploring me to remain calm. I’d first noticed it during the firefight between Daniela and the thugs. “I have nothing but absolute faith in you right now. Isn’t that weird?”
“Of course you do.”
“But why?” I raised my head from his shoulder.
“Along with turning into animals, we shifters have some, ahh... more passive abilities specific to our type of animal. As my bondmate you get to enjoy them whether I’m present or not for as long as I’m alive. You’ll never suffer any kind of impairment — mental or physical — for long. And you’ll be more rational than the average person.”
“So,” I began while twisting to roll onto his chest. It put our faces close, noses almost touching, eye to eye while I studied him in the dimmed bedroom lighting. Ian was an enigma, and nothing in the past prepared me for living life with a supernatural fantasy guy. “You’re sexy, you turn into an eagle, filthy rich, good in bed, and you have some sort of magical healing aura?”
“Mmhmm. All eagles do. The Ojibwe believed we carried away sickness to the Creator. I wished I’d been there for Russ’ wife, but we were both away so often together I never knew she was ill until she was beyond my help.”
“Ian?”
“Hm?”
“Can Dani and I do the same thing now with the healing?”
“Yeah, you can, but not her. Why do you ask?”
“She was so brave,” I repeated for what must have been the fifth time. “And she made me feel brave, too.”
“Because she pulls it from Russ. He inspires bravery in others.”
“One day, real soon, you’re going to have to explain all of this to me because this is some need to know information.”
Ian chuckled and opened his mouth to reply, only for the phone to buzz with an incoming message. Hiding nothing, he enabled the touch screen with a slide of his thumb and began reading the message.
We picked up your guy. You know where to meet us. We’re on our way there.
~Ian~
As I stepped down from the porch and approached Russ’ truck, I shot a glance over my shoulder to the raven perched on the edge of the roof. Harrison would remain as lookout over the night, and he had strict instructions to warn Leigh if any suspicious activity occurred on his watch.
I left my wife with my pistol and the key to my grandmother’s gun safe. After a five minute primer lesson on how to operate the handgun, Leigh’s confidence skyrocketed. I wished we weren’t in my grandmother’s house and short on the time for hanky-panky. Seeing her with my gun turned me on.
Not once in all of my entire career had I ever used my privileges with the government for personal gain, but I was more than willing to use them to protect someone I loved. Leigh didn’t know it, but all of our vehicles were tagged in law enforcement systems as special class federal vehicles. All six of us could speed to our heart’s content with or without a siren, but we kept concealed equipment to use in emergencies. One button would blast sirens and flash lights. My foot remained anchored to the accelerator the entire way.
A black Mercedes awaited me at the safe house in the middle of the country, almost smack dab between Houston and San Antonio. Juni and Nadir occupied seats inside, one nibbling a stale donut and the other drinking coffee.
“Glad to have your help on this, Nadir. I know you just got home for your R&R.” Nadir’s Middle Eastern descent gave him the edge we needed during
missions in Afghanistan. He’d spent the past two years in deep cover making sacrifices the rest of us couldn’t imagine. Now he was home spending his first days lending me a hand.
Nadir scoffed and shook his head. “Don’t think anything about it. We’re family.”
“Did he talk any yet?”
Nadir and Juni shook their heads.
“No,” she said. “We waited for you. We didn’t tell Russ we found him either, because we knew the moment we did, he’d rush out here from the hospital and we’d be lucky to have anything of him left for you to interrogate.”
“Good thinking.”
Juni worked Comms and Nadir was our Intel agent. Together, there wasn’t much the two of them couldn’t accomplish for the squad. I relied on them when legitimate methods of acquiring information were a bust or when I needed someone tracked down.
“How are we gonna do this one?” Juni asked. “The usual?”
I nodded and strode into the room to find my helpless target secured in a chair. He hyperventilated beneath the black hood, aware of the approaching footsteps.
“Who’s there? Look, man, I need a doctor. Y’all gotta let me out of here. I didn’t do nothin’, you can’t just hold me up in here like this.”
Without concern for concealing my identity, I removed the black bag and stepped back until I came into focus for our captive. The man in the chair was slim, scrawny like most backwoods drug users. The partial halo of dark skin from repeated burns on the lower lip was the telltale sign of a crack addict, along with a half dozen other visible symptoms of drug dependency. Under these circumstances, pity wasn’t part of my emotional repertoire.
“Ian MacArthur?”
I answered him with a sharp right hook to the face, juggling his head back and nearly knocking him unconscious. Usually, I was the calm and calculated one. The cool squad leader who never lost control. I had Russ’ role today, and I played the part with ease.
This fucker could have killed my wife and child.
“Didn’t expect to see me again, did you? Thought I was dead in there? Who sent you?”
“Fuck you,” he spit out. “I know I got rights. Where’s my lawyer?”
“I don’t think you get how this works. There’s no police involvement. No one, and I do mean no one, knows where the hell you are right now. You’re a ghost no one will ever find, and judging from the looks of you, no one will ever miss. Now someone sent a truck load of you to my house to kill me, and I want to know who. Now.” Taking him by the shirt collar, I tightened the material until it cut into his throat. After giving him a ragdoll’s treatment, his rebellion gave way to fear and he was thirsty for air again.
“I d-d-don’t know much.”
I cuffed him again, hard enough to knock the chair onto its back and for his head to strike the padded floor. We’d added that installation after Russ nearly cracked someone’s skull open during an interrogation. The guy had spit in Juni’s face and the southern gentleman in Russ had exploded violently.
“Don’t!” he shrieked, flinching away as I dropped to a knee beside his head with my fist raised.
“Ian!” Juni cried from the door. “What are you doing?”
“I’m fucking doing what needs to be done,” I growled at her. My fist began its descent, but she ran forward and grabbed my arm at the elbow. Nadir hauled me back with one arm around my waist.
The scuffle ended with me in the control room after Juni shut the door in my face. I dropped into her chair at the computer console and watched them unfasten the bonds to release our prisoner. His limp, mangled hand had basic first aid to prevent bleeding out and little else, but I recognized Nadir’s work. He and Sasha had worked closely during the final year of her active duty, making him our backup medic.
“Are you okay?” Juni asked gently. “I’m sorry, I really am.” Our detainee had tears streaming down his face. I’d shaken him up good enough that he flinched back from her initially when she reached out. “I’m just going to have a look at your hand, okay? We want to get you some medical help, but I need you to cooperate first so I can help you.”
“I’ll get him something for the pain. He must feel awful right now,” Nadir commented. He came out of the room and glanced at me after the door was shut. “Was all of it acting, or did you really lose it? That wasn’t normal for you. You’re always the cool-headed one.”
So much for being calm and rational. “I really lost it for a second, but the end was acting,” I admitted. We had a system here of good-cop, bad-cop, usually with Russ as the bad guy and one of the girls or Nadir as the good guy. The girls had the best luck thanks to their specific animal totems. Juni was our lucky rabbit and Sasha had the gift of timing. She always knew when to ask the right question.
“He’s at ease with her already. Once she has him calmed down and comfortable, he’ll spill whatever she wants.” Nadir plucked a medical kit from the cabinet and dropped it on the table beside me.
“What are you giving him?” I watched him withdraw a small vial of clear liquid.
“Some morphine,” Nadir replied. He withdrew a small amount of liquid, recapped the syringe, and returned to the room.
My operatives went through the usual song and dance. They got the guy comfortable and even got his name out of him. His name was Kevin Watson, and a quick look into our databases revealed he was the thirty-two-year-old, unemployed son of our town’s bar owner with a history of possession charges.
“When do I get to leave?” I heard him ask. “I have rights. I know I have rights. You guys can’t keep me here like this, can you?”
“Soon, my friend. I promise it will all come to an end soon,” Nadir assured him. “You’re very fortunate Ian has the pull to keep you out of prison for your crimes. You participated in an attempted murder. Did you know an infant was in the room?”
“No, no. Montgomery never said anything about kids. He just said to go in hard if we saw MacArthur’s vehicle parked in the drive. Told us the wife would be with his grandmother.”
Bingo.
“Ask him about Chief Montgomery,” I told Juni over the communication link. She wore a small earpiece while in the room with our suspect.
“It sounds like Montgomery really screwed you guys over,” Juni said. She flashed the guy a sympathetic smile and pulled up a seat. “Does he normally do shit like that?”
“Hell yeah. Thinks he can get away with doing whatever he wants ‘cause he’s police chief.”
Nadir whistled. “Sounds like a real asshole. Maybe there’s a way we can help you and keep you safe. I guess if he knew you were talking to us, he’d have you locked up.”
“He would. He knows people, man. I’ll be in TDCJ and down at Ferguson Unit like my homie, DJ.”
“DJ?” Nadir leaned forward a little on his seat.
“Dennis James. He got pinched by one of the honest cops. Uhh... What’s his face... fucking Hunt caught him. Montgomery told us we’re on our own if we get busted doing shit, and Dee got sloppy.”
“Why didn’t he try to make a deal? They gave him a pretty stiff sentence for the drugs he had on him, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. That’s ‘cause Montgomery knows people. This place is fucked up, man. I knew it was over for him when he got sent to Ferguson. You can’t hide once you’re in there.”
“I take it that means they have a few men on the inside.”
Kevin nodded. “Yo, man, can I have another shot of whatever you gave me? The pain is starting to come back.”
I chuckled. “Dose him up with something light and lemme make a couple calls. Our problem is bigger than I anticipated.”
Chapter Twelve
~Leigh~
“I’d like to visit Daniela Reyes,” I announced to the young woman at the nurses’ station.
The cold, clinical environment of the county hospital surrounded me. Doors opened and closed, wafting the scent of chemical deodorizers.
Once I had directions to Dani’s room, I made my way down the hall and knock
ed on the door.
“Come in!”
I stepped into a vacant room then shut the door behind me for privacy. The bathroom door was half ajar, but sour vomit assaulted my nose.
“Dani? You okay in there?” I hesitated outside the door, waiting to see if she wanted any help.
“Yeah. Just a sec, Leigh.”
The toilet flushed, and then I heard her at the sink. After a few swishes and gargles, Daniela’s pasty face appeared in the doorway. “Sorry about that. Mind helping me back to the bed?”
Holding her gown shut in back with one hand, I helped the wobbling woman back into her bed. “You don’t look so good. Hospital food not agreeing with you?” I expected to see Russ asleep in a chair. Rumpled hospital blankets were strewn over the back of it, indicating he’d been there. Tentative about making myself at home, I sat on the edge of the seat.
“The food is godawful. Russ went to get me McDonald’s while the breakfast menu is available.” Dani did a double take and looked around the room in confusion. “Where’s Sophia?”
“With her great-grandmother. Betty assured me she can still change a diaper and swaddle an infant. Plus, she has Ian’s goddaughter helping.”
“Good, I’m glad everyone is safe. I heard an animal growling outside during the shootout, so I just assumed another you-know-who was involved.”
I crept to the door and peeked into the hall. Without a nurse in sight, I took a minute to catch her up on the news. I told her about the wolves outside and the young man who knocked on our door that morning. His name was Harrison and he had kept watch over the house all night for Ian.
“Ohhh. Russ mentioned wolves coming to visit, but didn’t say much.” Dani’s distracted demeanor was at odds with her usual bubbly personality, setting off my maternal instincts. She looked like she needed a hug, so I leaned in and gave her one, careful of her bandaged shoulder.
“I’m so sorry you were hurt, hon.”
“You aren’t the one who hurt me, Leigh. I just feel awful right now.”
“Is everything okay? Should I call the doctor in? Would you like me to go and let you rest some more?”
Let Us Prey: BBW Military Paranormal Romance (Wild Operatives, #2) Page 12