Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  “It would be an open-and-shut case if they were humans,” Nate had said when he approved her signing out the docs. “Joe Peluso wouldn’t have a chance in hell. Neither would we. We’re…lucky.” Five years ago, that would have struck her as an extremely fucked-up thing to say about his own client. Now, given the United States’ new alliances, and given the kinds of powers supernaturals had, it made sense. Russian criminals, no matter their white-supremacist or violent shifter ties, were still a political minefield. Even in a Sanctuary City like New York, law-enforcement and government officials had to worry about the national and global implications. Because some terrible people mattered more than others. And factoring in that the victims were supes meant they could have defended themselves in ways that humans couldn’t. That added a whole other level of complication.

  Joe Peluso hadn’t considered any of that when he’d opened fire. She had to think about it now. What are you doing, Neha? A small part of her felt guilty. A small part of her was sick that she was trying to rationalize six deaths, six cold-blooded murders. They lived in a country where a Black man could be choked to death for selling cigarettes and a Sikh like her papa could be beaten for his turban…and here her firm was defending a white shape-shifter who’d been apprehended with nothing more than bruises. But it was the job she’d chosen. And you couldn’t pay rent with ideals, could you? So, she needed to know what made Joe tick. And what made six other men better off dead. If she sold off a piece of her soul in the process, it was just a by-product of her profession, right?

  Bullshit. You are so full of it. The tablet fell to her lap, and Neha tilted her head back against the arm of the couch. She could make excuses all day long, but she knew what this angst was really all about. Who this was really about. Joe.

  She couldn’t get him out of her head. Two weeks had passed since that first meeting, and he’d already moved in. With his bruise-mottled skin and chains and jumpsuit. And those icy, cynical eyes that burned hot when he turned them her way. Profession be damned, she knew she’d be conflicted about crimes committed by almost anyone else. But something about Joe Peluso flipped her inside out. As determined as she was to get to him, he was getting to her, too. After just two more meetings that had lasted maybe fifteen minutes apiece. After jokes about cooking shows, for fuck’s sake.

  It was disgusting. She was disgusting. She shoved off the couch and stalked to the tiny kitchen just off her living room, searching for the wine she’d uncorked two nights before. It was thick and red, like the blood that was likely on her hands now. She filled a stemmed glass to the brim with it.

  She’d been a nice girl once. The kind of girl who wore a kara around her wrist and went to the gurdwara regularly and spoke fluent Punjabi—plus a smattering of Bengali and Urdu picked up from some of her papa’s cabbie friends. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten the languages, but she’d forgotten how to be her—the girl who’d never seen crime-scene photos, who’d never held the hand of a woman beaten nearly to death by a spouse or looked into the eyes of remorseless killers. The girl who still thought the best of people. That Neha wouldn’t be fascinated by a monster like Joe Peluso, who put his worst on display. That Neha would want to laugh with one of Dustin and Nate’s hedge-fund buddies and make a good impression. Sometimes she felt like she’d killed that Neha when she went to work for the DA’s office. That death was on her conscience, too. Maybe she was a monster, too.

  The morbid thought made her toss back two more glasses of merlot and chased her to bed later that night, kept her tossing and turning for hours.

  “You think making a phone call about those girls makes me sympathetic? It was a call. The goddamn bare minimum. Don’t turn me into a saint, Doc. Don’t look for something that ain’t there.”

  Their third meeting—only the second without Nate and Dustin. His bruises are healing, his black eye almost back to normal. He still won’t win any beauty contests, and his walls are still sky-high. She tries sneaking around them. She tries the direct route. He refuses to let her in.

  “What’s the point?” he asks after minutes of her attempts to reason with him. “How long do you think I got in here, Doc? Be real. Odds are, I ain’t even gonna make it to my trial. There’s gonna be another ‘accident’ in the shower. Or someone’s gonna take me out during a transfer. This ain’t the movies, you know? No one’s getting an Oscar for my story.”

  “Well, damn. I was hoping they’d get a Bollywood actress to play me!”

  She’d made a joke of it. Laughed it off. But curled up on her side now, with one hand clutching her pillow, all she could imagine was the scenario he’d sketched out coming to pass. His blood circling a drain. His body battered in the back of a police van or slumped on a sidewalk. All because she’d failed him. Because she hadn’t fought hard enough.

  She already had blood on her hands. She already had deaths on her conscience. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, let Joe’s join the list.

  * * *

  The one-on-one with his lawyers’ “official psychiatric consultant” was a total waste of time. “A formality,” Taylor had called it. “To create a baseline assessment and establish that you show no signs of sociopathy.” It was really an hour with some bored, big-money baby boomer from Connecticut who just wanted to tick off a bunch of boxes, say “hmm” a couple times, and then half-heartedly pitch him on copping an insanity plea. He’d look really good on the stand, credible expert witness for the defense, all that jazz. Joe was no dummy. He got what was going on. So he also got that the real work was being put through the pretty doc. After all, she’d said it herself, right? “You’ll give me everything.”

  He barely remembered his mom, but he still missed her. He liked to read. He loved dogs. That was the kind of shit they wanted Joe to confess in his little meetings with the doc. How he was really a sweet and fluffy guy on the inside, and he had a sweet little pittie named Sadie growing up. Somebody who loved puppies couldn’t be all bad, right? In fact, that was why he’d decided to volunteer for the Apex Initiative and undergo the turning. On account of his affinity for animals. So, Your Honor, Joe Peluso most certainly does not deserve to spend the rest of his unnatural life behind bars. The hell of it was, he really did love Sadie to pieces, and he’d bawled his eyes out when his old man drove out to Long Island and dropped her off at the side of some road. He’d been around six or seven. After that, he’d quit crying about much at all. Then his pop had the good grace to die, leaving Joe at the mercy of his nonna—and the foster-care system every time CPS got a bug up their ass.

  He’d never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. That was another thing the lawyers wanted him to say. That he’d never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Joe had never been to Reno, but he’d shot plenty of men before playing target practice in South Brooklyn. Tore ’em apart, too. And who was he to judge if they deserved it or not? Judging wasn’t his job. Questioning it wasn’t his duty. What he’d done over there, he did under orders from his superiors, in the service of his country, like generations of brave men and women before him. But he wasn’t about to split political or moral hairs…especially since the country had changed so damn much since he was deployed the first time.

  And as for what had gone down here in the States? It had fuck-all to do with his military background. Everything to do with Kenny being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting caught in some shit between a Russian shifter outfit out of Brighton Beach and some human Gravesend Ukrainians. Four Russian bullets laid him out. Fucking four. How did you wave that off as an accident? Just getting “caught in the cross fire”? But that was what all the news stories had called it, and why the local cops just wrote it off and padded their pockets with bribes. Joe had gone with Kenny’s pop to the morgue to make the ID. Mrs. C couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She wouldn’t leave her bed for days for crying. Two of her sisters had to hold her up at the funeral. And the clawing in Joe’s gut—the closest thing he’d felt to grief
in a long damn time—made him go looking for payback.

  “You think making a phone call about those girls makes me sympathetic? It was a call. The goddamn bare minimum. Don’t turn me into a saint, Doc. Don’t look for something that ain’t there.”

  “Don’t hide something that is. If you were a killer without conscience, you wouldn’t have spared a thought about dropping that tip. You would’ve gone straight home and dined on steak without a care for the blood on your hands. Hell, you would’ve dined on your targets.”

  “What makes you think I didn’t still do that?”

  “Besides the autopsy reports?” She’d just stared at him. With those Disney princess eyes. He hadn’t given her any reason to believe in him. Hell, he’d been a belligerent asshole. But it felt like she saw him that night. Crawling into the bottom of a bottle of cheap whiskey to drown out the hiss-punch of silenced shots. Waking up a day and a half later to the cops pounding on his door. Going with them without protest, without struggle, because he knew exactly what he’d done. The taste of it was just as stale as the booze.

  That didn’t make it okay. Fuck, no. He was raised Catholic enough to know that an eye for an eye didn’t play. But that was the excuse they’d want to use in court if he started talking. They’d want to call in Mr. C or Kenny’s mom as character witnesses, hear stories from Zizi Teresa about how he sang in the church choir until he was eleven. They’d want to hear how Kenny was just a baby when Joe moved in with the Castellis a couple years later. How Joe helped him learn to walk and ride a bike. The whole heartbreaking sob story about how he was really a good man and he just had to avenge his family after a horrific tragedy.

  Thing was, Joe couldn’t sit there in a cheap borrowed suit, in front of all those people, and listen to that lie. He wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even an okay man. Hell, by some definitions, he wasn’t a man at all anymore. Yeah, he’d never laid a hand on a woman. He’d never run with a gang or dealt in drugs. And he didn’t go around snacking on people even though he was an apex predator now. But he was no hero. Not even some comic-book vigilante like Batman. He put down those motherfuckers, and he’d fucking loved it. Hell, he’d excelled at it. Because killing people was something he was just that good at. A pro. A gold-medal-worthy killer in the Murder Games.

  What would the doc say if he told her that? Dr. Neha Whatshername. Ahluwalia. Neha Ahluwalia. All those pretty vowel sounds for a pretty girl who’d never taken joy from taking a life.

  He’d seen her three times so far, and they had another meeting set for tomorrow. A week ahead of his prelim hearing, where his options were accepting a plea deal or saying those two ridiculous words: “not guilty.” And Joe could barely sleep for thinking about it. Not the hearing—fuck that—but her. What she would wear. What she’d smell like. If she’d have her hair up or down. If she’d hand him over her panties if he just asked nicely enough…

  “Fuck.” He exhaled, and it sounded like a gunshot ricocheting across the cell.

  Yeah, he loved dogs. He thought cats were freaking adorable, too. But his biggest problem right now, stuck in the dark with nothing but hours to kill, was how obsessed he was with one particular pussy. More obsessed with it, with her, than with his own defense.

  Feinberg and Taylor wanted to put his former XO on the list of character witnesses right off the bat. Joe shut that shit down immediately. He hadn’t talked to any of the guys from his old human unit since his arraignment almost a year and a half ago. That was on him, not them. No way did he want any of this shit touching the Corps. And Apex…? He couldn’t risk anything casting a shadow on their military service or putting their supernatural statuses into question. Stevens. Buchanan. Hawk. Drake. Even the newer members of the Apex Initiative that he’d barely gotten to know. They didn’t deserve to be pulled into this shitshow.

  And if the SOBs in charge had anything to say about it, that wouldn’t even be an option. They’d let Joe twist in the wind before risking public exposure of the whole program. They made that crystal clear for every Apex soldier before deactivation. “We will disavow all knowledge. We will take every necessary measure to protect the integrity of the unit and the program.” Translation: “We won’t hesitate to put you in the ground if you breathe a word of who we are.” So, he’d leaned into the lone-gunman narrative the minute he got hauled in. Lone wolf. Ha. Fuck yeah, it was just him and his guns. Nobody else. He’d never needed anybody else. Until now. Until her.

  Chapter 6

  He was alone in the room for ten minutes before the doc showed. Long enough to sweat it. It was a little joke the guards loved to play—especially since they’d figured out that he wouldn’t shift and wasn’t that much of a threat. Moore, this ancient fucker who was one step from a mall security guard, had pulled the “gotcha!” on him a few days ago. Kept him cooling his heels for nearly a half hour before he said, “Whoops! My bad! No one’s here for you after all!” Asshole. So now the possibility of that was always in Joe’s head. Under his skin. Hanging on to the hope of seeing Neha only to have it yanked away. But then the door opened, and it was one of the other guards, Miller—thank fucking Christ—and he had the most gorgeous company in the world.

  Oh, fuck. She was wearing a damn miniskirt. Sure, it was masquerading as a business suit, but the only business that came to mind was the kind transacted horizontally. Joe tried not to moan when she walked in and sat down across from him. He’d had a bitch of a night. A worse morning, getting hassled by the guards and knocked into walls as they moved him up the block. But it all faded away with Neha in the room. Her hair was down. Loose around her shoulders. And she was all buttoned up again—a row of ’em down a prim-and-proper black jacket and skirt that stopped inches above her knee. His eyes and his imagination should’ve stopped there, at her fucking knee, but it was too late.

  She was maybe five foot seven or five foot eight tops, and she had legs for days. And he wanted nothing more at this point than to get between them. To grab her knees, press them apart, tear her tight little skirt at the seams. The fantasies had been torturing him all week, because thinking about her was better, sweeter, than thinking about everything he’d done. Twice he’d nearly broken his own jailhouse rules and wrapped his hand around his dick. But, fuck, there was no releasing this tension. Especially with her trying to get into his head, all serious and full of questions, while he just wanted to bury himself in her. His tongue. His dick. His fingers. Whatever he could get inside her. He’d make it so good.

  “…and I was in touch with Nate and Dustin this morning. They’re keeping things close to the vest, of course, but they seem upbeat about your chances for a plea agreement.”

  He had to force himself to quit staring at her mouth—so soft and so pink, he’d kill to fuck it—and actually focus on the words. “I’m glad they’re upbeat. I ain’t holding my breath,” he said with a snort.

  “You’re also not being helpful,” she pointed out. “You stonewall them in every meeting. You don’t listen to me either. Your meeting with the independent psychiatrist was, by all accounts, a complete travesty. You seem wholly uninterested in your own defense, shooting down every logical strategy. You won’t agree to character witnesses. You refuse to address your upbringing. You won’t talk about your supernatural abilities. You’re resistant to anything that might make you sympathetic to judge and jury. Why is that? What is it about your background that you want hidden? Are you afraid to be seen as a decent person who snapped? Is it just that—”

  Oh, hell no. She needed to knock this shit right off. He couldn’t have her digging into his psyche or whatever the fuck, trying to get him to spill all the things he’d never talked to another soul about. It was like seeing him naked. No, like seeing him shift. “Doc.” He leaned forward, cuffed hands on the table in front of him like he was praying to the goddess of legal miracles.

  “Yes?” She blinked. All long lashes and parted lips. Shocked that he cut her off midspecula
tion about using his childhood as a defense strategy.

  “You ever slummed it?” he wondered, tacking a sleazy grin on the question. Testing her fences. Like one of those Jurassic Park raptors. “Ever fucked a blue-collar guy?”

  “What?” Oh, she got good and pissed just like he wanted. If she was angry, she wasn’t curious. She sat up straight, her jaw going tight and her dark eyes spitting nails. He couldn’t help but smile wider as he smelled the anger rolling off her skin.

  “You heard me.” Maybe she felt this thing, too. This wild, dark, impossible chain tying them tighter than his handcuffs. But she’d never do anything about it. Women like her never did. Except maybe under the sheets, a naughty book in one hand and her vibrator in the other. “Ever had a dirty hand down your pants? Grease-stained nails getting you off? I can’t figure if you’re the type of girl who might go slumming once in a while in between all those fancy dates uptown.”

  “That’s enough, Joe.” The doc didn’t yell at him. She didn’t haul off and slap him. She just sat there, still as a statue, getting a handle on her temper, getting a handle on her breaths if not her heartbeat. Until the nails in her eyes were more like sharp little pins. “I know what you’re doing,” she assured him. “Trying to change the subject. Trying to make me so uncomfortable that I’ll stop asking you questions you don’t want to answer. You can stop, because it didn’t work before, and it won’t work now.”