Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  It’s hotter than balls. Worse than a subway platform in August. And Joe has a hostile’s brains splattered all over his cammies. The ringing in his ears just won’t stop, but neither will the shells. It’s been hours, and he can’t stop tasting the meat…feeling the tear of skin under his teeth, the acid-sharp spurt of arterial blood painting his face, his throat. There’s a second when their hearts stop beating, where their weight shifts. The physical journey from life to the lack thereof. It’s a heaviness. He tastes that, too.

  The first time he killed someone, he was twenty-two years old. Didn’t even see a face. Just the kill zone in the sight of his rifle. It was like something out of one of those single-shooter video games. An internet-trolling incel’s basement wet dream. He thought he was such hot shit. Swaggered around collecting back slaps from his brothers, his friends. But that buzz wore off real quick once he got out of the high corner and down into the villages, into the desert camps. Once he started seeing their eyes. Real men. Real people. Who’d signed up for service just like he had. It was nothing like bagging CGI targets to rack up points. He quit swaggering. But he still said yes to Apex ten years later. Made it even more personal. Took the guns out of it, added fangs and claws. It took months for the man to stop throwing up what the monster tried to eat.

  Twenty years on, he hadn’t forgotten a single kill, even though he wanted to. He carried every death on his conscience, even though he liked to think he didn’t have one. And there were so damn many deaths. All in the name of duty and honor. He pretended he couldn’t judge what he’d done, but he judged himself plenty. Again and again and again. For every time he’d watched the life drain out of an enemy combatant. The doc and his lawyers…they thought what he did to those Russians was bad but defensible. They had no fucking idea.

  Joe gave up trying to sleep somewhere around 3:00 a.m. By that point, he wasn’t dealing with nightmares so much as memories. Afghanistan. Iraq. That shit was all on the books. But he’d been to a dozen more places he couldn’t pick out on a map—because why know, right? Why care? As far as the brass were concerned, too much information could lead to questions and regrets and hesitation. To insubordination. They’d dropped him into the brush with nothing but a pack for his gear and a couple of other Apex predators. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh fucking my.

  The powers that be, the suits and scientists in charge, they’d called it Phase Three of the program. Joe had no clue what Phase One or Phase Two involved. Tinkering with born supes? Getting supes and humans together and making superpowered babies? He’d tried to ask a couple times, throwing all that creepy sci-fi shit in there, but got shut down with the government’s favorite sentence: “That’s classified.” He was classified. The Phase Three group was all handpicked for their “highly specialized skill sets.” For their “spotless service records.” All fancy ways of saying that they were really good at killing whoever they were told to kill without asking too many questions. Perfect weapons in human form. Just point ’em at a bunch of hostiles and let ’em loose, right? Who cared what the consequences were? Those Brooklyn mafia goons…? Those motherfuckers who hadn’t cared if Mrs. C’s baby boy and some innocent women got caught in their cross fire? They were the first people Joe had taken out without being under orders…and the only deaths he carried that he didn’t regret one damn bit.

  Maybe that was how he could force the “not guilty by reason of insanity” bullshit to leave his lips. Because he had no guilt about it. Because he had to be insane. Because the craziest thing about all of this was that he had more feelings about a woman he’d just met than he did about what he was going on trial for. Feelings about making her laugh. About touching her, taking down her hair and digging his hands into it. About kissing her again. Jesus Christ, did he have feelings about kissing her again. Longer, harder, for days. This time with no interruptions.

  Best-case scenario, maybe Dr. Neha Ahluwalia’s mouth would wipe the taste of blood off his tongue once and for all. Worst-case scenario, maybe she’d just be the next person he ripped up and devoured. The latest in a long-ass line of casualties he wouldn’t, couldn’t forget.

  The one who’d haunt him all the fucking way to his own early grave.

  * * *

  It was close to four o’clock when Neha finally made it over to Brooklyn Detention for her weekly check-in with Joe Peluso. For her last attempt to get through to him before his hearing. She’d put it off as long as possible, donned as much protective armor as she could find. As if smoky eyes and a bold lip would make her forget that he had kissed her. That she had liked it. As if blasting hard rock on her iPod during the walk over would drown out the sound of his voice whispering seductive filth.

  Neha was proud of herself for the first ten minutes of the visit. She kept to the last few items she wanted to touch on before he entered his plea. Made a final effort to crack his backstory. “Your military records have been heavily redacted. We could only glean so much. Can you tell me anything about your time in the Marine Corps that might be helpful?”

  Joe clearly hadn’t gotten the memo about the tone of their meeting. He was slouched in his seat, arms as loose as his cuffs would allow and his eyes smoldering with some emotional tempest she couldn’t identify. “What does my time in the Corps have to do with anything, Doc? Why do you keep coming back to that question?”

  “You tell me.” She shrugged lightly, shuffling her notes. “Is that where you became a shape-shifter?”

  A crack of lightning appeared in his stormy gaze. “This ain’t a road you wanna go down,” he warned.

  “Yes, it is.” She was already going down roads she didn’t want to go down. There was definitely no turning back now. “Especially if it’ll help your defense.”

  “Fuckin’ hell, Doc.” Joe’s anger seemed to dissipate. He leaned awkwardly so he could scrub at his face with one of his hands. “It won’t. Nothing I did over there will pretty up what I did over here.”

  At least he was acknowledging he’d done things. That was a place to start. But Neha knew better than to harp on those details. It would just make him aware that he’d let something slip. “Are there a large number of supernaturals in the military?” she asked instead.

  “I don’t ask, and I don’t tell,” he said dryly.

  Oh, so funny. A regular joker, this guy. She huffed out her frustration, sitting back in her chair. “You know the government’s pushing for a supernatural registry? Just like the Muslim registry they were pulling for a few years back?” Nate, who was Jewish, had hit the roof, practically shouting the DGS walls down when the AP wire broke the story. “This is bullshit! We are not going to let this happen again!” He’d gotten on the horn to the ACLU immediately about filing an injunction, joining in on any large-scale lawsuits, etc. The case, like the legislation, was still pending.

  “Yeah? And?” Joe made a motion like “go on,” his handcuffs rattling with the gesture. “What does that have to do with me right now?”

  “I think legislation like that is racist, dangerous, and unnecessary. And I don’t personally care if there’s an entire elite unit of wererabbits in the U.S. Navy. Law-abiding American citizens should be allowed to live their lives—and the ones who don’t abide by the law deserve due process. You deserve due process.”

  “Wererabbits? Really?” He bypassed her last assertion entirely, brows pulling together in a mock-frown. “Wouldn’t Navy Seals be better?”

  She couldn’t stop the laugh this time. It burst out of her like a shot. Was it better or worse that Joe had gradually decided to trade surliness for silliness? Not that his delivery was all that much different…still gruff, raspy, like his throat was an unevenly paved road. The variation was in the tilt of his lips, the faint twinkle in his eyes. It was charming. And it was charming her.

  But he quickly turned serious once again. She watched him work out just how much he wanted to say next. The thoughts flickering across his face. The
set of his jaw. “My unit was a cooperative project across Army, Navy, Air Force, the Corps,” he said finally. “No wererabbits. What I can tell you is that every soldier was there voluntarily. Most were fully human to start. None of us were human by the finish. And that had nothing to do with shape-shifting. That had everything to do with war.”

  PTSD, she thought, even though he’d dismissed that idea weeks ago. He shook his head, like he’d already guessed she’d go that route again. “Don’t even try it. I’ve said all I had to say about PTSD.”

  “Joe, you won’t let us try anything,” she pointed out, unable to keep the reproach out of her tone.

  He grinned then. The same lewd grin that had gotten them both in trouble the last time she visited. “You ever slummed it? Ever fucked a blue-collar guy?” What he said this time wasn’t nearly as problematic, but it got to her just the same. “Not true. I’d let you try whatever you want on me. They’ve already got me chained up. You can do the rest.”

  Neha’s imagination immediately ran wild—too wild and too far for her to call it back. Pinning him down. Gripping those thick wrists. Riding him hard until he begged to come. Would an alpha male like him really let her try that? Oh god. She dropped her head into her hands, hiding not from him but from her own thoughts. What was this? Why couldn’t she stop? Why couldn’t she shut him out?

  On paper, there was nothing that indicated Neha was susceptible to such poor decision-making. Her parents hadn’t been abusive. Papa had never touched a drop of liquor in his life and subscribed wholeheartedly to Sikh tenets. Ma was never particularly strict, and her brothers were awesome. Their upbringing in Woodside—just twenty-five minutes from Manhattan via the 7 train—had been damn-near idyllic. Her parents had given them choices from the beginning. Easy-to-pronounce names that danced on the edge of assimilation, forgoing traditional Sikh naming conventions. Not pressuring them to follow religious laws. Especially after 9/11. They hadn’t even been out of their teens, but the hassles for covering their hair, for “concealing” ceremonial daggers, had been endless.

  Her brothers had picked totally opposing ways to cope. Nitesh, who now worked at a tech firm in Jersey City, was totally clean-shaven. Short-haired. He barely admitted he was Punjabi. Neal, meanwhile, had a beard that would make a Brooklyn hipster cry with envy. His hair was glorious, too. Longer than Neha’s and almost always covered by an array of bright turbans. He’d officially been baptized in the Khalsa and legally changed his name to Indrajit Singh Ahluwalia. He was Dr. Indrajit Singh Ahluwalia. Fancy. This had yet to stop the immediate family from still calling him Neal—because your house name stuck with you forever.

  She fell somewhere in the middle of her siblings. She respected her heritage, cooked desi food when she had time on the weekends, still had salwar kameez in her wardrobe and a picture of Guru Nanak on the wall. But she wasn’t devout—her version of a commitment to service meant doing her own thing and working in criminal law. And she wasn’t some kind of rebel either. She hadn’t stripped to help pay for law school like some of her friends had. She hadn’t turned to drugs or alcohol when classes got too stressful. She didn’t party. She didn’t hang out with rogue vampires. She’d had a few shitty boyfriends, but who hadn’t? There was no sob story to explain why there was suddenly a direct link between Joe Peluso and her hormones.

  All she knew was that his voice was enough to make her squeeze her thighs together under the table, and his dark eyes made her bite down hard on her lower lip so she wouldn’t show him an ounce of the weakness he’d brought out in her. She had to turn it into strength. She needed to use it as a tool. Lust was a weapon that could be bent and turned around. If it freed them both, all the better.

  “I’m not going to blow this case,” she told him, leaning forward and low so her neckline gaped and the slope of her breasts grazed the tabletop.

  He followed the motion, his mouth giving a tiny quirk. And then his eyes flicked back to hers. “Yeah? You got any plans to blow anything else, Doc?” he mocked.

  Yes. No. No way in hell. “You still think you can scare me away with that kind of talk? Haven’t we moved past that, Joe?” She tilted her head, offering him her best angle. A face that could launch a thousand ships. “Isn’t it time you told me why you killed those men in human skin instead of shifter fur and helped us mount a solid defense?”

  Fuck. She realized her verbal error too late. One wrong word choice gave him back the upper hand. “You want me to mount you?” His laugh… Oh hell, it was wicked and full of promise. “Kinda hard to do that in here, but let’s see what I can manage in court.”

  The images slammed into her again. Brutal. Gorgeous. Wrong. Joe bending her over the jury box. Seating her on his cock in the witness chair. Doing unspeakable things with a gavel. Taking her on all fours as the fur rippled across his body. She had to close her eyes against the full-color pictures. Against him. She almost conceded the point to him…the entire damn round…but spared from visual proof of his charisma, she could hear him. His breaths. How they came sharp and jagged. He was just as turned on. Just as affected. Joe Peluso was as connected to her as she was to him. They were in this together. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t. And it didn’t make sense at all.

  “Did you…did you do something to me?” She forced herself to give voice to the ridiculous question, but she couldn’t force herself to look at him while she asked it. “Did you make me feel this way?”

  One moment passed in silence. And then another. When Joe finally replied, it was softly…almost wounded. Like she’d hurt him somehow with the accusation. “What exactly do you think I did to you?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I have no idea what kind of supernatural powers you have. Maybe you put some kind of whammy on me. Put me in thrall. So I sympathized with you. Felt for you. Dreamed of you.” Fantasized, really. Writhing in her sheets. Trying not to touch herself and failing miserably. If that wasn’t some sort of spell, what could she blame except her own bad judgment?

  He laughed. The caustic, self-loathing laugh that she already knew all too well. “Doc, if I had that power, do you think I’d be in here? Don’t you think I would’ve whammied my way to freedom? Anything you feel…anything you dream…it’s no different than what you’ve been doing to me.”

  Neha’s chest tightened. Her breath caught somewhere between her throat and her rib cage. “We shouldn’t be doing this at all. This is insane.” The irony of her declaration wasn’t lost on her. His plea hearing was set for tomorrow. Nate and Dustin had been coaching him to go with “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but there was no guarantee he’d follow through. A court-appointed shrink could pretty easily substantiate the claim if he did—on paper he read like a sociopath—but sitting across from Joe now, shuffling notes like she wasn’t flustered and hot and confused, she knew he was as competent to stand trial as she was. Not that her own mental state was really much of an endorsement. After all, she’d become totally obsessed with him…advocating for him and flirting with him and wanting him when he’d killed six men with no regrets. The only regret he seemed to have was for her.

  “Doc…” He made the nickname sound like a tormented groan. Not impersonal. Not a jab. “Doc, you gotta look at me,” he urged.

  So, she did. She looked at his broken nose and his faded bruises and his scars. At his pouty mouth, not just swollen from a punch he took but also because it was asking to be kissed.

  “I know a guy in ESU,” he whispered, too low for the guards to hear. “He can get us a few minutes tomorrow. Before I go in.”

  There was a crashing sound in her ears that she recognized as her heartbeat. And a lurch in her stomach that she knew was the union of elation and fear. “Why do you want that, Joe? What do you hope to accomplish?” She almost sounded professional. Rational.

  He saw through it, of course. Right through the table and her clothes to where her panties were damp. “I hope to g
et my arms around you,” he said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “I just want to feel you close.”

  If he’d said “because I wanna fuck you,” she could’ve resisted it. That was what Neha told herself later. If he’d made it crass and vulgar, she would’ve said no. The tenderness in his voice destroyed her. All she could do was nod “yes.”

  Chapter 8

  “I just want to feel you close.” What kind of dumbass bullshit was that? Long after he was back in his cell, cooling his heels and waiting to hear if his bribe went through, Joe kicked himself for saying it. For wanting it. For daring to hope she’d show. For daring to hope at all. He had no use for sentimental crap. Especially in here. It was a weakness. And with the assholes who’d jumped him last month just itching for Round Two, he could not afford any kind of weakness. But he was the walking dead anyway, wasn’t he? He was gonna meet Kenny on the other side any day now. So, what did it matter? He knew he had no right to do this to pretty little Neha Ahluwalia. To ask her to meet him. To make her face up to this thing they had going between them. He didn’t care. It was the first time in years he’d felt something, anything, besides anger and grief. Besides empty.

  Wanting her… It was this clawing thing inside him. It was alive. White-hot and hungry. Just like the beast. He had to see it through before it burned him up worse than the fires of hell ever could. He’d never wanted a woman this damn much. He’d never wanted anything this much. Fuck, he’d only been with three people since high school. He hadn’t been a player in a long time. And maybe that was part of it—that he’d just gone without for too long. Or maybe it was just her. Just Neha. With that smoky sex-goddess voice and the mile-long legs and those eyes that saw too much of him. Or maybe…just maybe…it was a supe thing. The animal inside him recognizing a mate.