This was not Neha’s world. She’d stepped through the Looking Glass when she crossed the threshold of Kamchatka. But she couldn’t go back. She’d signed on for this. She’d demanded participation. She was all in now. Because she’d made that call. Used the number Joe had given her…not to save herself, but to find her way back to him.
A commotion by the doors pulled her from her ill-timed reverie and her rote rounds of the arena. She caught a flash of familiar white hair. Nate. The quick meal she’d downed with the kitchen staff a few hours ago tossed in her gut like a laundry load. She hadn’t seen him in what felt like years. She’d left him and Dustin twisting in the wind, throwing away all of their trust in her. He’d walked in with Finn, who was dressed to kill in a black leather jacket and skin-tight clothes beneath. He looked devastating and deadly. And that meant things were about to get serious. She had no idea how Nate and Finn even knew each other, but it was clearly part of whatever Third Shift had planned. Whether they were here to watch the proceedings or to help wreak havoc was anybody’s guess.
Neha took care not to acknowledge the two new entrants to the Pit when they were finally given the go-ahead. Grace, ever the consummate operative, took no such pains. She made a beeline to her partner and his date, batting her eyelashes, swinging her hips, and offering them some high-end vodka. Even from across the room, Neha could see the lusty smile on Finn’s lips and glinting blue in his eyes. Yeah, he definitely appreciated the performance.
Meanwhile, the bravado that Neha had slipped on like a Halloween costume from Ricky’s continued to unravel. What was she doing here? She was a Punju girl from Queens, not a superspy. What could she even do to help Joe if shit hit the fan tonight? The doubt rippled across her skin, distracting her to the point where she found herself entirely too close to the VIP section where Aleksei Vasiliev was holding court with a slew of cronies. Doubt immediately turned to sweat. At first glance, the vor looked like his little sister. Fair-haired, pale-eyed, attractive. But a second glance…it was like that old TV show, V. When the lizard people peeled away their skin to show their true form. There was an icy monstrosity that pulsed in Vasiliev. In how he smiled at the men in the box with him. In the way that he threw his arm across the back of the banquette…with his hand partially shifted into a claw.
“The Bear Pit is a ‘safe place,’” Yulia had warned her with a touch of mockery in her tone. “Our people shift freely, not just to fight but also to watch. You must not show surprise or that you are afraid. To do so is to flag yourself as prey.” The heads-up hadn’t actually prepared her for any of this. For half-shifted brown bears eating and drinking and trying to kill each other for sport. It was nothing like Tejal’s father’s side of the family…who only changed into their Naga forms for joy, for celebration, for prayer, and seldom did so in front of anyone who didn’t share that identity. The first supernatural Neha had actually seen in their natural form—at least to her knowledge—was Joe, back in Auntie and Uncle’s studio apartment. And now here she was…mere steps away from the man who’d ordered his death.
She suppressed a shiver and skirted toward the bar, hoping against hope that Vasiliev hadn’t actually noticed her lingering, smelled her fear or whatever. And her luck held…because he stood, turning his attention toward the fighting cage in the center of the room. One of his pals handed him a wireless microphone. He hadn’t acted as announcer for the earlier matches of the night. Those had been introduced by an older guy Yulia had called “Uncle Stanis.” So, this could only mean one thing: It was already Joe’s turn. So soon. Too soon. Was Third Shift even ready to move?
The whole team had agreed to go off comms for this mission, the risk of being caught with tech too great. “We’ll just have to rely on my profound psychic talents as a point of contact,” Finn had cracked after the decision…admitting roughly two beats later, under the force of his bosses’ glares, that he had no such psychic talents. “Just my charm, loves.” Working with the vampire was probably as endlessly annoying as it was sexually frustrating. But at least they still had the surveillance hack in place, and the operatives back in Hell’s Kitchen monitoring as much of the club as they possibly could. Would the feed pick up Aleksei’s low laughter, amplified by the mic? How his frigid gaze cut across the room, stopping first on his younger sister and then on Nate?
“Welcome.” He drew the word out with a flourish, gesturing widely with the microphone. “We have very special guests tonight for a very special show. A Kamchatka exclusive. Our reigning champion, Yuri Medvedev, and an honored guest—Joseph Peluso. Two apex predators. One battle.”
Two apex predators. Apex. Surely…surely, he couldn’t know? Neha had to fight to hang on to her tray, to keep the brimming shot glasses from spilling over, as the doors at the back of the room opened. Joe’s opponent strutted in first, on his own power. A dark-haired man with blue eyes. He was shirtless, revealing a sculpted chest and broad shoulders. Black athletic shorts clung to his massive thighs. Yuri Medvedev, according to Yulia. Classically good-looking, he wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a mafia romance novel. But the last thing he roused in Neha were romantic feelings. Just horror. Nausea. He was larger than Joe. Taller by at least four inches. Without shifting. It was not going to be an even match. Not by a long shot.
Joe was hustled in by two of Vasiliev’s henchmen. Practically shoved into the arena and toward the cage. It had been half a day since she’d seen him, but he’d passed that time far less peacefully than she had. New bruises dotted his skin. There was a cut over one eye. Heaven forbid he be at peak health while facing off against a supernatural twice his size. But her lone wolf wasn’t showing weakness. She saw in him that same swagger, that same curl of lip that he’d shown that first day in Brooklyn Detention. The sullen asshole with his shields up, not letting anyone in. He claimed a corner of the fighting cage and leaned against the bars, glaring across at Yuri Medvedev with “fuck you” in his gaze. A “fuck you” so emphatic that Neha could hear it from where she stood.
There was no way Aleksei Vasiliev didn’t hear it and see it, too. And it delighted him. Energized him. Turned his crank. He threw his head back and roared. That was the only word for the sound. A reverberating howl of triumph that made the hairs on Neha’s arms stand straight up. And when it died away, leaving only the uneasy murmurs of the audience in its wake, an eight-foot-tall brown bear stood in Yuri’s place.
Chapter 29
He didn’t have time to think, to blink, to process—to shift—before there was a motherfucking giant bear barreling across the cage at him. So, all Joe could do was duck and roll out of the way, landing in a crouch in the next corner. His skin prickled. His jaw started to crack. No. Stop. He had to hold off the change. He couldn’t show his cards this early. Not five seconds in. None of these fancy-ass mob people, gawking from their seats like tourists at a SeaWorld spectacle, knew what he was or what he could do, and that was his only advantage.
The bear charged him again, relying on brute strength. Like it was going to be that easy. Just trample him to death and be done with it. It wasn’t really supposed to be a show but a slaughter. Too bad for him and Vasiliev, Joe was more than familiar with slaughter. He feinted to the side and then propelled into the next corner, the opposite side of the cage from where he’d started. Half-acrobat, half-Spider-Man, one hundred percent shifter agility. The Apex powers that be had a former Cirque du Soleil performer on staff to train their units. Leopard shifter or some shit. Helluva guy. Joe made a mental note to send him a fruit basket if he got out of this clusterfuck in one piece.
He kept the circus act going as long as he could. Ninety seconds. Two minutes. Three. Spinning and jumping from each corner. Rolling between the bear’s legs and obnoxiously saluting the crowd after he hopped up without missing a beat. Until Medvedev was so pissed off he started to shift back. Still furry, fugly, but a few feet shorter. “Coward!” he spit out from a mouth that was almost human. “Face me. Face
me like a man. Like a beast. Not this joke.”
“You asked for it, asshole.” Joe flashed a feral grin and let the change hit his bones. ’Cause now it was an actual fight.
He filtered out everything. The onlookers. The noise. Everything but the other man and his monster. Who couldn’t possibly be a real match for his own. And this time, when Yuri charged him, Joe met him in the middle of the ring, stopping his momentum with their combined weight and then hooking one leg around his ankle and taking him down. Two twisted creatures hitting the concrete floor. Muscle against muscle. Snapping teeth and hooked nails. Grizzly Adams versus the Wolfman.
Joe was out of practice. Getting beat in the prison showers was nothing like this. And there hadn’t been much hand-to-hand combat in the desert. If a quick kill with claws didn’t do it, there was always a bullet to finish the job. None of the movies they’d made him watch at Apex compared to a real-time fight. Nothing was choreographed; nothing was staged. It didn’t go on for fifteen minutes with fancy special effects. No, it was ugly and feral. A blur of limbs. Fists connecting, claws raking, teeth taking chunks out of flesh. And pain. So much pain. At some point, they were both on their feet again, locked together like boxers without gloves. Pushing and pulling, landing against the bars of the cage. The bear wouldn’t stop until he was dead. There was murder in his eyes, in the rankness of his breath, steaming out of his pores with the sweat. And Joe felt the death dealer inside him rise to meet it. Bursting out of his skin and his borrowed clothes into a full change.
It was fucking fantastic. Like he was in the right skin again. In the right mind. The one that knew how to stalk and how to evade. The wolf went for the throat, snapping and biting and tearing. Twisting this way and that to avoid the bear shifter’s flailing paws. The blood filling his mouth wasn’t his own. And the hell of it was that it tasted fucking amazing. Like the hunt, like the kill. The beast was him. He was the beast. There was no end and no beginning. Not for him. But for his prey…? Oh, yes. He let the dance last a while. With nips at the bear’s heels. A hunk of flesh torn from one haunch and then the other. Not to put on a show but to make the creature suffer. To make him pay. The end came with one final shatter of bone and rip of sinew. And then Joe was rising up on two legs with a corpse at his feet and the wild coursing through his veins.
His maw parted and he unleashed an unearthly howl, louder than Vasiliev’s arrogant roar…and the entire place exploded into chaos. Screams and gunshots, even though no one was supposed to be armed. Of course, everyone was armed. With whatever they had. Bullets. Blades. Nails. Fangs. He wrenched the cage door open like it was made of balsa wood, wading down into the thick of it. Shoving people out of his way. He was bare-assed naked, wearing nothing but Medvedev’s blood and tufts of fur from a partial shift. The nightmare of Helmand unleashed on American soil.
Joe could barely hear anything over the cacophony of the crowd and the cacophony of his rage…except for one voice. Her voice. Screaming his name from across the room while tears streaked down her face. Struggling as one of his lawyers and some woman tried to hold her back. Fuck. Fuck. She saw him. All of him. The merciless monster.
Someone grabbed his upper arm. Dark hair, light eyes, vampire. Joe snarled, and he snarled back, showing sharp, red-tipped canines. “Come on. We have to get you out.”
It was hard to push human words through his half-morphed jaw. He managed the only one that counted. “Neha.” He couldn’t go anywhere without knowing she would be okay.
“Don’t worry about her.” Irish accent. No scent but cold, like air in the dead of winter. “Gracie and Nate have got her. We have to go now.”
The “now” resonated through him with a hint of power. Maybe he was getting whammied or something, but Joe pivoted and started moving toward the back of the arena, shifting fully back to human as he pushed past a few stragglers who hadn’t made it to the front doors yet and were only interested in making it there alive.
The vampire shrugged out of his black leather jacket, urging it into Joe’s hands. “I’m a firm believer in leaving the dance with the lad I came in with. You’re lucky I make exceptions.”
Oh, he was a goddamn comedian. Joe was in no mood to laugh as he shrugged on the jacket that was too tight across his shoulders and barely covered his dick. His brain was still a little scrambled, mostly animal and instinct, and it took everything just to get back through the narrow corridor that Vasiliev’s thugs had shoved him through less than a half hour ago. Out. Gone. Away. But not safe. Never safe. He fought himself just as much as he fought anyone who blocked their path. Because he wanted to go back. The wolf wanted to go back to his mate. Tasting of warm flesh. Dripping with blood. Marking her with evidence of his kill. Traumatizing her even more than she’d already been traumatized. Fuck.
Joe took a left by the room where they’d held him, trusting the vampire to keep up. Not trusting himself at all. Not while the beast was still so strong and loud inside him. Maybe that was why he slipped up, lost focus. Why he walked into a fist and a 9mm. The blow to his temple stunned him, sent him stumbling back. He got the vague impression of blond hair and an ugly mug while his bell was ringing. And then all he saw was a bright spray of arterial blood and that ugly mug separating from the neck it was attached to.
The vampire grinned with satisfaction, wiping stained fingers against the fallen goon’s shirt and then unceremoniously taking off his shoes and pants. He stripped the clothes with such efficiency that Joe had no doubt he’d done it before. Probably with just as many live men as dead ones. “You’re a decent date,” Joe huffed out as he took a few seconds to get right and get dressed. “Thanks.”
A deep bow and an eyebrow motion that was probably illegal in half the world was the vampire’s “you’re welcome.” And then Mr. Fanged and Flirty took it one more step. “You can call me Finn, lover,” he added cheekily.
Joe had no intention of calling the guy anything except a ride to the nearest bus stop. “Let’s go,” he growled, stepping over the body in their way.
* * *
Neha wasn’t sure how they got to the rendezvous point. Or even where it was. The past hour was a blur of sound and sensation and screaming inside her head that she couldn’t silence. All she knew was that Nate hadn’t let go of her hand since he and Grace had wrestled her into the back of a waiting SUV. Like he could will away what they’d just experienced with the warm squeeze of his fingers and his reassuring whispers that “everything will be okay.” How? How could he say that? How could he be so calm? The memory of Joe and Yuri Medvedev’s fight was tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. Brown fur clashing against black fur. Limbs that weren’t quite human or quite animal. Two men stripped down to their very elemental natures, warring to the death. And Joe had won. He’d delivered that death without one hint of mercy or restraint.
He’d tried to tell her. A dozen times. A dozen different ways.
“Don’t turn me into a saint. Don’t look for something that ain’t there.”
“My backstory doesn’t change what I did, Doc. Don’t try to make it my defense.”
“There was no insanity. No PTSD. I didn’t shift. I didn’t attack out of animal instinct. I planned it. I took out those motherfuckers because I wanted to.”
And now she’d seen it for herself. What Joe became in his darkest moments, what he was so afraid to show her…and what had led to his outburst in court so many months ago. “Yeah, I fucking did it,” he’d said—wanting to “get this bullshit over with.” Wanting to just go directly to jail and do his time and pay. No questions, no answers, no exposure to what he carried inside. Except he’d exposed part of himself to her, hadn’t he? With all that crude flirtation. With that desperate need for connection that had called to something equally hungry in her.
“Neha…?” Nate nudged her gently with his shoulder. “We’re here.”
“Where’s here?” She looked up with strangely bleary eye
s, barely making out Grace in the front passenger seat next to a fair-haired driver she didn’t know. The second time in a week she’d been carted off somewhere in a strange SUV. She had no idea how long they’d been parked.
“A playground off Canarsie Pier,” Grace replied. “We took the Belt all the way from Brighton Beach. No tails. Finn knows where to find us.”
“What if he can’t? What if he…? What if Joe…?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the questions. And it made her feel ridiculous. The six victim profiles. The guard slumped over in the courthouse. The bear shifter in the cage. They’d all had names. They’d all had lives…lives she was so very well versed in rationalizing away the importance of. She’d been faced with death again and again, practically desensitized to it, but she couldn’t even voice the possibility of Joe’s out loud?
“How do I know I’m not losing myself?” she’d asked her mother what felt like a lifetime ago. And asked again, albeit not in so many words, when they spoke last night. Was this it? Was this the sign that she was already too far gone?
“I don’t deal in ‘what if,’ Neha. I deal in facts, in science, in hard numbers. And I can tell you that Finian Conlan has escaped more impossible situations than you could even dream up. I’m sure the same could be said of Joe Peluso, given his military record. Given what you and he have already survived. They’ll be here,” Grace assured her.
“And after that?” This came from Nate, leaning forward to meet her cool gaze. “What happens to us?”
“We’ll cross that borough bridge when we come to it,” the driver responded with a soft laugh.
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