Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  That didn’t solve their problems. Not remotely. It wouldn’t erase the crimes Joe had committed or the ones Neha had abetted. It didn’t make him any less of an ill-tempered chauvinistic asshat or her any less of an impulsive fool. But it sure as hell made it all worth it to hear the words spoken, to say them out loud. To mean them. She loved him. Had been in love with him for weeks now. She’d put her career on the line, put her life on the line, because of that mind-blowing, earth-shaking fact. Unprofessional? Sure. Lust-addled? Definitely. But all of it, everything, out of love.

  Joe Peluso wasn’t some movie-star handsome hunk. He had a filthy mouth and no boundaries. He clearly had issues with authority and impulse control. They’d have to work on the whole vigilante thing. As careers went, it was hardly a stable one. But she adored this man—flaws and all. His humor, his strength, his rage, and his vulnerability. The beast inside him, and the human, too.

  Chapter 35

  Danny wasted no time stripping off his shirt and offering it to Yulia, who was shivering from what had to be the worst combination of shock, exhaustion, tranquilizers, and grief. Shifting back from her bear form had nearly sent her into a collapse…sinking into his arms like a deadweight. He hadn’t minded. There was nothing he’d rather be doing than holding Yulia Vasilieva close. But now was neither the time nor the place for an extended version of that impulse. Once she’d covered up to her satisfaction, they slowly made their way to the rest of Third Shift and company. Leaning on each other, shoring each other up. Stopping every few feet to trade kisses that were too weary to be anything but chaste.

  She’d betrayed her family, her clan tonight. For him and his. There was no going back from that. Wherever they went now…it was forward. Together.

  He could feel the heat of Jack’s glare from across the warehouse. Even though the man was rifling through a small backpack he’d brought and tossing clothes in Elijah’s general direction, there was no doubt in Danny’s mind that he was mad about how things had gone down. Once Elijah shifted—far less exhausted than Yulia by the effort—and tugged on a loose pair of track pants, his own baleful glare joined the “You’re in trouble” party. Only he widened the searchlight beam to include nearly everyone.

  “We done here?” he demanded, his rich and riveting voice echoing to the rafters. “Or does anyone else have any romantic declarations to make? More Russian vors to antagonize? I just want to get a sense of where we are.”

  “Hey.” Joe Peluso looked just as dangerously angry. He stepped forward, still keeping an arm around Ms. Ahluwalia. “Back off, buddy. Unless you want to get a sense of my fist in your face. Nobody asked you and JC Penney over here to ruin your beauty sleep by showing up, okay?”

  JC Penney. Danny had to stifle a burst of totally appropriate laughter. While Jackson did look like a catalog model, he’d probably never worn clothes off the rack in his entire life. His boss didn’t bother making that point, though. “Technically you did ask me,” he pointed out instead. “When you made that call to Third Shift. And where do you think you got that number? Where do you think the Apex Initiative came from? We were the first wave, Peluso. Phase One. Before they even had a name for the project. And we don’t abandon our own.”

  Way to declassify. Danny’s eyebrows skyrocketed into his hairline as he remembered everything Jack and Elijah had revealed back at the office, belying the patchy files they had on Peluso and his past. Heavily redacted for the likes of the Third Shift desk jockeys like himself and unceremoniously unredacted for literal regular Joes in a Brooklyn warehouse. Jack and Elijah really were aggravated about this whole situation. Danny cleared his throat, drawing their attention back over to where he stood. “So, what does this mean for all of us? What happens next?” Will Yulia be safe? That was his real question. The question that had sent him out into the night and gotten him held hostage when he was supposed to be following orders and maintaining a contact point at HQ.

  He expected to be yelled at. To be met with the same attitude they’d dished back to Joe Peluso. But almost the near-opposite happened. Elijah brought over the small bag of clothes and gently offered it to Yulia. “There’s another pair of sweatpants in there,” he told her softly. “No such thing as ‘too prepared’ when shape-shifting’s involved, yeah?” And then he turned to Danny. “I’m glad you’re all right, mate. And I hate that Mack wasn’t so lucky.”

  Elijah glanced across the warehouse to where Mack’s body still lay. Along with so many others. Naked grief etched his features for a few seconds before he sighed heavily, scrubbing at his face with his knuckles. “But the rest? It’s going to be a total shitshow,” he assured. “There’ll be a power vacuum in Little Odessa without Vasiliev’s organization keeping things running. And the people he answers to… Well, the bright side is we hope this’ll shake them up enough for us to nail them. I’ll be assessing that operation in person soon enough.”

  Elijah had been prepping for his mission for weeks now. Studying up on Emeric Aston’s girlfriend and other potential points of contact. This thing with Vasiliev and Peluso had simultaneously thrown a wrench into that mission and made it more of a priority. Danny didn’t envy him the task ahead. And the cleanup of this mess would be no walk in the park either. Scrubbing the warehouse, making arrangements for Mack, sorting out how much the NYPD would need to know about what actually happened…

  The NYPD. Danny swallowed what tasted like bile in the back of his throat. Somewhere in the last few days, the police department had become a them instead of an us. He hadn’t given a single thought to his precinct. To the calls he hadn’t bothered to answer and the voicemails he’d deleted unheard. He didn’t belong there anymore. Maybe he never had to begin with. The real justice work was being done bigger and better everywhere else. “City law enforcement’s going to hate this,” he said. Not just about the cleanup, but about the decision that was just starting to take root in his brain. “Be prepared for the local precincts to give you a ton of grief.”

  “We know. None of this is going to be a party.” Jackson acknowledged him with a nod before looking around at the 3S operatives and civilians alike. “A cleaning crew is already en route for this location. Danny, you and Ms. Vasilieva should probably get checked out at HQ. Bunk down there, too, if you have to. Mr. Feinberg…as far as we’re concerned, you were never here.”

  “I’m okay with developing a case of selective amnesia, but there are some things I won’t be forgetting.” The pale-haired lawyer was crouched by Finn, who still wasn’t looking so great. The shirt pressed to his stomach was soaking through with blood, even though he’d fed from Grace to try to replace it. “Like how this is going to impact Joe’s case. And Neha.”

  “I’m pretty interested in that, too,” Neha said. By all rights, she should have been as exhausted as Yulia. After days in hiding, the infiltration of Kamchatka, and this supernatural showdown. But she stood tall in the circle of Peluso’s arms. Her eyes were clear and the line of her mouth was sharp. “There are active APBs out for Joe right now. I have no idea what my family thinks of where I’ve been, but I do know that the New York State Bar Association isn’t going to be thrilled when they are made aware of these circumstances.”

  “No one’s going to be thrilled,” Elijah responded drily. “Except maybe the Daily News and the Post. Hope we at least get some creative headlines out of this. But we’ll get you two back to Safe House 13 while we enact the cover story and get all our ducks in a row.”

  Their ducks, their werebears, you name it. So much to do and so little time to do it all in. Somehow, Danny wasn’t overwhelmed at the prospect. He looked at the brave, beautiful woman next to him…swimming in his shirt and a huge pair of drawstring sweatpants that were cinched as tightly as possible at the waist. They probably had a matching list of aches and pains. They would be able to compare bruises and scratches and broken teeth when they were in the med bay at HQ. And Yulia would cry and mourn at some point. And then cry and
mourn some more. Because evil crime kingpin or no, Aleksei Vasiliev had still been her older brother. But Danny would be right beside her, holding her hand, giving her a shoulder, giving her someone to hit—and probably knock across the room.

  He lifted her fingers to his cracked lips, brushing a kiss across her split knuckles. “Don’t tell Elijah,” he whispered, “but I have a romantic declaration to make.”

  “Later,” Yulia said just as quietly, canting her body in to his. “First, you must take me on that date to the Met.”

  “The opera and the museum,” Danny promised. “Because I need culture…but I also need you.”

  * * *

  It felt like hours before they got out of that godforsaken warehouse in Midwood. Before they were alone. Joe’s head was a mess. Full of all kinds of shit. What-ifs. What-will-bes. What-the-fucks. But the only thing knocking around his brain that mattered was what Neha had said to him before those spy boys started lecturing. “I love you willingly.” And what he’d said to her. “I am so damn in love with you.” He heard the words over the sound of the fancy rainfall shower pounding his skin and pounding the tiles. Grace and the others had called it a locker room, but this was a fucking cabana or some country-club shit. Trust-fund kids got their horse-riding lessons in this fancy place. Now a blue-collar bruiser from Queens was taking advantage of the same perks. When he’d washed up before, it was quick, efficient. This time…this time, he sloughed off more than blood and dirt. He soaped away the courthouse. The cage. Vasiliev. All of it. He let everything but Neha’s voice circle the drain. Her voice…and then the feel of her arms slipping around him as she joined him under the spray.

  “Why waste water?” she murmured. “Besides, it was lonely in the other one.”

  Not lonelier than prison showers. Than the cell he’d spent months in. The cell he might be going back to. The cell he should go back to. Jesus. Fuck. Joe didn’t know where the tremors come from, but all of a sudden, he couldn’t stop shivering. The water was steaming hot, but he barely felt it. And the memory of Neha’s I love you’s and her soft hands on his back didn’t make a dent.

  “Hey. Hey, it’s alright. I’m here.” Somewhere over the buzzing in his ears, he heard her comforting him. Whispering things in both English and Punjabi. And then she was shampooing his hair with the expensive-smelling stuff from the wall dispenser. Running her fingers along his scalp. Arching up on her toes, her front to his back, so she could reach.

  Maybe it was what she said. Maybe it was the press of their bodies. Maybe it was just being cared for, because that had been such a foreign concept to him these past couple years, but he eventually stopped shaking. Braced against the tiles, bowing under the spray and under Neha’s tender ministrations. She loved him willingly. And he loved her more than he’d ever thought he was capable of. If what was building between them only lasted as long as the next few hours, it was still more than he ever thought he’d have. So, he turned. And he tended to her the same way she did him. Burying his hands in the wet, thick ropes of her hair. Working a lather through the strands. After she rinsed out the shampoo, he went to work on the rest of her…soaping her feet and her legs and up her thighs.

  “We’re not in a rush now.” She laughed softly, parting her legs in invitation. “You can take all the time you want. Do Aviation High proud.”

  He did them proud alright. You better fucking believe it. Sinking to his banged-up knees—healing just fast enough for him to do this properly—and pulling her onto his face like it was her custom-built seat. It had only been a day or two since they’d last had sex, but it was like tasting her new. The salt of her on his tongue. The warmth of her against his lips. It was so damn good. So damn perfect. The condemned’s first meal and his last meal. He licked and took and sucked until she trembled with one orgasm and then another, crying out his name and scratching the back of his neck.

  The water was cold by the time they got out. He wasn’t footing the bills at this place, so he didn’t spare it a thought beyond grabbing towels so Neha didn’t shiver like he had. They dried off faster than they got wet. Dressing in fresh sets of spy clothes from a special locker hidden behind some modern art and then heading to the tack house and the safe room. “We’ve keyed in your print information, so your fingers should activate the biometric scanners on all the secure-access doors,” Tate had told them before dropping them off. Which was creepy as hell. When Joe said this out loud during the short walk back, Neha slipped her hand into his. “I have a better use for your fingers,” she assured him.

  It was freaking weird and wonderful at the same time. Doing something as coupley as holding a woman’s hand. He’d always thought the phantom bloodstains on his palms meant it wasn’t for him. Guys like him didn’t get walks in the park and love songs and happy endings, right?

  Turned out he was wrong. Guys like him got to toe off their shoes and climb onto a fold-out couch and hold beautiful women in their arms. They got to breathe in her hair and her skin, and laugh when she admitted horses terrified her. “Seriously? I mean, yeah, they’re kinda fucking scary…but you just faced down a bunch of bear shifters and some kind of hawk-shifter guy like you’ve been doing this supe thing your whole life, and it’s horses that terrify you?”

  Neha punched the thin pillows, huffing. “I had goat trauma during a visit to Punjab as a kid, okay? Goats, horses, cows. Things with hooves. It’s all related.”

  Goat trauma. Joe cracked up. It felt real good to lose it, too. Like the world might actually be okay for a minute. “I promise to protect you from any goat shifters we meet,” he said between wheezing chuckles.

  “Oh my god. Are there really goat shifters?” She pulled back to gawk at him, her pretty face scrunched up with horror. “Don’t tell me they actually exist? Like satyrs? Or centaurs?”

  “Not that I know of…but I wouldn’t rule it out, Doc.” He’d learned a couple of valuable lessons since he’d been recruited into the Apex Initiative. Most of them in the past few weeks with Neha. But there was one that predated her: There was more bizarre, unexplained, and unexplainable shit on this planet than the average human could even dream up. He was living proof.

  He was living. That, in and of itself, was unbelievably bizarre. He’d cheated death a thousand times in twenty years…hell, a thousand times in the past week. And all so he could be with this incredible woman. Those first couple days with her…he thought it was biological, chemical. Something his wolf wanted, something the scientists programmed into him. Imprinting. But it wasn’t just the wolf now. It was the man, too. It was all of him. Together as one. Wanting her, loving her for exactly who she was. “Thank you,” he told Neha, bringing her closer so she was tucked against his chest.

  “For what?” He felt her curious frown on his neck. Her mouth tickled. It should’ve distracted him, but instead it just crystallized his answer.

  “For seeing something in me.” ’Cause god only knew most people didn’t see beyond the surface. Beyond the battered mug and the scarred fists. “For hanging in there. For believing in me when I didn’t give you a reason to.”

  “Unbridled lust isn’t a reason?” she wondered, pressing a saucy, smacking kiss to his pulse.

  Christ, he loved her so much. “‘Unbridled,’ huh? And now we’re back to horses…”

  “Oof! No!” Neha shuddered theatrically before settling in his arms. She stroked her palm over his heart in slow circles. Such a simple thing and it felt so good. So right. “I don’t expect this to be easy. Just navigating your case in the wake of going AWOL is going to be a nightmare. To say nothing about how we’re going to move forward together. And you should probably talk to a professional about your…anger management issues.”

  Joe couldn’t help but laugh again. Not because the idea of talking to a therapist was so off base, but because she put the reason so damn delicately. “You can say it, you know. Because you’re not wrong. I went off on a rampage. I kill
ed people. And if you were in danger, I can’t say I wouldn’t want to repeat that. Hell yeah, my first impulse would be to play judge, jury, and executioner.” He’d taken lives again tonight. Pushed to it, sure. But he’d done it knowing full well that killing was still something he was good at. He no longer wanted it to be the only thing he was good at. “I need to be the man you see, Neha. That guy. The one who makes better choices—whose first impulse will be to think of what you’d do.”

  “Hmm. What I’d do?” Neha rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling in the dark…but she reached for his hand, squeezing it tight. Like she didn’t want to let him go even a little bit. “I try to help people. Sometimes I run off with questionable men who turn out to be perfect for me.”

  “I’d like to do that—help people,” he admitted. Because, fuck knew, he had so much making up to do. So much penance to outweigh his sins. But… “I’m hoping the second thing’s a one-time deal and only a you thing. ’Cause I don’t know if I wanna run off with Finn.”

  His tough lawyer lady actually giggled. “I think there’s a waiting list to run off with Finn. Or run away from him. Probably both.”

  Probably both. The vampire had taken a hit for her at that warehouse. Saved Joe’s skin, too, back at the club. He was never going to be able to repay that. He was still going to give it a shot. Thanking everyone at Third Shift—even those dicksmacks who ran it—for pulling his ass out of the fire. And for giving him one more chance with Neha Ahluwalia.