by Liv Rider
“Do you think Zach and Tse were able to come up with anything on Madoc?”
Griffith shrugged. “Hard to say. We know him, but he knows us too. He knows where we’d look.”
“What was he like? Before, I mean.”
It was hard to remember Madoc the way he used to be. “He was a good hunter. It took us a while to even suspect anything. He wasn’t always like he is now. Taking a life changes you.”
“Tse said….” Noah hesitated. “Tse said that Madoc killed your partner.”
Griffith flipped the bacon over. “Tse talks too much.” Which was a blatant lie considering Tse’s usual reticence; if Tse had told Noah about Rafe, he’d had a reason. “Rafe and I were work partners. Sometimes we were other things.”
“I don’t mean to pry,” Noah said quickly. “It’s none of my business.”
The eggs and bacon were done, so Griffith scooped them out onto a plate and put it on the table, going back to check on his coffee and grab the toast that had just popped up.
“Grab some plates, would you? Second cabinet to the right of the fridge. Silverware’s in the drawer there.” He gestured.
Noah found the plates and silverware, and laid them out as Griffith brought the toast over. “You’re not prying,” Griffith said, sliding into one of the chairs as Noah resumed his seat. “You have a right to know.” Still, it took him a few minutes to sort out what he wanted to say. “We had an open relationship. Rafe didn’t want anything serious.”
“What about you?”
“I guess I was willing to take what I could get.” He sipped his coffee, then helped himself to a scoop of the rapidly cooling eggs. “Rafe had…a presence, I guess you’d say. He was a dragon too, and had a dragon’s charisma in spades. Different from Madoc, though. He never used it to manipulate others. It was just part of him.”
“That must have been hard to resist.” Noah ate slowly, pushing his eggs around on his plate. Griffith could see how much he was holding back on asking what he wanted to know.
“I don’t know that I tried very hard,” Griffith admitted.
“Tse said that Madoc claimed they’d been together. That Rafe’s death was an accident.”
“Yeah,” Griffith said flatly. “It was a lie that it was an accident—we knew enough about what Madoc had been up to by then. But he was probably telling the truth when he said it came about in…intimate circumstances.”
“I’m sorry.”
Griffith shrugged. “Rafe was who he was. I went in eyes open.”
“I doubt that made it any easier.”
Noah was a little too spot-on sometimes. “It’s in the past. But Madoc was right that I have a lot of reasons to want him dead.”
“But when you had the chance, you didn’t kill him.” Noah sounded curious, not reproachful.
Griffith shrugged. “He was unarmed and not posing an immediate threat. It would have made me just as much a murderer as he is.”
“You know, if shifter courts are anything like human ones, if they convicted Madoc of manslaughter before, he can’t be tried again for any of those previous crimes. The only thing you have on him is another attempted murder. And considering the circumstances, he’d have a decent case for claiming an unreliable witness.”
Noah had spoken calmly and objectively, as if he hadn’t been the target of that attempted murder.
Griffith had gone through all of the same arguments in his head, and hadn’t come up with any better conclusions. It was a moot point, anyway, until they found Madoc again. “All the more reason we need to do this right.”
Zach called while they were cleaning up. Griffith put him on speaker and placed the phone on the counter so Noah could hear. “Did you find anything?”
“None of his old buddies have seen him, but that’s about what we expected. He knows we’re looking for him now, so my guess is that he’s avoiding everyone he used to know.”
“What about the bar where I first got his trail?”
“Bartender said he just showed up, nursed his beer, and didn’t talk to anyone before heading out.”
“He can’t have just disappeared.”
“It’s a big city, Griff. Lots of places to hide.” Zach’s voice turned suspicious. “You’re sounding surprisingly less tense this morning. Did you—you didn’t, did you?” At Griffith’s silence, a strangled crowing sound came through the phone. “I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your hands off each other.”
“You’re on speaker,” Griffith reminded him.
“Hi, Zach,” Noah offered up.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Zach said, unperturbed. “Couldn’t resist the big bad dragon?”
“Enough, Zach,” Griffith said, but without any heat. “What’s the next move?”
“Can’t do much else but keep searching. Tse and I are making the rounds of his old haunts again. We’ll keep you apprised. You two lovebirds have fun.” Zach ended the call before Griffith could say anything more.
“Sorry,” he said to Noah.
Noah shrugged. “He’s not wrong.” He leaned back against the kitchen counter. “So what now?”
“I have some of my old files from the last time we tracked Madoc down. I want to have another look, see if we can find something in there.” Griffith didn’t have much hope of finding anything new, but it beat sitting around waiting for Zach to call with news.
His files were all in boxes in the spare bedroom. It took a few minutes of hunting, but he finally found the box with his notes on Madoc’s case. He brought it back to the living room and cleared a spot on the coffee table, carefully emptying the contents onto it.
Some manila folders, one for each suspected victim, and a jumble of random notes scrawled in his handwriting. For a moment it was six years ago, he and Zach starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together, trying to convince Rafe. Griffith still wondered if Rafe had suspected Madoc deep inside, and had gone with him anyway—for the thrill and excitement of it, two things Rafe had always found hard to resist. It had made him a fearless hunter, willing to take risks that no one else would, but it had been a part of him Griffith had never understood.
“You don’t have to look through these if you don’t want,” Griffith said, as Noah sat down on the couch next to him and eyed the pile.
“I don’t mind. Maybe fresh eyes will help.”
“Have at it, then,” Griffith said, picking up the top file.
Still, he hesitated before opening it. He hadn’t looked at these in years. He’d been grilled on them during the trial, every detail burned into his memory. And afterward, he’d read through them obsessively, wondering what he’d missed, what connection he hadn’t been able to make to convince his shifter peers that Madoc had been what he and Zach had suspected: a cold-blooded murderer.
He took a breath, bracing himself as he opened the file.
***
Noah placed the folder he’d been sifting through on the read pile on the coffee table. His neck was stiff; they’d been at this for almost two hours. He cracked his neck and stood, stretching.
Griffith glanced up briefly at him, but he was still deep in investigation mode. Noah went over to the window next to the fireplace to give his eyes a change of scenery. The trees were just starting to turn in streaks of yellow and red.
He’d learned a lot about Madoc in the last two hours. How he’d used his hunter status to prey on those weaker than he was; how carefully he’d avoided leaving any evidence to directly link him to his crimes. These files were mostly conjecture on Griffith and Zach’s part, and if Noah hadn’t witnessed firsthand Madoc’s intent, he might have also thought it all circumstantial. Madoc had been good. The one victim he’d been careless with had been Rafe. And even then, it had been ruled manslaughter.
Griffith hadn’t hesitated to hand over Rafe’s file when Noah had asked for it. Noah studied the crime scene photo of Rafe pinned to the inside flap of the file. Even in death Noah recognized him as the man with Griffith in the photo
on the mantel. There, he’d been good-looking in a careless way, his smile easy, his arm thrown familiarly over Griffith’s shoulders. Griffith had looked different too, those laugh lines around his mouth out in force.
Stupid to be jealous of a dead man. Or angry with the way Rafe had handled Griffith’s feelings so casually. In death, Rafe looked peaceful, as if he were only sleeping. Would that have been Noah, if Griffith hadn’t been there to save him?
Griffith was thumbing through one of the files, seemingly unaware of Noah’s observation of him. Noah’s chest tightened with the same rush of emotions he’d felt last night.
“We have to talk.”
Noah barely realized it was his own voice speaking until Griffith looked up. “I know.” He sounded resigned.
Noah had initiated the conversation, but now he didn’t know where to begin. Seeing his hesitation, Griffith said, “I’ll start, if you don’t mind.” He put down the file he’d been thumbing through and seemed to steel himself. “Noah, last night…it was amazing. More than amazing.” His voice had gone gruff. “But we got lucky. The bond very easily could have turned permanent.”
“And you don’t want that.”
“I….” Griffith seemed surprised by Noah’s response. “You have your whole life ahead of you. I forced the claiming mark on you; you didn’t choose it freely. Your mate may still be out there waiting for you.”
“But your dragon thinks I’m yours.”
Griffith tensed, as if fighting a powerful response. “Yes.”
Noah felt again that surge inside him, another presence almost breaking to the surface, a sense of white hot fire filling his veins with one unrelenting demand.
“I think my dragon thinks you’re mine.”
Griffith stilled. A reel of emotions flashed over his face. Noah recognized a few of them: surprise, satisfaction, joy, fear. Griffith shook his head. “No.”
It was like a gale knocking Noah down and leaving him stupid. Out of all the responses he’d expected from Griffith, no hadn’t been one of them. “What?”
“You can’t…Noah, you just found out what you are. You said yourself that you’ve never been able to sense your dragon before. How can you know what it wants now?”
“Last night, I started to sense…something. A presence, a voice—I don’t know exactly, but it was very clear about what it wanted. Who it wanted.”
Griffith shook his head. “You can’t rush into something like this based on a feeling.”
Isn’t that what love is?
Griffith’s phone buzzed. Griffith glanced down at the ID distractedly before answering it. “Do you have any news?” It must be Zach. A pause. “How far out are you?” Another pause, then Griffith ended the call and tossed the phone back on the couch. “Zach and Tse are coming over.”
Noah attempted to keep his voice casual. “Did they have any luck?”
“Didn’t sound like it.” Griffith blew out a breath. “Whatever’s going on…we’ll figure it out. But our goal right now is Madoc. Anything else is a distraction.”
Easy to infer what he meant by that. But Griffith wasn’t wrong, either.
“When this is done...when the mark has had a chance to fade, we can have this conversation again.”
What if we don’t get that chance?
Noah wasn’t going to voice that possibility, not out loud. Not when it was clear Griffith was thinking the same thing.
Chapter Eight
Zach made himself comfortable in the big leather chair across from the couch. “We need to talk.”
Griffith would be happy if he never heard those words again. By the grim look on Zach’s face, Griffith had a good idea what he was going to say. “Not if it involves you using Noah as bait.”
Zach raised his arms as if appealing to the heavens. “What other plan do you have? You were lucky to find him in the first place. Do you have any leads other than the ones we’ve already tracked down?”
“He’s right, Griffith,” Noah broke in. “It’s the surest way to draw him out.”
Griffith felt the muscles around his jaw tighten. If Zach thought he was going to put Noah in danger, risk losing him the way he had Rafe….
Fuck.
Zach’s voice softened. “You’re not the most objective judge of this, Griffith.”
He was right, and Griffith fucking hated it. Still, he wasn’t ready to give in just yet. “He may have already moved on to his next victim. Madoc’s not stupid; he knows we’re protecting Noah. Why take the risk when he can just find someone else?”
“You’re the one who said Sofia thinks Madoc won’t be able to resist going after Noah again,” Zach pointed out. “She’s not usually wrong about these things. Besides, you know as well as I do that Madoc’s an arrogant son of a bitch with a serious grudge against us. Taking Noah out from under our noses would be too sweet a revenge to pass up.”
None of that was reassuring Griffith any as to Noah’s safety. But he was out of arguments. He sat down on the end of the couch and gestured tightly for Zach to get on with it.
Tse was the one who spoke first. “We can create as much of a closed system as we can, to minimize the risk.” He turned to Noah. “Are there any places you visit regularly? Buildings or facilities on campus, that aren’t typically crowded?”
“I go running most days in Centennial Park,” Noah offered. “It’s only a block from my apartment.”
“A park wouldn’t be my first choice, but we could make it work,” Tse said. “What’s the traffic like on the running path?”
“It depends on the time of day. After lunch and before people get home from work, it’s usually deserted.”
“Okay. Zach and I can take watch at different checkpoints in the park, and Griffith can be on call.”
If Tse thought Griffith was going to wait helplessly at home while Noah was making himself deliberately vulnerable, he was crazy. “If we’re doing this, then I’m out there too.”
Zach opened his mouth—probably to argue with him—but whatever he saw in Griffith’s face made him change his mind. “Okay. But just as backup.”
“Fine,” Griffith said curtly.
Noah straightened from where he’d been leaning against the arm of the couch. “I’ll need to get my running shoes from my apartment.”
“I’ll drop you off,” Griffith said. “Give you a chance to get some fresh clothes.”
Noah said, “I’ll grab my bag.”
Griffith turned to Zach after Noah had disappeared to Griffith’s room. “You know what a risk you’re asking him to take?”
“Nothing he isn’t willing to do. C’mon, Griffith, he’s a fully grown consenting adult, who knows firsthand what’s at stake here.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t be just as dead if our plan doesn’t work.”
“Is that what’s really worrying you? Or is it that he’s going to leave you the way Rafe left you?”
“Of course I’m worried that he’s going to die.” Griffith forced the words out through a too-tight throat.
“Look, Griffith, I liked Rafe. Everyone did. But I didn’t much like the way he was with you. Noah’s not going to die, and he’s not going to leave you.”
“Whether he leaves or not is his own choice. He has his own life.”
“And you think he can’t have that life with you?” Zach looked skeptical. “I’ve known a lot of shifter couples, and they all have that same sappy look you two have. Besides, your dragon’s already claimed him. Did it ever do that with Rafe?”
“The mark isn’t permanent yet. Once it fades, Noah will be able to choose freely.”
Zach shook his head. “You’re an idiot, Griffith.”
Griffith was saved from responding by Noah returning with his duffel bag over his shoulder. “So,” he said uncertainly, looking back and forth between them. “Are we doing this?”
Zach shrugged, his eyes still on Griffith. “Your call.”
Griffith was never going to forgive himself if this ended ba
dly. “Yes,” he said grimly.
***
Centennial Park was nearly deserted at this time in the afternoon, like Noah had said. Griffith had dropped Noah off at his apartment twenty minutes ago. If Madoc was watching, he would have seen Noah heading to the park on foot, ostensibly alone and vulnerable.
Griffith had insisted on parking the Range Rover on the street next to the park while Zach and Tse set up at their vantage points. He could hear their low voices in the ear piece Tse had given him. On his phone screen Noah’s heartbeat flashed reassuringly in steady beats, transmitted from the monitoring bracelet Noah wore. Tse had given Noah a panic button too, which would sound out over Griffith’s phone if Noah triggered it.
Despite all the precautions, his dragon was just as pissed off by this plan as he was.
“You there, Griff?” Tse’s voice broke through.
“Here,” Griffith said shortly. “You have eyes on him?”
“Clear view of the running path, up to the bench where we agreed he would stop. He’s just coming up on it now.”
“I can see the rest of the park from here,” Zach said. “If Madoc gets anywhere near it, we’ll know.”
It would still take precious seconds to get to Noah if that happened. Madoc had already proven how quickly he could work—it was possible they could get there too late.
He suppressed the surge of panic and fear he felt at the thought.
Already he was compromised, and not because of his past history with Madoc. This was entirely in the present. The person Griffith would give his life to protect was putting himself in danger, and all Griffith could do was sit by and watch it happen.
“He’s slowing now, almost at the bench.” A pause. “He’s at the bench. He’s stretching.”
Noah was following the plan to a T. By the pulse on Griffith’s phone, his heartbeat was beginning to slow from its runner’s pace. Griffith tried to picture him out there, alone and vulnerable, and clamped down on the picture. No sense making himself more crazy about this.