Chasing a Wolf: Moonbound Series, Book Four

by Camryn Rhys

  “Thank you.” He glanced down at his mate. The gunshot had grazed her arm and healed just enough that they could pass it off as having been the same mad dog. As long as no one thought too long and hard about why a dog that practically tore out Maggie’s throat and tried to bite off Tomás’ arm only took a small nip at Lani before running away. So far, no one seemed suspicious.

  “This dog, who attacked you, it seems like a dangerous animal. I hope someone catches it, or it disappears into the mountains.”

  “I’m sure the police will be on the lookout.” Tomás turned up the corners of his mouth and Lani stirred beside him. Her insides were still empty and her eyes hollow.

  Adrian’s suit pants that Tomás had stolen from his closet itched like wool, and the shirt was too big in the chest. It felt like a betrayal to be wearing this man’s clothing, but there’d been no choice. His had been soaked in blood. So had Lani’s.

  It was the first time he’d seen her in a real dress. Adrian’s closets had been full of strange clothing. The blue silk dress was far too big for her, but it looked bohemian enough, she could pass it off as her own. It brought out the golden flecks in her eyes. Those sad eyes.

  “My friend?” Tomás called after the nurse just as she left his curtained-off room. “The woman who came in with us. Can I see her now?”

  “The doctor is just finishing with her.” The nurse drew heavy eyebrows together. “She was the worst of the three of you. But she does appear to be recovering. We gave her a room and she will need to rest tonight.”

  “Can we see her before she sleeps?” Tomás shifted his legs off the side of the hospital bed and Lani plopped down onto the space he’d vacated. “I just want to make sure she’s okay, with my own eyes.”

  “You can. She has a visitor right now, but you can go in, as long as she remains stable.” The nurse held up a finger and wagged it at him. “Don’t you go upsetting her, now. She’s been through quite a trauma.”

  “We all have.” Tomás swallowed and walked around the bed, taking Lani’s hands and pulling her to her feet.

  She still didn’t speak, and he still didn’t push.

  “She’s just this way.” The nurse led them through the bustling row of curtains, and the noise level ratcheted up with the influx of more people. Their little corner had been quiet enough, minus the occasional rustle of emergency room intake, but as they got closer to the nerve center, Lani’s attention began to perk up.

  He held her closer, feeling for any signs of emotion or pain, but there was still nothing. Shock, Tomás was certain. But even when she’d been getting stitched up by the nurses, she wasn’t feeling any pain.

  A little numbness could be a good thing. Too much, and he was afraid she might never recover. But he’d never lost his mother, so he couldn’t say what he would’ve done in her place.

  The nurse deposited them in a small, sparse room, where Maggie lay almost flat on the hospital bed.

  Alex sat at her side, with both Maggie’s and Tomás’ packs at his feet. He waited for the nurse to give instructions and vacate, and then he bounded up to close the door behind Tomás and Lani. “It’s done.” He returned to his seat and clasped his hands over his mouth.

  “Where are they?” Tomás asked.

  “In the rental car.” He held up the ring of keys they’d taken from Adrian at the penthouse. “I tried to get back up to the penthouse after we finally let the elevator door close, but you need a keycard and I couldn’t get Maggie’s thing to work again. I don’t know what else these open, but it’s not the elevator.”

  “So what are we going to do about the dead guards?”

  Alex shrugged. “Hope they don’t have us on camera and let the police sort it out.” He barked out a laugh. “Maybe they’ll put Adrian in jail.”

  Maggie groaned and shook her head. “You obviously haven’t spent much time in Mexico. Money greases the wheels around here.”

  “Hey, you should rest.” He reached for her and rested his hand on the edge of the bed, his eyes going dark. “You’ve done enough.”

  “But none of you can do what I can do.” Her laugh sounded chunky, like a cold engine trying to turn over. “Why don’t you get me my tablet?”

  Alex raised his eyebrows and Tomás nodded. The tablet was reluctantly handed over, and her fingers went to work.

  “How’s the princess?” Alex’s voice was dark and low. None of them had spoken to or about Lani since they got in that elevator.

  While Alex had cleaned up Maggie and gotten her into a dress, Tomás had done the same for Lani, and with the new clothes and new mission, it’d almost seemed possible to leave the grisly scene behind them.

  Except for the fact that they’d had to ride that elevator with the dead bodies of the two people Lani had been the closest to in all the world.

  No one had wanted to touch the subject, and Tomás didn’t blame them.

  “I don’t know, honestly.” Tomás took the chair beside Alex and pulled Lani into his lap. “She isn’t feeling anything. I mean, nothing.”

  Alex nodded, pulling his lips together in a tight line. He blew out a breath. “Do you think she’ll make the trip back up the mountain?”

  “She’ll be fine.” Tomás repeated the mantra he’d been saying to himself for hours.

  She will be fine.

  “She will.” Maggie croaked from the bed. “She’s in shock, but she’ll be fine.”

  But they didn’t know Lani. They hadn’t seen the way she’d blocked off her emotions, kept from feeling. They didn’t know how she’d been imprisoned with her mother for years and kept from men and the world.

  She was resilient enough to survive thirty years of emotional battles, but the bloody end of that battle…would it make her retreat? Or emerge?

  “I think if we can make the travois at the edge of the mountain, Alex and I can pull it, and Lani can walk beside us.”

  “What about me?” Maggie asked, looking over the edge of her tablet.

  “You’re staying in the hospital.” Alex’s voice was firm. “You almost died, Mag. I’m not going to take you up a mountain.”

  “I’m going with you.” She matched the assurance in his tone. “I’ve jumped off bridges, Alex. I’m not afraid of a little pain.”

  The Cuban wolf shook his head. “Someone has to wait for the rest of the team. We’ll be out of communication when we’re up by the volcano.”

  The room was silent for a long moment and Tomás felt a tiny movement in Lani’s emotion.

  She raised her hand and made the sign her people used to mark their devotion to the god who lived in the volcano. When her wrist popped, she looked up at it, surprised, almost as if she’d been unaware that she made the gesture at all.

  Emotion caught in his throat and he tried to tamp it down, but he couldn’t. He was full of so much relief that they had escaped with her in tact, he didn’t care how long it took for her to feel again. He was just grateful she was alive and with him.

  Tomás took her hand out of the air and kissed it.

  She snuggled into his chest and the faintest glow of warmth lit inside her. It wasn’t nameable, and it wasn’t big, but it was there.

  “I don’t want to be the one who waits.” Maggie’s voice was improving every time she used it, and Tomás smiled at her.

  “Then be the one who works.” He kissed Lani’s hand again and she threaded her fingers through his, resting on his shoulder.

  Maggie’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “You two are aligned against me.”

  Alex dug around in Maggie’s pack and pulled out something black and square. Her phone? It was giant, almost as big as her tablet. The screen read a number from North Carolina, where it was about dawn-o’clock.

  “Is this Rain?” Alex handed the phone across the bed.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow and answered the phone. Her features relaxed. “He’s calling from a secure line.”

  She paused, listening for a long moment, then answered, “I’ll tell th
em. We’ll check in when the rest of the team is here.”

  “I’d called him yesterday when I figured out there was a part of the hotel’s security system that had bypassed the others.” She turned her tablet so they could see a grid of camera views that rotated back and forth. “See what’s missing on this grid?”

  Both Alex and Tomás watched the cameras for a long moment as they cycled through the different views of the hotel. Then, each one went back to its first position. Alex scoffed.

  “The Penthouse.”

  Maggie nodded and turned the tablet back to herself. “The Penthouse, the hallway, the secret entrance.” She moved her fingers around. “My guess is, there’s a phantom system hidden somewhere behind this one, where he has a private security person who monitors them.”

  “That’s why only three guards came after him. And no police.”

  “And no police,” Alex finished with him.

  Maggie let her giant phone drop onto the bed and she pressed a button on the side of the plastic that levered her up into a semi-sitting position.

  Alex shifted in his chair as she moved, and Tomás saw the moment he wanted to order her around, but held back. It was like he was growing as a person.

  Or learning. Maggie was a badass. Forget the nearly-fatal neck wound, it was time to get back to work.

  “Are you gonna tell him about…Adrian? And…the island?” Alex’s features were so strained, Tomás steeled himself for an outburst, but it never came. The Cuban wolf closed his eyes. “We have to tell him.”

  “We have to tell the alpha council, too,” Tomás said.

  “First things, first.” Maggie typed something into her tablet. “Rain has a guy on base who…let’s just say, he has the government behind him.”

  She turned the tablet again. “He gave us access to a mainframe that even the hotel system doesn’t know existed. Just like I thought.”

  The screen had five boxes, lit in red. One was the exterior of the main Penthouse elevator, in the hallway, showing the busted door. The foot of one of the dead guards was still visible in the gray corner of that screen.

  The second was the exterior of the private elevator. All was dark, but Tomás could see swaths of black on the edges of one side of the door, where Lani’s mother had fallen out, and where Alex had held the door open with one bloody hand.

  The other three, he didn’t recognize, but they weren’t from the interior of the Penthouse, which he’d seen extensively.

  “No shots inside the place,” Alex whispered. “That’s telling.”

  “This man is not only high-tech, and evil, but he’s hiding something from everyone.” Maggie swiped at the screen. “They think there are more feeds, but they’re only able to remote access these five.”

  “The island?” Tomás asked with a heavy sigh. “This means someone’s going to have to go to the island.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment.

  Maggie kept swiping at things on her tablet screen, but Alex and Tomás just sat, flexing their hands, Tomás with his arm around Lani, and let that sink in.

  “For now,” Alex finally said, “We need to focus on the mission. We have to tell Rain, and the council, and we need to figure out a way to get to that island.”

  “And you have to go up the mountain,” Maggie said, glancing at Lani. “You have to take her home.”

  A tight fear clutched at Tomás’ throat. This wasn’t her emotion, it was his. What would happen if they took her back to her home?

  Would she disappear, catatonic, into her people, never to return? Would she wake her emotions again?

  He wanted to whisk her away to Las Vegas and take her away from her father and…for the first time, he understood why Marco’s and Elise’s mothers had abandoned everything to get as far away from Adrian as possible. Tomás wanted the same thing for Lani—freedom from this madman.

  But did he want it enough that he’d leave her on the mountain? Or that he’d stay there with her, and never see his family again?

  Tomás licked his lips and took a long breath through his nose. “You’re right. We have to do that, and we need to get a jump on it tonight, while it’s still dark. We have work to do yet, and we need to get into the woods before the sun rises.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The cool night air prickled Lani’s skin. She wasn’t cold though. Or warm. Or anything. Just numb.

  Since seeing her mother on the floor of the elevator, she hadn’t been able to feel anything. The walls she’d built years ago to keep emotions out had sprung up again overnight and they were tamped down so tightly that not even her mate could get through.

  It was too much.

  Every time she peeked over those walls the pain threatened to swallow her whole. So she’d plodded forward, staying quiet. Staying detached from anything that could trigger a memory from the last two days.

  The hike up the mountain had been long and silent, but the climb had been cathartic. She missed the scent of the trees and the sounds of the birds. Taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and let her gaze disappear into the snapping flames of the funeral pyres.

  Zolin and her mother were being laid to rest in a ceremony of honor that would bind their ashes with the mountain. The volcano would keep them safe and they would have peace.

  Their medicine man finished his prayer to the gods and then her father stepped forward to say his goodbyes. To the warrior he revered as a son. And to the broken women he’d cared and loved as his wife, even though Lani’s mother had never loved him.

  She left Tomás’ side and joined her father at the edge of the ceremony circle.

  He embraced her and kissed her forehead.

  “I can’t feel anything,” Lani whispered.

  “You have the fire of the mountain burning in your heart, little wolf. I can still feel you. Feel your magick. Take that strength and find your path with your mate. When you find that new home, be sure to bond to your new alpha so he can take care of you the way you deserve.”

  “This is home. You are my only family. I can’t imagine leaving.”

  “You will always be my daughter, Citlani, even if you are a thousand mountains away. You are not my blood, but I have loved you just the same. Your mother and Zolin would both want your safety above everything. It is not safe for you here any longer.” The chief took her hand and they walked around the circle to stand in front of Tomás. “It is up to you to protect her now, Tomás Rivera. You must take her far from this place.”

  Lani translated for her mate.

  He hesitated for a moment and then bowed his head. “I will.”

  Her father smiled down at her mate. Tomás’ actions and answer had pleased him. The chief reached for Tomás’ hand and placed her palm against her mate’s.

  She intertwined her fingers and breathed easier as Tomás’ magick ebbed and flowed around her like a gentle tide. Existence without him was impossible. Her mate was as integral to her life now as air.

  The walls around her mind cracked ever so slightly and she reached for the comfort he’d been offering her.

  As the ceremony ended, an old woman from the village approached and motioned for them to follow. “This is for you to rest. Your father says you need to rest before traveling in the morning.”

  Citlani translated the words for Tomás, and he did his best to thank her.

  “What about Alex?” he asked before she disappeared into the darkness.

  The old woman turned and looked to Lani.

  “Our friend?” Lani asked.

  “He is being taken care of. Rest.”

  “Thank you.” Lani turned to Tomás. “He is sleeping elsewhere. Don’t worry.”

  Sleep. Had she slept at all since…

  She couldn’t remember. The images in her mind were either foggy or so frighteningly vivid forgot she was dreaming and started to scream. It gave new insight to the nightmares her mother had suffered from for so long. Over the years, she’d never understood why her mother hadn
’t healed.

  After meeting Adrian and getting a taste of what he was capable of, she knew now why her mother had never been able to heal. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her mother had run, in an attempt to lure Adrian away and Citlani had insisted in walking right into the fray.

  If it hadn’t been for the huge sacrifices of Zolin, and Tomás, and his friends, she’d be exactly where her mother had feared.

  Dead or dying at the hands of her father.

  A sliver of fear threaded through her body. He’d come so close to killing them all. It was her fault. Most of it.

  They wouldn’t have ever tried to break into his apartment if it hadn’t been for her pressing about her mother.

  Zolin wouldn’t be dead. Maybe her mother would still be alive. Although, from what she’d seen in the hotel room, being a prisoner to that man was a fate worse than death.

  Tomás sat down on the mat in the corner of the tent and pulled her down beside him.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks and sobs wracked her body, sending little shudders up and down her spine. She wanted to wail and scream and cry. All the emotions she’d been pushing away and hiding from came creeping out of the corners.

  “Just let me in.” He nuzzled the top of her head and pulled her into a tight embrace.

  “I’m drowning,” she sobbed. “My mother. Zolin. My father said goodbye and told me I have to leave the village. Everything I’ve ever known is here.”

  “We’re going to figure it, out one day at a time. And I’m going to be right by your side the whole way. I love you so much.”

  She lowered the walls around her mind, and a rush of sympathy and comfort from Tomás wrapped itself around her shoulders like a warm fur.

  Their magick hummed together, swirling and spinning in the air between them. He is with me. Completely. Open. Warm and offering her anything she needed without demanding payment in return.

  He didn’t use affection as a reward; it was hers because he wanted her to have it. Tomás had given it to her the second Zolin had bonded them together.

  She’d just been too afraid to see it…feel it. And she hadn’t known how to return his affection…or love.