Nik shrugged at Kell’s questioning look. They’d often agreed that women — even bird-women — were incomprehensible. “Anyway, Felderman checked himself out of Methodist against doctor’s orders late this afternoon. Archer followed him to one of those generic suites hotels off the Beltway, up near the airport.”
Kell pondered that information. “Was anyone with him?”
“He was alone, used a fake name, and paid cash for the room.”
“Weird.” Kell retrieved his wallet from the duffel and stuck it in his pocket. If he’d done that after stopping at the ATM, this afternoon might have gone differently. Or maybe not. “Why would the governor leave the hospital against doctor’s orders and hide out in a hotel room outside the city center?”
“I have a bigger question for you to think about.” Robin handed Mori’s T-shirt to Nik. “A big one.”
Nik touched the fabric tentatively at first, then grasped it with both hands and closed his eyes. Finally, he shook his head. “I get nothing from it, not a single image. What’s the bigger question?”
Robin’s gaze met Kell’s, and she’d never looked more troubled. All traces of laughter had disappeared. “Did you have any idea your girl Mori was a shifter?”
CHAPTER 18
The pain woke her, seeping into her consciousness with increasing insistence until she remembered. The fire. Michael’s face twisted in hatred. The brand. The smell of burning flesh. Beginning to shift as blackness fell across her vision like a curtain.
Mori opened heavy eyelids and took in her surroundings — at least the ones visible without moving from her position curled on her side atop a huge bed that seemed to take up most of the room. She was naked and shivering with cold except for the hot, burning pain throbbing in the center of her back. She’d wear that “B” the rest of her life; even a shifter couldn’t heal a burn without scarring.
Nothing about the room was familiar. Plain white walls. A scuffed-up oak dresser with no mirror but a small TV sitting on top. A ladder-back chair. The twin-size bed. A single floor lamp that cast an elongated shadow across the wooden floor. She angled her head to look up without jostling her back and saw the sloped ceiling. An attic, then.
Moving cautiously to keep her back as immobile as possible, Mori used her left arm to lever herself into a seated position so she could check out the rest of the space. The room was small, maybe ten-by-ten, with a dormer window through which she could see Michael’s gardens, smothered in darkness now except for the decorative lights in the fountain. Through an open doorway, she spotted a toilet and a small dressing table.
Still nighttime, but how long had she been unconscious? Not long enough to have healed much, judging by the pain.
She needed clothes. A shirt would be excruciating against her back, but being naked in Michael Benedict’s attic was high on her list of vulnerability-inducing activities. And she was tired of feeling vulnerable. She’d come here prepared to give Michael what he wanted. In order to keep everyone safe, she’d been willing to live a half-life, to do the duty that had been drilled into her since birth.
He’d thrown it back in her face, and had gone too far in doing so.
Mori wasn’t accustomed to rage, had spent her life learning to avoid it. So it took her a few moments to identify the chest-tightening sensation, like her heart and lungs had grown so massive they threatened to explode from the confines of her ribcage. Like the air in the room had grown so thick she couldn’t inhale. Like the beast inside her ached to escape, and to kill.
She had to get out of here. She’d find Kell somehow and warn him about Michael, even if it meant revealing the existence of her kind. Once Kell was safely away from them, she’d figure out a way to stop Michael.
She scanned the room, looking for clothes. There were no closets. Mori pulled out each drawer of the smaller dresser in turn, but all were empty.
She noticed a few stairs leading downward in a nook cut into one corner of the room, with a door at the bottom. Easing down them, trying to avoid the creak of old wood, she turned the knob and found it locked. Damn it, Michael.
“You might as well come back up the stairs, Emory.”
Michael’s drawl came from behind her. How had she missed seeing him? Goose bumps dotted Mori’s skin as she turned and climbed the four steps back into the room. Looking around in confusion, her gaze finally lit on the TV screen — not a television, but a monitor. Michael’s face filled the rectangle in all his arrogant glory.
For the first time, Mori noticed the red dots glowing in the far corner of the ceiling. In all the corners. Cameras.
“You son of a bitch.” She walked to the bed and jerked the thin, brown-plaid spread off it, wrapping it around her like an oversize bath towel, letting it hang a little lower in back to keep it from pressing on the burn.
“Might as well not cover it up, sweetheart. I saw it all last night. Who do you think carried you to your new room?”
Mori’s heart raced, and her face heated. God, had he raped her while she was unconscious? Planted his precious seed inside her just to prove she had no say in it?
Michael laughed, and his teeth gleamed on the monitor. “I can see what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. I want you awake when I fuck you. I want you to know who it is that’s fucking you, and why. It’s time you remember who I am, little girl, and that this isn’t about you and your precious feelings.”
“I don’t want—”
The words fizzled in her throat. He didn’t care what she wanted. Probably never had, although he’d at least pretended for a while. She’d kept thinking she could work out a deal with him, hoping he could see the situation from her standpoint and figure out a compromise.
Now, too late, it finally hit her. She’d been thinking of Michael as a powerful man, but still reasonable. He wasn’t reasonable, because he’d never had to learn the art of compromise. He was the alpha of the Dire Wolves and fully aware none of the other males could challenge him, much less the females, whose role in traditional Dire society had never been more than shadows of their mates. Michael held all the cards and always had. To see him as a modern man capable of empathy and reason had been a serious error on her part.
“Very good. You realize it now, don’t you, Emory? What you want simply doesn’t matter. So sit down, and I’ll tell you what your life is going to look like — at least for the next twenty years or so.”
Her mind settled into a numb paralysis, incapable of complete thoughts. Only snippets of what-ifs and snatches of things she might have done differently. Thoughts she couldn’t articulate, which he wouldn’t want to hear even if she could put them into words. Mori shuffled to the bed and sat on the edge, facing the monitor.
“First, forget about trying to escape. The window is unbreakable and bolted shut. The door is reinforced steel. The walls, floor, and ceiling have been soundproofed. Welcome to your new home.”
Mori blinked, her gaze shifting to the staircase. How long had he been planning this? Had he planned to keep her this way all along and simply used the marriage as bait? “You can’t keep me here forever.”
“Not forever. Only until you beg me to come to you and fuck you. And I mean beg. Hands and knees. Naked. Hmm…” He smiled. “Makes a pretty picture.”
What was he smoking? He could leave her here for the rest of her life — and Dires had very long lives — and she would never let him touch her. “You’re delusional, Michael. Sick and delusional.”
Michael laughed. “Oh, you’ll beg. You might be able to shift to stay warmer, but you can’t do without food forever. If you’re stubborn enough to think you’ll let yourself starve, I’ll strap you down and feed you intravenously, just enough to stay alive, but not enough to rid you of the hunger. And in case you find some other way to try and kill yourself, don’t forget the cameras. Your every move will be monitored day and night.”
Mori had only thought things couldn’t get worse. The room took on a distant quality, remote and detached. The voice coming
from numb lips didn’t even sound like hers. “What else?”
“Once you’ve given in and I’ve fucked you better than you deserve — and you’ve thanked me for it properly — you can have clothes and regular meals, as long as you continue to cooperate. When you’re pregnant, you might be allowed onto the grounds occasionally. With guards, of course. After the child is born, we’ll repeat the process until you’re no longer of use to me for breeding. Then I don’t care what the fuck you do.”
The children. She could hate Michael, but she would love her children, and they had to be protected. They’d need her influence in their lives to make sure they grew up to be good and strong, maybe with Gus Chastaine’s heart and his gentle wielding of power. He would be horrified to know what kind of man his successor as the Dire alpha had turned out to be. She’d wager he never saw this side of his neighbor.
Her optimism was crushed with Michael’s next words. “My real fiancée, Leslie, will be moving in to assume the role of the children’s mother. Although human, she knows what we are and why I can’t have children with her. You’ll never see them after they’re weaned, of course. We’ll come up with a suitable story about their birth mother.”
Mori was on her feet before she realized it, charging toward the nearest corner and shouting at the camera. “You can’t do this. My parents—”
“Your parents recently deposited a check for five million dollars. Last I heard, they’d decided to put the Quad-D on the market. They’re deeply ashamed that their daughter, who could have been the jewel of the new generation of Dires, has turned out to be such a disappointment. You have no one but me, Emory.”
Tears pricked the back of Mori’s eyes, but she refused to cry in front of Michael. He’d enjoy it too much.
“But I will allow you one visit.”
Mori frowned up at the camera’s glowing red eye and turned to face the monitor. Michael had a particularly unpleasant smile on his face, even for him. If he thought she’d want to see either of her parents after they’d literally sold her, he was—
Oh God.
Michael held up a familiar shirt. Kell’s olive-green tee with RANGERS stamped across the front. “Recognize this?”
A chill stole across Mori’s chest, and she wrapped the bedspread around her more tightly. “Stay away from Jack Kelly. He has no part in it.”
Michael sniffed the shirt. “I can still scent him on it even though you were wearing it, which will help me track Mr. Kellison. Oh, don’t look surprised. A simple call to his apartment manager, claiming to be a potential employer, told me everything I needed to know. Humans are quite careless with their information.”
Mori’s anger rose again. “There’s nothing to know other than that he’s a veteran. He’s out of work. He’s injured. Forget about him.”
Michael leaned toward his camera, his face filling the monitor. “Look at you, all filled with righteous indignation. It’s the first time today I’ve seen you look like anything but a scared rabbit. Kellison knows too much, and it’s only a matter of time before we find him in whatever hole you two were using as a hideout. The cab driver won’t be hard to find. So I can kill your soldier in front of you or torture him to control you. I haven’t decided which.”
“Look, Michael, let’s talk about this.” She’d agree to anything if he’d leave Kell out of it. “Please. We can work something out where nobody gets hurt and you get what you want.” She’d get on her damn hands and knees and beg him now if he wanted.
“Too late for talk, Emory.” Michael made a show of holding his arm up to his face and looking at his watch. “I have an early meeting in only a few hours. Enjoy the rest of your evening and your day tomorrow. Travis and the rest of my staff will be watching, so behave yourself. Tomorrow night, if you’re hungry enough to beg or I have Kellison in hand, we’ll talk again.”
“But—”
The screen went black.
After a glance at the nearest camera, Mori dragged the ladder-back chair in front of the window and sat, staring out at the part of the gardens illuminated by the fountain. She’d never liked them, and now she realized why. They were beautiful, no denying that, but they reminded Mori of her mother. Like Celia Chastaine, the gardens were elegant but had no life or spark of warmth to them. Even the areas meant to look like wild growth were constrained by hard edges, and should they try to escape their brick and stone prisons, they would be pruned mercilessly.
The irony of the comparison wasn’t lost on her. Mori was being pruned.
She let her mind wander and ended up thinking about her grandfather, who’d been the Dire alpha until his death when she was fourteen. Had he known about the agreement between her parents and Michael? She wanted to think not, but he probably had. Gus would have known Michael would be his successor, just as they all had. The entire Dire population that remained — about thirty of them total — had banded together in Texas under the gentle force of Gus’s personality.
Her grandfather had known she was the only female Dire at her birth. Maybe he’d hoped she’d grow to love Michael. Or maybe he’d thought another girl would be born in the Dire population, to offer them all a better choice than procreate or perish.
She’d adored Gus Chastaine, that much she knew, and something he’d said more than once came back to her. Vividly, she remembered standing next to a fence, admiring a new stallion he’d bought, black with a snow-white star on its muzzle. That horse had a mind of its own, full of spit and spirit.
Starlight had kicked or bitten half the hands on the ranch, including Gus, and yet her grandfather had refused to use harsh techniques to break him into submission. “You have to let a wild thing come to you when he wants to and not force him,” he’d said. “Force him, and he’ll either lose his spirit or he’ll bide his time, and then rise up and take you out the first chance he gets.”
Those seemed to be her choices now as well. Mori was being forced to submit. She could get on her hands and knees and beg, grasping whatever moments she could out of the next twenty years. Or she could bide her time, think things through, and fight.
She wasn’t an alpha. She’d spent her whole life in the Dire structure, where little was expected of the women who’d all grown up in her mother’s generation. But thanks to her mother’s lack of maternal skills, she’d been on her own enough to know women had options.
She might not be an alpha male, but if she was going to survive, she had to act like one. Fake it till she made it.
Only, how did she do that?
Mori rose from the chair, glared at each of the four cameras in turn, and walked back to the bed. Besides her bedspread-turned-cape, there was a single pillow and a thin sheet. Michael wasn’t kidding when he’d said she’d have to shift to stay warm.
A noise at the window caught her attention, and she turned too fast, wincing as the edge of the bedspread touched the raw wound on her back. She didn’t see anything at first, but then, there it was again. A rustle. Walking closer to the window, she looked at the sill in disbelief.
Through the glass, outlined by the light of the fountain below, she saw the silhouette of a freaking eagle, its head cocked, staring back at her.
CHAPTER 19
There was no sign of Archer in the lobby of the King’s Crossing Suites when Kell and Nik arrived just before midnight. It was a typical generic suburban suites hotel, filled with furnishings and carpets all dyed a hundred shades of beige.
“Where’s our kitten?” Kell studied the few people still wedged into the chairs scattered around the lobby, talking and drinking. It wasn’t as if Archer Logan, their cougar-shifting team member, could easily hide. The man was six foot four of muscle, with shoulder-length waves of black hair and the creepiest green eyes on earth. Women liked that long-haired shit. From what he’d seen, they fell all over the guy.
“My guess would be the bar.” Nik angled toward a door leading off the back side of the lobby. The faint sounds of soft rock and clink of glasses met them as they paused in the
doorway to give their vision time to adjust to the low lighting.
Sure enough, Archer sat at a back-corner table, flirting with a waitress who stood with one hip cocked provocatively, one finger twirling around her hair. To his credit, as soon as he spotted Kell and Nik winding their way through the tables, Archer seemed to give her the heave-ho. She eyed them with obvious annoyance when she passed them on the way back to the bar.
“Sorry to cramp your style.” Kell pulled out a chair and angled it so he could see the entire room. Force of habit.
Archer clamped a hand on his shoulder and almost jarred Kell out of his chair. “Hey, gotta try and keep pace with you, ladies’ man. Heard you caught a shifter and didn’t even know it.”
Kell speared Nik with a you-and-your-big-mouth look, but he didn’t have a lot of room to criticize. He’d put them all in jeopardy. “Tell us about Felderman.”
The waitress returned, set a beer in front of Kell and a glass of bourbon in front of Nik, and winked at Archer before turning to leave. She added an extra swivel to her hips as she made her way through the tables and back to the bar.
Kell joined the others in watching the show. He wanted to make a wisecrack about tomcats or alley cats or something cruder, but really, it would just set him up for more ridicule.
“OK, then. Felderman.” Archer took a sip of his drink. “He hasn’t left his room, unless he jumped out the window. I’ve got a clear view of the elevator from here. He checked into Room 601. Ordered room service an hour ago — steak, rare.”
Kell was impressed. “And you know that, how?”
Archer grinned. “Gadget hacked into the hotel’s room-charge system. He’s sending me text updates. So I also know Felderman hasn’t made any phone calls out, but did receive one from a number Gadget traced to” — he punched a button on his phone and looked at the screen — “Travis Milkin. Felderman didn’t answer the phone. Name mean anything?”
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