Shadowed Lover

by Lauren Dawes

  The Yellow Eyes had the smallest territory compared to every other pride. With only the states of California, Washington, and Oregon to watch, Jett was stunned to hear their females were the ones disappearing.

  “Who? Who are they?” Thomas asked.

  “A female named Elsie Fox was reported missing by her parents about a week ago,” Zed replied. “Another named Chastity Reynolds has also been reported.”

  “Are there any other prides that have been hit?” William asked.

  Greg Bolton blew out a breath. “Yes.” The Leo’s voice was so low, it barely beat back the din of the other males voicing their objections to things that were completely out of their power. Zed slammed his fist against the table, quieting the room.

  “A Black Claw female was taken on Friday night,” the Leo said.

  Friday night? Jesus. That was over forty-eight hours ago. Why the fuck had they been sitting on this for so long? Jett focused on Drake, finding the male’s jaw tight as he stared straight ahead. Did he already know?

  “Tell me you’ve got some solid leads on this, Tony,” Thomas demanded. He leaned forward in his seat, jabbing his finger at the Leo. “Tell me you know what the fuck is going on.”

  Lewis stood up, a hand sliding inside his heavy jacket, his body jacking forward as a vicious growl rippled up from his throat. His eyes were laser-focused on Vecchio, ready to defend his Leo. Drake nodded to Grayson, who stepped forward and touched Lewis’s shoulder, holding on tightly before the male could shake him off, and closed his eyes. Lewis retracted his hand and sat back down, glaring at Grayson over his shoulder.

  With the situation diffused, the Leo of the Yellow Eye pride lifted his eyes, looking at each Leo in turn. “It’s being investigated.” Gesturing to the male beside him, he added, “Lewis is looking into all avenues and speaking to all the right people.”

  “Just trust that everything that can be done is being done,” Zepher said before any other questions could be thrown out or blood drawn. “Now, the reason for this meeting wasn’t to inspire fear, but to serve as a warning to all of you. Keep an eye on your female members. Besides them going missing under the cover of darkness, there doesn’t appear to be any pattern or reason for the disappearances. Once contact has been made by whoever has committed these atrocities, then a plan to get our females returned to us will be put into place.”

  “What’s been done in the interim?” the Black Claw Leo demanded. “What are the Trinity doing to mitigate against more abductions?”

  “What do you mean?” Zeke asked, his eyes narrowing and his voice dangerously low.

  Greg met his stare. “I mean, how are we supposed to protect our female members if we can’t have a direct line to our Shadows? They’re on the front line. They’re the ones who can keep them safe.”

  Zeke’s upper lip curled back from his teeth. “The rules we have are designed to keep us all safe.”

  Greg loosed a breath. “I understand the reason for the rules. I understand that you don’t want to risk another insurrection among the prides, but surely if there was more communication—open communication,” he stressed, “it would at least deter whoever’s taking our cats, knowing that we aren’t all walking around with blindfolds on here.” Greg glanced around the table for support and found none.

  “We’re not here to discuss that particular matter, Greg,” Zed said sternly, but not unkindly. “We need to focus on the more pressing issue here, and that’s our missing females.”

  So they were treating the symptoms but not the cause?

  “Do we have suspects at least?” Tavaris asked.

  Scheller drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Nothing. They’ve all been taken at night when they’re alone.”

  A collective curse rose up from the table.

  “Like I said before,” Zepher boomed over the noise, “everything that can be done is being done.”

  Jett totally called bullshit on that one. If everything that can be done was being done, they’d be more than willing to relax their ridiculous laws and allow unfettered contact between the Shadows and their Leos. Jett’s hands curled into fists as he thought about his sisters. This could so easily happen to Katya or Mila, and if it did? He knew he wouldn’t be sitting in a meeting and discussing it. He’d be out nailing the sonofabitch who thought he could take from him to the wall and flaying the skin from his body.

  He glared at the participants seated at the table, tuning out of the discussion as fire burned through his blood, licking at his self-control and turning it to ash. He had to get out of there. He couldn’t be held responsible for turning the whole house into a wiener roast.

  “I’m out,” he said just loudly enough for everyone to turn and look at him. Like he gave a fuck. He stalked from the room, taking the stairs two at a time and making a beeline to his room. Pulling out his phone, he brought up Katya’s number, hit send, and began to pace.

  “Come on, pick up, pick up,” he said.

  “Hello?”

  “Katya. Thank fuck.”

  The sound of squeaking hinges came over the line, the acoustics changing. “Jesus, what’s wrong, Jett?”

  Alarm bells began to blare in his head. “Are you outside?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Oh, fuck no. “Get inside, Kat. Now!”

  “Jett?” she asked in a small voice. “What’s wrong?”

  He blew out a breath when he heard the hinges squeak again. The sound of her footsteps moving along the linoleum was soft. And then it went quiet.

  “What’s going on, Jett?”

  He wasn’t sure how much he could tell her, but he also didn’t want her to become alarmed with the truth. Instead he settled for something he should’ve run past Drake first.

  “I want you out of that trailer. You and Luce. Now.”

  His sister sighed. “And where would we go? I haven’t found a place to live yet. There aren’t that many decent places in my budget.”

  “You can live with me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, his head hanging loose between his shoulders. “You and Luce. You can have your own rooms. I’ll take care of you like I should’ve done when I first left.”

  “Jett…I don’t even know where you live. I don’t know anything about your life.”

  He sucked in a breath and then another. “I’ll tell you as much as I can tomorrow.” Massaging the back of his neck, he added, “I’ll come and pick you up in the morning.”

  “I’ve been called into work tomorrow, and Luce has school.”

  Fuck. “Afterward then. Are you picking up Luce?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Go straight home afterward. I’ll see you around four. And make sure you pack up all your stuff. You aren’t going home after this.”

  A small sob escaped her mouth, the sound crushing him. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He pumped his free hand into a fist. “It’s only a precaution. I’ve got it under control.” He hung up before he said anything more and yanked open his bedroom door. Walking to the head of the stairs, he looked down at the foyer to see the last of the Leos leaving. Grayson shut the door, his head dropping as if the weight of the information shared at the meeting weighed as heavily on him as it did on Jett.

  “Are you all right, my man?” Grayson said without glancing around.

  Damn, Jett hated it when Gray did this. “Fine,” he clipped.

  The other male turned around and stared at him, calling a non-verbal bullshit on his statement. “You ran out of there pretty quick.”

  “I doubt there was much else they were going to say that I wanted to hear.”

  “True,” Grayson replied, his eyes gravitating to the rec room on the opposite side of the hall.

  “Where’s Drake?” Jett called.

  “In here,” his boss called from the dining room. He took the stairs down, holding out his fist to Grayson as he passed. He walked in to find Drake still standing in the s
ame position as when the meeting started, his expression vacillating between fierce anger and heart-wrenching sadness.

  “Sorry for skipping out,” he said, taking a seat opposite the imposing male. “All I could think of was my sisters.”

  Drake nodded. “I hear that. And honestly, if I could’ve walked out, I would have, too.”

  Jett stared at him for a moment. “You knew, didn’t you? Before they announced it. That’s why you took off yesterday.”

  Drake frowned briefly, like he couldn’t believe he’d been found out by one of his team, then said, “I was given the heads-up by Zed over the weekend.”

  Jett tried to summon anger or indignation, but he knew the reasons why Drake had been told earlier. “Listen, I need to ask you something.”

  Drake’s mouth thinned into a slash. “Is this about your sisters?”

  He dipped his chin, ready to give him the reasons, knowing he needed to have solid explanations for what he was about to ask Drake to do. He figured he’d already fucked up enough with keeping in contact with his family. What was one more indiscretion? “I—”

  Drake put his hand up and stopped him. “I already know what you’re going to ask me.”

  He tried not to let his hope flare. “And?”

  “And, what?” Drake jacked forward on his hips, jabbing a finger in Jett’s direction. “You know we can’t have anyone living here who isn’t a Shadow. You aren’t even supposed to be speaking to them. It’s against protocol.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Don’t make me bring up that other shit either,” he warned, talking over Jett. “You’ve been in contact with your family not on one occasion, but for fucking years.”

  “I know,” Jett ground out. “But given what’s going down right now, they’d be safer here than where they’re currently living.”

  Drake folded his arms across his massive chest. “But I wouldn’t know anything about that now, would I?”

  Jett’s hackles rose. “Forgive me for not being a Chatty Cathy about my less than stellar childhood.”

  “I get it, I do, but without knowing more, how can I make a decision about what you’re asking of me? If I agree to this, it opens a can of worms we’ll never be able to close.”

  So Jett had two choices. Spill his fucking guts about what his life was like—what it was still like for his sisters—with the possibility that Drake might allow what he was asking of him, or pucker up tighter than an asshole and risk his sisters’ safety.

  “Fuck.” Looking around, he said, “I’m going to need a drink if we do this.”

  “It’s not even lunchtime yet.”

  “And?”

  A smile flashed onto Drake’s face. “After the morning we’ve had, I’m down with that.”

  15

  A pop-up appeared in the corner of Avah’s computer screen—a notification about yet another girl who had gone missing. Moving the cursor over to the little box, she clicked and sucked in a hiss as the image of a young woman filled her screen.

  And another one.

  And another one.

  And another one.

  She got closer to the screen, like the information would suddenly become clearer or the answer to the riddle would jump off the digital page.

  No such luck.

  Picking up her desk phone, she pinched the handset between her ear and shoulder and punched out the number of her contact at the Portland PD with the end of her pen.

  “Did you get them?” Detective Chris Smith asked in lieu of a greeting.

  “Yeah,” she replied, clicking through the four different reports. “Tell me what you know.”

  “Off the record, right, Avah?”

  She tried not to roll her eyes. Everything they discussed was off the record.

  His chuckle drifted over the line. “I know you’re rolling your eyes at me right now, just so you know.”

  “Sorry.” She scrolled down the report of the first girl in the lineup. Chastity Reynolds, aged twenty-two. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Caucasian. “Of course this is off the record.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Another girl. Samantha Gapps, aged twenty-three. Black hair. Black eyes. African-American.

  The third girl. Aimee Rees, aged twenty-five. Brown hair. Hazel eyes. Caucasian.

  “They’re all under twenty-five?”

  The detective grunted, and she’d worked with him long enough to know what that meant.

  “What am I missing?”

  “Check their last known locations.”

  Her eyes skimmed down Aimee’s page before she crosschecked against the other three. “They’re all students at the University of Oregon.”

  “Bingo.”

  She frowned, trying to connect the dots. “I don’t get it. Why these girls?”

  “According to everyone who reported them missing, they all had evening classes, and some time between the class finishing and them leaving to return home, they just vanished.”

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “There’s something going on here, Detective.”

  “Yeah, there is, but fuck if I know what it is. There’s nothing to go on. The girls’ cell phones haven’t been touched. Neither have their bank or social media accounts. It’s like they’ve just disappeared.”

  Like ghosts, she thought idly, which was pretty damn hard to do in the age of technology they lived in. “Will you keep me in the loop?”

  “Of course. How else can I get you to talk to me?”

  She could sense his grin through the phone. Chris was an attractive man—she wasn’t going to lie—but he was as career-driven as she was. A relationship wouldn’t just fail, it would disintegrate.

  “Are you ever going to let me buy you dinner?” he asked.

  She clicked her pen as she stared at the faces of the missing girls. “What would we talk about?”

  He laughed, a deep bass that hit her in the chest. “Work, probably.”

  She looked up when her boss came swaggering out of his office. She sat up straight and said softly, “Thanks, Detective. I’ll speak to you later.”

  “Avah,” Andy said loud enough for everyone else to hear.

  “Yes, Andy?” she replied, lowering the phone back into the cradle while staring at the bulge in his stomach that had slowly started creeping south of his belt. The guy was in his fifties and had a serious relationship with his Marlboro Reds. He hitched his hands onto his ample waist, his yellow fingers digging into his extra weight.

  “I’ve got a story for you.”

  “Oh?” Here we go. Whenever Andy said he had a story for her, it was usually some ridiculously obscure event where she’d ended up surrounded by the weird and wonderful whack-jobs of Portland. “What’s it going to be this time, Andy?”

  He grinned, his yellow teeth cracking through his lips. “Are you allergic to cats?”

  “No?” Where was he—Fuck.

  “The International Cat Show is on at the Portland Expo Centre. I want you down there.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She jumped to her feet, ready to lay down the reasons why she should be covering the high-profile court case that was starting that morning instead. “I—”

  Her boss rounded on her, jabbing his fat finger at her chest. “You will go and cover the goddamn cat show like I told you to, or you can find yourself another job.”

  Avah looked around, hoping to catch the eye of one of her male colleagues, but the pansy-ass bastards all suddenly got busy looking anywhere but at her.

  Fucking sac-less, the lot of them.

  “I just need a chance, boss.” That was a tactical use of the word—she hardly ever used it. She didn’t want him to lord it over her any more than he already did.

  “This is your chance,” he said, speaking with a tight jaw. “Your last chance to do as I tell you.”

  She let out a breath and looked away. “Yes, Andy.” She picked up her cell phone from her desk and dropped it into her handbag. Rifling throu
gh her top drawer, she pulled out a small notepad and threw it into her handbag as well. She guessed she was going to report on a freaking cat show.

  * * *

  Nearly six hours later, Avah returned to her house covered in fur and sneezing. It turned out she was allergic to cats. Dropping her handbag down onto the couch, she stripped out of her fur-covered clothes and weighed up the merits of simply lighting them on fire, or putting them in the laundry. She couldn’t afford to replace her wardrobe right now, so she opted for the laundry hamper instead.

  Wandering into the bathroom, she got the hot water running, impatiently waiting for the steam to start rolling. She let down her hair, scratching absently at a small rash on her arm.

  “Damned cats,” she muttered, forcing herself to stop irritating the growing welt. The whole show had been hell—nothing but cats and cat lovers, all of them primped and preened and ready for show, and that was just the owners. Honestly, she would’ve taken the Oregon Renaissance Faire over this any day of the week.

  After a quick suds and rinse, she washed her hair, sighing contentedly when the itching stopped. As soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, she got dressed in her pajamas and grabbed her laptop. She needed a new job. She needed to get away from Andy and his stupid fucking boys club.

  Opening up her Mac, she signed in to her go-to social media account and clicked into the messaging app. She plugged in the name of her old college roommate and wrote out a message. It didn’t take long for the computer to ping with a reply, and she picked up her phone and dialed the number she’d asked for.

  “Tilly,” she said when her friend answered. “How are you?”

  “Avah, I haven’t spoken to you in forever.”

  Shifting the Mac from her lap, she said, “Yeah. It’s been a while. Thanks for hitting me back so quickly.”

  “Anything for my old roommate. So tell me, what’s going on?”

  “I need to get out of my job.” She glanced around at her sparsely furnished house. Even though she’d lived there for five years, she’d barely moved in and made the space her own. She was too busy working to worry about slapping on a fresh coat of paint, or checking out the closest Pottery Barn to get some new furniture—not that she could afford most of that stuff.