Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  The entire pack had gathered at Troy’s directive, but it wasn’t to rally behind him in the effort to find and save Reece. That much was painfully clear.

  “You told that woman—” Curt was referring to Reece, of course, “about all of us, about the pack! Word has spread through the Fist like wildfire! She ain’t your one true mate, Troy! What the hell have you done?”

  In a burst of simultaneous rage, the pack broke out into cursing accusations until Curt unified them in a volatile chant:

  “Dethrone Quinn! Dethrone Quinn! Dethrone Quinn!”

  Shane barked into Troy’s ear, “Fuck, brother! They’re going to string you up!”

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” insisted Kaleb, who was now tugging on Troy’s arm to pull him away.

  But Troy held his ground. He got in Curt’s face, pointing his finger at him and commanding, “Bow down to your king, Curt! Get the fuck down!”

  “Your father would roll over in his grave at the mess you’ve made in our town!” Curt sneered, getting in his face.

  They were chest to chest, nose to nose, and Troy was about ready to tear the guy’s throat out.

  “Stop!”

  The aged voice cut through the raging pack and there was sudden silence, as Sasha stepped forward, away from her daughter-in-law, Nikita.

  She was holding a massive crystal, an amethyst the size of a bowling ball that was just as smooth and round. She shoved Troy and Curt apart, coming between then and lifting the crystal ball.

  “Look,” she instructed them and the crystal lit up brighter than the sun.

  Troy had to shield his eyes, but as the crystal cooled and images took hold inside of it, his eyes widened and he leaned in.

  “Reece!” he exclaimed, taking hold of the crystal in both hands as her image appeared within it.

  Reece was shackled inside some kind of cave that was outfitted like a sleek apartment. She was crying and jerking her wrists that were cuffed, tethering her to the wall.

  The image shifted and Troy realized she was also inside of a cage.

  It shifted again, pulling out of the cave and he saw Angel’s car.

  It pulled out further and further, at warp speed, and he caught sight of the road, the intersection, the street signs!

  “I know where she is!” he shouted, turning for his brothers and shoving the crystal into Curt’s arms. “I know how to get there!”

  As Troy jogged off with his brothers, heading towards their trucks, Curt called out, “This isn’t over, Troy!”

  It wasn’t. But it would be soon.

  He just hoped he wouldn’t be too late.

  Chapter Twenty

  REECE

  Reece jerked on the chains. The iron links were welded deep into the stone wall of the cave in the back of the cage he’d stuffed her in. They weren’t coming out. Her wrists were already chaffing, bleeding a little, blisters bubbling up, where the cold metal cuffs rubbed.

  There were candles lit and flickering all around the room. Romantic lighting. It made her stomach turn.

  Dante was seated in a leather-back chair, an antique. It looked as though he’d lived here quite a while. Was this his home? Had he lived right here in the Fist his whole life? Or had he swooped into town recently like he’d told her? He was nursing a round glass of merlot, swirling the red wine, as he stared at her.

  Those eyes.

  They weren’t just dark. They were empty. Soulless. And also lustful, the way he was drinking in the very sight of her cowering inside of the cage. Undressing her with his eyes, perhaps.

  Reece had already screamed for help. She’d already fought against the chains that refused to give. She cursed and threatened everything she could think of, but Dante’s expression had remained the same. Cool. Calm. Collected.

  He was enjoying this.

  Her throat felt hoarse and raw.

  And Angel!

  Oh, that Angel! Reece would like to tear her blonde hair right out of her useless head, that’s what she’d like to do!

  Angel had been doing as she was told. Obeying. All these stupid little tasks. She was serving him. At his beck and call, but Reece didn’t feel sorry for her. She’d been free. She’d been in Jack’s care, in the care of the hospital staff in Jackson Hole. She could’ve had the full protection of Quinn Security if she’d wanted. And what did she do? She’s slipped away from Jack Quagmire, who loved her, in the middle of the night to carry through whatever dark plan Dante had been cooking up. That’s why she’d nearly killed Reece out on the plains, why she’d leaped onto the truck bed and had stalked towards Reece with her fangs exposed and snout crinkled in a menacing growl.

  After having fetched Dante’s merlot and poured it, it had been Angel who had lit the candles, rolled a slab of stone over the open entryway. She’d disappeared outside for a time, too, and Reece could only imagine she was out there, tearing down the canopy tent, pulling the chairs and table out of sight, covering the stone patio with dead tree branches so that anyone coming through wouldn’t discover a trace of evidence that anyone had ever been around these parts.

  Now Angel was standing poised beside Dante.

  Her car was still outside!

  Maybe Reece would still have a prayer of someone finding her!

  “I should go,” Angel said, but it sounded like she was asking for permission. “My car is outside. Someone could see it.”

  Damn!

  “You can go when I say you can go,” he told her coolly.

  “I did what you told me to do,” she asserted, cutting her eyes to Reece in the cage. “You said you’d release me.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “What?” she breathed, her voice like wind over reeds as his betrayal finally hit her.

  “But you’re correct about your car.”

  “I don’t want to go down for this, Dante,” she warned, and Reece could almost see the swelling fear rise up in Angel’s mind. She wanted to drive back into town. Park behind Angel’s Food. Go on with her life as though nothing had happened. Uninterrupted. But so long as Reece went on breathing, so long as she could report every detail of this heinous crime to the sheriff, Angel’s destiny would end up looking a lot like Reece’s current one. Locked up behind bars. “If I leave now, I don’t want to have to look over my shoulder for God knows how long.”

  Dante narrowed his eyes on Reece, studying her crouched form and perhaps feeding off of the terror that was pouring out of her. His lips twisted into a wicked grin, as he assured her, “You won’t have to look over your shoulder. I’ll break her and it will never occur to her to report any of this.”

  Angel let out a rocky breath of relief.

  Reece threw herself against the bars of her cage, clutching them in a white-knuckle grip, and spat, “I’ll never forget this! Never! You’ll have to kill me!”

  Dante only laughed and it caused a flood of tears to spill from Reece’s eyes. Her glasses were somewhere around here. They’d been flung from her face during the struggle to thrust her inside the cage and shackle her. Dante had tried to infiltrate her mind, command her to obey him from inside her head, but he’d failed. He’d had to resort to physically overpowering her, but she’d put up one hell of a fight. If she could keep him out of her head, and keep fighting, she might have a chance to live through this. She couldn’t fall apart like this, though. She couldn’t collapse into a ball of tears and terror. She needed to stay strong until Troy found her, or perhaps the sheriff. But what hope did she have of either of them finding her, when she was hidden in the cliffside of an uncharted mountain?

  Dante flicked his fingers at Angel without taking his dark, soulless eyes off of Reece, excusing her.

  Angel didn’t waste a single second once she was excused, and she also didn’t go out the front where she’d pushed that giant stone slab over the open entryway.

  There must be an exit out the back, Reece realized when Angel padded off, the sounds of her footsteps fading and fading. How deep was this mount
ain? Angel must have used a tunnel that opened up out on the other side of it.

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, though her voice sounded frail and fearful.

  Dante swirled his wine then sniffed it and asked, “Do you like merlot?”

  Yes! she thought. If she could encourage him to open the cage, unlock these shackles, she might have a prayer of fighting him, fighting her way out of this hellhole!

  “It’s why I came in here, blindly trusting Angel,” she allowed.

  “This bottle,” he said, marveling the label of the red wine, ‘is almost as old as I am.”

  “Not all wine is better with age.”

  He locked his eyes on her, growing severe, and said flatly, “This one is.”

  “Are you offering me a glass?”

  “Have you earned it?” he countered.

  “Look, Dante,” she said, feeling suddenly exhausted. Willing herself to fortify her mind against someone who she wasn’t sure she’d even realize if they’d penetrated her thoughts or not, was draining her. Terribly. “I don’t know what you have planned here. I’m trying to be agreeable so that I can survive.”

  Was that too honest? Had he influenced her in some way to reveal that one shred of truth?

  She was getting paranoid.

  “Survive,” he echoed thoughtfully. “Is that all you hope to do?”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but was starting to sense that Dante would prefer an audience over a conversational partner so she kept her mouth shut.

  “With me, Reece, you could do more than survive. You could thrive. Thrive greater than you ever thought possible.”

  She feigned an interested smile.

  “I’m not the enemy, you know,” he informed her. “I’m the one who’s saving you.”

  She jerked on the chains and challenged, “Really.”

  Dante let out a rumbling chuckle and she could see how he might’ve wooed Angel out of her house that night. He was handsome and charming and physically attractive. But any woman with an ounce of instinct would know he was dangerous.

  “You didn’t bond to Troy Quinn,” he told her, but how would he have known? “You had several opportunities and you pulled away from him. If you want to analyze female instincts, you can’t ignore the evidence of your behavior.”

  How did he know to use the word instincts other than the fact that she’d just thought about it? Was he already here, in her head, listening to her every thought?

  “You’re right,” she admitted. “I didn’t sleep with him or go through whatever ritual is required. But that wasn’t because my instincts were telling me he was dangerous. It’s because I can’t wrap my head around being anything other than what I am. Human.”

  He rose from the leather-back chair and took one confident step after the other, closing the gap between them until he was looking down at her through the bars of her cage.

  “How would you like to really be the Queen?” he asked. When she didn’t react other than her mouth gaping open, he reminded her, “That was the one point of interest you had in the idea, wasn’t it? Being Queen? Becoming a Royal? You liked the thought of it. That’s why you initiated that roll in the thicket with him. Am I wrong?”

  She was afraid to speak or even think.

  “I can offer you that,” he told her in a soothing whisper.

  “You’re not a Royal,” she shot back. If he could throw in her face her deepest most private thoughts, then she could throw in his face what she knew about the situation. “You have no standing.”

  Dante threw his glass of wine against the stone wall above her cage and glass shattered, shards of it and red wine dripping down the wall. He paced away, furious, and insisted, “I am the rightful king! I was next in line to inherit the throne!”

  “But you’re not a Quinn,” she pointed out, hissing each word through clenched teeth. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not,” he said calmly, as he turned to her and neared the bars again. “And I will take everything Troy has and wants.”

  With a shaky voice, she asked, “Including me?”

  His answer was to kneel in front of the padlock on the cage, pull a large key from his pocket, and open the cage door.

  She was still shackled, still chained brutally to the stone wall, but this was progress. If she could get him to unlock the iron handcuffs from her wrists, she might have a fighting chance…

  But when he began edging into the cage with her, he shifted into his monstrous half-wolf form in an instant, his hands transforming into paws with claws, fur sprouting from his face, his body contorting into a hunched form that resembled a deformed wolf. His incisors elongated into fangs and Reece recoiled, cowering and pinching her eyes closed as he crept near her.

  She gasped when he tore her tee-shirt open straight down her front.

  Whimpering, she hissed, “Get away from me!”

  “I’m going to mate with you,” he informed her and she whimpered louder, crying and jerking on the chains that held her. “I’m going to turn you. And together, we will take what’s rightfully ours.”

  “No,” she breathed, refusing, but she was helpless, and when he tore her jeans off of her body with his ghastly claws, she knew this was the beginning of the end. “Wait! Do you hear that?”

  “Stop being clever,” he snapped as he took rough hold of her ankles and pulled her in a brutal jerk towards him.

  But when the telltale growl of a vehicle pulled up outside, he knew she wasn’t lying and paused.

  “Shit,” he hissed, loosening his grasp on her thighs where he’d grabbed her, claws digging into her skin.

  Voices came next, but Reece couldn’t identify who they belonged to, only that it sounded like men had climbed out of the vehicle and were walking around outside.

  She sucked in a full breath of air and tried to scream with all her might, but Dante was too fast for her. He stuffed her balled tee-shirt into her mouth then slapped her sideways and she fell to the stone floor, dazed.

  The next thing that she knew, as she dared to open her throbbing eye, was that Dante was outside the cage, fastening the padlock. He ran out the back of the room in the same direction that Angel had left.

  Reece prayed that whoever was out there would be well equipped to kill the creature who had nearly stolen her life.

  ***

  Dante spied Troy and his brothers stalking around outside. Five pickup trucks. Five Quinns. Shit.

  He couldn’t take them. Not all five of them. Not in his half-wolf form. He knew it, and he hated it.

  He should’ve stayed inside and made Reece Gladstone his for now and all time. Doing so would’ve crushed Troy, weakened him, and given Dante a solid shot at taking his life. But then he’d have the other brothers to contend with.

  It was too risky. Much, much too risky.

  He used his wolf hearing as he continued to peer at the clueless brothers—they hadn’t yet discovered the stone slab of the entrance door, Angel had done an excellent job of hiding it with vegetation and vines and fresh tree branches—and he didn’t hear one peep emanating from inside the cave. It meant that Reece hadn’t managed to spit the tee shirt from her mouth. If she was rattling her chains with all her might, no one could hear it. Good.

  But it was only a matter of time, he thought to himself as he slinked away from his spying post and crept away through the thick forest. Eventually, they would smell her scent, connect it to the stone slab, and find her.

  Good thing he’d packed and hidden a virtual arsenal of firearms, all loaded with silver-plated bullets.

  He knew the rules and was prepared to win the game.

  Running now, light-footed and agile, he made his way to the old oak tree where he’d stashed his weapons. There was a cluster of large rocks, moss-covered and heavy, but he rolled them aside and began digging with his clawed paws. When he reached the gun sack, he willed his paws to transform into human hands, allowing the whole of himself to shift as well, and selected a rifle.<
br />
  If the Quinns got within close range, the rifle wouldn’t serve him, so he grabbed a handgun as well and stuffed it down the back of his slacks just in case.

  Then he started off again, jogging soundlessly to the side of the mountain where he could spy Troy and his brothers, take aim, and take them out, one at a time.

  But when he reached the vantage point, only one of them was there.

  Dean.

  The runt.

  He took aim, pinching one eye shut, and pulled the trigger.

  ***

  BANG!

  Reece startled in a full-body flinch within the cage.

  Oh God!

  She pulled the tee shirt from her mouth, something she would’ve done sooner if she wasn’t floating in and out of consciousness, barely holding on, dazed from the blow Dante had cast across her cheek.

  “Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, hoping like hell anyone would hear her.

  Who had been shot? Was Sheriff Abernathy out there? Had he killed Dante? Or had Dante fired? Oh God, who had he shot? If Troy was lying out there dead… She couldn’t bear the thought. She had to focus, get out of this cage, and save herself.

  She should’ve let Troy turn her. He was the one, wasn’t he? Why had she been fighting it this whole time? She loved him. She knew it. With her entire heart, she knew it and had known it and had felt it burning in her heart like a fire for years. Why couldn’t she have gone through with it out in the thicket of Yellowstone? Troy had said it himself. The only way for Reece to truly stay safe was to become his. To allow him to turn her into a werewolf. Join their souls eternally. It would’ve protected them both. But she’d turned her back on the idea. She’d broken up with him, fired him, and ran off into the arms of a woman who had ultimately led her to certain death.

  Furious, she yanked on her chains.

  Useless.

  She screamed again.

  But no one heard her.

  Then, she scooted down as far as her chains would allow, positioned herself on her back, and began kicking her sneakered feet, hard, against the rattling side of the cage. The bars rattled and bent, but didn’t break free from the steel support rim. She tried again and again.