Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “What makes you think I’m keeping secrets?” she confronted, defensively.

  All Elizabeth had to do was fix a leveling gaze on her mother to indicate that she knew Gretchen well enough to understand when the critical woman was holding back.

  “Fine,” she sighed. “I knew about the land.”

  “If you didn’t want me to sell it, then why didn’t you say so?”

  “I didn’t know that Thomas had left the land to you until I read the will myself. By that point, you’d already taken off for Wyoming and honestly, Elizabeth, I thought it was some kind of soul-searching venture. I didn’t for one second think you would be so decisive and proactive as to sell.”

  “What did you think would happen to the land?” she questioned.

  “Well, first of all, I assumed Thomas would’ve left the acreage to me in his will.”

  “Okay…? That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

  “To answer your question,” she allowed though she seemed very put off by the conversation, “I didn’t think anything would happen with the land. I thought that things would remain exactly the same, that the plot in Wyoming would remain in the Halsey name and go untouched as it had for generations and generations.”

  “What’s the sense of having land if you aren’t going to use it?” she asked, confused.

  Again, Gretchen sighed but this time it seemed to deflate her resolve to keep secrets from her own daughter. Having weakened, she finally came out with it.

  “We were using it,” she told her. “Okay, technically I wasn’t using it. But your father had made trips—”

  “He did?”

  “Do you want me to explain everything to you or are you going to interrupt me, Elizabeth? Because if you’d like to do all the talking, then I can easily accommodate—”

  “No, no, go on. I’m listening.”

  “As I was saying, your father was part of a secret… club.”

  “A club?”

  “One that the family, the Halsey side, mind you, had been a part of for centuries.”

  “Really?” she said, keenly interested. She leaned in as her mother elaborated.

  “I don’t know much about it, to tell you the truth,” she insisted. “When married, it’s often best to allow your partner to have his fun, unencumbered.”

  Elizabeth felt the urge to ask her mother about that statement. Any tips and advice about maintaining a healthy marriage, or even a successful relationship would be much appreciated considering all she’d been through with Dean, but she held her tongue and gave Gretchen her full attention.

  “My understanding of the situation was that Thomas would come out to Devil’s Fist to meet with his club. They used the land to hunt, yet he never brought back the game he’d supposedly taken down.”

  With the Yellowstone National Park a mere breath from the old Halsey land, Elizabeth couldn’t help but question the legalities. Most species were protected by the park if not endangered. Had her father been hunting illegally?

  Gretchen went on, “From what little he told me, I believe your father was hunting wolves.”

  “Wolves?”

  “Yes,” she said frankly. “I don’t know why, but Thomas had always felt that wolves were pure evil. He regarded them as sneaky, murderous creatures that were inclined to attack humans. Of course, I never believed it. I’ve watched National Geographic and have seen other nature programs that would seem to contradict Thomas’s impression, but that’s how he felt. He was part of a secret society that would meet annually in Devil’s Fist to hunt as many wolves as possible. This tradition goes back generations on his side of the family.”

  Puzzled, Elizabeth sat back on her side of the red, vinyl booth and pondered the mystery of it all.

  “One thing I learned decades ago,” Gretchen started up again. “Something that never sat quite right with me, was the family name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Halsey wasn’t the bloodline name on your father’s side. Oh, it must have been five or many seven hundred years ago, all the way back at the top of the family tree, that the family changed their given surname to Halsey.”

  “You’re kidding,” breathed Elizabeth.

  “Yes, Elizabeth, I’m kidding,” her mother said sarcastically with an annoyed little huff. “I’ve let you drag me all the way out here only to retaliate against you by kidding.”

  “Alright, alright! Sorry!” After a beat, she asked, “What was the original surname?”

  “Something silly sounding,” she said as she wracked her brain. “A dirty Italian name. What was it? Aniglari? Aligori?”

  “Alighieri?” Elizabeth offered as a chill raced through her bones.

  “Yes! That’s it. Alighieri. How did you guess it?”

  “So,” she began, attempting to wrap her mind around the bloodline. “Five hundred years ago, the family changed their name from Alighieri to Halsey. Why?”

  “It had something to do with an out-of-wedlock embarrassment. I really can’t remember the details if I ever learned them at all. You know how your father was. He was a man of few words. But my impression was that some great ancestor of your father’s with the surname Alighieri had a child out of wedlock. The child turned out to be some kind of criminal, which confounded the embarrassment, so they changed the family name to divorce themselves from the social nightmare of it all.”

  “And they began hunting wolves ever since,” she supplied.

  “Something like that, now I’m really going to have to have a cocktail if you expect me to keep discussing it. I find these kinds of conversations exhausting and you know it.”

  Lucy swept in and set their pancakes down in front of them, the coffees as well, and asked if they’d need anything else.

  Elizabeth barely had the attention span to thank the waitress, she was so bogged with the revelatory information her mother had provided her.

  Lucy padded off through the diner and mother and daughter fell silent as they ate their pancakes.

  Dante Alighieri was a distant blood relative of Elizabeth. Well, thank God she hadn’t slept with him! But this was no joking matter. Long ago, an ancestor of her father’s had birthed a child with Sasha Quinn. That child grew to become a criminal of sorts named Dante Alighieri. Elizabeth had a pretty strong feeling that the criminal offense Dante had posed was that of being a werewolf. And how did her ancestor respond? He had changed the family name and committed himself to returning to Devil’s Fist to hunt the son he wished he’d never had. As time unfolded, the Halseys probably had no way of knowing who Dante was, only that he was part wolf, and that was enough to compel them to hunt wolves, blindly and desperately. Elizabeth wondered if her own father had even put the pieces together, or if the tradition of hunting on the old Halsey land once a year had clouded the truth behind it all.

  But one thing was clear—the Halseys had become werewolf hunters throughout the ages.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DEAN

  Dean stepped out of the little stone house where he had met Troy and his other brothers, with the exception of Shane who had opted to plow through some administrative work at Quinn Security. Compared to the cool chill of his mother’s home, it felt warm in the front yard, the bright Wyoming sun blazing down and competing with the seasonal autumn drop in temperature.

  The brothers had devised some semblance of a plan for the full moon. It had taken Troy and also Sasha several meditations to check, double check, and triple check the strategy they planned to employ, but by the time the meeting had adjourned, it seemed they had everything they would need other than the full moon. It was only a matter of time.

  While it seemed the Quinns were getting closer to ridding Dante Alighieri from the Fist once and for all, at the same time a rift had been torn between Dean and Elizabeth, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why.

  Yes, he had been forceful with her. He hadn’t sugarcoated the predicament they found themselves in. But he didn’t feel that h
er reaction was justified. Didn’t she understand that he was looking out for her? He was doing everything within his power to keep her safe and yet it seemed that the harder he pushed to insert himself into her life in a permanent way—in order to protect her and provide the best possible life he could offer her—the further she pulled away.

  He knew it wasn’t very mature of him to blame Rachel Clancy, but he did.

  He also blamed Troy and the universe. Hell, Elizabeth was meant for him. She had been marked. She was destined to become his one true mate. It shouldn’t have been so easy for him to mess everything up. As far as he was concerned, the second he had asserted her destiny to her, finally telling her everything he knew about the situation, she should have agreed to be with him. Wasn’t that more or less how things had gone for Troy and Kaleb and Shane?

  It wasn’t fair.

  He had spent the bulk of the meeting worrying about Elizabeth. She had been far too headstrong about driving over to Jackson Hole. Why did everything have to be on her terms? She was so impulsive all the time. He had offered to take her either after his meeting or another day, but she’d refused to wait.

  So when his cell phone vibrated in the front pocket of his jeans and he saw he had received a text message from her, every cell in his body lit up.

  Meet me at Libations? We need to talk.

  “You heading back to Quinn Security?” Kaleb asked him.

  Distracted, Dean said, “Ah, no, I need to meet Elizabeth.”

  He was only vaguely aware of his brothers piling into their respective pickup trucks and pulling out, as he stood staring at the text message that was impossible to decipher.

  Generally speaking, when a woman told a man that they needed to talk, it was rarely a good sign. But there was no way Elizabeth could break up with him, could she? If she was destined to be with him, it would be impossible for their relationship to end, right?

  Or had that assumption amounted to his Achilles’ heel? Had he been trusting some ancient law that wouldn’t hold up in the court of Elizabeth Halsey?

  He felt ragged with nerves as he finally climbed into his pickup truck. What if she wanted to call it quits? Or worse, what if she had been met with more resistance in Jackson Hole in terms of buying the burned down building? If she was impulsive enough to drive to Devil’s Fist in the first place, if she was impulsive enough to drop her dress for Dean and decide on a random whim to sell her family’s land and then, on the flip of a dime, turn around and try to buy back a little slice of the town, who was to say she wouldn’t, on another impulsive whim, decide that the only place she wanted to be was back in Los Angeles?

  Dean couldn’t lose her.

  As he drove off towards the heart of town, he told himself that he had to do anything and everything he could to convince her to be with him.

  But wasn’t that the very attitude that had pushed her away in the first place?

  God, why was she so difficult?

  He didn’t want to have to say goodbye to her, but he also knew that everything he had tried to say to her had ultimately failed in terms of getting her to be with him.

  He realized, as he pulled up along the curb in front of Libations bar that when it came to Elizabeth Halsey, he just plain didn’t know how to win.

  If fate had anything to do with it—and he sincerely prayed it did—he would have no choice but to loosen the hard, controlling grip he had placed over their relationship and let destiny lead the way.

  It was literally the last thing he wanted to do, but at the same time, it was definitely his only option.

  He heaved the heavy door open and stepped inside the dimly lit bar. It was far from lively, but there were a number of customers seated at the counter where Jack was pouring tap beer into a pitcher. A few of the tables were occupied as well.

  He found Elizabeth seated at a high table in the window across from a wealthy-looking woman who wore the kind of designer skirt suit that Elizabeth herself had worn the night he’d met her outside of this very bar.

  She was going to break up with him with an older woman looking on?

  He hoped that wasn’t the case as he neared their table.

  “How’d it go over in Jackson Hole?” he asked as he pulled out a chair.

  “Fine,” she quickly offered before making formal introductions. “This is my mother, Gretchen Halsey.”

  He shook the older woman’s hand. “Elizabeth’s mother!” he said, surprised and at the same time both thrown and delighted. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Dean.”

  “Why does everyone in this God-forsaken town dress like a gardener?” she scoffed as she carefully lifted what appeared to be a very large martini to her lipstick-painted mouth to drew in a dainty, uptight sip.

  “He’s not a gardener, mother. This is Dean Quinn, who I told you about,” said Elizabeth, trying to smooth over her mother’s shameless insult. “He’s a bodyguard and runs a private security firm with his brothers.”

  “Then he shouldn’t dress like a gardener,” she frankly informed them before sucking down another long sip of vodka.

  Elizabeth offered him an apologetic smile as he cautiously sat down in the chair beside her.

  “What brings you to the Fist, Mrs. Halsey?”

  “Boredom, I suppose.”

  “I called her and asked her to come,” Elizabeth told him. “I thought you two should meet.”

  “Good Lord,” Gretchen choked. “Why?”

  “Mom,” she warned as she widened her eyes at the older woman. “We talked about this.”

  “Really, Elizabeth, would it be so terrible to find yourself a worthy gentleman in Los Angeles?”

  Though Mrs. Halsey was fast proving to be intolerable—she was like Elizabeth had been but amped up to the millionth degree—Dean felt a warm swell spread through his chest. Elizabeth wanted her mother to meet him. That had to be a good sign. No matter how insulting Gretchen was, Dean resolved that at the first chance he got, he would ask Gretchen for her daughter’s hand in marriage.

  “I also wanted you two to meet,” Elizabeth went on as she directed her statement to Dean, “because Mom told me something very interesting when we had lunch over at Angel’s Food.”

  “Oh?” he said, interested but also terrified that whatever Mrs. Halsey had to say would come with more blunt accusations about Dean secretly working as a gardener.

  “It seems that long, long ago, maybe five centuries back, the Halsey surname had originally been Alighieri.”

  He froze, stunned, the wind having been knocked out of him.

  “What?” he asked in shock.

  As Elizabeth explained all that her mother had told her over lunch, Dean felt his entire world begin to tilt off its axis.

  ***

  As Dean sat beside Elizabeth in Libations and attempted to fathom the longstanding history between Halseys and Quinns—Elizabeth shared blood with Dante?—clear on the other side of the Fist where the old Halsey land ran along the south edge of Yellowstone, Sheriff Rick Abernathy stalked through the darkness beside Detective Eddie Friendly, though both men wore plainclothes and didn’t quite trust one another.

  Equipped with the Latin chants in his hand—Rick had printed out the cell phone photos he’d secretly taken at Quinn Security—he slowed his step and scanned the darkened landscape that was lit only by the soft glow of three-quarter moon and a wide constellation of stars.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked Eddie, feeling suddenly paranoid that now that he’d released Eddie from the locked dog crate in his basement he could be attacked at any second.

  Eddie adjusted the bow that was slung over his shoulder, the basket of arrows he carried only had three. Rick was counting on Eddie to be an excellent shot with a bow and arrow, something Rick himself had little confidence in.

  “Yes,” Eddie insisted.

  “Why in the hell did Dante strong-arm me into letting him live in my daughter’s old cabin if he was just going to hide out on the old Halsey land anyw
ay?” he complained.

  “To keep an eye on you, obviously.”

  As they started off again, heading deeper into the land and following the perimeter of a wide field where the tree line separating the forest to the north stretched out endlessly, Rick asked him, “What is he planning for the full moon? Do you know?”

  “It’s going to be a full ambush,” Eddie told him darkly. “But if we succeed tonight, it won’t happen.”

  “A full ambush?”

  “All of the Quinns live on the same short stretch of road,” he explained. “The pack is going to take them at night.”

  “Dante thinks they’re just going to tuck themselves into bed and go to sleep the night of the full moon?”

  “No, he’s smarter than that,” Eddie said, slowly his step as they came to what appeared to be a subtle path of matted grass. He sniffed the air then stooped to touch the matted grass. “This way,” he told Rick and as they started off along the trail, he went on, “Dante is planning the attack to take place two nights before the full moon.”

  “He’s never mentioned that detail in any of the meetings.”

  “There’s a reason for that, Rick. Dante doesn’t trust the pack he’s created. He questions their collective loyalty and rightfully so. Nearly every resident he’s turned has fought him, some outwardly, others have just stewed in silent animosity. He’s questioned the number of moles in his midst. And he knows that the Quinns expect that he’s waiting for the strength of the full moon to aid his effort. What the Quinns don’t know is that he doesn’t need the full moon. His werewolves do, but Dante isn’t opposed to sacrificing them. They might have to fight at a weaker point in the moon cycle and that may get them killed, but he has always regarded them as pawns anyway.”

  “So, two nights before the full moon, his army will ambush the Quinn men as they sleep in their beds?” he summarized. “How is he planning on handling Lucy Cooper?”

  Eddie sneered a wicked grin at him and reminded Rick, “He’s been under the impression you’re taking care of her.”

  “But what if I don’t kill her?” he asked, speaking in further hypotheticals since it was obvious to Eddie that Rick had no plans of harming Lucy.