That was when Cooper hurled a heavy, unbroken olive jar as hard as he could at her head. It hit its target, and Sylvia’s growl turned into a short little whine, like a question mark. She swayed, obviously dazed, and the dark wolf tossed her off him, re-seized the nape of her neck with his teeth and knocked her head against what remained standing of the olive stock. Sylvia fell to the floor, unconscious.
The sudden silence was startling. Cooper only heard the beating of his heart in his ears and his own fast breathing. Too fast.
The large, dark wolf was eyeing him. Beautiful amaretto eyes wary, skittish and sad. A dog expecting the boot.
Cooper dropped to his knees. “Oliver,” he exhaled, and the wolf blinked. “Thought you were dead.”
His chest hurt and his arms felt funny. Too light for his body. Like a hive of bees had set up camp right under his clavicle and swarms of them were filling his appendages. He refused to let them fly him away. He couldn’t bear to take his eyes off Park for one second.
He reached one buzzing arm toward Park. The wolf dipped his head, unsure, then limped slowly closer, leaving bloody paw prints on the cement. He sat, just out of reach of Cooper’s hand, and then slid to a lying-down position, watching, always watching. Cooper got the distinct impression that his every expression was being scrutinized and memorized to be obsessed over later, but he couldn’t care less. Not when Park was bleeding and they’d both almost just died.
He shuffled forward on his knees and without hesitation checked the wound on Park’s side. It was bleeding sluggishly, little pieces of glass still poking out of the fur. Cooper picked them out carefully, keeping an eye on the flow. When it was clean, he unbuttoned his shirt and wrapped it around Oliver’s torso as a makeshift bandage. The back foot was worse. Larger pieces more deeply embedded, but because of the location it was bleeding a lot less, so he worked those out, too. Park stayed silent and still the whole time.
“There. You should be fine. It’s hard to tell like this, but I don’t think you’ll even need stitches.”
Park blinked at him. His fur looked...soft. Luxurious, even. Interestingly, the dark brown faded to a silvery white on his belly, legs, throat, and in two little spots behind his ears. Cooper wanted to reach out and stroke him. Hold him. But didn’t want to do anything that could be interpreted as treating him like an animal. So Cooper held his front paw instead and squeezed. Park looked down at where they touched.
“I should check on Eli,” Cooper said finally. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for exactly. Park obviously wasn’t going to say anything. Not like this. Cooper wasn’t sure why he wasn’t shifting back, but it probably had something to do with pain or adrenaline or, hell, maybe just being naked in a pretty frigid warehouse.
Cooper started to pull away. Oliver’s other front paw crossed his body with some effort to come down on his hand, and he blinked up at him.
Cooper couldn’t help it. He had to say it. “I’m sorry. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look really—”
He and Oliver both jumped as somewhere in the warehouse a door slammed open.
“BSI! Put your hands up and identify your location!”
“We’re here!” Cooper yelled back. “Situation controlled. Suspect is incapacitated and we’ve got an agent down!”
Oliver narrowed his eyes.
“What? You’re literally in down position.” He could hear the thumping boots of agents approaching nearby. He must have been closer to the exit than he thought. “We’re here!” he called again. “Repeat. Situation controlled. Suspect is incapacitated. Agent Park is—”
A BSI agent rounded the corner with his weapon drawn and tased Park.
Chapter Thirteen
“Oliver!” Cooper called, stomping into the Parks’ foyer, snow and mud flying off his boots across the tile. He didn’t care. He just needed to find Oliver, to see he was okay.
As soon as Park had been hit in the warehouse, it was mayhem. Cooper had lost his shit, going after the agent who had tased him—soon-to-be ex-agent if Cooper had anything to say about it. Immediately the rest of the BSI team had shown up, and while some tried to calm Cooper down, a couple of wolf agents had surrounded an unconscious Park and taken him away to be checked out. They hadn’t allowed Cooper to go with him, promising, “Agent Park will be driven back to his family’s estate as soon as he’s shifted and been given the okay.”
Cooper had rushed through giving his statement as fast as possible—which had still taken hours of waiting around while they sorted out stories. By the time he was free to leave, Park was already gone.
“Oliver!” Cooper called, striding through the dining room and checking the empty kitchen. There wasn’t any sign of a single Park family member, and the feeling of dread in his stomach increased.
Relax, it’s just leftover adrenaline, he tried to tell himself. But that was a lie. The unformed suspicions that had been floating around his head since yesterday were growing darker and more worrisome now. This case just didn’t add up.
The BSI agents hadn’t been interested in telling Cooper much—he was still the agency’s most unwanted, after all—but they couldn’t keep him entirely in the dark. Especially not after they themselves had fucked up so royally. They basically agreed with Daisy. Sylvia Rosetti had decided it was time for a change in power. She’d lured the Freemans here and given them “permission” to camp on the border of her property with stories of “abnormal wolves” passing through her woods and plenty of tracks to prove it. Then she’d stolen their guns and murdered Joe, setting them up as the perfect patsies, either as distraction or to be killed as well, their murders pinned on the family.
“Probably hoped the pack would do her dirty work for her and actually slaughter the poor bastards,” an agent named Morrison had said before another agent had kicked him and muttered something about how Cooper was fucking one of said pack. They’d shut up real quick after that.
Sylvia was sticking to her story: she had no idea where Girard was and she’d known nothing about the attacks until she’d shown up to work just before dawn to find Geoff dead. Initial findings had put the time of death late last night. She claimed when she found the body she’d panicked, locked the office door and left to “get help.” She claimed there was no sign of Dr. Freeman at that time and adamantly denied putting her in the fridge. When Sylvia had returned, she’d attacked Cooper and Eli in the belief that they were there on behalf of the Park pack to take her in...or rather, take her out.
Her story was weak, even for a phony alibi. Why would she think the pack was retaliating unless she was admitting responsibility for Joe’s and Freeman’s murders? She had no answer for that. Whose help had she supposedly gone to get? She wouldn’t say. In fact, shortly after insisting she’d been set up, she’d just stopped speaking entirely.
The BSI didn’t sound particularly concerned when Cooper had asked these questions. “Are you trying to say Ms. Rosetti didn’t attack you?”
“No, she did. She definitely did.”
“Then what’s the problem? You said yourself she wouldn’t have attacked you if she was innocent, and Dr. Freeman picked her out of the lineup as her attacker.”
The problem was Cooper’s gut was less satisfied than ever. There were too many unanswered questions. Like why kill Geoff? If this was all about a pack war, wouldn’t she want her right-hand man by her side? And why kill David Freeman but not Emily? Not unless this was really about something besides a simple takeover. Acres and acres of something else...
“Oliver!” Cooper called again, anxiously. He walked into the living room and Stuart quickly stood from where he’d been huddled on the couch, running his hands through his hair.
“Oh.” Cooper lingered in the doorway, leaving a good deal of distance between them. His every instinct telling him to turn back around, get in the car and drive straight back home to DC, do not pass go, do not colle
ct two hundred dollars. But leaving Park was not an option. It never had been. “Is Oliver here?”
“Upstairs. Showering.” Stuart swallowed. “He told us what happened.” His voice was gruff and his eyes were red. His mustache was particularly uneven, as if he had pulled out several of the hairs on one side. The same side as the scar.
“Right. I should go. Check on him.”
“Has Sylvia...” Stuart stopped. Wet his lips. “Did she really do it?”
“She hasn’t confessed,” Cooper said slowly. “But Dr. Freeman has positively identified her, so they’re charging her. Three counts of homicide. One attempted homicide, two abductions. They’re even towing our car in to see if there’s evidence of foul play with the brakes.”
“Jesus.” Stuart’s eyes slid shut as if he couldn’t bear to see the world a moment longer. “Did she say...why?”
“She’s not talking at all. For now.” Cooper shifted in place and kept his voice carefully neutral, calm, uncurious. “The BSI thinks it was all about taking over your family’s territory.” He hesitated. “That seems like a lot of work for little payoff to me. Who cares about the title and some taxes on dying businesses when the real money’s in the land?”
Stuart looked up at him sharply. The nails of his right hand lengthened to claws and then retreated back into his skin. A reflex he’d thought better of.
They were both silent for a long moment, then, “You have to believe me,” Stuart said roughly. “I didn’t know anything about the rest of it.”
“Anything about what?” Helena said, slipping into the room from behind Cooper, who jumped, heart pounding.
Marcus followed her and put a reassuring hand on Cooper’s arm. “All right there?” he murmured, and Cooper nodded. “We heard about Sylvia. Shocking.”
“You didn’t know anything about the rest of what?” Helena repeated impatiently, looking between Cooper and her son.
“Helena, I...” Stuart took a deep breath. His whole body was shaking and the whites of his eyes had disappeared, lost to the wolf. “This is my fault. Sylvia and I have been selling land, our land, to housing developers for the past year. We were just trying to revitalize Port Drove. All this space was just going to waste while wolves are living on top of each other in the cities.
“I swear I had no idea Sylvia had hurt anyone. You have to believe me. That was never part of the plan. We were just selling the outer properties. The ones we don’t even touch. I would never have let her—”
Helena slapped him. The crack of flesh on flesh rang through the air, shocking Cooper. It clearly shocked Stuart, too. “Mom?” he whispered.
“When you first came to us about parceling the land, we told you no. You disobeyed us and now Joe is dead. You continued to lie, to protect Rosetti over your own family, and Oliver, Eli and Mr. Dayton were nearly killed.”
Cooper blinked, surprised to hear his own name in the mix. Beside him Marcus had gone extremely still, not even breathing.
“I didn’t know.” Stuart’s voice shook.
“I believe you,” Helena said, and raised her hand to Stuart’s face again. Cooper stepped forward. She may be over a hundred pounds lighter and more than a foot shorter than her son, but he couldn’t just stand by and watch an assault.
But Helena didn’t hit him. She just curved her palm gently to Stuart’s cheek and looked into his eyes. Her own irises had expanded and shimmered into dark, unforgiving pools. “But you have put this entire pack at risk. You may no longer call yourself a Park.”
Stuart gasped and then made a horrible sound. Something like a moan that seemed to come from deep within him. “Please... I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t...”
“Enough. You are not my pack anymore.”
He fell to his knees and started to shake, but Helena just stood there, impassively, even as Stuart pressed his lips together as if trying to stifle his own protests and promises.
Cooper felt a sharp tug as Marcus took a surprisingly firm grip of his elbow. “Come on,” he muttered. “You can’t see this.”
Cooper resisted. “He needs help.”
Stuart had fallen to his side now and was hugging himself so tightly his shoulders looked dislocated. Maybe they were. Cooper could hear the rock-against-rock sounds as the rest of Stuart’s body began to shift. His features were becoming horribly distorted, so much slower and more painful than when Camille had done it. Almost like he was fighting the change.
“You need to go. This is not for humans to see,” Marcus said urgently. His eyes were very bright, intense.
“What are you doing?” Cooper demanded, trying to shake Marcus off. Helena ignored them, not taking her eyes off her son. “You’re hurting him.”
“He’s hurting himself,” Marcus said. “You can’t help him now.”
“But—”
“You’re just making it worse,” Marcus said, and when he tugged on Cooper’s arm again, it was hard enough that Cooper felt it in the tendons of his neck and he finally let himself be pulled from the room. “He needs to shift and he wouldn’t want you here. Go. Wait for Oliver upstairs.”
Marcus closed the door firmly behind him, and Cooper stood alone in the foyer.
Twenty-five long minutes later, even with the ridiculously thick walls, he could still hear the plaintive howl that echoed all the way through the house. When he looked out the bedroom window, he saw a thin gray wolf run across the snow and disappear between the trees. With conviction he rarely felt about anything, Cooper was sure that would be the last time he ever saw Stuart Park.
* * *
“Fired isn’t good enough. I want him arrested. And then I’m going to fucking kill him. Incompetent piece of...”
Cooper trailed off as the bedroom door opened and a fully dressed and person-shaped Park slipped into the room. It had been over an hour since Cooper had gone upstairs to wait, but Park looked like he’d only just gotten out of the shower minutes ago. Had he been in there this whole time?
His hair was wet, cheeks flushed, and he looked so handsome it took Cooper’s breath away. If I had never seen this man again...
“Santiago, I’m going to have to call you back.”
“Agent Dayton, wait. Don’t you dare hang up this phone. We need to discuss—”
“There’s nothing left to discuss. I told you, I’m finished.”
“You can’t—”
Cooper cut the call and tossed his phone on the open suitcase in the corner. “Hey.”
“Hello.” Park hesitated in the doorway, expression unreadable, then moved into the room to sit on the bed. He limped slightly, keeping weight off his left foot.
Cooper ached to sit beside him and hold him. To be held. He was still deeply shaken. Not just from what had happened with Sylvia but also from seeing Stuart...well, whatever that had been.
It didn’t make sense why it had bothered him so much. He knew it didn’t make sense. The guy had been a dick from the moment they’d met and he was at least partially responsible for multiple crimes. But the look of pure agony on his face had disturbed Cooper on a level he wasn’t even sure he fully understood yet—almost like he’d witnessed some horrible violence—and right now all he wanted was to remember how Park’s hair smelled and what the skin just along the edge of his jaw felt like against his lips ten hours after he last shaved.
But there was a force field of tension radiating off of Park, screaming Do Not Touch, so he stayed standing where he was and tried not to sway toward his personal true north too obviously.
“How are you feeling?”
Park shrugged. “Fine. All bandaged up now. You were right. No stitches necessary. The tasing was...not something I want to experience again, but no permanent effects.” He smiled faintly at him. “At least for me. Sounds like the agent responsible might be in for some trouble.”
“Ex-agent. Santiago just called to t
ell me. He’s officially been booted,” Cooper said. After the first time had resulted in a fatal tragedy, the BSI now had a zero-tolerance policy for wrongful shootings, thank god. Any agent who couldn’t quickly and properly assess a situation or whose first instinct was to use deadly, unnecessary force was not someone who should be carrying anything more dangerous than Pixy Stix. “If he’s smarter than he seems, he’ll skedaddle out of town before I catch up with him.”
“He better watch his back in the salad accouterments aisle, your weapon of choice.”
Cooper snorted but felt a twinge of nerves. Accouterments? Park’s language was getting all flowery and private school, a sure sign he was uncomfortable.
“Nice aim, by the way,” Park added.
“I’ve been known to pitch a few strikes under pressure. Best closer Little League ever saw.”
“Really?”
“No. I was lousy. But Sylvia was two feet away. It wasn’t exactly the majors.”
Park still seemed nervous and uncomfortable. He shifted restlessly and the bed creaked in protest. “What did you mean on the phone to Santiago? You said I’m finished. What—what did that mean?”
“Oh.” Cooper exhaled shakily. “I told her I’m done with the BSI. I’m, uh, going to put in my papers, so to speak.”
Park stared at him. “That’s it? Just like that?” There was more panic in his eyes than Cooper had expected. After all, he hadn’t really hidden his dissatisfaction and Park had known he was considering this for a long time. Was Cooper supposed to have consulted him first?
“Well, yeah,” Cooper said slowly. “I mean, after what happened today?” He shuddered. “I’ve had enough.”
Park abruptly looked down at his lap and a violent tremor shook his body.
“Oliver—?”
“It’s nothing. Just...hurts.” He touched his side gently.
Cooper took a step forward, reaching to comfort him.
“No, please,” Park said softly. “I can’t.”
Cooper froze and then stepped back, dropping his hands to the side. It wasn’t like Park to reject touch, and he felt a prickle of worry and frustration. Could this withdrawn attitude be because he’d seen him shift? That...bothered Cooper more than he’d thought it would. What was the big fucking deal? Was he really so untrustworthy still?
Thrown to the Wolves (Big Bad Wolf) Page 23