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Chapter Fifteen

Tegan

“Move,” I said to my two giant bodyguards as Josephine headed back to her desk with the phone pressed to her ear, ready to make it rain hellfire the moment Gideon answered her call.

I knew the moment I saw her sitting there this plan was fucked beyond all recognition.

“Will she actually call him or is she bluffing?” Barrett asked as we marched down the hallway. All the offices were dark. If we could get in and out of here quickly, we had a chance of actually leaving with what we needed.

“Oh, she’ll absolutely call him,” I whispered, which wasn’t easy, because I could barely breathe right now. “Not sure if she believed any of that bullshit story?—”

“I thought it was pretty good, until she called out how you left,” Bellamy said.

I rolled my eyes. “In my defense, I thought I’d never set foot in this building again. But she’s Gideon’s first, longest, and most loyal employee. She knits him a sweater every year for Christmas, you know, because he doesn’t have a mate to do it for him. She’s terrible at it too. But he wears them, because he loves Josephine. If only he treated others the way he treats her.”

“Think she might be more than just an employee?” Barrett asked.

“She’s like, pushing eighty if she’s a day.” I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

“Not like that. Like a mother, or an aunt.”

“Doesn’t matter who she is right now. She’s definitely ratting us out.” I tried the knob on the door to Gideon’s office. I knew it was locked, but it was still worth giving it a try. Good thing I managed to grab the key card off Josephine’s desk when she was feeding me her own bullshit story.

Moonlight Mates was reporting that I was probably dead? That was a bit dramatic, even for them.

Oh, shit… Bellamy said that Gideon’s guys had been at the Stepchild, and we had that run in with the wolves in the road. We didn’t need Silverclaw’s employee of the year to call in my crimes, because he already knew exactly what we were doing.

And Josephine would’ve known I didn’t have a card to get into any office, except this one had been in plain sight. Too fucking easy.

Maybe she was rooting for us to bring him down in her own way.

But we were in Gideon’s office and that was all that mattered. “We’ve been set up. This is a trap.”

“Why?” Barrett’s question was a growl.

“Because his desk is immaculate. Not like Gideon, at all.” My heart banged in my chest. “It doesn’t even look like he’s working in here anymore.”

“Let’s do a sweep before we move on. Check for anything that looks unusual,” Barrett suggested.

I slid into the chair behind the desk and went for the first drawer. Locked.

Barrett put one of his big hands on the desk, and with the other, he pulled the drawer free. He looked at me with fire in those dark eyes before he repeated the motion. He nodded to me and then joined Bellamy, who was turning over every trinket, trophy, and award in the place.

Bellamy was thorough, and I had to respect that. Maybe the grouchy bear wasn’t so bad after all.

There were some files in the drawer, but not many. Not like many things were kept on paper anymore. I flipped through, but most of these things were just permits, contracts…which might come in handy. I grabbed that group of folders. But they weren’t the plans that I’d seen on the desk, the ones that had made Gideon nervous enough to fire me.

Nothing else of interest in the files.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. It was only a matter of seconds before security came and hauled my ass out of there for a second time.

My two-man wrecking crew didn’t seem to be having any better luck. They’d hardly slowed down to take a second look at anything.

Think, Tegan. Where would he put the blueprint for the resort that you’d seen? The step-by-step instructions to destroy a pack? Think like Gideon, with his weird alliances and even more sinister ambitions.

That was when I spotted the photo on his desk. Was that…

Sweet mother of the moon, there was a framed picture of him and me. I almost didn’t recognize myself—not only because I had purple hair at the time, but because I looked so happy. It was the two of us on one of our very first tours, with a pack of shifted mountain lions.

Just before Gideon’s recklessness got one of them seriously injured.

Why would he have kept this picture, much less framed it and put it on his desk? It had been years since I’d seen this photo. With trembling hands, I pulled the back off the frame.

A thick wad of papers with drawn plans fell out.

“Guys. I found it.” I slipped the folded papers into my sports bra. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Barrett’s face lit up, and his smile warmed my body. “I knew you could do it.”

He believed in me when no one else had. Hell, I didn’t even think we could pull this off. And we did it. We fucking did it.

“Not so fast.” Gideon Silverclaw stood in the doorway of his office, in one of his impeccable, overpriced, faux safari outfits, with his arms crossed over his chest. His hair was slicked back like he’d just come out of the hair and makeup trailer. His boys, Larrie from the Moonlight Mates —and of course, Josephine—flanked him. “I believe you owe me a few things, Tegan.”