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Chapter One

PSI Division B Headquarters, location classified…

Gram Campbell sat in a chair, looking out of the infirmary-room window at the setting sun. Even being immortal and having seen countless sunsets, the beauty of it wasn’t lost on him. Although it was hard to find joy in much of anything as of late.

Not long ago, he’d thought he had it all…a ready-made family, a future. None of that was to be.

He was alone, and doing his best to heal from life-threatening injuries. He’d sustained them a few weeks ago. He’d gotten them by protecting someone he loved, and he’d do it all over again. Though, this time, he’d be sure the assholes from The Corporation couldn’t get the jump on him long enough to inject him with whatever they’d given him. It was something engineered for a supernatural with extremely high healing capabilities.

Gram had slightly higher than the average shifter-healing abilities—or he had, until the injection.

It had stopped his ability to heal himself as a supernatural would. And while he was still doing far better than a human would under the same circumstances, he was nowhere near where he should be. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be one hundred percent again. That worried him.

He couldn’t return to work as a solo operative with the Paranormal Security and Intelligence (PSI) Shadow Ops Division until he was medically cleared for duty. Gram couldn’t even get clearance to go home, let alone return to work. It had taken its toll on him mentally. He’d never been one to sit around. Idle hands were the work of the devil, in his opinion. Being forced to do nothing was pure and absolute torture.

Pain radiated through his back and down both legs. He gritted his teeth and rode out the discomfort. He knew another spasm would follow shortly behind the first. It always did. They were like aftershocks from an earthquake. Everyone knew they were coming, but no one could predict them. He’d been told the pain was caused by damaged nerves. He didn’t know or care. He just wanted it to end.

Medication had been offered to help dull the pain, but he didn’t want any more. The meds—which were experimental in the sense that no one had ever tried using the concoction before, and no one should really try to use it again—caused him to hallucinate and killed his ability to focus in any fashion. They monkeyed with his ability to use his natural-born magik and made his already pissed-off wolf even more unstable than it had been.

The hallucinations were honestly what bothered him most. They had gotten so bad while on the meds that Gram had thought his mother was in the room with him more than once, and he’d had full conversations with her.

She’d been dead for over a century.

That didn’t stop her from weighing in on his love life, or lack thereof. Yes, he understood she wasn’t really there. That she was a manifestation of some deeper need to have his mother around him when he was injured—at least that was what the head shrink had claimed; the one PSI had tried to force him to see.

Gram just thought it was caused by the shit they were injecting him with.

If getting lectured by his dead mother about getting up and out into the world to find his perfect someone wasn’t bad enough, the damn meds kept making him think a white wolf was in the room with him. It wasn’t. At least, he was about ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t.

His wolf, the one who was as broken as he was, would have lost its shit had an actual predator been near. Then again, his wolf had had the shit kicked out of it, too, so it was nowhere near full strength. That being said, it could still sense danger. It didn’t seem the least bit worried about the white wolf appearing to him. Even Gram’s wolf understood the crap they were giving him was making him loopy and high.

Gram had thought that was the weirdest it would get on the meds. He’d been wrong. Several times in the last week alone, he’d thought a red kickball had rolled into the room, only to find it wasn’t actually there. It had been a trick of his mind.

In addition, he’d started seeing a woman in white. She had long dark brown hair and pale skin. The dress she wore hung almost to the floor, leaving her bare feet showing. While the dress was nothing he’d consider fashionable or form-fitting, it was thin, gifting him a glimpse of what she did and did not have on beneath it. His dick didn’t really care if the chick was real or not. Each time she appeared to him, he walked around with a hard-on for hours.

He’d yet to see her full face, but each time he hallucinated her being in the room with him, he felt the fierce need to draw her close and protect her. The problem was, the second he tried to make contact with her, she vanished into thin air, having never actually been there to start with.

He understood she wasn’t real, that she was simply a by-product of the drugs he was being given, but none of that mattered. He couldn’t get her out of his head. She’d only just started appearing to him…and he found that ironic, since visions of her began when he’d started skipping doses of the serum. He’d assumed that would lessen the number of weird things he was seeing.

It hadn’t.

A few times, she had been standing next to the red ball, looking to be staring off at something in the distance—not that he’d seen her face or anything. He could sense her anguish, her despair, and her desperation. He could also smell her fear, as if she was real and truly near him. In addition, the hallucination of her was always accompanied by the smell of honeysuckle and vanilla. Both scents he found soothing and alluring.

Kind of like her.

She was tall for a woman but nowhere near Gram’s height. And she was thinner than he felt comfortable with. It was as if she was supposed to have more to her but didn’t. As irrational as it sounded, he wanted to feed her, care for her, and protect her.

Not to mention fuck her.

It had been three days since he’d taken the injections but he still saw her. His last time seeing her had left him acting like a fool. He’d rushed into the hallway as fast as he could, considering the condition he was in, and he’d nearly knocked over his close friend Garth, who had been coming to check on him.

Garth humored him when Gram told him of the woman in white. It was painfully clear Garth hadn’t seen her, or the white wolf who had appeared just after the woman vanished. It was also clear Garth thought Gram had lost his damn mind.

So did Gram.

His two main doctors, James Hagen and Auberi Bouchard, had threatened to hold him down and give him the meds regardless of his thoughts on the matter. He knew they’d do it at some point if he didn’t start healing on his own soon. For all the meds’ faults, they had assisted in kickstarting his healing abilities, though not to the point where they needed to be.

Still, something was better than nothing.

That was what they kept telling him.

If roles were reversed, he’d have done and said the same things to them. It was difficult to fault them for wanting the best for him. But Gram didn’t want to be under the influence of the medication any longer. He’d either heal on his own or he wouldn’t. He couldn’t continue to be out of touch with reality.

And he had to stop fixating on a woman who didn’t exist, all while also dwelling on the woman he’d cared for and lost to another.

The plus side of no meds was that he no longer had conversations with people who had long passed or saw wolves that weren’t there. The down side was that his pain was high, and his healing had crawled to a virtual standstill. He still had burns over large portions of his back and down the back of his left leg. And his right leg, which had been effectively shattered, wasn’t healed fully. It had a long way to go. The damn thing had turned into a jokester in the sense he never really knew when it was going to give out on him and stop bearing his weight.

“Trick knee, my arse,” he said gruffly. “Try trick leg. Hell, trick body.”

He was under the care of the best medical minds in the world. But that meant nothing to him. He wanted out of the infirmary—out of headquarters. He could not heal just as well at home as he could not heal there. He missed his bed and the smell of his house. The damn infirmary smelled heavily of disinfectants, all of which bothered his sensitive nose. He had a constant low-grade headache as of late, and he blamed it on the smell of bleach and pine-scented cleaners.

No pine tree he’d ever been near smelled like the stuff they used around the infirmary.

He actually longed for another woman-in-white sighting, just so he could smell something good—like her.

“Och, she’s nae real,” he reminded himself.

As pain spread down his back and into his right leg, numbing his foot, he considered changing his stance on the meds. Maybe even taking just a small dose to take the edge off.

“Even a small amount is nae guid for my mind,” he chastised himself for his moment of weakness.

The medication not only made him feel high and see things that weren’t there, it didn’t do his magik any favors, either. The same magik he’d been born with, that he’d learned to control centuries ago, was now a stranger to him thanks to the injuries and the meds. The combination left Gram’s power erratic, and that was dangerous.

Downright deadly even.

No amount of practice seemed to help. Of course, he hadn’t exactly been able to open up and go wild with his power, mainly because of his weakened state.

As much as he disliked admitting it, he wasn’t the same man he had been before the attack, before his world had turned upside down. His magik and his body should have been back to business as usual. Being stuck in a room, subjected to test after test and pumped full of experimental drugs, shouldn’t still be a thing for him.

But it was.

In fact, it was his full reality as of late.

And he hated it.

Gram had lost track of the number of days he’d been in the infirmary. Felt like forever. Far longer than he’d ever needed to be treated for anything before. The days ran into the nights and the hours ticked by painfully slowly. Some moments, he swore time stood still. If his injuries didn’t kill him, boredom likely would. Most of his friends and fellow PSI-Operatives had missions to go on that took them away from headquarters. That was great for them but sucked for Gram.

He disliked knowing he wasn’t out there helping fight the good fight. The Corporation was enemy number one, and it seemed like new revelations concerning them came daily. They had their hand in everything. They backed countless governments, controlled huge businesses, and were far bigger than anyone ever thought them to be.

They had one end goal, which seemed to be total world domination.

Aim high and all that shit.

It seemed as if they were able to regenerate at an alarming rate. PSI would cut the head off one faction only to have two more pop up elsewhere. It had been all hands on deck with PSI and its affiliates for months now. They could spare no one. He was needed in the field, not sitting on his backside, doing nothing but seeing things that weren’t there.

Besides that, he had to admit he missed his friends. The company was appreciated. He’d spent twenty years as a solo operative, but even that had given him contact with some of his friends. His handler, Armand, for one, and a network of contacts he’d acquired over the years and trusted fully. One of which was a wereshark named Cody.

Prior to being a solo operative, Gram had been part of PSI Team Eight. That had given him a close-knit set of men he considered brothers. His friends all stopped in to check on him as time permitted but he could see the pity in their eyes, and it stung.

He’d had that same look on his face more than once when visiting an injured brother-in-arms. He knew what they were thinking. If he didn’t actually heal and soon, his days with PSI were over.

Fuck that.

As if on cue, a visitor arrived.