Page 77

Cameron

I inspected the damage in the bathroom mirror. The side of my face and chin were crusty with blood, and the flesh above my ear was swollen. My hair looked like shit, and a purple bruise was already forming on my cheek.

“How’s it going in there?” Nate asked through the door.

“I look like I got kicked by a horse. Other than that, I’m doing great,” I said dryly.

“I called JC. He’s sending a team to take care of the body.”

We’d dragged the attacker to the side and piled trash bags on top of him to hide him. The second guy had vanished before we could find him.

Hissing, I dabbed at the wound with a washcloth. “Does he have any idea who may have sent them? Or how the hell they knew where we were?”

“He’s pissed,” Nate said. From the muffled sound of his voice, I could tell he’d turned around to lean against the door. “Once they take the body in, they’ll try to figure out if it’s some lone wolf hitman or someone from the Toronto pack.”

I could imagine JC’s wrath if he discovered one of his own pack members had been behind the attack. If what he’d said was true, then Rick’s family had allies within JC’s ranks, so the idea wasn’t wholly outlandish. Still, I wasn’t sure how the man would react.

“Did you check the gun for silver bullets?” I asked absently as I cleaned the blood off my cheek.

“No. I just shoved it into the saddlebag of my bike. I don’t have any gloves to handle the ammunition, but from the sensation I got when I touched the gun, I have to think it does.”

“Huh,” I grunted, frowning at my reflection.

I thought back to when I’d picked up the pistol.

How wrong it had felt in my hand, almost like it made me sick to have it touching my skin.

Absently, I touched the spot on my neck where my small silver pendant usually sat.

I’d lost it during the skirmish in the forest. Would I experience that same sensation?

Would it burn? Ache? Maybe sizzle, like I was being electrocuted? Strange how my body could change.

If I had to guess, the gun did have silver bullets. That proved how serious the men had been. The man had carried a weapon that would have been uncomfortable for him to hold, all to kidnap me. The mere thought sent a shudder up my spine.

“Hey, can you open the door? It’s weird talking to you like this,” Nate said, a good-natured lilt to his voice.

“Oh, right.” I opened the door.

He stepped in and immediately examined my face.

“How’s that?” he asked, nodding to my wound.

“Probably not as bad as yours.” I gasped. “Jesus, you haven’t cleaned the blood off your head yet.”

His split-open forehead was already sealing, something that, even in my distraught state, I found fascinating. But his face was still caked in blood. It was dried and flaking off in places.

“I’m fine. I’m more worried about you. You’re a new shifter. You won’t heal as fast as me. Not for a few weeks at least.”

“That’s something to look forward to.” I turned back to the mirror and resumed cleaning my face. I tossed a washcloth to Nate. “Clean up. You look like a savage.”

Taking the cloth, he wet it and went about scrubbing his face. “So, what do you think about what your friend Lesley said? About Lenny’s toxicology report?”

“I think it proves that whoever was using Lenny as a weapon used his addictions as a leash. Anyone who would do something like that is the worst piece of shit I can imagine.”

“We really need some way of connecting all this to the Masters family. Maybe I can try and access Rick’s phone records and prove he’s been in contact with Lenny or something. I’ve got a contact who could help with that.”

I turned to Nate. “I’d caution you against anything that goes directly against them. Something like that will be taken as a direct threat. We’ve seen what they’re capable of. Maybe you should leave this to JC.”

“They’ve already tried killing Ollie, busting my brains in, chased you through the woods, and attacked you in a fucking convenience store.

” Nate tilted his head back dramatically.

“Jesus. And let’s not forget they used a feral to forcibly turn you into a shifter.

I doubt there’s much more they can do to us that they haven’t already. ”

My shoulders slumped. “Still, JC has power and resources we don’t.”

A thought occurred to me then, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek.

“What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?” Nate asked.

“Speaking of resources, I may put a call into some people I know from work. Maybe if we can’t get him on this , we can get Rick on something else.”

“What’s that? Clubbing baby seals?” Nate asked derisively. “Playing polo with kittens instead of balls?”

Snorting a laugh, I said, “No, smartass. There might be something more innocuous that could bring him down. Traffic violations, tax fraud, stuff like that. I mean, the FBI never caught Al Capone. In the end, it was the IRS who put him behind bars.”

Nate bobbed his eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. “Fair enough. Here, give me that,” he said, snatching the cloth from my hand.

“ Hey .”

“Calm down,” he muttered, tilting my chin up.

He gently cleaned the wound, being sure to be extra cautious around the lump on my head. I relaxed into his touch. His fingers on my skin sent waves of electric energy through my entire body. I couldn’t explain it, but I relished it.

“There.” He tossed the cloth into the sink. “Where else do you hurt?”

“What doesn’t hurt?” I rolled my eyes. “After the last two days, I feel like I’ve been rolled down a mountain in a trash can.”

Nate gently probed my body for aches and pains, touching here, massaging there. Nothing overtly sexual, yet there was a strange eroticism to it.

“Christ, your hands,” Nate said, wincing.

Both my palms were raw from catching myself on the pavement when I’d fallen. They looked worse than they felt, though.

“Yeah. Not great. It stings a little, but it’s not bad.” I studied my palms. They looked much better than they had even twenty minutes ago. “I really am healing faster. “

“You’ll heal even faster the longer you’re a shifter. Look.” He raised his shirt, showing me some of the injuries he’d received in his fight with Rick. The cuts and bruises had already faded. They looked like weeks-old injuries.

“Wow,” I said, looking from his wounds to mine. “I’m like a superhero.”

Nate chuckled. “Something like that. Let me make sure you’re okay everywhere else.”

Nate lifted my shirt to check my lower back for bruises, then rolled up my pants to inspect for cuts and abrasions. It felt pleasantly surreal. A weird, pulsing energy seemed to be pulling us toward each other. A magnetism I couldn’t fight even if I wanted to.

Again, I found myself in a bathroom with him, wondering what it would be like to be with this man.

To really be with him. Somehow, when we were together, the rest of the world vanished.

Right then, it was as if he and I were the only people on the planet.

An intense desire flooded me, and my inner wolf urged me to touch him, but I held off. Barely.

As if he could read my mind, Nate looked up, his eyes latching onto mine. For a moment, we stared at each other. A tether bound us, dragging us closer. My wolf growled in happy anticipation, and a small grin spread across Nate’s lips.

The moment shattered when his phone rang. We jerked away from each other, and the energy dissipated. Unfortunately. My wolf and my own subconscious gave a bitter snarl at the interruption.

Nate glanced at his phone. “It’s Ollie. I gotta take this.”

“Put it on speaker,” I said. “I want to hear.”

Nate nodded. “Ollie, I’m really glad you called,” he added with a bitter note in his voice.

“Yeah, I love you, too,” Ollie said. “I was calling back about that little issue you figured out.”

Nate glanced at me. “I told Ollie about what you found in the toxicology report.”

“What did you find, Ollie?” I asked.

“Hard to describe,” he said. “At first, I shrugged it off. Addicts relapse. Happens a thousand times a day. What’s the big deal?

But the fact that he was being manipulated struck me as weird.

I followed my hunch and did some digging.

Nate, you remember what I told you about Rick’s dad joining the pack? ”

“You said he sort of appeared a couple decades back,” Nate said. “Lots of money, desperate to join up, and with a kid in tow.”

“Yeah. Lincoln Masters has been very covert about his past, but rumors still get out. There’s no proof to it, but people always said he probably came from the Detroit area.

That he’d been a member of that pack and had some sort of falling out.

I checked, and around the same time he joined up with the Toronto pack, a huge meth problem plagued Detroit.

More than the usual drug crisis. This stuff had absolutely flooded the streets.

The kicker? Almost as soon as Lincoln joins Toronto, the problem eases. ”

“What the fuck?” Nate’s face was a mask of confusion that matched what I felt inside. What was Ollie getting at? Could Rick’s father have been the reason for the surge in drug use back then?

“The guy got really lucky, too,” Ollie went on.

“Before Lincoln joined up, the laws about switching packs were pretty lax. Shifters are pretty goddamned loyal, so bouncing around packs was never a huge problem. Packs were always hesitant to bring in new people, but it wasn’t as big a deal as it is now.

Plus, Lincoln probably greased the wheels with cash.

A few grand in the pockets of certain elders makes the process easier, if I had to guess.

With all that, no one thought we needed restrictions?—”

“I know where you’re going with this,” Nate said through gritted teeth.

“Yeah. About three months after Lincoln joined, a feral wolf ends up murdering an alpha’s mate out near Maine.

That sent the entire North American pack system into a frenzy.

Alphas became paranoid, and packs enacted a ton of laws and unspoken rules about stamping ferals out like some cancer, shunning lone wolves because they were more likely to turn feral.

It was a huge deal.” Ollie sighed. “It’s also why you’ve had such a rough life, Nate, and I’m sorry for that.

I wanted to give you an overview of what I found. ”

“You said there was an explosion in methamphetamine use in Detroit,” I said. “But I don’t recall ever hearing about anything like that here.”

“If he was involved, and I want to put an emphasis on if , then he’s much smarter about it this time around,” Ollie said.

“Meth use on the streets began to rise almost from the moment Lincoln arrived.

I pulled arrest reports for the last twenty years.

You can see the steady rise, beginning within months of his arrival and acceptance into the pack.

“After seeing all this, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the guy Rick sent after Cameron randomly happened to be an addict from Lincoln’s old stomping grounds.

There’s too many threads connecting this family to all this shit.

We said Lenny was being controlled, and I think Rick did it with drugs,” Ollie said.

“Where do we go from here?” Nate asked. “Everything you’ve said sounds circumstantial. Is there any concrete proof?”

“Not as of yet. I’ve reached out to a contact in Detroit. I’m waiting to hear back if he can meet up. There’s a chance he has some dirt we can use against the Masters family. I’ll let you know what he says, and maybe the three of us can speak to him.”

“Definitely,” Nate said. “Tell us as soon as you have a meeting set up.”

“Will do. That’s all I’ve got. I wanted you to know.”

“Thanks. Call if you hear any more.”

“Will do. Bye, guys.”

When Nate ended the call, I could see the wheels turning in his head.

This was getting weirder by the minute. Had Rick’s father amassed his fortune through drug sales?

The idea was so incongruous with the image I had of him that it made me dizzy.

I recalled the ritzy gala where I’d met him and his wife Madison for the first time.

In my mind, drug dealers were street-level criminals dressed in torn jeans and scuffed boots.

They definitely weren’t polished, coiffed snobs wearing three-thousand-dollar suits and thousand-dollar shoes.

“Are you still hungry?” Nate said. “You didn’t get the snacks you wanted, and I’m starving.”

My stomach was still grumbling. In fact, it made a loud gurgling sound when he mentioned food, and I blushed in embarrassment.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Nate said with a grin. “I’m going to order more takeout. I’d rather not leave the house again. I’m fairly certain this house is safe, but after what happened earlier, I’d rather not take chances.”

“Good call,” I agreed.

An hour later, we were sitting on the couch, eating falafel and gyros while watching TV.

His knee brushed against mine, and I was struck by how strangely domestic this all was.

As though we’d been spent years together doing this.

I enjoyed the steadiness that came with being around Nate, as did my inner wolf.

When we were done eating, I leaned against him, letting his warmth radiate into me. The show we were watching faded into the background as I curled up against him, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart.

After a while, I felt eyes on me. When I looked up, Nate was staring down at me.

Almost drunk on his scent, I grinned, and when he leaned down to kiss me, I parted my lips and swept my tongue into his mouth.

The kiss was deep, passionate, and sent a shudder of desire through me.

Nate growled and pulled me closer. My wolf let out a low, happy growl as he wrapped his arms around me.

After all that had happened, we both needed a release.

A moment to forget everything. The fear, the worry, the drama that had filled our lives the last few days.

For all we knew, this could be our last chance to be together.

Even with all of JC’s promises and assurances, the pack could turn Nate away.

If that was the case, then I wanted to drink in every moment with him.

I ran my fingers into his hair and kissed him even harder.