Page 81

Ollie had said Anita was in her early thirties with bright red hair and a scar on her cheek.

I spotted her immediately at the back of the café.

She saw us, and Ollie must have given her a description of us as well because she waved at us hesitantly.

Raising my own hand in greeting, I led Nate to the back booth.

“Anita?” I asked as we approached.

She nodded and gave me a thin smile. “Yes. You’re Cameron and Nate?”

“That would be us,” Nate said, and gave her a reassuring grin as we took our seats opposite her.

A server swooped by before we’d gotten settled to take our orders.

During the interaction, I watched Anita.

The scar on her face was one of her defining features, marring what would otherwise have been breathtaking beauty.

The thin, diagonal, and jagged blemish ran from her right earlobe down her jawline almost to her chin.

She seemed overly conscious of it, too, keeping her head turned and presenting the uninjured cheek, as well as touching her face and subtly covering the scar with her hand.

“Anita?” Nate said, his voice low and warm, unthreatening. “I’m really glad you’re willing to speak to us.”

Anita took a sip of her coffee. “When Ollie called and said JC needed a favor, I couldn’t help but say yes.” She must have noticed my gaze lingering on her scar. “It happened a long time ago.”

Blinking in surprise, I tore my eyes from her jaw and back to her eyes, embarrassment sending heat to my cheeks. “Uh, I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to?—”

“It’s fine. No worries.” She ran a finger along the twisted scar. “I call this my battle wound. My bonded mate did it to me.”

“He what ?” Nate snarled. “Your own mate ?”

She nodded again. “Yes. He wasn’t who I thought he was, and I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”

The words slammed into me with surreal force.

Again, my gaze bounced to her scar and back to her eyes.

I could almost envision myself in her shoes.

What would have happened if I hadn’t discovered who Rick truly was?

We would have ended up married, and then what?

Would he get mad about something I said and attack me like this poor woman’s mate had attacked her?

Anita’s phone rang, and she glanced at the screen. “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s my son.”

She answered the call, keeping her voice low.

“Hey, sweetie, what’s wrong?” She flashed us an apologetic smile.

“Yes… well, that’s not really something Aunt Sherry can do…

She’s in charge while I’m gone, what she says goes…

No, you can’t buy more credits for that game…

No… No… Can we talk about this when I get home?

I’m doing something right now… Okay… Love you, bye. ”

She rolled her eyes as she put her phone face down. “ Kids . Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” I said, waving a hand through the air. But deep down, I could see myself in this woman, and it disturbed me how close I’d come to becoming her. Damaged and all on her own with a child after her mate had shown his true colors. I suppressed a shudder.

“Uh, how’s JC doing?” Anita’s tone was casual, but something in her eyes said there was a deeper meaning behind her question.

“Good, as far as I can tell,” Nate said.

“What’s your connection to Ollie and JC?” I asked.

Anita shrugged one shoulder. “I’m a cop.

Ollie and I have worked together in the past. We’re in different packs, but there are times when cases in Detroit and Toronto overlap.

JC…” She took what appeared to be a steadying breath after saying his name and went on.

“Well, I’ve known him a long time.” Color crept into her cheeks.

It was obvious she and JC had something going on, and she was trying her best to hide it from us.

She was doing a poor job of it. My journalistic intuition told me there was some sort of romantic link between the two.

Either current or in the past, I couldn’t tell.

Was it forbidden to have a mate outside your pack?

Some backwards law similar to the way packs rejected lone wolves?

A lot of what I’d learned and experienced with pack life had been positive so far. I could still see that fat envelope of cash JC had given my mother, and all the hoops he’d jumped through to help me and Ollie after the attack. Yet, it appeared there were a lot of things in need of adjustment.

“How is JC, by the way?” Anita asked, doing her best to sound casual but failing miserably.

“He’s good. Are you guys close?” I asked.

Anita chewed at her lower lip, trying to hide a smile.

“You could say that. Like I said, we go way back.” She rolled her eyes, a self-indulgent smile on her lips.

“When we were young, JC was quite the ladies’ man.

He was a few years younger than me, but that didn’t matter.

He and I had a connection. We, uh, had some fun times in high school, if you get my drift.

Had I not gone off to college and met my mate…

” She sighed. “Who knows. Anyway, back to business. Where were we?”

“They tell us you’ve had some experience with the Masters family?” Nate prodded, trying to get the conversation back on track. “Why don’t you tell us what you know about them?”

Our server arrived a moment later and set our plates down. As interested as I was in what Anita knew, my new shifter metabolism screamed at me, and I began eating before the first word was out of her mouth.

“I am very familiar with Lincoln Masters.” Anita scowled.

“He’s one slick son of a bitch. My old partner spent over twenty years trying to catch that bastard.

When he retired, his one regret was never tossing Lincoln’s ass in jail.

I joined the department when I was twenty-one, right after leaving my mate.

When I got promoted to detective, he mentored me.

I’ve decided to pursue this in honor of him, but I have to say”—she shook her head wearily—“he was right about Lincoln being slippery.”

“What’s so hard about finding out what they’re doing?” I asked.

“The Masters Foundation, for one,” Anita said, popping a fry into her mouth.

“It’s a front. A well-financed and managed front.

The foundation is used to create shell companies to hide Lincoln’s other holdings.

One of the biggest shell companies is a legitimate business.

A construction company. Keeble and Jax.”

The name sent a bolt of excitement through me. Lenny Nash had worked for that company, along with his cousin. The Masters Foundation owned that company? I’d assumed they were partners. This was a direct link from Lenny to Rick.

“There’s accounting firms, logistics companies—hell, they even own a chain of gas stations out near Montreal.

That, and everything in between,” Anita explained.

“We’ve tracked several interesting things that looked to be leading back to Lincoln Masters.

Some are pretty gruesome. Murders, disappearances, corporate takeovers, anything you can imagine. ”

“Then go to your superiors,” I urged, jabbing my finger into the table for emphasis. “Go after this guy.”

“All my evidence is circumstantial or tenuous at best. When looked at from a distance, it seems like I’m connecting dots that aren’t there.

It only becomes obvious when you really drill down and dig.

That isn’t enough for a warrant or official investigation.

Besides, there’s the pack dynamics I have to worry about outside the human police force. ”

“What?” I glanced from Anita to Nate, who now looked like he was sucking on a lemon.

“Lincoln Masters left the Detroit pack he’d been born into and joined up with the Toronto pack right before the laws changed,” Anita explained.

“Those new rules made it a pain in the ass for shifters to change packs, and damn near impossible for lone wolves to be accepted into one. He slipped in right before that. He’s become a pretty influential member of that pack.

If I were to level accusations against him and possibly trigger a human investigation into his dealings without incontrovertible proof… you know what would happen.”

“War.” Nate tossed his fork down bitterly. “JC’s hand would be forced if enough pack elders took offense to what Anita did.”

“A pack war?” I asked dumbly. “That’s a thing?”

“Not usually,” Anita said. “Pack warfare only happens between smaller packs. Regional conflicts aren’t that unheard of.

But”—she held up a finger—“packs the size of Toronto-Ottawa and Detroit? That hasn’t been seen in at least a hundred years.

The only way I can go after Lincoln Masters is if I catch him red-handed.

At that point, no one could question it. ”

“What have you found?” I asked, trying not to think of the disaster a full-scale shifter war would look like.

“Drugs,” Anita said with a shrug. “Lincoln Masters made his money on drugs. It’s honestly the craziest success story I’ve ever seen. Not only because of the sheer amount of money he made, but because of how well he hid his identity while he did.

“About twenty or twenty-five years ago, a huge surge in crack cocaine, heroin, and meth swept through Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland,” she went on.

“The main drug flooding the streets was meth, though. Law enforcement in all three cities were struggling to find the supplier and producer. The only thing we had to go on was this weird rumor of a drug kingpin known only as… wait for it… The Wolf.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Nate said, letting out a derisive laugh.