Page 10

Chapter 10

A dler’s senses seemed heightened to the extreme. It was a combination of the scent of blood and his mate so near, his mate who Adler needed to keep safe no matter what.

That’s the wolf talking. Of course he is safe here. Get a grip .

Adler forced himself to shift his focus from Gordon to the bodies.

In this, her human form, Adler didn’t recognize the female wolf, Mary Ann. He saw that her medium-long hair had been dyed—nothing as colorful as his mate did, just a light tone of caramel brown with the roots showing in almost black. Gordon never lets his hair grow out this much. Was she too busy to touch it up? Or was she trying to get back to her natural color? I wonder what she looked like in her wolf form. I must have heard her howl during the full moon at some point.

“Was her chest torn open with bare hands?” Adler asked, leaning forward across the area the forensics team wasn’t done with yet.

Maxim nodded. “I thought the same. That’s why I wanted the both of you here.”

Gordon came back, now mostly covered in one of the all-white forensics suits. He put on a surgical mask and face shield, then pulled up the hood of the suit, zipping it all the way in the front before pulling on a set of black gloves.

Now uniformed like the rest of the forensics team, he crossed the line of tape, stepping into the heart of the mayhem.

“Have you documented the bodies so far? Can I examine them?” he asked a team member.

Adler didn’t know if his mate was able to tell the forensics people apart. He sure couldn’t. However, the person Gordon had asked nodded, and Gordon carefully made his way over to Mary Ann.

“Anything you can glean, Gordon, we are eager to hear,” Maxim said, crossing his arms.

Adler frowned. Maxim wasn’t happy, and given Adler’s beta nature, seeing someone so alpha unhappy had the same effect on him. He felt glumness creep in from all sides made only worse by the fact that he couldn’t be physically near to his mate just then.

“Well,” Gordon said, peering into the open chest. “I’ll need them back at the morgue before I give you anything definitive, but”—he looked at the broken ribs like fence posts after a car crashed into them—”I think this was likely done by a vampire. Not a very young one, someone with the kind of explosive strength that comes with age. And yes, at first glance, I’d say they tore into her. Through her. They paid no attention at all to keeping your ribs lined up all evenly, did they? Such horrible manners.” He turned his attention to the male corpse. “The neck is broken, here. That would have taken quite a forceful blow.” He looked back over to the werewolf’s corpse. “I don’t see the heart, but the lungs are there, and…” Adler took a steadying breath as he watched his precious mate reach inside that torn-open chest and feel around. “Yeah. I’d say it’s just the heart that’s missing.”

Maxim raised his chin. “But you’ll have to count all the wobbly bits later?”

Gordon barely glanced up from his work. “Exactly.” He took a few steps back, looked around and took an instrument from a work kit nearby. A thermometer, Adler realized when Gordon pushed it inside the open chest. “I think this happened in the early hours.”

Adler looked at the message on the wall behind the two bodies, the red letters stirring something in the back of his mind. He turned to Maxim.

“Do you have any reason to think humans are involved? I mean, it doesn’t seem like it.”

A very small frown line appeared on Maxim’s otherwise smooth forehead. “I’m not sure. For now, I am including you as the direct point of contact between this investigation and the NAPD. Better to have you here than to miss you later. Like a condom you always carry in your pocket just in case, you know.”

Adler’s wolf nearly bounced with happiness when Gordon’s head spun around. “Maxim, did you just compare Adler to a condom?”

Maxim smiled, putting his teeth on display. “In the most loving way, of course. My way of celebrating technological and cultural advances such as condoms surely are.” He glanced at Adler. “I’m sure you’d be the textured kind.”

Adler heard Gordon gasp, and he hated that the suit covered up his mate all too well. Still, it was enough for Adler to feel very smug indeed.

With his mate’s shock on his behalf pushing him, Adler allowed himself to give Maxim a smug look. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Maxim?”

At least one of the forensic people looked up from their work.

Maxim gasped in fake-shock. “Oh my, Adler. Now you tell me, now that you have been mated for good, taken off the menu of all single people who do not mind getting bitten while playing in the sheets. Oh, I lament the time I wasted knowing you but never knowing you truly, utterly, in the way a flower knows the bee or a keyhole the turgid key—”

“Seriously, do you have to, in front of my corpses?” Gordon said.

Maxim winked at Adler. “Feisty, isn’t he?”

“The feistiest.” Adler met Gordon’s eyes, pretty much the only part of his mate’s face he could see right now.

Unspoken tenderness passed between them, and Gordon huffed in exasperation before turning back to the two bodies.

“I’ll take care of them. If you two have any other clues to follow, you can go do that now.”

Aw, he’s dismissing me. Fuck, if I were in my wolf form right now, I’d show him my belly, hoping he’d pet me.

“Gordon, darling, you’ll make Adler jealous, what with his body temperature being so much higher than that of your lovely corpses,” Maxim said. “I trust he is not that dismissive of you normally, Adler?”

“Only if I try to wake him early,” Adler said, fondness making color rise to his cheeks.

Maxim nodded. “Such are the joys and tribulations of bedding together and waking together, of negotiating having and holding forever what others can only dream of. But so often the soft love of hours early and middling dark will mark the will of the willing and wanting. It’s a gift given gradually and grudgingly, those ghastly early hours, Adler. Best cherish them to utmost effect.”

“You are distracting when you break into metered monologue,” Gordon said. “Can you two please just go and leave everyone else to do their jobs?”

This brought agreeable sniggers from the small platoon of white-clad clue hunters.

Maxim sighed. “Adler, next time you bring your mate, I expect you to caffeinate. Gordon, we’ll talk more once you and the corpses are done.”

Gordon turned. “Oh, the looming fun.”

The look on Maxim’s face, bereft of a rhyme, was priceless, and once more since the mate bite, Adler felt the need to strut around and tell everyone, See, this right there, that’s my mate poking fun at that hunter. Nothing scares him, and he’s perfect.

But at the same time, Adler’s perfect mate had dismissed him, and not leaving the scene then and there would have been taking the shine out of Gordon’s spotlight.

I hope he watches me. I hope I get a reward for leaving later when we’re alone again.

Adler imagined what such a reward might look like. Unfortunately, he had a vivid imagination and far too many toys to feature in it.