Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (40 page)

“Part of the first. I need to know how she died.”

He tensed, and his scent roiled with conflict, but the wolf stayed hidden. I’d be able to deal with this using words.

“Why?” he said.

“To know her. And to make sure my heart and my head stay in line.”

He snorted again, and the tension scent changed, became darker.

“She and I were both infused at the same time,” he said. “I could change. She couldn’t.”

Ahhh.

“Then I’ll say it again,” I whispered, “for Olivia and for Hope, if I can help, I will.”

But I’d pushed him onto a course and he wasn’t listening this time. “It kills eventually,” he muttered. “The body tries to force a change. It’s agonizing. Some parts work, some don’t.” The stark horror of it oozed out of his voice. “I kept praying she could do it. Just hold off another minute, another minute. She was screaming for me to kill her.”

I held him, my words useless for this pain.

“I don’t know if I did, in the end, or if she just died. The pack…” he stopped for several breaths. “We were at Bitter Hooks with the pack. They gather for it. For support. They helped me bury her up there. The body…the thing that was left. It’s there.”

I will remember you, Hope. You will live in me and we will ease this pain together.

His breath sighed out in a long stream. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“I was rough. Worse than that.”

I lifted my head and stared at him. “I was asking for it. Not some male bullshit like ‘walking down the street in the wrong type of clothes’ asking for it. I wanted it, because I could feel you needing it. If I hadn’t, believe me, you would have known about it, wolf. Understood?”

“Understood,” he whispered.

“Good.”

I laid my head back down on him, my hands flexing with the pleasure of feeling his body and the drifting sense of still being connected to him.
Mine.

We lay listening to the beat of our hearts for a long time.

“I’m going to be in trouble with the pack for this,” he murmured, lips against my hair. “So’s Olivia. I’m supposed to stay away from you. She’s supposed to help.”

I chuckled. “Well, you said it; you can’t be expected to restrain your wolf. If he wants you to make logical decisions, it’s less wolf you need, not more.”

“Huh? I thought your sister was the lawyer.”

“Yeah, but she never beat me in an argument.”

Gods, Kath. I’d heard her reaction to Jen. What the hell would she think of this?

He craned his head around to look at the back of my neck.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

I kissed his shoulder, then bit it playfully. He wriggled around a little and began licking the back of my neck gently. I didn’t know if it was like Athanate healing, but hell, it felt good.

In a little while, he stirred against me. “There’s another thing you need to know about werewolves,” he said, slyly. His hands began to knead my back.

I chuckled. “Stamina, eh?”

He wasn’t much more restrained the second time around, and even my ordinary teeth nicked him. I tasted his blood and I worried that would set off some bloodlust reaction, but my Athanate was laughing at me.

Plenty of time for that later.

“Only one of us needs to walk out,” I said and shoved him back towards his desk. “You get back to the work you haven’t been doing.”

“But, it’ll be—”

“Yeah, embarrassing. No one ever died of that.”

I had to shove him back a few more times before I made it out the door.

My jeans were ruined. Thank God for my belt, because there wasn’t anything else keeping them on, and there was nothing left underneath. I was going to have a black eye from bouncing on the desk. My hair looked like my fright wig.

If that wasn’t enough, we’d howled. Neither of us was the quiet type.

Olivia couldn’t help but know, and that I didn’t mind so much. But the way an office works, I doubted there was anyone on the whole site who didn’t know their boss had just had his wicked way with his loose woman. And she’d liked it. Loudly.

Olivia had her head down.

I stopped in front of her. She wasn’t giggling. She didn’t look up. I was afraid she might be crying.

A stray curl had slipped from her hair tie, and I reached over to tuck it gently behind her ear. She pressed her cheek against my hand. Pack behavior.
I am weaker, protect me,
it said.

I pulled her chin up as I had before. “I meant it, Olivia. I don’t know what I can do yet, but whatever I can, as soon as I can.”

Her eyes looked up at me, faith and trust in them. Then she blushed and kissed my wrist.
Whoops.
Not the reaction I’d been aiming for. I had to stop broadcasting Athanate sex appeal and alpha Were domination.

Still, she looked a bit happier than she had. I smiled confidently at her and walked out.

I could sense the watchers.

The whole warehouse was looking across at the stairs the moment I hit the top step. My Athanate loved it. My head went up and I started to catwalk. Applause and wolf whistles—
if only you knew
—followed me out the door, and I then was striding across to the Ford.

Far from being embarrassed, it made me float away, practically intoxicated by the lust beamed at me from the warehouse.

Head in the clouds. That’s the reason I walked straight into the site of Matlal’s ambush.

Chapter 38

I couldn’t haul my sorry ass to Haven looking like I’d done three rounds with a mountain lion.

I didn’t want to go back to Manassah, because that would be the first place Matlal’s teams would be looking. But Matlal might not know about David’s house.

Craft is craft. No one knew that I was driving the Ford, and I wanted it to stay that way, so I parked two blocks away and walked, just another bag lady down on her luck, accidentally strayed into Wash Park.

But there’s a difference between going through the motions and being focused. I was still floating.

I’d already opened the door and walked in before my nose got my attention and instincts took over. I lunged to the side and ended up crouched in a corner, with the HK swinging to and fro across the silent hall.

No one gave me the slow hand clap this time. No heads popped out from behind chairs. No tingles from my bracelet. The clock ticked on the wall. The breeze pushed the door against the stack of mail on the floor. I inched up to stand and began to search, leading with the HK.

The place smelled of Matlal
and
Altau, but it was empty.

On my second pass, I looked at it like a crime scene, even though I didn’t have my kit. Who had been here? Where were they while they were here? What were they doing?

I could see from indentations on the carpet that a stool had been put beside the window. Someone had sat there watching the front. There was a cushion on the sofa where someone would have used it for a pillow if they’d been lying down. A team of two, taking turns to look out?

I checked the trash. Long stakeouts require food and drink. The trash cans were empty, but there was a lingering smell of oily fast food and coffee.

Why had they gone? And why bother to clean up afterwards?

The smell from the sofa was a mix of House Matlal and wolf. Was this the rival pack that Alex had said were looking for me?

The most confusing clue was when I cleared the litter of mail from near the door. Matlal’s wolf had been injured here. He’d bled on the carpet, and on some of the mail. The scent of Altau was strong.

I couldn’t stay here, not even long enough for a shower. I didn’t know what had happened, but there were just too many scenarios that involved Matlal’s team coming back here. I got out.

This time, I was doing the bag lady shuffle convincingly as I made my way up the road. I’d freaked my hair out even more.

Good thing.

I didn’t turn as the SUV passed me. I didn’t go slower or quicker. My hand was already inside my jacket as if I were cold, wrapped around the HK’s grip.

I heard them stop and the doors opened, slammed shut again. All four doors. Four people at least. I came to the crossroads and snuck a look back as I turned left. The SUV was outside David’s house, but whoever had come in it was out of my sight already. Two more limping steps to be certain I was out of their sight and then I took off.

Ten minutes later I pulled over and turned on the octopus.

Bian answered the call neutrally. The caller ID would be withheld.

“Bian, I need a secure number to call you on, now.”

“Time to come in, Amber.”

“Give me the number now. I have the recording. I’ll come in soon.” Sheer donkey stubbornness kept me resisting; there was no sensible reason for me to hold off now. She gave me a number and I called it right back. The disk that Ingram had given me was in the reader and I’d found the audio file. When she answered, I clicked play.

“Shit,” she said, almost as soon as it played. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Amber, listen to me, nothing is safe out there. Get back here now.” Fury and worry twisted her voice. I could tell she was regretting not hauling me in yesterday.

“Soon. Look, that’s not all. I just came from David’s. Something’s screwed up there—maybe an ambush taken out. Matlal and Altau marques all mixed up. What’s going on? I don’t know how safe
anywhere
is at the moment.”

“Hold on.” I could hear her talking Athanate to someone. From the sound of it, she wasn’t getting the answers she wanted.

I turned on my other cells while I waited. Skylur’s secure cell was blank. On my personal cell, there was nothing from the colonel. Just a single, simple text message.

Mike 6 call Bravo 5
.

Keith had used that message to get me to call him last week. He’d come with news that my old master sergeant, Top, was dead. He’d brought a parting gift of my Ops 4-10 equipment. He’d warned me that things were changing in 4-10, and gave me the first hint that Colonel Laine had a problem. Keith and I had a history, but he was married now, and with the situation at 4-10, he shouldn’t be contacting me unless it was really important. What did he want? The first stirring of nervousness began. I noted the number and turned the cell off.

Bian was getting increasingly tense with whatever answers she was getting.

She came back on the line. “Amber, are you sure about the marques? Matlal
and
Altau?”

“Positive. There was a stakeout there and a fight. The place was empty when I arrived but as soon as I left, a car pulled up and at least four people went in. Didn’t stop to check who they were. Cleanup crew? New stakeout?”

She was silent for a while.

“I don’t know anything about this,” she said. “My team don’t know anything about this.”

“How bad is that?”

Bian was Diakon of House Altau. Officially, a Diakon was the person who controlled the connection between the Athanate House and the rest of the world. In practice, that made her number three in House Altau. Number two if you accepted Diana’s description of her role as being advisory. And Bian was head of security. There weren’t a huge number of Altau from what I could see, so how on earth could there be Altau out here without Bian knowing about it?

“I don’t know. Amber, I’ve just put my team under quarantine until I clear this up with Skylur. Don’t tell anyone and come straight in.”

She ended the call.

I filled up with gas and drove out towards City Park to get away from any tracking on my personal cell. I’d forgotten Skylur’s cell and reached over to turn it off. There was a text message from him.

Situation escalated. Deception over. Come in now.

I turned it off.

Bian and Skylur had now both given me a direct order to get out to Haven. But my inner donkey had all my paranoia and my curiosity lending it strength.

Just the one quick call.

The octopus made its connections and I got through.

“Keith, it’s me.”

“Amber, thank God.” It was Keith, talking from a busy street somewhere and sounding…different.

“Can you meet me?” he said.

“Kinda difficult today.” I really didn’t like the sound of this. What the hell was going on?

“It’s about JL. Can’t talk on the cell.”

JL was the colonel. This got worse and worse. I needed time to think.

“Gonna have to be patient. Are you staying on this number?”

“No. Can I call you?”

“No.” I didn’t know how you could call into the octopus, and if I had I wouldn’t give that away, ex-boyfriend or not. Who might be listening to Keith’s cell?

He spouted a stream of gibberish. Embedded in the gibberish were numbers in Vietnamese, a language we shared working knowledge of.

“Okay,” I said, and he would know I had the cell number he wanted me to call next. “You here privately, or for the firm?”

“Privately.”

I ended the call.

I could turn Keith down and head for Haven. That was the most sensible thing to do, by a long shot.

I could call that number and show up somewhere we agreed. That felt like the dumbest option, and realizing that made me feel ill. Not Keith, surely? Why would he betray me? But I plain didn’t believe him. The way he’d spoken and what he’d said just didn’t feel like Keith. I couldn’t believe he had a private reason for seeing me that involved the colonel.

First decision: I had to check it out. I owed it to Colonel Laine. Second decision: how? I needed some kind of fallback if it did go wrong. There wasn’t time to set up a safe meeting using Victor. Not that I had the money to hire Victor’s team for another afternoon’s work. Of course, I could ask Jen to loan me the money, and I knew she’d say yes.

While I thought it through, I stopped on Colfax to get something to eat. No knowing when I’d next get the chance.

“Uh, ma’am, your change.” The kid was holding it out to me at arm’s length and not meeting my eyes. Okay, I still looked a fright, but I didn’t smell, did I? Or rather, not a smell that he could detect.

His supervisor came over and passed me a large safety pin with a smile.