I raised my voice and tried again. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
More rustling, and then ragged, raspy breathing, a whimper, and a dullthump.
Whoever the caller was, they were in distress. Every cell in my body reacted in less time than it took my brain to process the information.
I jumped to my feet, my vision gold around the edges. I’d moved so fast my chair shot back across the carpet and hit the wall behind me. On the other side of the conference table, Hines slid his own chair back, clearly alarmed at my glowing golden eyes and low growl.
A whisper on the phone: “Help…”
Her voice was so weak and so desperate that I barely caught it. But I wasn’t the only one listening.
My wolf shoved me so powerfully that I staggered and hit the side of the table with my thigh. The pain barely registered.
MATE NEEDS US, my wolf snarled.
Alice.
I ran.
I burst through the conference room door and took off down the hall toward the front doors of Maclin Security. Hines was shouting behind me, but I ignored him. Ron was in the office; he could deal with our client. Alice needed me right the hell now.
Why call me instead of someone she knew better? The only possible explanation would be sheer desperation.
“Alice?” I called, my voice full of my wolf’s growl. “Alice!”
No answer came—only the sound of raspy, uneven breathing that gurgled in her lungs. Every rattling breath sounded like it might be her last. Fear and rage made my gut churn and my skin tingle.
My wolf howled in fury and paced, stiff-legged, ears flat and teeth bared.
I called Alice’s name a half-dozen more times and still she didn’t respond. She might have passed out.
I made it to my car and jumped in. But as I hit the ignition button, I realized had no idea where she was.
I dug a prepaid phone from its hiding place under my seat and dialed a number saved in its memory underTakeout. I let it ring twice, ended the call, and took off in the direction of Alice’s house just so I could be doingsomethingbesides sitting in my car growling and listening to Alice’s raspy breathing over my car’s speakers.
The seconds ticked by as I drove, willing my prepaid phone to ring. Sometimes it took moments, and sometimes it took hours for a return call from this number. Alice’s life might depend on which it was today.
Miraculously, the prepaid phone rang only three minutes after my call. I answered midway through the first ring.
“Cyro, I need a location on a phone number that’s calling my cell right now,” I said without waiting for a greeting.
I provided Alice’s number, but in the background, computer keys were already clicking.
“Hold on.” Cyro’s voice was male but clearly artificially generated. The hacker used a different voice every time we’d spoken. Today’s iteration had a British accent.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears.
Alice was still breathing, but every time her inhalation hitched it sent a chill straight through my body. Every so often she let out a wheeze or a wispy moan of protest and pain as if whatever had hurt her hadn’t stopped tormenting her. I had to focus on not crushing either my phone or the steering wheel. The bones in my hands creaked with my wolf’s fury and worry.
“I have an approximate address,” Cyro said after what felt like an eternity. The computerized voice named an area on the west side of the city, far from Alice’s own home on the east side.
“Thank you.” I ended the call, dropped the phone in a cupholder, took the next right, and raced toward the west sideand the intersection Cyro had given me. After that I’d have to try to find her car by going street by street. Even Cyro’s resources, whatever they were, usually couldn’t give me an exact location.
Halfway to my destination, though, my phone beeped with a text message that included a precise address and a satellite image of a single-story house with what looked like a red Mustang and Alice’s little blue car parked in the driveway.
Cyro also sent the name of the homeowner, but the name Natalie Newton meant nothing to me. That could be Alice’s client, or it could be the person who’d hurt her. My wolf snarled at the thought.
I’d have spent more time wondering exactly how Cyro got those pieces of information if I hadn’t been focused on getting to that house before Alice stopped breathing.
