Sitting across the street outside the café facing their building was the man who’d unsettled him so much two nights ago at the bar.
“It is,” Viggo confirmed, his wolf’s hackles raised without any explanation. The man wasn’t doing anything, and yet for some reason, his mere presence triggered every one of Viggo’s warning bells.
“He looks different.” Bjorn scowled.
Viggo agreed. It wasn’t just his suit – a slick, silver-gray number that couldn’t have been more different from the jeans-blazer combo he’d worn at the bar – but also his slicked-back hair and the way he was sitting.
As though sensing Viggo and Bjorn’s eyes on him, the man looked up. They made brief eye contact, the man looking away and promptly rising to his feet and walking away.
“We’re following him, right?” Bjorn asked, voice hard.
Viggo hesitated, but then he nodded. “We are.”
Wolf pushing to the surface, eager for the hunt, Viggo kept his eyes on the man’s back as he moved further and further away.
“How are we doing this?” Bjorn asked, vibrating like a hound straining to be let loose.
“Careful,” Viggo said, putting a calming hand on Bjorn’s back. “We don’t want him to notice us.”
It was the safest option. The alternative was to stalk him – to make it obvious they were following him, using fear and intimidation to make him so anxious that he’d be willing to talk once they finally cornered him – but that approach couldn’t be justified. At least not yet.
The man hadn’t actually done anything. For now, Viggo just wanted to see where he went.
“I can do careful,” Bjorn said, eyes never straying from his target.
Together, Viggo and Bjorn moved down the street after their target, keeping out of sight and staying as far back as possible without losing him.
Silent and focused, they worked together in perfect harmony, not a word passing between them as they followed their target away from the city center and toward the old warehouse district.
Once worn down and riddled with poverty, the warehouse district was now the city’s premier example of gentrification. Converted lofts and new apartment buildings proliferated, a new store or restaurant opening every week, crowding out anything and anyone who had been there before it became a fashionable place to live.
Following the man down a side street, the crowds thinning and making it more difficult for Viggo and Bjorn to stay unnoticed, Viggo wondered what exactly he was hoping to accomplish. The man probably wasn’t on his way to a secret meeting where Viggo could conveniently overhear his dastardly plan, whatever it might be, and in all likelihood he was wasting his time.
Viggo pushed the doubt away. It was better to follow the man and learn nothing than not to follow him and miss out on finding out something important.
They were now at the very edge of the warehouse district, the buildings around them yet to be converted into luxury housing, and the crowds had thinned down to almost nothing.
“He went down there,” Bjorn said, nodding at an alleyway up ahead.
Tilting his head, Viggo listened to their target’s footsteps. The sound was easy to follow, shoes on asphalt much easier to track than the sound of paws on dirt, their target moving down the alley at a now-familiar brisk pace.
Since there was no way to follow someone down a dark alley and stay unseen, Viggo and Bjorn had to wait for him to exit the alley before they could follow.
Without any warning, the man started running. The steady sound of his footsteps turned into a mad scramble, and before he knew what he was doing, Viggo was running after him with Bjorn right at his side.
It was instinct. They’d been tracking their prey for half an hour, getting into the zone, their wolves as close to the surface as they could get without taking control. When their prey ran, Viggo and Bjorn were biologically primed to follow.
It was a mistake. The second they turned into the alley, Viggo heard a quick succession of whooshing noises followed by something sharp hitting him in the back.
He roared, turning to face whatever had attacked him, casting around blindly until he spotted movement behind the boarded-up window in the abandoned factory on the other side of the street.
It was a trap, Viggo suddenly understood. The man had been so suspicious – had triggered his instincts – because he wasbait.
“Viggo, it’s a trap,” Bjorn slurred next to him, falling to his knees. Viggo moved to help him, panicking at seeing his mate go down, but to his horror, his legs failed him. He stumbled to his knees, his vision going dark before his face hit the pavement.
The last things he heard before losing consciousness were footsteps behind him and a snide voice commenting, “Well, that was easy.”
25
