Yet as he gazed down at her, he remembered how many times she’d pulled away from him. How many times he’d felt that wall of hers go up and snuff out the most powerful emotion he’d ever experienced.
So he forced himself to slow down and take his time. This was way too important to rush. Lacey gave him a little frowny face when he gently urged her head back onto his shoulder, but she didn’t complain. She didn’t shut down on him, either. That had to be good, right?
On stage, Allen caught Alex’s eye as he and Lacey went back to swaying to the music, giving him a knowing nod as he put a harmonica to his mouth and slipped into another soulful tune.
* * *
Alex hated waking up Gage and Mac in the middle of the night, but he knew his boss would want to know about the betas moving into the area—and the hunters they were running from. It was something that might affect the Pack at some point, though Alex wasn’t sure exactly how. Like Season and Allen had said, he couldn’t imagine hunters showing up in Dallas, not when there was a pack of alpha SWAT cops waiting here for them.
When he pulled into the driveway of Gage and Mac’s new two-story home, however, Armand Danu’s minivan was there and the lights were on in the house. Alex frowned as he got out of his pickup. What the hell was Everly’s oldest brother doing here at this hour?
Alex rang the doorbell, replaying the evening in his mind while he waited for his boss to answer.
He and Lacey had left the club around two o’clock, then gone back to her place. He’d kissed her at the door, mostly because he knew he’d never want to leave if he went inside. As it was, walking away from her had been about the hardest thing he’d ever done. Not only did Lacey have to get up early for work, but he still didn’t want to rush into anything.
Even so, he couldn’t help but think that their relationship had turned some kind of metaphorical corner.
The door opened, and Mac stood there, a smile on her face. Tall with long, dark hair and blue eyes, she was a journalist for the Dallas Daily Star. While her job should have put her and the SWAT commander at odds, instead, it had brought them together.
“Hey!” she said, opening the door wider. “Come in. Gage is in the office. Go on back.”
Any other person probably would have asked him what he was doing there, but Gage’s wife was so used to him and the other guys in the Pack coming over, she didn’t even blink.
Gage was studying a big map of the United States attached to the far wall in his office, Armand on one side of him, Everly’s father Florian Danu on the other. There were at least twenty colored pins tacked randomly about the map, with photographs of people positioned near each.
Alex’s boss glanced his way, apparently not surprised to see him. Why should he be? Gage had smelled him the moment Mac had let him in. Hell, Gage had been a werewolf for so long, he’d probably recognized the sound of Alex’s truck when he pulled into the driveway.
“What brings you by at this time of night?” Gage asked. “Please tell me you haven’t done something that’s going to end up with you in jail again.”
Alex chuckled. He couldn’t blame Gage for being worried. Two months ago, he and Brooks had been arrested for coming to Cooper’s assistance after a little misunderstanding with the FBI.
“No, nothing like that.”
He nodded to Everly’s father and brother, then explained about the betas he met at the club downtown. Gage didn’t seem surprised by any of it, not even when he mentioned the hunters. Come to think of it, neither did Florian or Armand.
Alex gestured to the map. “What’s all this?”
Gage’s mouth tightened. “You’re looking at werewolves who have been murdered by hunters across the United States in the past year.”
Alex did a double take. There were a hell of a lot of people up there, including women and even some kids. Alex was pretty sure the kids hadn’t been werewolves, which had to mean they were collateral damage.
Shit.
“How do you even know these people were werewolves?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know, not with a hundred-percent certainty anyway,” Gage said. “But after almost fifteen years of looking for werewolves to put on the SWAT team, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the red flags after a person goes through their change. I could be wrong about some of them, but my gut tells me I’m not.”
Alex knew from personal experience that Gage had ID’d him simply from reading about how he’d survived that shooting in Rochester. He supposed the bigger question was what had made Gage start looking for these particular people in the first place. It wasn’t like most of them would ever have been SWAT candidates.
“And you just happened to stumble over these dead werewolves by accident?”
Alex didn’t want Gage to think he was questioning the way he ran the Pack, but he had to know.
“No, I didn’t just stumble over them.” Gage glanced at Everly’s father. “After meeting Florian, I realized there was a lot about hunters that I didn’t know, so we started doing some digging.”
“It was time consuming cross-referencing the list of unsolved murders in the United States with people we thought might be werewolves,” Florian added in heavily accented English. “We’ve been working on it for weeks.”
Alex looked at the photos pinned to the map again. The people were from every walk of life. They were young, old, male, female, black, white, Hispanic, Asian. Even after all the crazy stuff that had been going down lately, he’d never realized there were so many werewolves out there.
