Like everything else in his life.
Chapter 1
Los Angeles, California, Present Day
“This isn’t music,” Zane said to fellow werewolves and SWAT teammates Rachel Bennett and Diego Martinez, practically shouting to be heard over the throbbing beat coming out of the club they were heading toward. The sign above the entrance readAttitudein big, bold, splashy letters. “I’m not sure what the hell it is, but it’s definitely not music.”
Rachel laughed. Tall and athletic with long, blond hair she always wore up in a ponytail, she was the newest member of the Pack. “My grandma used to say, ‘When the music starts to get too loud, you know you’re getting old.’”
Rachel seemed to have a lot of sayings from her grandma, but that merely went along with her relaxed, southern twang. Zane frowned at her over his shoulder as they passed the long line of people waiting to get into the club and walked straight to the door. The crowd complained loudly—some of them more vocal than others—wanting to know what was so special about him and his friends. Zane ignored them.
“I didn’t say it was too loud,” he pointed out to his pack mates. “It’s that bloody backbeat the LA clubs add to every song they play. It makes my teeth ache.”
Diego laughed as he and Rachel moved ahead of Zane. Originally from southern California, his dark-haired pack mate had a unique way of appearing intense and laid-back at the same time. “Do you think the reason he can’t stand the music is because he can’t dance?”
“You might be onto something there,” Rachel said, slowly rolling her hips to the sound coming out of the big doors as she walked. “He’s just mad because he doesn’t have any rhythm and the rest of the Pack does.”
Zane snorted. He was used to his pack mates on the Dallas SWAT team ragging him because he couldn’t dance. He’d never fancied dancing anyway, so it wasn’t like he cared, but his pack seemed to think it was an insult to all werewolf kind. Like being able to gyrate your body around a crowded dance floor in time to a crappy song was some kind of valuable skill. He much preferred focusing on abilities that had some purpose in his life—like being able to run down a speeding car full of bad guys. Or having complete control over his fangs and claws. Fortunately, those were things he excelled in.
“Do you think there’s anything we can do to help him?” Diego asked thoughtfully, acting like this was a serious problem that needed to be fixed.
Rachel shook her head in fake despair as she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Unfortunately, no. I think we’re going to have to accept that there’s no chance for a recovery. Zane will never be able to dance.”
“Very funny,” he grumbled as he and his friends approached the two bouncers standing guard at the door.
The guys were big and no doubt imposing to a normal human. Zane and his friends weren’t normal or human.
One of the men moved to block their path, but a low growl from Zane made him rethink that decision. The bouncer glanced at Rachel and Diego, then at Zane again before stepping aside. The people at the front of the line protested, saying they’d been in line for an hour, but Zane ignored them, too. The suspect they were after had gone in the club. Zane and his pack mates didn’t have time to wait in line.
Once inside, Rachel and Diego went their own way. They were pretending to be a newlywed couple in LA for their honeymoon, while Zane was undercover as a lone British tourist. This was the third club they’d been to in as many nights. Their target’s routine was becoming seriously repetitive.
Zane wandered deeper into the club, nearly gagging from the myriad scents assaulting his nose. There must be five hundred people in there, drinking, dancing, and sweating out dozens of different illicit drugs. Even if he weren’t a werewolf with a nose good enough to pick up the scent of a rabbit from a thousand feet away, he would have been overwhelmed.
He tried to block out as many of the scents as he could, pushing them to the background one by one. He momentarily picked up on one that was decidedly pleasant, and any other time, he would have liked to follow it. But meeting the woman giving off those pheromones wasn’t in the cards tonight. He reluctantly pushed her scent out of his head and kept walking. He picked up another one as he went that was somewhat familiar, but there were too many competing smells to nail it down clearly, so he dismissed it as well.
“Our guy and his crew are standing at the far end of the bar,” Diego’s voice came over the earpiece Zane wore.
“Copy that,” Zane said.
Turning, he headed that way, skirting the dance floor. Several women eyed him with looks that could only be calledhungryas they gyrated to the music. One of them, a tall, slender brunette in a tight dress that didn’t leave much to the imagination, grabbed his left bicep through his leather jacket with both hands, giving it a squeeze and trying to drag him onto the dance floor. Searing pain shot through his arm, almost bringing him to his knees, and it took every ounce of control to keep his fangs and claws from coming out. So much for always being in control. He wasn’t as successful at hiding the growl that escaped. The woman couldn’t possibly have heard the sound over the noise, but the look on his face was enough to scare her off. Releasing his arm, she quickly retreated and went back to dancing with her friends.
Zane stopped in his tracks, waiting for the throbbing pain in his arm to recede. Taking a deep breath, he wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead with the back of his hand. It was difficult to believe that after two months it could still hurt so damn much.
“What’s Stefan doing?” Zane asked into the mic clipped on the inside of his shirt when the pain finally became a dull ache.
“Same thing he’s done every night since we started following him,” Rachel answered. “Staring at people like a frigging pervert. He makes my skin crawl.”
When Zane finally got to the far side of the club, he found Stefan Curtis leaning back against the bar, regarding the crowd of people on the dance floor with an appraising eye. Four big guys stood guard, two on either side of him. They looked vigilant, even though the vibe they put off was enough to keep everybody far away from their boss.
Based on the way many of the women eyed Stefan, they obviously considered him attractive. With his perfect blond hair, classic features, and tailored suit, he could have easily been a model forGQorGentleman’s Journalmagazine. But at the same time, Zane could understand why Rachel’s skin crawled when she was around the guy. It was difficult to put into words, but there was something unsettling about the way Stefan looked at people. Like he was mentally dissecting them to see what made them tick. It made Zane’s fangs ache to come out, as if his inner wolf instinctively recognized a threat when it sensed one.
That wasn’t surprising, considering Stefan’s uncle was Randy Curtis, the former chief of police of the Dallas PD and current member of the FBI’s top ten list of fugitives. It was tough to get your name on there, but trying to murder an entire SWAT team, as well as their friends and family, was a good way to do it.
Six months ago, no one in the Pack even knew what a “hunter” was. But in September, they’d learned that groups of men roamed around the country, killing any werewolf they stumbled across. Within weeks, werewolves had shown up in Dallas looking for protection. No one thought the hunters would be bold enough to try anything in a city guarded by a pack as big as the Dallas SWAT team. Seventeen alphas strong at the time, equipped with weapons and tactics only SWAT cops possessed should have been more than enough.
But in November, the hunters had attacked them, almost killing several members of the Pack, including Zane. He was still missing a major chunk of tricep muscle from his left arm and likely always would, regardless of all the experimental drugs the Pack’s doctor had tried. But as bold as that assault had been, it paled in comparison to the blatant attack on the SWAT compound in December. It had been a miracle any of them had survived it.
Knowing there were people who wanted to kill werewolves simply because of what they were was bad enough, but it had been even more crushing to learn their own police chief had been in league with the hunters the whole time. Zane and his pack mates had no clue what his connection to the hunters was or why he wanted the Pack dead, but they’d tracked him to LA three weeks ago and had been searching for him ever since.
