“Don’t worry about us,” Gage said. “I trust your inner wolf even if you don’t yet. Take Carter with you. If Bagley is there, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
Hale glanced at Carter to see that his pack mate looked as stunned as he was. But underneath that surprise was another emotion. It was well hidden, but Hale had worked with Carter long enough to recognize that he was worried.
Maybe even scared.
Not of facing Bagley but of something else.
Hale was about to ask Carter if maybe he wanted to sit this one out, but before he could get the words out, Gage was tossing him two tubes of the pink goo. Hale caught them with a frown. He wasn’t sure why his boss thought he would need it.
“In case we’re wrong about all of the hunters being in that warehouse,” Gage said. “And considering how much Tamm seems to hate you, it’s a distinct possibility.”
Hale had to admit that was probably true but decided he didn’t have time to worry about any of it. He had to go. Without another word, he turnedand sprinted out of the ops truck, heading for the nearest SWAT SUV. Fortunately, Carter got ahead of him and jumped behind the wheel. Hale knew he was too rattled to drive himself.
He had his phone out and was pulling up Karissa’s number before Carter even got them moving. The call went to voicemail. Cursing, Hale thumbed the red button and redialed as Carter took them around a corner so fast he felt them go up on two wheels for a moment. Hale barely paid attention, praying Karissa picked up this time.
She didn’t.
He took a deep breath, damn near hyperventilating. Something was horribly wrong. What if Bagley had already gotten to her?
“You said the opening was at seven, right?” Carter interjected into the middle of Hale’s total meltdown. “Karissa’s a security professional. If she’s on the job, she’s not going to stop to pull out her phone. Leave a message and then text her.”
Hale thought that might be the most logical collection of words ever grouped together in the history of the English language and he grabbed hold of them like they were a life jacket.
Calling Karissa again, he left a message on her voicemail asking her to call him, saying that he needed to know she was okay. Then he texted her the same thing. After that, he sat there and stared at his phone, waiting for something good to happen.
“We’ll be there in less than five minutes,” Carter announced calmly. “Karissa is fine.”
Hale wanted to believe his pack mate, but then he hit the green button, fangs starting to extend as the call went to voicemail once again.
“Anything on the monitors or perimeter sensors?” Karissa asked softly into the lapel microphone of her carefully selected conservative dark pantsuit. “Because my instincts are screaming that Bagley will be making an appearance sometime soon.”
There were a few agonizing moments of silence—long enough that Karissa was half a second from running straight for the security room at the back of the auto plant—before Deven finally answered.
“There’s no sign of him anywhere,” her brother said. “But that doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot when the guy we’re worried about can appear out of thin air whenever and wherever he wants.”
Karissa knew Deven was right, but that didn’t keep her from hoping all the same. In her heart, she knew Bagley wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to take out her and Patterson in one fell swoop. She wanted to think he wouldn’t risk reporters and their cameras seeing him, but something told her he’d come up with a way to deal with that issue.
“Just make sure to keep every light in the plant turned on,” she said. “Bagley will have a harder time materializing in a brightly lit room. Hopefully.”
Half listening to the rest of what her brother was saying, Karissa continued moving around the crowded room, weaving around reporters as well as politicians and random rich people who seemed to be there simply to be seen. The primary focus of her attention was Dominic Patterson, of course, but she tried to keep an eye on Glenn, too, seeing a scenario where Bagley might want to grab the son as bait.
Unfortunately, it turned out keeping an eye on Patterson senior was a monumental task all in itself. The plant was a circus, with everyone roaming around the assembly-line equipment, and Dominic seemed in his element, flitting around like a pixie, glad-handing and ego-stroking. The man was a natural at it.
Karissa followed him from one assembly bay to the next, keeping close to him as best she could. As she moved, she caught the eye of Jerome and the other nearby security guards, making sure they were focusing their attention on their boss instead of all the expensive assembly robots that were being put through their paces by Patterson’s engineers.
Jolie Washington and Tristan Bond were working the crowd as actively as their boss. It was funny how merely a few hours ago, Karissa would have beencovertly watching them, trying to figure out which one had hired Bagley. After knowing they weren’t involved at all, it changed everything about how she looked at them. Now, they seemed like nothing more than business executives, eager to help make sure Patterson’s automotive plant was a success.
As Karissa moved through assembly bay 2, keeping pace with Patterson and his son without making it obvious, she found her mind repeatedly going back to her parents and everything they’d done. She realized there was still a part of her in denial, a part that wanted to believe the two people she’d loved her whole life—a mother and father who raised her to be honest, courageous, and compassionate—wouldn’t do the things she’d heard them confess to earlier.
But there was another part of her that wondered if she’d ever known her parents at all. It had been bad enough when the worst thing she’d thought they’d done was to send her three oldest brothers to beat the hell out of her teenage boyfriend. And while that had been beyond awful, she had to admit it paled in comparison to hiring a known hit man to terrorize Dominic Patterson purely for the purposes of inflating their security company’s public profile. A scheme that had resulted in multiple deaths that her parents had shrugged off asnot part of the plan.
Karissa maneuvered around an impeccablydressed server carrying a tray of champagne flutes, still keeping an eye on Patterson as she continued trying to square the mom and dad who’d read her bedtime stories as a child with the coldhearted people who existed now. But no matter how hard she tried, she simply couldn’t get there. The distance was too great.
As crappy as she felt at that moment, Karissa knew this evening would only get worse because at some point she’d have to tell Deven what she’d learned. Her youngest brother liked to act as if he were worldly and tough, but she knew this was going to hit him hard. She worried how bad the fallout was going to be.
She was about to contact Deven on the radio, driven by the sudden urge to check in and make sure everything was still okay, when the lights flickered. Her stomach twisted in that familiar way it always did whenever bad things were about to happen.
No one else around her seemed to even notice the slight flutter in the long row of fluorescent bulbs mounted high up on the ceiling, but Karissa definitely did. She’d practically been holding her breath for the last twenty minutes, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
