She shrugged a shoulder. “It was a little amusing. No onetoldyou I was a prostitute. You made that embarrassing assumption on your own.”
“So, what, you’re the Riot’s resident hitman and a camgirl? Where do you find time to go grocery shopping?” I couldn’t help the unnecessary sarcasm. Maybe it was the tense situation, or my lack of self-preservation, but she brought out the worst in me. If I were going to die tonight, it wouldn’t be sniveling at her feet. I could feel my ears twitch again, ruining the tough persona I was trying to portray. In my experience, they would go away on their own if I relaxed. Of course, that was likely not going to happen soon.
“Who says I do my own shopping?” Even the modulator couldn’t strip all the teasing from her tone. “I’m sure it would blow your little mind to think I hold any position of power in amob. And quite frankly, I don’t have to justify shit to you. You’ve seen what I do to people who piss me off. All you need to know is to stay out of my feckin’ business and let your boss know I’m tired of his bullshit.”
Scowling at her, I shrugged off my coat and tossed it onto the back of the couch opposite where she sat, and placed the brown bag that held my dinner on the side table by the door. My fingers plucked at the buttons on my wrists, and I rolled the sleeves of my simple white shirt to the elbows. It was something to buy me time as I stared Vixen down, brain offering and subsequently tossing possible ideas to either capture or remove her from my condo.
“Why don’t we just quit the games then?”
“I’m bored, mostly,” the answer came just on the heels of my question. “And again, I don’t owe you a damn thing. But I like watching you squirm.”
I was getting tired of this. My feet carried me around the couch toward the one she seemed to make herself at home on, one hand reaching out for her arm like I was going to drag her off. “Well, I don’t owe you shit either, so get–”
I blinked, and the next second Vixen slammed me onto the area rug on my back. The breathwhooshedfrom my lungs. Before I could fill them again, Vixen’s weight pressed against my hips as she straddled me. Leather-clad legs pinned my arms to my sides, and the cold kiss of a blade pressed against the side of my throat. Something brushed lightly against my clavicle, cool and hard and dangling from the hilt of the knife in her hand. It looked like… some kind of fox face charm made from pink beads? If I weren’t in mortal danger, I’d laugh at the ridiculousness of a killer having fucking hot pink beads dangling off her knife handle.
This close, the full blow of her scent rocked my head back and almost made my eyes roll from the sheer pleasure floodingmy system. It took a moment to realize how familiar the smell was, and why. She wasdefinitelythe woman I met in Masked Merrow's office and the bartender, Lorelai. The mask wasn’t a coincidence at all. I should have known the Red Riot logo matching its design went deeper than aesthetics. They were all connected.
Despite the terror flooding my system as I was frozen beneath her, another, more embarrassing development was happening between my legs. My dick was in a whole other alternate reality, straining from behind the zipper of my jeans in the worst kind of betrayal. One that she was quick to catch on to. I curled my hands into the rug’s pile to avoid latching onto her enticing hips and pushing her down even harder. I had a higher chance of dying from sheer embarrassment than a slashed throat at this point.
“Mmm,” she moaned in that robotic tone. Her ass ground right into my unintentional boner and my ears flattened to my head in frustration. She was definitely enjoying my precarious situation. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a bottom. Maybe I could introduce you to pegging, wouldn’t that be a treat?” The laugh that tittered through her modulator made my teeth grind in horny frustration.
Vixen—or rather, Lorelai’s—nails grew out before my eyes, digging ever so slightly into my chest where she propped herself up on one gloved hand. The prickles of pain were enough to keep me grounded. If I needed more proof that she was some kind of shifter, I had it now. She had to be a powerful alpha to shift on command, even more so for a partial shift. That kind of control was rare among our kind. “No. Thanks.” I spat each word through a tightly locked jaw. “Now, get the fuck off me before I toss you.”
Her hips rocked again, and she bent low. The entire front of her body pressed against mine as she folded her arms beneathher to prop up her chin. I didn't miss how the blade pressed a little deeper into my skin, one flick of her wrist away from slicing my throat wide open. Her heat, her smell, that cocky attitude that her mask couldn’t hide, it all drew me in and left my common sense behind. My fingers were digging into the last bit of sanity as I was being dragged along in the wild storm of enticing pheromones. They were screamingmine, mine, minewith every beat of my racing heart.
She bent her head low, the smooth matte mask pressing against the side of my head as that robotic voice filled my ear. I struggled to take in enough air to avoid blacking out. “Keep out of my way, puppy, before you get run over. You’re too cute to kill.”
I wanted to scoff at the warning, but my brain felt like it had been replaced with cotton. Her hand slapped my cheek lightly, and she leaned back from where she’d pinned me to the floor like I wasn’t having an existential crisis. “And what if I don’t?” Still stunned, I slurred the words.
Lorelai pushed against my raging boner again, dragging a low moan from deep in my chest. I was practically running a fever at this point, every part of my body screaming to get her beneath me. If I had any doubt she was my mate before this point, that hope had been thoroughly smothered. Just when I managed to unclench my fingers from the rug and raise them toward her waist, both of her hands snapped down to latch onto my wrists and drag them up to pin them over my head. Maybe I could have broken loose and switched our positions. Unfortunately, I was now a slave to the fox’s instincts that I could no longer separate from my own. Her chest was just about even with my line of sight, and I wanted so badly to nuzzle my face in and mark her all over with my scent. It was the sweetest kind of torture to lie beneath her like this and do nothing. As a beta, myinstincts, driven by my primal, were usually manageable. This was uncharted territory I was stumbling across.
From the tilt of her head, I could imagine an insolent smile hiding behind her mask. “I don’t think you want to find out all the ways I know how to kill a man. This is your last warning to stay out of my way, puppy.”
And like a violent tornado passing through, she sprang up from her press against my body and stepped over me to move toward the door, leaving the carnage behind and breezing out like she was wholly unaffected by the last five minutes. I waited, literally holding my breath until the door clicked shut. Nothing of her was left behind but the shambles of my self-restraint and her scent imprinted on my brain. Cursing violently, I plucked my glasses off and placed them on the couch before grinding the heels of both hands into my eyes, before pushing my fingers back through my hair to cover the fox ears still laying flat against my skull. There was no telling how long I lay on the carpet, knees bent and flat on my back, just focusing on slowing my racing heartbeat. None of my normal coping techniques were working to shift back to normal, and the waning adrenaline left me with the beginnings of a panic attack.
“Fuuuck,” I groaned aloud.
The thought of saying screw it to everyone involved and going underground was becoming more appealing by the minute. It was the knee-jerk reaction to protect the foster family that raised me that kept me from wiping Grant Black from the world and making a new life for myself. Andrea would one hundred percent lash out at them if I were no longer under his control. And I couldn’t bring myself to lose another set of parents. Guilt tore at my throat for the lack of restraint I had against my body's natural instincts. I was here to establish communication with the Red Riot boss and find Cyber_Fox, not fuck around with whatever the hell Lorelai was.
Sighing, I managed to pull myself together enough to lift up from the floor and snatch the takeaway bag from the entryway before hiding in my office for the night. In the morning, I was going to have some words for whoever was supposed to be guarding the building’s entrance.
Then again, it was apparent that a burly guard and a door couldn’t slow down the likes of a woman like Lorelai.
It was an easy guess that Andrea would be pissed off about Frank. He decided to grace me with a phone call at the crack of dawn, demanding updates on my progress. My guess was that news had already trickled out to the darker waters, and investors were beginning to pull their money. When CEOs suddenly died, stock values tended to take a hit. And if the stocks crash, Andrea loses his investment. Fortunately, my fox ears had subsided sometime after I fell asleep, so I had that minor victory in my pocket.
“I send you to Vegas with a perfectly good alibi, and you still manage to fuck it up?” His cool tone belied the true rage beneath the terse response. This was the voice he used right before he delivered the finishing blow to a long night of torturing some poor bastard. “Tell me why I shouldn’t fly over myself and put a fucking bullet right through your forehead.”
Because that would break the rest of whatever bullshit truce you thought you had.I kept that little thought to myself. “Apparently, Frank was not operating under the same understanding you have with the Red Riot. Did you know he was trafficking women? Or young girls?”
His end of the line was silent for a long time. So long, I had to pull the phone away to see if Andrea had hung up. Then, the slight tinkle of ice hitting glass came through the speaker.Andrea probably knocked back a straight vodka, even this early in the morning. “Have you found any leads on Cyber_Fox?”
Unfortunately, the only person of interest I found was a murderous bitch whom I was also inconveniently imprinting on. Do I let Andrea assume I’m as incompetent as he thinks I am and play dumb? In my snap decision, I went with the latter. I only hoped it wouldn’t be the choice that killed me. “I haven’t found much of anything, Andrea! Ever since I got here, I’ve been dodging the shitstorm Frank stirred up! How the fuck am I supposed to be covert if I’m already under a magnifying glass because of your idiot subordinate?” The words just… spilled out of me. I hardly ever get this worked up.
Andrea’s response was remarkably cool, considering. “Well, now that your cover as Frank’s employee is gone, so is your support on my end. Either come back with Cyber_Fox’s head in a bag, or never leave Vegas again unless you want a brutal death.”
The threat should have been what chilled me to the bone. Andrea was not one to make bluffs or false promises. But my brain was laser-focused on the sudden change in plans. “I thought you just wanted me to find Cyber_Fox and reveal her identity. The plan was just to set up a meeting to out her. When did this become a hit?” I felt like a fly that had just got caught in a glue trap. Still alive, but very aware of the fact that I was one hundred percent dead if I couldn’t find a way out myself.
“It became a hit when you fucked up and let Frank get killed,” Andrea’s wolf rumbled in his voice. “You’re fucking lucky I don’t take your pathetic life myself, since you allowed the death of a pack mate and business partner.”
