Blood trickled down my right shoulder from the torn skin, even as it began to knit itself together with the shift. Pushing myself up on a hand, legs tucked underneath me, I used the other to claw back the wild mess of hair covering my face before finally meeting Taylor’s concerned gaze. Nudity wasn’t an issue among shifters, not that it would have mattered to me if it was.
“Get the whole feckin' Riot to the warehouse,now.” If Gabriele was here… “And take that piece of shit to the Merrow’s storageroom with at least four guards on him,” I jerked my head at his near-lifeless body. Gabriele’s chest was barely moving now. “Make sure he stays alive long enough for me to deal with him personally.”
It seemed like I had a pest problem, and Gabriele would be the perfect reverse Uno to tempt his father out of hiding.
Downfall
Grant
Iwasn’t getting anything from sitting around Lore’s place waiting for her to come back. Once I’d managed to get out of that gorilla’s clutches, I managed to convince him I was notchasing after her and wanted to go back to my condo. He seemed to believe me, albeit reluctantly, and palmed a set of keys from his pocket to unlock the SUV parked beside Lore’s bike space.
“Well, she didn’t say you couldn’t go home,” the guard grumbled. “Seriously man, don’t make it any harder for the both of us than it needs to be. The boss can handle her own shit.”
Fortunately, the awkward car ride was fairly short; I hadn’t realized how close Andrea’s building was to Lore’s until I gave the Riot member the address. It only took about ten minutes door to door. Absent-mindedly, I wondered if Lore even knew he owned a building so close to her home…
“Remember what I said,” the guy leaned over the center console, talking through the rolled-down window as I slammed the passenger door shut. “Keep your head down. When Lore's free, she’ll call you.”
Yeah, like I was going to just sit on my fucking hands.“Fine.”
He mean-mugged me all the way to the building’s entrance, judging from his narrowed stare when I turned back. I waited until he finally pulled away from the curb and went around the corner to make sure he wasn’t going to park and follow me up. I wouldn’t put it past Lore to post someone outside my damn door. Racing through the lobby to the elevator, I couldn’t get to the condo fast enough before the unsettling anxiety really set in. Every worst-case scenario—of which there were at least ten when it came to Lore—stampeded through my brain and trampled every reasonable thought. I burst through the door and practically sprinted to my temporary office.
Hacking into the club’s security system would be beyond stupid. But getting into the street cameras? Laughably easy. In less than ten minutes, I’d navigated through the lights’ cameras until I found the live feed closest to the Masked Merrow. The quality was shit, but at least I had eyes on the building to be able to see Lore pull up. So I waited.
And waited.
And checked the time. It had been at least twenty minutes between leaving her place and now, and Lore had a good head start on me while I was wrestling with her oaf of a guard. That was at least thirty minutes for her to make it to the club. Surely it wasn’t that far away? I pulled up another window and slid it over to the next screen, typing in the club’s address and mapping out the route from her condo. With traffic, it should have been fifteen minutes. Given she was riding the bike and likely driving with no consideration for road laws, she could easily shave off a couple of minutes. So… where the hell was she? Absently, my hand drifted to rub the spot on my chest where Lore carved her mark. The wound had healed to smooth skin by the time I left her bed this morning, but the claim it represented was a brand straight onto my heart. I didn't need reciprocating bites to know we belonged to each other. Possessive fear for my mate drove my pulse to unhealthy heights with each passing minute I couldn't find her.
I checked a couple of the cameras around the block, trying to see if I could catch a glimpse of the bike parked somewhere else besides the street. Just as I was about to flip back to the front view, a wave of people flooded out the back door into the alley behind the club and raced off in either direction. They were armed to the teeth and had urgent expressions plastered on their faces, one of which was familiar to me.
Taylor led the group coming toward the camera I watched from. His lips moved, but didn’t seem to be talking to anyone he was with, likely on the phone with a hands-free set, and at that moment, I would have given anything to be able to catch the audio on the street cam. Whatever was going on had him panicked. And that had me spiraling right along with him. I felt so… useless. All I could do was follow the Riot cars from camera to camera, watching to see where they were turning and tryingto pinpoint on the map where they could be going. The general direction was Lore’s condo, but the trajectory was a little off. The SUVs stopped a few blocks south and two west of the logical route Lore would have taken.
She didn’t make it to the club. “Where…?” I couldn’t even finish the question. But that word played on repeat in my head as I frantically circulated through all the cameras in the area that Taylor had gone through, until I landed on an angle that chilled my blood.
There were other cars blocking both ends of some alley, a couple bodies scattered on the ground, clearly dead. Out of the corner of the camera’s range, it looked like another SUV had been wrecked in the middle of the road, and as I watched, no less than three cop cars came barreling onto the scene with their emergency warning lights going. Police piled out of their cars with their guns drawn and took up defensive positions at the mouth of the alley. In the grainy black-and-white display, it was hard to tell who approached them with their hands raised, but one of the officers seemed to recognize the man and gestured for the others to hold their fire. The two of them stepped onto the sidewalk, where the camera could give me a slightly better image.
“Wait… that’s Jerel. What the fuck is going on?”
Whatever he said, the cop nodded his agreement and gestured with his chin toward the alley. Jerel’s hand lifted to rub his temple in what appeared to be frustration, and then jerked his attention back toward the alley like someone called out to him. Both men hurried off, the officer grabbing his radio to call something in. But Jerel met two other people in the alley’s opening, holding one smaller figure between them.
A riot of curls draped over the woman's shoulders, whose curves I was able to imagine with my eyes closed. The sight of her shivering, barely able to walk while being held up by twomen, threw me from panic straight into a deep pit of fury. Even her feet were bare, her body barely covered by a riding jacket stretching to her thighs.
Lore had shifted for some reason. Her life was in danger, and I hadn’t even known. I hadn’t been there to protect her.
Something crunched in my fist. My eyes slowly moved to where the wireless mouse had been, which was now in sharp pieces and digging into my palm deeply enough to draw blood. With a roar breaking from deep in my very soul, I jumped out of the chair and threw the remains at the wall with all my strength. Plastic and blood scattered on the beige carpet.
I had to go. I needed to leavenow.
Storming into the guest bathroom, I raided the cabinet beneath the sink for a first aid kit and hastily treated the oozing cuts. Not even bothering to change, my body moving completely separate from my wrath-muddled brain, I grabbed the black satchel holding all my pistols and holsters out of the nearby closet and hauled the whole thing with me toward the condo’s front door. Between my floor and the building’s exit, I managed to pull the street cameras up on my phone just in time to watch Taylor climb into his car and pull away from the alley.
Thumb flicking through the limited amount of contacts saved on this encrypted phone, I quickly found the one I needed and yanked the phone to my ear. All I needed was a connection, something I could trace to find where the hell they were going.
“What, Grant?” Jerel’s gruff voice came through the line. Putting him on speaker, I engaged the tracking app I designed and hoped I could keep him on long enough to catch the signal. “I seriously don’t have time for your shit right now.”
“I should have known the number associated with the club would be yours,” I hurried through the building’s doors that spat me out on the empty sidewalk. “Where is Lore?”
Jerel’s sigh practically rattled the speaker from its intensity. “Look, Grant, if Lore didn’t bring you along, she doesn’t want you involved, so - “
“Let me talk to her.”
