“I see that look in your eye, Slade. We can’t just let him die,” Reid hisses, knowing the rest of us can hear him, but the humans are too far away to pick up what we’re saying.
I can’t help the grin that splits my face as Sabrina’s mouth twists in annoyance at his voice, like she was actively pretending he didn’t exist until she got her mental walls firmly in place to deal with him. “To be fair, then we’d only have to split the bonus between two people,” she points out, embracing her other half’s callousness. “We’re practically done, and I’m sure we could pull anything necessary off of his hard drive. A few round the clock days and we could pull it off.”
So much for saving Jonathan.The corner of my lips twitches as I reach out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear.No matter how maturely she tries to handle things, hurt inspires pettiness.Not that I think she’d really let the guy die in a bid to stick it to Reid.
Reid opens his mouth to argue, but is wise enough to shut the fuck up when we hear a car door slam and footsteps coming. The heavy footfalls are clearly male, striding directly our way with a sense of purpose, and I pivot to face the new arrival. It may very well be an employee that forgot something in his office or he’s here to pick someone up, but regardless, it’s going to change the tone of this standoff instantly if there’s a witness involved.
He rounds the corner to our section of the parking garage, the same denim jacket as the thug in front of us, and his weapon already drawn. “Enough of this,” he growls, raising his gun to aim between my eyes. “The girl. Now.”
With a smirk, I slowly raise my hands, drawing both of their attention to me for a split second. “Counter offer.”
Boden and Cinjin work in tandem as they've done countless times, each picking a target without the need to converse. Blood sprays across Jonathan’s face as the man holding him at gunpoint takes a bullet to the brain at the same moment as his friend, both bodies landing with a heavy thud. My ears are ringing from the gunshots still echoing around the parking garage, and with my heightened senses, it hurts like a son of a bitch, yet I can’t help but smile. One problem after another has been piling on until I’m practically drowning lately, like I’m holding onto my family and our legacy with a fraying rope. Butthis?This is familiar; comforting, in a fucked-up sort of way. It’s therapeutic having at leastoneproblem that we can simply shoot in the face to solve as opposed to endless mind games and deceit.
Checking on Sabrina with a glance over my shoulder, my smile falls as I see her attention rapt on something to our left. Following her gaze, my stomach flips as I see a security guard at the end of the aisle. Byte-Ware doesn’t mess with rent-a-cops either; not with the sort of information they have access to. So, when the man draws his gun, using his other hand to radio into the building, I close my eyes with a sense of impending dread, assessing everything in a new light. And when I open them, I search the ceiling, finding one of the security cameras turned from its normal position to aim directly at us, catching the entire thing.
It was a fucking set up, but why? We could clearly make a case for self-defense, and Jonathan’s a witness to corroborate our claims. So what was the point?
By the time the police arrive, I still haven’t figured out the answer. But as the sun dips below the horizon and my skin begins to itch, strung too tightly for comfort as I watch someone put handcuffs on my mate and guide her into the back of a squad car while I’m shoved in another, it takes everything in me not to shift and tear the man’s fucking throat out for touching her, for separating her from us.
And it finally dawns on me; that’s all this is. While there’s no evil council overseeing our kind to smite us if we reveal ourselves to humans, if we were to shift in the middle of a police station, we’d be riddled with bullets before we even made it across the lobby. Someone’s fucking with our heads, trying to goad us into destroying ourselves.
And it’s working.
***
“So I believe we’redone here, Officer Williamson.” Our lawyer reaches beside her chair to pick her briefcase up off of the floor, rising to her feet and encouraging me to do the same.
Even though she’s spent the entire day running herself ragged, Terra is immaculately put together, never letting any of the vultures see so much as a crack in her armor. Clad in a deep purple skirt and light gray dress shirt, it’s yet another power move. It leaves all of her wicked scars on display, the dramatic contrast against her dark skin instantly drawing the eye. Arms, collar bone, neck; Terra put up one hell of a fight before I found her and put a bullet through my father’s skull.
Our fathers had let their power go to their head for ages, but when they started attacking humans in the middle of the fucking city several nights in a row, it was the last straw. They put all of the surrounding packs at risk of exposure, and they’d already been gunning to eliminate my family for years before that. Nothing brings people together better than a common enemy.
While none of us walked away from that mess unscathed, Terra bears the physical reminder daily. Rather than let it destroy her though, she embraced it, uses it to her advantage. She leaves her scars on display to show the world that she’s already been through worse than anything they can throw at her, so they’re going to have to try a hell of a lot harder to intimidate her.
There was no better person to study in order to perfect my own mask and learn how to navigate the shark infested waters we were all drowning in, and seeing as she already knew what we were, no better person to act as our pack’s lawyer.
“If we have any more questions, Mr. Hawthorne,” the middle-aged officer starts, and I bite my tongue until I taste blood, at my breaking point.
Three fucking hours we’ve been stuck here, and the only thing keeping me from slamming my fist into his face is the fact that I’m on the cusp of freedom. We can walk away from this now if we cooperate, but assaulting an officer in the middle of the police station is going to be harder to brush under the rug and only result in me being separated from Sabrina longer. Thankfully, Terra senses how close I am to snapping and saves me from answering.
“You’ll direct them to me.” Leaving no room for debate, she leaves her card on the man’s desk. “I believe you’ve harassed my clients enough for one evening, especially after such a traumatic ordeal.”
Following her lead, we head out the door and approach the one directly across the hall. She walks in without knocking, giving a similar no-nonsense quip and gesturing for Reid to follow us out. Extending my senses, I attempt to pinpoint which room Sabrina’s being held in, but the chaotic noise and scent of sweat and gunpowder overshadows everything else. After gathering Cinjin, we enter the next interrogation room, but the second we step into it, I freeze. A warning growl escapes before I can bite it back, and Terra bristles beside me. Her fear snaps me out of it, never wanting to be a reminder of what she went through, but I pin my narrowed gaze on the three officers in the room.
Boden’s wrists are cuffed, bolted to the ring in the center of the metal table, along with a chain between his shackled ankles. The officers surrounding him aren’t even feigning civility, their weapons trained on him as if begging him to make one wrong twitch.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Terra demands, striding directly into the fray.
Two of the men exchange a loaded glance before one reluctantly speaks. “He didn’t want to wait until the sergeant gave permission for him to leave.”
The third hasn’t taken his eyes off Bo, his hand trembling slightly. “There’s something wrong with him. On some sort of drugs, I think.”
None of us need to probe for details. Bo’s golden eyes are hard enough to cut glass, his muscles coiled, even if he’s sitting perfectly still. They may have restrained him, but they gave him a better opportunity to walk away from this if he desired, shackling him to a shield. A hard jerk and that table could block him from two of the officers while he breaks the handcuffs, disarms his target, and uses it to take out all three of them. Then it’d simply be a matter of stealing a key from a corpse. I see it all playing out in his frigid glare as he studies them, but thankfully, either we arrived in the nick of time, or he was clinging to the vestiges of his dissipating patience for a little longer.
“Of course there’s something wrong with him,” Terra snaps. “Someone attempted to kidnap his wife, and now he’s been kept separated from her for hours on end while being treated like a criminal instead of a hero for saving Mr. Davis. Some distress and agitation are expected, and a bit of compassion is warranted given the circumstances.”
Despite their reluctance, Terra’s a one woman wrecking crew and makes quick work of threatening them with numerous lawsuits and name dropping connections until they’re all but begging her to accept their apologies and not put anything on the record. Storming out of the room, she moves down the hall and shoves the door to Sabrina’s holding room open.
Only to find it completely empty.
