“If we’re moving the stuff, they’re just behind the dumpsters. But the restaurant’s open. Shouldn’t be anybody around.”
Ryan nodded, then spoke into a walkie-talkie. He’d been coordinating with the police during the entire ride over. Right now, he was telling them to hang back while they went in with Brady. Twenty minutes ago, he’d been dancing word circles as he tried to explain to his boss why he’d been secretly searching for the serum when he was supposedly out on sick leave.
Frankie knew the answer: He’d been following up on shifter leads, but that wasn’t exactly something he could say to his captain. Easier to claim he’d been home hunched over a toilet like half of the police force. He even dredged up a realistic-sounding cough to support it. But then a tip had come in from one of his gang contacts, he’d told his captain, and so he was following up.
Fortunately, his captain had bought it. Or maybe he was too grateful for a lead to question things more deeply. And so now the three of them were walking cautiously down the alleyway while Ryan thumbed off his phone.
“We’ve got an audience, so no shifter stuff,” he said in a low voice.
Frankie nodded. She’d been fighting as a normal human against wolves her entire life. Fortunately, Brady was right and there weren’t any guards. Better still, it was early for the lunch crowd, so Ryan had been able to quietly usher the staff out the front door to talk with a grim-faced officer. And now they were slipping in the back while Brady indicated a keypad beside a door.
“Time to go in?” Brady asked.
“Yeah,” Frankie said right as Ryan called out, “Wait!”
Both froze while Ryan stepped back outside. She heard him rooting around in the dumpster before he came back with a busted selfie stick, which he extended with a quick pull.
“There’s no facial recognition or anything, right?”
Brady nodded. “Just the code.”
“Then stand back. I’ll do it.”
Brady shrugged and backed away. Ryan hadn’t even let Frankie come fully into the building. She stood outside, holding open the door while he used the selfie stick to key in the numbers Brady gave him.
“Paranoid much?” Frankie muttered. She didn’t see any reason to expect a trap. Brady had been going in and out of here for weeks.
“I’m a cop, and I’m alive. So yeah, I’m paranoid.”
She knew better than to argue with the experienced professional, so she held the door while Ryan carefully punched in numbers.
Time seemed to slow as he awkwardly maneuvered the selfie stick, and Frankie couldn’t shake a sense of unreality. It was midmorning on a beautiful day, and she was about bust into a serum stash with the cops. She felt like she was on a TV show complete with a hot cop in a Kevlar vest right in front of her. Ryan was everything a TV hero ought to be: confident, alert, and sexy as hell with his bulging biceps and quiet authority. If she weren’t about to betray her brother and her pack, then this would be really exciting. Instead, she gnawed on her lower lip and tried not to be sick from nerves and the smells from the nearest dumpster.
Fortunately, it would be over soon. A few more seconds and—
Boom!
She was looking right at the keypad as the explosion happened. She saw the burst of color, but it didn’t register in her brain. Neither did the fact that she was thrown backward, off the door. It wasn’t powerful enough to land her in the dumpster, but she’d definitely been knocked back. Brady, too, as he stumbled beside her. But what about Ryan?
Ryan!
The sound hit her brain next. The boom and the muffled silence afterward. It had happened simultaneous with the explosion, of course, but her mind was just now processing it. And her vision was stabilizing as the dust started to clear.
“Ryan!” she screamed.
Then she saw him, plastered against the side of the hallway, his face red but not bloody. He was staring at her, his gaze wide and his mouth open in shock. She straightened, as much as her rubbery legs allowed her to and headed for him.
He acknowledged her with a relieved breath, then abruptly started bellowing into the walkie-talkie. Her ears were still ringing, but she could process his words.
“We’re fine! Stand down!” His gaze shifted then, cutting hard to the blown doorway. She saw the same gaping hole and—much worse—the charred remains of the selfie stick. She didn’t know a whole lot about explosives, but she could see that the blast had centered behind the keypad and had been designed to blow up whoever was entering a code.
Score one for paranoia. If Ryan hadn’t been using a selfie stick, he would’ve been the charred mark against the wall. Or Brady would have been.
She looked over to her pack mate who was standing with openmouthed shock. She reached out to touch his arm and he flinched away from her, but then steadied. His expression told her everything he was thinking. That Ryan had just saved his life. That Raoul had tried to kill him. And that this whole situation was getting incredibly real.
Meanwhile, she watched as Ryan squared his shoulders and moved through the busted door. Damn it, she couldn’t let him go in there alone. No matter what her asshole brother had put in there, she was not going to let Ryan face it by himself. So she pushed her shaky legs to move and made it to his side in a few nervous steps. But then she stopped right next to Ryan as she took in the space.
Just as Brady had said, there were racks of jugs containing the serum. Enough to poison the city for years to come, and she shuddered at the thought. Then she turned to a small table with a corkboard above it and a sign-in sheet below. On the corkboard was a map with a big red line showing the pathway to where they were dumping the serum into the water supply. But it was the sign-in sheet that caught and held her attention.
