Page 13 of The Enforcers: NOAH

Noah sat back in the chair, thinking hard.

Reading between the lines, the story had all the hallmarks of a shifter war that had been covered up.

That happened a lot more often than people would think. The Shifter Council existed to govern shifters and enforce their laws, but their prime directive was to prevent the knowledge of shifters’ existence from becoming public.

Anyone who was deemed a risk—shifter or human—was silenced. Sometimes permanently. Shifter conflicts were covered up; disinformation was handed out to the human press. There were shifters strategically hidden in government, the military, the media, and the judiciary. Noah didn’t even want to know all the places the Council had their tentacles.

All he knew was that it worked. Shifters had been safe from human persecution for centuries. Although, their isolation also meant they’d never had to adopt more civilized ways of doing things.

He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

But Mina…he wondered if those “genetically unique” wolves were wolves at all, or shifters. Had she and her friend Adams had gotten on the wrong side of a shifter war and been caught in the crossfire? Or had they learned too much and been targeted by the Council?

Her mental breakdown might have been the result of trauma, but it also might have been helped along with some of the mind mojo the Council had at its disposal.

Better than death, but it still sucked.

He delved into her more recent files. She hadn’t done anything for a couple of years after Alaska. Then she’d suddenly started searching the country for wolves who were related to the Alaska pack. From her notes, it seemed like Mina believed the hunters the wolves had supposedly attacked were really poachers, and that they’d taken a number of the wolves out of Alaska—alive or dead.

If they were alive, Mina was determined to find them. Since she left her husband she’d been moving from state to state, tracking down rumors of “giant wolves,” trying to find out where the alleged poachers might have taken them.

Until she’d had another breakdown and Robbie Wells had taken their son.

Noah leaned his chin on his clasped hands, staring at the screen, not really seeing what was on it. Her quest was a fool’s errand. If it had been a shifter pack, and they’d escaped the slaughter, the survivors were probably fine—relocated somewhere.

If they were wild wolves, well…locating any survivors and returning them to their original territory was a beautiful dream, and one he admired her for. But it had almost zero chance of happening.

He wondered why it meant so much to her—enough that she would risk losing her custody fight to keep going.

Personally, though, her research presented him with a problem. There were several hundred “giant wolves” in the Nashville area. It was the largest shifter pack in the United States, and even though the Jenkins estate backed up to protected parkland, there simply wasn’t that much wilderness for them to run in.

As Noah went through Mina’s notes about web sites and rumors and alleged sightings, he realized the Wolf Council’s reasons for wanting to break up the Nashville pack weren’t just about their fears that Nash or his successor would rival them in power.

This pack, just by existing, was becoming a danger to shifters everywhere. There were too damn many of them in too small a space. And Mina, if she didn’t stop digging, could very well be the one to expose them.

Noah hesitated, wrestling with his conscience, and then uploaded all her files to a special cloud account Jesse Travis had set up for him, mostly for spying on the Nashville pack. After uploading the files, it automatically ran a software protocol that erased all evidence that the files had been copied.

Noah told himself he was trying to help Mina, but he still felt like dirt, going behind her back after all she’d done for him.

When he was finished with the files, it was time to leave. And that meant he had to screw Mina over yet again.

Luckily for him, she hadn’t had time to transcribe all her case notes on him into the computer. He found her dictation recorder she used during surgery and smashed it, guilt stabbing at him.

He’d make it up to her, somehow.

With a sigh of regret, he also found all the paper notes Mina had made on him and scattered them on the floor. After that, he opened the small refrigerator, took out the vials of blood she’d taken from him and smashed them too. He pulled out the snacks and juice boxes she kept for Brock and scattered them around, leaving the refrigerator door open.

He put the scrubs he was wearing in the hamper with the other laundry. Then he shifted to wolf and raked the spilled papers with his claws until they were in shreds. He also chewed on the snack packs and juice boxes, scattering their contents and making sure the blood samples were thoroughly contaminated.

He raced around the room a couple of times, knocking things down at random, and finished by lifting his leg and pissing on the torn-up notes and smashed recorder.

When he was sure the room looked like it had been destroyed by a panicked wolf, he leaped up on the desktop under the big window. He was surveying the room one last time, looking for anything he’d missed, when his wolf ears registered the sound of the lock on the front door being picked.

Noah froze. Who the hell was breaking into Mina’s office?

As the question floated through his mind, a scent wafted down the hallway, and he heard murmured voices.

Robbie the Asshole, and the scent of another man he didn’t recognize, but could guess at. Mina’s trap-setting ex and his partner had come back to clean up their mess, and finish whatever they’d planned to do with Noah last night.