Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “They didn’t have any way of really supporting you is what you’re saying. They couldn’t meet you on your level.”

  “Oh, God, no. No, we were on totally different levels. We might as well have been in different worlds sometimes. They both meant well, believe me. I was too much for them. Then Mom got sick, and Dad got sick not long after she died. That was a different kind of sickness.”

  He winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “I notice you didn’t ask what the sickness was,” she murmured, almost teasing him. “Could it be because you already know? Because your team already knows just about everything there is to know about me?”

  “What can I say? We’re thorough. We weren’t about to get ourselves mixed up with you until we knew everything we could.” He glanced at her for a split second, probably afraid to take his eyes away from the road much longer than that.

  “Of course not. I would expect nothing less.” She patted his knee. “Anyway, Dad just couldn’t take it without her. He fell apart, watching her die. Cancer is an ugly thing.”

  “So I’ve heard. But you stayed strong through it, didn’t you? You were right there with her.”

  “As much as I could be,” she whispered. “Somebody had to be.”

  Only when they both fell silent, when there was nothing to be heard but the sound of rain lashing against the car and wind howling all around them did the faint sound of a car horn reach their awareness. Marnie looked out the rear window. “Is he all right back there?” she asked, watching Zane driving.

  “He’s trying to signal me. Oh, damn.” He touched a button on the car’s display, turning on the Bluetooth connection. “I forgot to do that. Maybe he’s been trying to call.”

  Sure enough, within seconds, Sledge’s phone rang. The sound of it traveled through the truck’s speakers, filling the cab with the sound.

  “What’s up?” Sledge asked when he answered.

  “Someone's following us. In a black SUV. They may be a few hundred feet behind me. I can barely make them out in the rearview, but the car is there. I’m not imagining this.”

  Somebody stole Marnie’s breath. That was the only way to explain how she had suddenly lost the ability to breathe. Or maybe it was the fact that her heart had jumped into her throat and lodged itself there, choking her.

  “Are they freaking serious?” she demanded. All right, so maybe she could breathe, and maybe her heart wasn’t actually in her throat. The sudden shock had passed.

  Rage filled the void it left behind.

  Sledge looked at her, surprised. “Are you all right?”

  “No! I am not all right. It’s not bad enough that we had come out in the middle of a freaking hurricane, but now somebody’s chasing us? Still? They can’t take the day off for a hurricane? Hopefully, they’ll drown out there.”

  She leaned over, rolling her window down, and stuck her head out. “I hope you drown!” she screamed back into the howling wind.

  “Whoa, whoa! You need to take a breath.” Sledge grabbed her by the back of her shirt and pulled her into the truck, then rolled the window up thanks to the controls on his door. “I’m not sure about this side of you, whether it excites me or makes me nervous. I am trying to get us to Kara’s without getting us both killed, so I would appreciate if you didn’t make my job more difficult.”

  She wasn’t about to apologize though. She was too furious for apologies. “I just don’t understand this. Why are they doing this? Even now? Why?”

  “They’re determined,” he grunted, his jaw twitching, eyes focused on the road ahead.

  Then, something else hit her. She felt selfish for not having seen it before. “This means they’re following you, not just me.”

  “That would seem to be the case,” he agreed in a tight voice, looking from one mirror to the other as he continued driving them down the road. “To be honest with you, I’m not sure what I would rather do right now. Stop the car and put an end to this or keep going and see if they have the balls to follow.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to go out there and try to face off with them,” she fretted.

  “What? You don’t think I could take them? A woman, no less?”

  “Watch it,” she warned. “Besides, that woman has some serious artillery. You know that from experience.” She wrung her hands, her palms soaked with sweat. Sweat rolled down the back of her neck, too, under her arms, between her breasts. She might as well have stood out in the rain at this rate.

  “You know that can’t hurt me,” he reminded her. She chose to stop herself before reminding him a bullet to his head could stop him pretty quickly.

  “What should we do?” Zane asked, still connected.

  Marnie held her breath, waiting to see what Sledge would decide. Would they keep going? Would they stop and face the threat? The fact that the truck could become hopelessly stuck in rising floodwater wasn’t lost on her—if they kept moving, they were safer.

  But they would also lead the person trailing them to Kara’s home, and that was the last thing she wanted to do. Kara had been so good to her—she couldn’t put her in danger.

  Sledge drew a deep breath. “Let’s do it. We’ll pull over up ahead, under those trees. See them?”

  “Yeah, I see them,” Zane replied. Marnie looked out the windshield and saw what Sledge was referring to—a cluster of tall, gnarled trees, all of their limbs swaying back and forth. She guessed it was as good a place as any. And it would provide cover for her if she had to hide for any reason.

  Wouldn’t it? She had no idea what she was doing. She was painfully unprepared for this. Sledge was the only one who could help her, the only one who could make this right.

  “Are you sure you can handle this?” she asked, hearing the tremor in her voice and hoping he didn’t take it the wrong way. He was a man with a lot of pride, and she guessed without knowing for sure that being a shifter meant he didn’t always think rationally. The animal inside him wouldn’t like to be insulted. Instinct told her this.

  But instinct also told her she could very well die, no matter whether he fought for her or not. Sometimes, the bad guys won in the end. That was the case for Beth, Michael, Carla, Dan.

  Not to mention all the guys and girls Sledge’s team had to leave behind because they were too sick, too battered to be brought along after the escape from the lab.

  “Stay in the car, whatever you do, and stay low.” Sledge pulled over with Zane following close behind.

  “I feel sick.” She reached for him, clutching him with fingers that were more like claws. “I don’t think you should do this.”

  “Marnie, there’s no choice. Whoever this is, they’ve seen us. They’re following us. We can’t let this go on. Please, trust me.” In one quick motion, he took her by the back of the neck and pulled her in, crushing his lips to hers. She held on tight, kissing him as hard as she could, overcome by desperation at the thought that this could be their last kiss. She could lose him in all of this.

  And she’d just found him.

  “I love you,” he whispered, locking eyes with her for the briefest instant before jumping out of the truck and slamming the door behind him.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Please, come back to me.”

  She watched as Zane got out of his truck, the two of them walking together into the road. The rain had already plastered their clothes to their bodies, leaving little to the imagination. She couldn’t help but think that if she’d spotted the two of them standing in the middle of the road, even during a hurricane, she would’ve had to slow down and do a double-take.

  Although they were both snarling, enraged. Two men who’d seen enough, who’d been through enough. Sledge stood with his hands fisted, hanging at his sides, his teeth bared in a snarl as he stared down the approaching SUV. Was he crazy? Was he daring a cold-blooded killer to run him down?

  She looked back to where the SUV bore down on them, a scream threatening to tear itself from her as th
e headlights grew brighter and brighter against the driving rain. They weren’t slowing down. They weren’t going to slow down!

  She reached back, her hand touching the door handle, prepared to launch herself from the truck and do God only knew what—what could she do, after all? The reason didn’t make much difference when a person was more terrified than they’d ever been in their life.

  Then she did scream, though not for the reason she’d imagined.

  The SUV suddenly fishtailed, headlights swinging in a wide arc before it started a long series of tumbles, over and over, glass shattering, metal crunching, until it came to a stop mere feet from where Sledge and Zane stood.

  They didn’t stand there for long because a second car swung wildly toward them. Marnie screamed again, hands over her mouth, as both Sledge and Zane dove out of the way of the out-of-control SUV which soon bore down on Marnie and the truck.

  Lucky for her, a tree got in the way.

  Not so lucky for the driver who slammed the car headfirst into the solid trunk.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It took a second for Sledge to get his thoughts together after what he’d just witnessed. The pounding of the rain on his head, shoulders, back, mixed with the echo of screeching metal and broken glass, all of it causing even more confusion that he was already suffering from.

  The moment passed, and he came back into focus.

  “Check the first car!” he screamed to Zane before running in the direction of the truck and the second SUV that had slammed into a tree not ten feet away.

  Marnie was still there, inside, sobbing openly. Sledge held up a hand, hoping to reassure her, and the two of them exchanged a long look before he turned his attention to the smoking, crushed wreck in front of him.

  Déjà vu was a very real thing, indeed, though he hardly felt the same sort of concern for the person sitting behind the wheel of this car as he did for the girls in Marnie’s car. They’d been innocent. This person probably wasn’t.

  For all he knew, they could’ve been an innocent bystander, another person who happened to be on the road at the worst time possible. In fact, he might have needed to thank whoever this was for saving them from an assassin.

  Though on second thought, as he approached the wreck, it wasn’t lost on him that this too was a black SUV with dirt-covered plates. Granted, the rain was doing a good job of clearing away the muck, but still.

  Could there have been two of them?

  A mass of strawberry blonde hair covered the face of the woman behind the wheel. The airbags had deployed, and she was unconscious. He smelled blood, though the scent wasn’t strong enough to lead him to think she was injured to gravely. But just as with Marnie, the threat of internal injury wasn’t far from his thoughts.

  As much as he wanted to watch this person die for everything they’d done, he couldn’t leave her there. Especially when there were so many questions he needed answered.

  “Hey. Hey!” He leaned into the car, a brief respite from the driving rain—instead of hitting him straight on the head, he only had to deal with the echo of it pounding against the roof of the car. “Hey, wake up. Wake up!” He slapped her, flat-out, a patch of red blooming against her ashen cheek in an instant.

  But it got the desired result. She stirred, her eyes fluttering. “Help… Please…”

  “Why the hell should I help you?” he snarled. “Answer me. Why should I help you?”

  The girl lifted her head slowly, struggling to focus as she turned to look at him. She had green eyes, large, luminous eyes. Not the sort of eyes he would’ve expected to find on a cold-blooded assassin. “Because I helped you,” she whispered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He demanded, his face only inches from hers. His wolf was in a frenzy of bloodlust, rage, thirst for vengeance.

  “He was going to kill you. All of you. I stopped him.”

  Zane joined them, his voice as sharp as gunfire. “Dead,” he barked, satisfied. Sledge was satisfied too, though it seemed satisfaction was never clean or easy. Because now he had questions, even more than before.

  The girl closed her eyes, sighing softly. “You’ll want to go in and take his phone. It was hooked up to the car’s system. We were in contact when we were following you.”

  “Hang on. What’s this all about?” Zane demanded, pulling Sledge out of the truck and glaring at him. “Why’s she still breathing?”

  “I saved your life,” the girl insisted. Her voice was weak though, and Sledge had the sense she was barely hanging onto consciousness.

  “Exactly how did you do that?” Zane asked, taking her by the back of the neck. His grip was hard enough that she winced, though it did seem to bring her around again. She’d been moments from swooning before Zane took hold of her.

  “I hit him. That’s the reason he flipped. I hit him from behind deliberately because he was going to hit you and kill her.”

  “What? You have a conscience all of a sudden? Or is it your personal rule against committing murder in the middle of a hurricane?”

  “If you would get me out of here and take his phone like I’m telling you to, I can tell you the whole story. Please, I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Zane looked back at Sledge, and an expression of disbelief washed over his rain-slicked face. “You can’t be serious,” he growled.

  “We have to find out who was behind this. Why this is happening. She’s our only chance.”

  “You realize she could tell us nothing but lies, right? How are we supposed to believe anything she says?”

  “They’re killing us too.” Somehow, even in the state she was in, she managed to raise her voice above theirs to make herself heard. “We’re just as vulnerable as you are. More so. They’re tying up all loose ends.”

  “You expect me to feel sorry for you?” Zane almost screamed straight into her face. She flinched but only slightly.

  “Or leave me here to die. Honestly, if they find out what I did, they’ll kill me anyway. It really doesn’t matter. I’ve lived long enough.” She closed her eyes, settling back in her seat. She might’ve been preparing to take a nap, something completely innocent. There was a sense of resignation coming from her. Like the rest of them, she seemed very tired.

  “What are we supposed to do with her? Tell me that.” Zane turned to Sledge, glaring through the rain into his eyes.

  “How am I supposed to know? There has to be somewhere we can go. I want to know what she knows. I want to know why this happening, who they are, and what we can do to stop them.”

  “I can help you,” she whispered, eyes closed. “Just get me out of here, and for God’s sake, take his damn phone. Destroy it. Throw it in the water. Whatever. Just make sure nobody else can pick it up and use it. I don’t want them knowing I was the last person to speak to him.”

  “They can think this was nothing more than an accident,” Sledge muttered, looking around. “Maybe she crawled away? Or got picked up by a cop? We can leave him as he is.”

  “You don’t think somebody’s going to find it suspicious, his phone missing?” said Zane.

  “It could’ve fallen out of the car during the accident for all they know. Don’t worry about that right now. We can’t stay out here forever. We’ll strand ourselves.” Meanwhile, Marnie was waiting for him in the truck, probably wondering what was taking so long. The fact that she’d managed to stay inside the truck and hadn’t come out yet to see what was happening spoke of her self-control, her instincts. She knew better than to get herself into the middle of what could be trouble.

  “You know Jace will kill you.” Zane didn’t have to finish that thought. No, of course, they’d never take her to Kara’s. They couldn’t exactly take her back to Marnie’s, either.

  Or could they? Maybe that was their only choice now. It wasn’t like the assassin didn’t know where she lived—after all, she’d broken into the house. There was nothing in the house that was secret to her since she’d already examined everything.

/>   “Marnie’s,” Sledge decided. “She’ll probably flip, but it’s all we can do.”

  “This is completely insane,” Zane growled, glancing into the car where the assassin floated in and out of consciousness.

  “I know—and if you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.” When Zane’s jaw snapped shut, Sledge knew he had his answer. Winning by default wasn’t the same as winning outright, but it was better than losing.

  Zane pried open the door and pulled the girl out—not gently, not by a long shot. He carried her to his truck and practically threw her into the back. Sledge wanted to remind him that she might have internal bleeding but knew it would be no use.

  If she died by the time they reached Marnie’s, it wouldn’t be much of a loss.

  He went to the truck then, launching himself into it. Into her arms. She covered his face in kisses, shaking like a leaf. “I thought you were dead,” she breathed between kisses.

  “I thought so, too,” he admitted.

  “What’s going on?” She looked over his shoulder, where Zane was climbing into his truck with a scowl. “What’s he doing?”

  Sledge took a deep breath and hoped he hadn’t made the biggest mistake of his life. “It’s a good thing you’re sitting down.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “She’s asleep.” Doc sounded grim when he joined them. “There’s nothing in the room that she can use to harm anyone or herself. So long as we keep guards posted on her around the clock, I think she’ll prove to be an easy patient.”

  “You have a lot more faith in her than I do,” Zane muttered, arms folded. He was still damp after their close call in the rain. Marnie was surprised the water didn’t turn to steam; he was so furious.

  “I agree with Doc,” Logan announced, his voice filling the room. He was still at headquarters, while the storm had eased just enough for Doc to get through in his truck. “It sounds like she’s afraid for her life. This could be the break we need.”