Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Zane nodded. “I can vouch for that.”

  With that, he stood, holding out a hand. “Come on. I’ll go down with you and leave you alone once you take a look around to make sure everything’s okay.” It was clear Sledge wasn’t a huge fan of this, but neither of them was bothering to wait and make sure they had his okay before going into the house, then heading to the staircase just outside the kitchen.

  Now that it was just the two of them, he could stop her, share a quiet word. “You’re sure about this? Nobody wants to see you suffer a sleepless night.”

  She blew a strand of dark, sleep-tangled hair out of her eyes, exasperated. “I’ll sleep a lot easier when my shift is over, knowing the rest of you got some sleep. How am I supposed to rest, always wondering if you guys are holding up okay?”

  It was a funny thing, looking down at her as she descended the stairs before him. He’d never given much thought to the sort of mate he’d want one day—this whole mating thing that sort of slammed into their group all at once, with none of them knowing what they were getting into once it started. There was no user manual, no instructions on how to be a wolf shifter created by the government in a lab. There were no elder wolves to guide them; there was no one to walk them through the finer points of what life meant for people like them.

  So he’d never really thought about a fated mate, someone to walk through life at his side.

  But he had the feeling now that whoever she was, he wanted a mate like Marnie, like Serenity, like Kara. Somebody brave, somebody smart. Somebody who wasn’t afraid to take the reins from even an alpha wolf, who wouldn’t back down just because she was told she shouldn’t or she couldn’t.

  There was more than enough time to think about that, wasn’t there? This wasn’t the time. Not with a furious, vengeful redhead tied to a chair, one with eyes that practically burned with hatred.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” she spat.

  All he could do was shake his head and click his tongue as if he actually cared. “No, I think you’re the one who doesn’t know what she did. You should never have gotten mixed up with us in the first place.”

  “I didn’t exactly have a choice,” she insisted.

  “There’s where you’re wrong. There’s always a choice.”

  The basement was finished, sparsely furnished with what looked to be a secondhand sofa, an old TV, and a stack of paperbacks on the floor beside the couch. “I used to hang out down here while the painters and floor guys were working upstairs,” Marnie explained, taking a seat and pulling out a paperback at random. “Believe me, I’m used to spending the night down here. This won’t bother me in the least.”

  She looked at Aimee, a nasty smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Though I can’t speak for all of us, can I?”

  Zane left it at that since he didn’t think he could burn their guest half as well if he tried for the rest of the night.

  Chapter Ten

  During the course of any difficult assignment, it was crucial to take a quiet moment every now and then and make sure it was worth going forward as planned or whether she needed to course correct and move in another direction.

  She’d done it more than once when something went south or just flat-out didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Either she’d gotten bad intel, or her target had invited a civilian home after a night on the town, leaving her wondering if waiting until morning would be considered acceptable by her superiors or whether she should pump a few bullets into an innocent third party.

  It was important for somebody in her line of work to know how to pivot on command and still keep things moving smoothly.

  The thing was, she’d never been up against anything like this before.

  It was time for Aimee to take stock of herself. What was her current status? Was she going to make it through this?

  All signs pointed to yes; she would be fine. Granted, they hadn’t exactly been gentle with her while dragging her down to the basement, practically throwing her into a chair and tying her tight enough to cut off the circulation in her hands and feet. But that was hardly anything she couldn’t recover from.

  What bothered her much more than her numb hands and feet, more than the chafing of her wrists and ankles, more than the dull, persistent throb of her bladder which got worse as the hours went on was how easily they’d managed to catch her. They hadn’t even had to try.

  Why was it so easy for them? What was she missing?

  The immediate answer was obvious. She hadn’t known anything about those floodlights.

  Chance supposedly tried to enter the house, hadn’t she? Aimee closed her eyes, forcing herself to focus, to make sense of what at the time hadn’t seemed like anything more than a mix-up, a failed assignment.

  She remembered hearing that Chance hadn’t been able to get in, that Marnie wasn’t alone now.

  But they hadn’t said anything about floodlights or a security system or anything like that. Why hadn’t they told her? Why hadn’t they spread the word around? Maybe the floodlights were a new thing?

  Or maybe…

  She cleared her throat, looking toward Marnie out of the corner of her eye. The girl was a cold fish, having clearly shut herself down after their little talk earlier. She wasn’t about to try to reach out and be friendly now—certainly, Aimee couldn’t blame her for that. She didn’t need friendship, either. She only needed an answer to a question nagging at the back of her mind.

  “Can I ask you something?” she whispered. Her throat was so dry—she hadn’t had anything to drink except for a few handfuls of water from the bathroom sink just before she’d attempted her escape.

  “Knock yourself out,” Marnie muttered, flipping a page in her book a little harder than she needed to.

  “When were the floodlights installed?”

  Funny how that got her attention. Clearly, she’d hit a nerve. Was this something they’d discussed upstairs while Aimee sat tied to a chair, wondering how she’d manage to escape this time? Or was it something Marnie herself had wondered about? Geniuses probably never stopped thinking.

  She saw what a stupid assumption that was before the thought was even fully formed. Still, Marnie’s posture had changed. She’d gone rigid, and while she stared at the page she was on, her eyes didn’t move.

  Sure, she was smart, but Aimee was trained for situations like this. She could read anyone—except for Zane, who still alluded her for some reason. She understood him in bits and pieces, but not entirely. There were still enough pieces missing that she couldn’t begin to put the puzzle together.

  “The floodlights? The team installed them,” Marnie murmured in a far-too-casual tone from her spot on the couch.

  “When, though?” Aimee pressed. “How long ago was it? And yes, it’s important,” she added.

  “Right after they took me on as a client. That very same day.”

  “So not, like, yesterday?”

  “No. Not, like, yesterday.”

  Aimee’s stomach went icy cold, a cold that spread through her as certainty firmed up. “Long before now? Were they in use when somebody tried to sneak into the house after you left the hospital?”

  “Yes. They were very much in use.” Marnie left her finger in the book to hold her place, though Aimee had the feeling it didn’t matter, that she hadn’t been paying the strictest attention to it anyway. “Does that mean something? Is there something I should be aware of?”

  “No. It doesn’t have to do with you.” Aimee looked at the floor rather than looking at Marnie anymore. She couldn’t. Not when everything was falling apart around her, or as good as.

  They hadn’t told her about the lights.

  What were the odds that Chance hadn’t reported a freaking bank of floodlights on the property? Floodlights that were probably motion-activated? Why wouldn’t she have gone back to the client immediately and reported such a huge development?

  Easy. She would have. Chance was a professional like the rest of them. Secre
ts would only get the rest of the team killed. They couldn’t afford to keep secrets from each other, any of them. While they rarely contacted each other, they’d have to report back to their handlers.

  And those handlers hadn’t seen fit to spread the word to the others.

  Why not? Had they counted on her getting caught by those lights? Had they hoped for it, even? Probably. She couldn’t put anything past these people. Still, why sabotage their efforts? They still wanted Marnie dead.

  With Chance gone now, who did that leave? There was no way of knowing.

  “Marnie. I need you to listen to me,” she murmured, staring at the carpet. It looked old like it had come with the house. One of the few things Marnie hadn’t changed after purchasing the place.

  “Okay.” She hardly sounded impressed.

  “I mean it.” Aimee shot her a look out of the corner of her eye. “You have to listen. You have to believe me because it’s important. Too important to be shrugged off. Okay?”

  “I said I would listen.” Marnie lowered the book to her lap again. “What is it?”

  “They have to separate us. You and me. We can’t be together. I realize they only brought me here because the roads were in terrible condition and because I already found the location of your safe house.” She flinched a little, wishing she’d thought this through before she’d started speaking. All she was going to do was freak the girl out by reminding her of what happened in the recent past.

  Marnie didn’t respond or even visibly react, so Aimee continued. “I didn’t tell them the location. I swear to God, I didn’t. I was going to the house to warn you away from them, but you were already gone. You’ve gotta believe me.”

  “I don’t have to believe anything.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s your life we’re talking about. No, I’m not worried about myself,” she snapped when the look on Marnie’s face changed to one of disbelief. “I don’t care about myself right now. I don’t. This is for your benefit that I’m saying this.”

  “Why would you care about me?”

  “Because it’s not fair. What they were doing to you wasn’t fair. You were only trying to work, to do the job for them. Same as me. Yes, I know the work is very different,” she added when again, Marnie’s expression shifted. “I guess I felt sorry for you. I don’t know. There’s a reason why these people never told us much about the targets they assigned to us. They didn’t want things like this to happen. For us to, you know, pity the people we were supposed to be taking out. I learned too much about you, I guess. There isn’t any time to go into it now.”

  “If not now, when?” Marnie leaned forward. She was an eager listener now, a light shining in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Don’t you think I want to know how this went? Who made the decision to take us out? What their reasoning was?”

  “You aren’t going to get any reasoning from me,” Aimee insisted. “I know. I know how much you must want to know why they did this, their thought process. I wasn’t privy to any of that, I swear, and this is why; I’m sure of it. The more I knew, the less I wanted to be involved. I made a stupid mistake. I asked questions. I asked why it had to be you, your team. What did you do? You were just a person, a girl like me. You weren’t involved in some shady deal. You weren’t, like, into sex trafficking or something really vile. You were just a person who built a business. You were proud of it. That was it. So I asked about you and that was what probably tipped them off that I needed to be eliminated.”

  Marnie chewed her lip, frowning. She didn’t know what to believe. “You don’t have to believe me, that’s fine,” Aimee insisted. “But please, believe this: having us together only makes it easier for them. Now, they’re looking for me just as much as they’re looking for you. If they have even an inkling that we’re together, they’ll come for both of us, and that puts your life in greater danger than before, but they don’t know where the safe house is. I think either you or I should go there; it doesn’t matter who so long as you’re safe.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trap? How do I know you aren’t trying to send me to the safe house because you know they’ll be waiting for me?”

  “Then I’ll go there. Did you hear me? It doesn’t matter. So long as we’re separated, that’s all I care about.”

  Marnie hesitated, nails tapping on the book forgotten in her lap. “I can talk to them, send one of them down to see you once they’re awake.”

  “Fine, whatever, but it has to be fast. I would hate to see anything happen to you now.”

  Marnie stood, never taking her eyes from Aimee. “I wish I knew whether or not I can believe you,” she admitted with a catch in her voice.

  “You can. I swear. I was going to the house to warn you—they didn’t know I installed the tracker on your laptop. My orders were to break into your office, which I did, and I told them there was nothing left behind. That was a lie. Your computer was there, obviously, and so was Beth’s computer. I should’ve taken them, should’ve sent the files over to whoever wanted them—or destroy them, whatever they wanted—but I didn’t. For all I know, somebody else could’ve gone in there and found the laptops and known I was lying. Between that and the questions I was asking, I earned a target on my back.”

  “Then, it wasn’t you.” Marnie crossed her hands over her chest, practically slumping over an obvious relief. “You weren’t the one who shot at me. Right? If you were trying to help me, you wouldn’t have shot at me.”

  She’d already said too much, but she guessed there was nothing wrong with admitting this much. “No, that wasn’t me. I’m guessing it was Price, whose car I flipped.”

  “And you didn’t run me and Beth off the road, either. Right?”

  She had to go and ask that, didn’t she?

  For an instant, Aimee’s heart filled with hope. Yes, hope, something she hadn’t dared entertain in as long as he could remember. Hope was a waste of time; it was pointless. All it did was break a person’s heart.

  There was nobody to tell her otherwise. Nobody to reveal the truth. The truth could be whatever Aimee wanted to be. The odds of the actual truth, the real truth, ever coming out were slim to none.

  Because she wanted to be good. Decent. Wanted at least one of the people holding her hostage not to hate her. They didn’t have to like her—she never would’ve asked for something like that; she wasn’t crazy. So long as Marnie didn’t hate her.

  Since when did she care so much about the opinions of other people? Especially complete strangers.

  It didn’t matter, and she knew it. She didn’t deserve kindness or understanding, and even if she ever got it, it wouldn’t be because she’d lied.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she meant it. “But it was me. I ran you off the road. I killed your friend. I didn’t know anything about you then—you were just a job. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”

  The poor girl. She swayed slightly like she was standing on the deck of a ship on stormy seas. What a world she’d been thrust into, a world she couldn’t have had any awareness of before now. What a terrible thing for her. She probably expected to wake up eventually and find out it was all a dream.

  “How can you say that?” Marnie breathed, blinking rapidly like she was trying to keep tears from flowing. “You’re sorry? You think that just because you didn’t know anything about me or Beth that it exonerates you? That I’ll forgive you because I was nothing but a job? Because Beth, my best friend, was nothing more than a job? I’m sorry, but you’re not going to find forgiveness from me.”

  Close it out. Shut it down. You are in control of this. Yet no matter how practiced Aimee was at closing herself off from emotion, it didn’t work now. All she could do was scramble around, gathering up the bare scraps of her dignity and trying to hold them around her like a protective garment.

  And she was failing. She could feel control slipping through her fingers like water, like sand. There was no holding onto it anymore.

  She managed to nod briefly
, firmly. “I understand. That doesn’t change the fact that one of us needs to leave. You should take this to the team as soon as possible so they can figure something out.”

  Part of her expected to get an argument, to be told it wasn’t for her to say what had to be done. Instead, Marnie fled up the stairs, her slippers slapping on each step. The slamming of the door made Aimee wince, and only then could she let herself sag with fatigue.

  It didn’t matter what anyone thought of her so long as they did the right thing and protected Marnie.

  Because she didn’t matter. She never had. She didn’t deserve protection after the life she’d lived.

  Chapter Eleven

  Zane woke to the sound of sobbing.

  He sat up, blinking hard, rubbing sleep from his eyes while trying to make sense of whatever it was Marnie was sobbing to Sledge the living room. He’d gone to sleep with the guest room door open—the room which had been Aimee’s for the past two days.

  The fact that he’d slept on the pillows which head cradled her head hadn’t escaped him, but nothing much mattered besides getting a few hours of sleep. Now that he had, he felt better, though his dreams were broken and troubled. Dreams of the wolf, of roaming the streets and backyards as the wolf, of sniffing out a threat closing in on all of them.

  It was just a dream. Right? There was nothing to be concerned about.

  Except for the sound of those sobs, which floated up the stairs.

  “I hoped it wasn’t her. I really did. I feel so stupid.” That was all he could make out before the rest got lost in heaving sobs.

  He closed his eyes, growling. Nobody had to tell him what she was crying about now. While the deaths of all of her team members had hit Marnie hard, none of them had affected her the way Beth’s had. She wouldn’t be crying like this over anybody but her best friend.

  Aimee was doing a job. She was only doing a job. It was a mantra playing over and over in his mind, one he tried to focus on so the sound of the wolf’s snarling and panting and howling would be drowned out. His wolf didn’t care who made her do it or why.