by Camryn Rhys
“Alex is here,” she said, almost like a mantra. “And Niko. They can take Faye.”
Luther tried to hide his shock, but barely succeeded. “Where are you going to take Faye?”
“We need to take her back.” Maggie pointed wildly, over and over, toward the city. To her apartment? “She’s a wolf. She might not really be dead.”
She’s dead, he wanted to say, but he held his tongue. They walked down the stairs to the lower deck. Two men jumped from the dock and landed on the boat. They stared at him for a long moment and looked up the steps toward the other deck, then back at him. The dark-haired one shook his head.
Luther pointed to the gangway. “Put that across to the dock and if you can find a rope, tie us on.”
“What the hell were you thinking, Maggie?” the dark, Hispanic-looking man with angry eyebrows advanced on them.
“Hey, now.” Luther stepped between Maggie and the man and flexed his shoulders. “You leave her the hell alone.”
“I just wanted to get into the security system,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Alex, but there wasn’t time for a big meeting.”
Ah, so this was Alex.
Luther put his hand on the man’s chest and pushed him back toward the deck. The clunk of the gangway made them all turn, and two women filed onto the boat after the other man.
“Gods, Mag, we were so worried.” One of the women came forward, her hands outstretched, and clasped Maggie in a hug. She looked vaguely familiar. Small and slight with a curtain of dark hair. A bright blue streak caught his attention.
The hotel girl. She’d delivered supplies to his boat from…
“Julianna,” he said aloud when he recognized the other woman. His insides constricted. “Maggie.” He grabbed for her. “We have to go.”
“No, no.” Julianna reached for him. “I’m on your side. Luther.”
His heartbeat raced. Adrian’s daughter. She was on their side?
“She’s the one who told us you’d gone to the island,” Alex said, sliding a hand around Julianna’s waist.
Ahhh. He glanced at Maggie, hanging onto the short Asian girl. “So this sleeping with the enemy thing runs deep with you guys.”
Alex grunted. “You’re one to talk.”
“I’m telling you, we have to go.” Luther pushed at Alex’s chest again. “We turned off the security system on the island. They know something’s wrong and this is the first place they’ll come to check.”
“Then let’s go.” The other man gestured for everyone to follow.
“No.” Maggie’s voice was weak, small. It tore Luther apart. “Faye. We have to bring Faye.”
“Who’s Faye?” Alex exchanged a look with Julianna, then with the others. “Where is she?”
“She’s dead.” Tears slipped from Maggie’s eyes. “It’s my fault, Alex. We tried to rescue her, but… I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s not important,” Luther said. “The important thing is, we need to get out of here.” He tried to pull Maggie, but she stood her ground.
“I’m not leaving without Faye.” She glared at Luther and guilt lanced him straight to his heart.
Did he want to leave the girl behind to forget what’d happened? There were plenty of arms to do the carrying. But he knew why Maggie wanted to bring her along. She was convinced the girl was still alive.
She was dead.
“Fine,” he said at last. He thumbed up the stairs. “She’s in the control room. At the front of the boat.”
Alex took off up the stairs and the other man lifted Maggie into his arms, stepping toward the gangway.
Luther pulled at him. “I don’t think so, buddy. Get your hands off her.”
She touched his hand and gave him a sad glance. “Let Niko do this. You have to take everything with you. We can’t come back, now that Adrian will know what you’ve done.”
Niko raised his eyebrows. “I’ve got her, man. Don’t worry.”
“She needs a hospital,” Luther said.
“She just needs to go home.” The guy’s voice was unforgiving. Solid.
Luther didn’t have the strength to argue. Maggie might be a fast healer, but she’d been shot. He would take her himself if he had to.
“Hannah and I will help you,” Julianna said, pointing back toward the boat. “We should be able to carry anything you can’t live without.”
“I’m never coming back here.” He had to say the words aloud to believe them. He’d found the woman he couldn’t live without, but he was about to lose the only home he’d known since Boston. Ten years and no home, and now he had to leave the boat behind. “I’m never coming back,” he repeated.
“Let’s go,” Alex called, careening down the stairs with Faye in his arms. “We’ll meet you back at the apartment.”
Luther led the two women to his room and tried to imagine a life without this place. He walked around his room, thinking of what he could take, but everything seemed to be worthless.
He grabbed a duffle bag and threw his wallet, gun, and computer into it. Hannah and Julianna had opened drawers and were cleaning out clothes and putting them on the bed. He grabbed a pair of jeans, some boxers, a t-shirt, and some socks, and threw it all in the bag, then walked out of the room.
On the way up to the deck, he stopped at the safe and opened it. He took the bag with his savings in it, and led the women back out into the night.
He had to leave this whole life behind.
Luther was done with Adrian Rossi.
Chapter Twelve
The apartment was dark when he arrived. Niko opened the door when they knocked and deadbolted it behind them. Maggie was nowhere to be seen. Luther set his bag on the ground and the women took chairs at the table where Alex was already sitting.
“Where’s Maggie?” Something under his skin buzzed, like there was another energy there, trying to get out. He looked around the dark room and saw a tiny glow in the living room. Faye had been laid out under a barely-glowing lamp. Like a desk lamp, hovering over her.
Still no Maggie.
“She’s in the shower. We need to know what happened.” Alex drilled Luther with dark anger in his eyes. “I personally would like you to explain why you took Maggie, alone, out to the most dangerous place on creation, without calling us and asking for backup.”
He sat and laced his hands together, trying to keep his calm. This asshole wanted a fight, but Luther was done fighting. “Maggie wanted to go to the boathouse, just on the beach. She thought she could get into the core of the system there and maybe find schematics of the house, or something.” He pressed his fingers together. “We didn’t know there was a second system.”
“It was supposed to be recon, then?” Niko asked, raising a light brow.
“Yes.”
“Then how did you end up with a dead girl?” Alex gritted his teeth. “And why is Maggie full of fucking bullets?”
“Take it easy on him, Alex.” Julianna stroked the man’s arm and spoke in a calming voice. “He’s got wounds of his own.”
“We’ve been on assignment now for two months,” Alex snapped. “Maggie is like my sister. I want to know why this asswipe thinks he can mess with my sister.”
“It was her idea.” Luther let his head shake slowly from side to side. “I told her we would only go to the boathouse, and then we had to come back. But the system wasn’t set up how we thought. It was like a phantom system was hiding somewhere. She ran off to find it before I really knew what was going on.”
“So it’s her fault?” Alex rose a few inches and Julianna grabbed his forearm.
“Alex.” She pulled him down. “Stop.”
“How did the girl die?” Niko asked, a calmness in his voice that Luther appreciated.
No sense stirring up trouble when they’d had so much already.
“I don’t know. I thought she’d been shot by a sniper, but…” Luther glanced toward the living room. Faye’s body had been laid out on the floor in the dark. He could see
the glint of her white dress, but nothing else. “We didn’t have time to find out. We just had to take her. Maggie thought she might still be alive.”
“So she was a wolf?” The Asian girl put her hand on Niko’s thigh and the muscles in her forearm tightened.
“We think she was Rossi’s—” Luther glanced up at Julianna. “We don’t know who she is, really. Except that the women told us to take her.” He snapped his mouth shut when the rest of the details threatened to spill out of him.
“It’s my fault.” Maggie’s voice carried through the room and stuck inside Luther like an arrow. She stepped into the kitchen, a towel on her head. She wore the same blue shirt he’d put on her in the yacht.
He reached for her and she walked to his side, her steps slow and careful. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “We don’t know what happened.”
Once she was in the low light, his eyes went straight to her shoulder where the neck was so wide, it hung open still. Where there’d been a wound, there was now only skin. She was a fast healer, but…
He glanced down at his own arms.
Healed. This magick.
It confounded him. When they were alone, he’d ask her about how she had done it. What spell she had cast on him to make his skin come back together.
“We should do an autopsy,” Julianna suggested. “I know one of the coroners and he can put us in touch with—”
Alex raised his hand to her shoulder. “She’s a wolf. If there’s something wrong with her, we need another wolf to look at her.”
“But isn’t she dead?” Luther asked, glancing around the table.
“She is,” Alex responded. “But she’s a wolf, so the wound might’ve healed. We need someone who knows what they’re looking for. How do you think your arm healed so fast?”
Luther’s mouth dropped open. “I’m not a wolf.”
The whole table turned to glare at Maggie.
“How does he not know?” Alex growled.
“I told Niko, I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him. There were… it was…”
“Tell me what?” Luther turned to stare up at her. “Mag. Tell me what?”
Her mouth tightened and she touched the edge of the wound on his bicep, then traced a few inches and stopped. “I had to. I told them, I didn’t have a choice.”
“Maggie.” Luther grabbed her hand. “Tell me what?”
Her brows turned down and her forehead wrinkled. Her finger was hot on his skin. “I made you a wolf.”
Emotions churned in his eyes, flecks of gold from the magick of the wolf spirit were settling into place. His shoulder was healing nicely already, which meant his internal injuries were well on their way as well. By the next day he’d barely be able to feel that he’d been run over by a Jeep.
“Take the back bedroom tonight, Maggie. Talk. Rest. You two have a lot to sort out.” He nodded toward Faye’s body. “We’re going to call in a favor with Hannah’s family and get a doctor down here to examine Faye.”
Maggie fought to swallow the accumulating spit in her mouth. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. She’d turned every system on the island off. But Faye was dead. Something had killed her. Guilt pressed on Maggie’s chest. The young woman’s death was on her hands, no matter what anyone said. And Luther was alive…but cursed. And confused and probably angry. The pit at the bottom of her stomach twisted, reminding her that he might hate her for what she’d done.
Leave her.
How would she survive without Luther? Everything had changed now.
“Take her.” Niko urged at Luther, pointing to the dark hallway.
Luther wrapped an arm around Maggie’s waist and tugged her away from the group.
“I’m so sorry. Please forgive me,” she sobbed. “I couldn’t lose you. It was selfish. But I couldn’t watch you die.”
He tucked her against his strong frame, half walking half carrying her toward the hallway. “Shhhhhhh. There is nothing to forgive.” He pushed open the bedroom door and closed it behind them.
Maggie’s knees gave out, but he caught her around the waist and sat on the edge of the bed, cradling her in his arms. “I just don’t understand how any of this works.” He tucked a lock of her short hair behind her ear and kissed the top of her head. “I need you to tell me.”
The magick rolled off him in waves, comforting her, soothing the ache in her soul. He was her mate. They weren’t bonded yet, but she belonged to him. They belonged together and he wasn’t rejecting her.
“I cursed you.”
“Cursed?”
“The spell is a blessing and a curse wrapped together.”
“So, will I change into a wolf like you, now?”
His honest curiosity tugged at her heart, pulling her out of the pit she’d thrown herself into. Everything had happened for a reason on this mission. Fate had been in control from the very beginning—sending certain enforcers to Mexico, having them find their mates, her finding Luther.
But…changing him without his permission. Without letting him make that choice. She’d taken Fate into her own hands and the punishment had been Faye’s death.
Darkness descended over her thoughts again.
“Maggie?”
“You can shift now, yes,” she answered, her voice void of emotion. “I asked Fate to give you a wolf spirit to protect and heal you.”
“Because of the Jeep. On the island.”
Maggie pushed out of his arms and stood a few feet away from him. His dark eyes flashed with hurt. He missed her touch as instantly as she did.
“It’s not all bad. But I did it without your consent. Without asking you if you wanted to be bound to the moon.”
Luther rose from the bed and walked toward her, but she backed away, shaking her head. “I’m so afraid that…” She couldn’t finish.
When he heard how she’d trapped him for the rest of his life. His tune would change.
“Stop running from me.”
She paused at his words. He was right. Maggie was backing away from him, getting closer and closer to the open bathroom door.
He sat on the bed again and patted the mattress beside him. “Just tell me what it is. So much has happened, Mag. I just need the truth. Please.”
Taking a deep breath, she stepped closer and dropped to sit beside him on the bed. “Only female wolves can change a man. It’s a spell reserved to use if we fall in love and mate a human.”
“It healed me.”
Maggie nodded. “A mate bond would’ve done the same thing without turning you into a wolf, but not fast enough, and I would’ve had to feel your injuries.”
“Feel them?”
“Experience them psychosomatically.”
“God, Maggie. I was almost dead.”
“I know. Bonding with you would’ve incapacitated me for a day, or more. It just wasn’t feasible for the situation. So I used the only other option I had.” She drew in a deep breath, allowing his calmness to soothe her worries. Maybe he really wouldn’t leave her. “Magick always comes at a price. You’re alive and well, but you are bound to the moon just like me. Like all of us. It’s a half moon now, so you have time to adjust to the idea, but on a full moon…we all shift. There isn’t a choice. We’re trapped in our wolf forms from sunset to sunrise the next morning.”
His body tensed and he stood from the bed, turning to face her. “Every full moon?”
“Yes.”
“How do you hide this problem from people? From humans.”
A tiny sliver of amusement tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Very carefully.”
“And the bond, you spoke of. The…mate bond?”
“There’s no rush. I know this has to be completely overwhelming. I’m sorry.”
Luther knelt on the floor in front of her, placing a palm on one of her thighs. The touch calmed her racing heart and dried the tears threatening to drown her eyes. “You saved my life. I’d be dead without you. I’m never going to regret the choice you made for me.” He rubbed h
is thumb in a circular pattern over her bare thigh. “I feel strange things since waking up. And your friends…they look different to me. You look different to me.”
Maggie nodded. “We all have a magickal signature, like a radio wave that we emit. Its how we can sense each other when we are near. Certain relationships produce stronger signals.”
“Like a mate bond.”
“Yes. A mate bond is one of the strongest, but also the most encompassing. Our emotions become telepathically linked and we experience everything the other feels. From a stubbed toe, to a stabbing.”
Luther shook his head. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
Her heart clenched. Of course he wasn’t. He shouldn’t be. But it still hurt to hear.
“I want you, Mag. Whatever that entails, but I need to let this whole wolf thing settle first. Can you give me time?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, hot and searing. “Of course. You’re my mate, Luther, even if you’re never ready to bond. I’ll always be there for you. Always.”
He reached up and wiped her cheeks with his fingers. “What happened today was not your fault. Do you hear me?”
She nodded.
“Adrian Rossi is a monster and we’re going to beat him. I’m not leaving Choaca until we do.”
Maggie leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Luther’s neck. Hope had bloomed in her heart. He wasn’t angry. Or upset.
He was just trying to cope with his new set of circumstances. But he wanted her. He’d told her he wanted her.
“Lie down and try to sleep. I’m going to take a shower and then I’ll join you.”
She released him and sighed. Exhaustion didn’t even begin to describe what she felt. She turned and crawled up the length of the mattress where she let her head sink slowly into one of the giant feather pillows stacked against the headboard. “Promise, you’re coming back.” Maggie craned her head and glanced over her shoulder as Luther disappeared into the bathroom.
“I promise.” The bass of his voice rumbled through the room, and his earnest response relaxed her enough to release the tension she’d been carrying since they left the dock.
