by Vivi Andrews
In fifteen minutes, he’d burned up any good will he might have managed to build over the last two years of playing nice with the fucking lions. He’d bided his time, working to gain some shred of trust, keeping his ears open for any hint of the Organization, and it had finally paid off. They’d hit the fucking jackpot. The Hawk had appeared, recently escaped from the Organization, and directed them to the hard drives—three gold mines of data they could finally use to strike back against the bastards who had been systemically kidnapping and experimenting on shifters for decades.
Dominec had been good. Played along. Until this time.
Grace and Kye had been pissed. The Hawk had nearly shot him in the face. But he couldn’t regret what he’d done. Even if it would make it harder to get his revenge moving forward.
He’d need to get the locations of the other Organization facilities from Mateo somehow, before he left. Then he could cut a swath through the bastards, leaving as many bodies as possible in his wake before they took him out.
It had been satisfying, calming—the automatic, almost rhythmic fire of the gun, the scent of the blood, bodies slumping, lying where they fell. All because of that one tiny figure, lying cold on the slab.
The box opened, releasing the shards.
Little shoulders between his hands. Fighting the adrenaline so he didn’t squeeze too hard. “Shift and hide, Micah. Don’t come out, no matter what you hear. If they find you, use your claws, go for the eyes, the throat, the stomach. Soft bits. And then run. Understand?”
Two more. Mismatched. One old and years out of place. Mashed together wrong.
Ksenia frowning at him as he cuddled the baby in his lap, her fine, delicate features tight with disapproval, accent thick with irritation. “You spoil him too much, Dominec. You will turn him into a girl.”
Ksenia frowning, head tilted to the side. “Do you hear that, kotik?” The rare endearment catching his attention, making him instantly alert.
Her ears had been better than his. He’d only heard it a moment later. The sound of English where it didn’t belong. The heavy footsteps of humans.
Another pair of shards.
Ksenia meeting his eyes over Micah’s head, ushering the boy to the bedroom, her eyes huge with fear, but mouth set with fierce determination. Reverting to Russian, as she did when she was angry. Or afraid. “Uspokoit’sva, malyutka. Vse budet khorosho.” Hush, baby. Everything will be all right. “Tikho, Mishen’ka.” Quietly, Mikey.
Ksenia’s green eyes, blank and unseeing, meeting his across the floor, forever open as a thick rivulet of blood tracked across her high forehead and pooled in the midnight thickness of her hair. The weight of the drugs as heavy on his limbs as the three men kneeling on his back. One of them cursing. Bemoaning the loss of valuable merchandise.
He tried not to remember the rest. Close the box. Lock it tight. If he could just avoid the other shards, he could survive it.
But they always came.
The closet opening. A tiny figure flying out, baby claws flashing, snarling baby growls. Going for the soft bits. Just like his daddy told him. The soldier’s shout, the spit of the silencer. More cursing.
“Fool. That cub was worth more than you.” Was worth.
Was.
Dominec rubbed at the hollow cavity of his chest. How old would Micah be now? Since his tenure enjoying Organization hospitality, he had a hard time with dates and numbers, the passage of time. The boy would be a teenager certainly, but what kind? Gawky and awkward with the disjointed growth spurts or tall and lean and cocky as he became a young man—like his father had been. Stupidly arrogant. Knocking up the first pretty tigress to flick her tail at him.
Soft steps in the hallway outside his door, so close to silent he almost didn’t hear them.
Dominec went still, one hand curling automatically around the grip of the pistol he’d just tucked into the backpack. Had they sent someone to kill him? Too much trouble. Cut your losses. Give the body to the scientists—no.
He shook his head sharply. That was the Organization. Lone Pine was—
Three quick raps. “Dominec. I know you’re in there.”
Grace. Lone Pine was Grace. She wouldn’t kill him. Not without warning. It wasn’t her style.
He forced his hand to release the gun, zipped the bag and moved to open the door. The locks were sturdy enough to slow even a shifter down, giving him that extra bit of warning if someone came for him in the night—and completely unheard of in the pride where half the doors didn’t even have latches so the shifters could come and go by swatting at them in animal form. Dominec had installed them himself when he’d commandeered the apartment as his own.
He cracked the door and Grace slipped through the opening, eyeing the locks as she passed.
“Hey.” Her hands were tucked into the pockets of her jeans, deceptively relaxed, as she strolled around his place. Her clear blue gaze took everything in, missing nothing.
“I’m surprised to find you in an apartment,” she commented casually. “I always pictured you in a shed in the woods, sharpening your knives and writing your Unabomber manifesto on the walls in your own blood.”
He didn’t respond.
She wandered over to the windows. “And on the top floor too. I’d expect the birdies or the climbers to go for the penthouse view, but a feline? Are you some kind of Super Tiger who can survive a six-floor drop?”
He could survive the leap to a balcony on the building across the way—he’d tested it when he moved in—but he didn’t need to tell her that. He could see her calculating the distance, drawing the right conclusion. Grace didn’t miss much. He suspected that was why he’d always found her presence both unnerved him and helped him focus his fractal thoughts.
She would have followed his scent trail here. He should have found a new place to sleep by now. Usually he kept two or three bolt holes around the pride and rotated between them, abandoning them and taking his locks and his meager possessions with him when the scent trails became too saturated, but now that the pride was filling up with refugee shifters from the Organization raids, options for his hiding places were fewer and he’d stayed in this one longer than he should.
Lone Pine was unique. By far the biggest lion shifter pride in North America—probably the world—they also had the distinction of being the only shifter pride or pack he’d ever heard of that accepted shifters of other species into their ranks. He’d come here to glean information from the other shifters on possible Organization activities so he could take his revenge, but dozens of others came here for sanctuary. And now that number was swelling again.
The main pride compound had an abundance of the little one-room bungalows that most of the feline shifters preferred, as well as a handful of newer apartment complexes, and the Alpha’s mansion, reigning over it all from the top of the hill. They had their own school, a communal dining hall—since many of the apartments and bungalows didn’t include kitchens, designed as they were for the community-minded lions—and even a general store. Everything a small town of shape-shifters could need, tucked inside a sprawl of land in the Montana wilderness and surrounded by a perimeter fence that was guarded night and day. There was some sort of technology Dominec didn’t pretend to understand that was supposed to shield them from satellite surveillance. That technology was probably the only thing any of the packs and prides had ever shared with one another.
He wouldn’t be accepted into another pride when he left here, but he couldn’t imagine he would miss pride life. He wasn’t exactly a joiner.
Grace had completed her lap of the open-concept studio, hands still casually tucked in her front pockets. She wore a V-neck top that was tighter and more feminine than her usual T-shirts and he absently noticed her cleavage. She was tall and strong and aggressive, the kind of woman who was sexy because of her strength rather than her dainty femininity. With her blonde hair cut short and her face
free of makeup, she couldn’t have been less like Ksenia and the women he had once gravitated toward, but he had to admit she was attractive. If you liked that sort of thing.
He didn’t need to ask why she was here.
“You drew the short straw?”
“I was volunteered.” She shrugged. “I was the one who advocated for you to be on the team, so you’re my grenade to fall on.” She rested a hip on the arm of the sofa that had been in the apartment when he claimed it. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you you’re off the team.”
“I figured.”
Her eyes moved deliberately to the bags he’d already packed. “Are you going to be a problem, Dominec? We can’t have you going off on your own on some kind of quest for vigilante justice and endangering the rest of us.”
So he wasn’t to be exiled. What then? Stay here and twiddle his thumbs like a good boy while the others moved against the Organization by inches?
“Did you go down there with the intention of killing anyone you found?” Grace asked when he didn’t respond.
“Does it matter?”
She cocked her head to the side. “I don’t know yet.”
She waited, her two-tone blue eyes steady on him, calm and unwavering, like she could sit there for days. Part of him wanted to flash his crazy and see if he could scare her off, but he’d threatened her in the past and she hadn’t even blinked. Grace knew he was dangerous, she let that knowledge sit in her eyes as she looked at him, but she never smelled of fear around him. He could almost like her for that. If he remembered how.
He angled his head, knowing it would make the light play over the scars on his face, accentuating the grotesque, twisted folds of tissue. She just arched a brow impassively.
He remembered that look. She’d given it to him the first time he’d shoved his scars in her face. Bet that hurt like a bitch, she’d said. Didja kill the guy who did it? When he’d flashed his teeth and said yes, she’d just nodded. Good for you.
Nothing seemed to faze Grace and she sure as hell didn’t have normal boundaries. He didn’t think it was a lioness thing because the others had given him a wide berth. No, it was just Grace who felt like she had the right to be in everyone else’s business. Who wasn’t afraid to tell you to your face what she thought was wrong with you and took it upon herself to fix everyone.
Except him. She’d never tried that. Just as well. He was beyond redemption anyway.
He wouldn’t scare her off and while he could hold a vendetta like nobody’s business, he didn’t think he could out-stubborn her. Quickest way to get her out was to answer.
“No. I didn’t.” He’d never wanted to be a killer.
“So what happened?” she pressed. “Something had to push your massacre button. What was it?”
The little body, cold on the slab.
He could tell her it was nothing, that he’d just felt like going on a killing spree. Nothing he said now was likely to help him or hurt him. They weren’t going to let him back in the field again and he wasn’t going to get the freedom of exile either. If he left, they might hunt him. If they thought he was completely unhinged, they would. Always minimizing the risks of exposure.
He didn’t want to explain. But this was Grace.
“Did you look in the rooms?”
Grace nodded. “When I saw the hallway, I made sure the first rooms were clear of threats before I headed to where Dr. Russell was being held.”
Where he had been. The Hawk had stopped him there. By that point he’d been in that clear, cold place where nothing touched him. But that first room…the chill in the air…
“I wasn’t expecting a hallway. I’d been told it was maintenance.” He hadn’t been prepared. The sight hitting him like a punch. The little chest spread wide open. “I opened the first door and there was a man in a lab coat performing an autopsy. On a child. About four, if I had to guess.” Smaller than Micah had been, but then Micah had always been big for his age.
Grace swallowed, the sound audible in the stillness of his apartment. “So you killed him.”
Dominec nodded. He hadn’t even been aware of his claws coming out until the first spray of blood had arced across the wall. That odd detachment.
“He probably wasn’t the one who killed the child,” she said.
“No,” Dominec admitted. He could acknowledge now that the scientist had just been doing his job. “But someone did. Someone he worked with. And he let it happen.”
“So you decided to kill them all.”
He shrugged. “A guard came in while I was…busy. He had a gun.” It had been a quick, conditioned reaction. Disarm. Two shots. Head. Heart. Just like they’d taught him.
In that chill, hollow place he’d gone, he’d had a particularly macabre appreciation for the irony that he’d never even held a gun until the Organization had put one in his hand. They’d wanted a super soldier. Well, that’s what they got.
“It felt good,” he admitted. “To do something. I’ve been on a leash too long. About time I chewed through it.” He met her eyes. “I’m not going to pretend I regret it.”
“Even if your rampage cost us valuable information that could ultimately have led to the destruction of the entire Organization?”
“You want to stop them. When they’re all dead, they’ll stop.”
“And if other shifters who are still in captivity are hurt because of what you did? If another child ends up on an autopsy table because you slowed down our efforts?” Her gaze was hard. “You aren’t the only one, Dominec. I know things were shit for you, but things were shit for a fucking ton of us and we’re trying to save as many shifters as possible. Once we have them out, if you want to go play genocide with the evil scientists, I’m down. But you can’t do that shit when you may be inhibiting our ability to get the fucking job done. Get it?”
He bared his teeth, the dominant predator inside him not taking kindly to being dressed down—even as the tiny little rational pebble in a corner of his brain acknowledged she might have a point.
“Just try to be good, okay?” she said, exasperated. “You’re on probation.”
“And what happens if I’m bad?”
He almost thought he saw regret in her eyes, but it must have been an illusion. “You know the answer to that.”
He did. Death sentence. The shifters had always been ruthless about protecting their secrets. If they thought he would expose them in his quest for vengeance, they wouldn’t hesitate to take him out. He wondered who would do it. The Hawk maybe? He was a trained sniper.
The injustice of it pressed against his brain, making his skull feel too small. But when had life ever been fair? In a perfect world, every Organization doctor would be dead.
And Micah would be alive.
“Why can’t I fucking go after them?” he growled. “Point me at them and let me pay them back for what they’ve done to all of us. We aren’t doing enough.”
“We’re being strategic. Not kamikaze. You can commit hari-kari when it doesn’t potentially impact the rest of the pride. Are we clear?”
He was snarling, but he managed to grit out the word. “Clear.”
He would play nice. For now. At least where she could see him.
Chapter Three
She was going to have to keep a close eye on the bastard.
Grace jogged down the steps of Dominec’s apartment building, replaying the conversation in her head. There had been no emotion in his eyes whatsoever when he’d spoken of killing all those people—which she supposed was better than if he’d gotten off on it, but still. That cold black stare was some scary shit.
She couldn’t help wonder if he’d always been like that, or if it was a conditioned response. Or a defense mechanism. What had he been like before the Organization touched his life? He was startlingly handsome, on the unmarked side of his face. Startling becau
se one so rarely noticed his finely carved features with the distraction of the scars. Had he been vain once upon a time?
Tall, muscular, with silky black hair just a little on the long side and inky black eyes—had they ever been mischievous rather than dead?
He would never have had trouble with the ladies.
Had he been married? She’d heard that the Organization had killed his family, but she didn’t know who that meant. It could have been parents or siblings, but the way he’d spoken about that child on the autopsy table…
He was old enough to have been a father when he was taken. Mid-thirties now, if she had to hazard a guess. No one knew how long he’d been with the Organization or how he’d escaped. He’d simply said it was too long and he’d killed his way out. Then he would tilt his head, in that way of his, calling attention to the scars. Like he was proud of them. Wanting to make sure you didn’t miss them. Trying to punish everyone who might avoid looking at them head on.
Grace had never been afraid to look. He wore his damage on his face. No one could see hers. Didn’t make one of them more special than the other.
She slipped into her office—just a few more things to finish before she could call it a night. Those duty rosters weren’t going to edit themselves. And even if Roman had been giving her shit, getting a health report from Brandt on the incoming refugees was a good idea. She was a pride lieutenant, but she was also their security team’s primary medic and worked closely with Dr. Brandt when he was short staffed. Which was pretty much always, these days.
A lioness’s job is never done.
She sat down at her desk, flipped up her laptop—
And stared at the sticky-note she’d stuck on the screen earlier so she wouldn’t forget the family dinner she’d absolutely promised her mother she would make it to.
“Shit.”
It was the reason she’d put on the freaking girly shirt after her shower when she got back to the pride and she’d completely spaced it. The anniversary of her parents’ mating day. And she was over two hours late.
