by Vivi Andrews
He scanned the dozen or so patrons huddled around tables and bellied up to the bar, looking for the perfect fuse to light.
There. Two men at the end of the bar. Emaciated. Huddled over their drinks like they may be snatched away at any moment. Jumping at every stray noise.
Perfect.
Dominec moved slowly, making sure they heard him as he approached so he didn’t startle them as he slid onto the barstool two stools down.
Whiskey, the tigress who ran the bar, looked up from the pint she was drawing and frowned at him. She knew he wasn’t a regular. Knew he had only been in here once in the last two years, but she didn’t question him, just turned to carry the pint across to a table in the center of the room.
Dominec waited until she returned, biding his time. It wouldn’t pay to rush.
He propped his arms on the bar as he waited, angling his head so the scars on his face caught the light—just in case the two refugees down the bar had missed them.
Whiskey returned from her drink delivery with a couple of empty pint glasses and set about rinsing them behind the bar. “Dominec,” she said, her tone far from welcoming. “You drinking?”
“Coke.”
She nodded and grabbed a fresh glass, filling it with ice and reaching for the soda gun. She set the drink in front of him and went back to work sliding used glasses into a dish rack, but he didn’t fool himself that she wasn’t listening. Whiskey was notoriously discreet, but she heard everything that happened in this pride.
And he’d seen her a time or two with Grace. He’d have to tread carefully.
Dominec sipped his drink, let the light play across his scars, and waited.
It didn’t take long.
The one sitting closest jerked his chin toward Dominec’s face. “Organization do that?”
Dominec nodded, making sure to keep his face angled so they got a good look.
“Fuck,” the one sitting farther down muttered.
He nodded again, taking another swallow of the soda. It was too syrupy sweet for his taste, but he needed a prop and he didn’t think water would cut it. He let the silence stretch, pretending to enjoy the Coke.
The one closest, a small, dark-haired man with the unmistakable scent of a badger, spoke again. “These lions. They get you out?”
Dominec shook his head. “Killed my way out.” He emphasized the first word slightly, letting the violence of the act resonate.
The one on the end—lynx, bobcat, something like that—murmured an awed curse. The badger lifted his beer, frowning into it. “Wish you’d killed ’em all.”
“Me too.” Dominec paused, fighting the urge to look toward Whiskey and see how she was reacting to the little bonding session occurring at her bar. He’d let his fellow drinkers bring up the Organization, but he needed to watch his words so his hands stayed clean of whatever was to come. After taking another slow swallow of Coke, he mused into his glass, “I can’t believe any shifter would actually consider letting them live.” He shook his head ruefully. “Taking hostages. What the fuck is that? It’s not like the Organization showed us any mercy.”
The men huddled over their beers visibly perked up. “Hostages?”
Dominec feigned surprise. “Didn’t you hear? This last raid. They took a ton of hostages. Put ’em in some barn. Of course, we can’t touch a hair on their fucking heads because they might be valuable. They might have information. So who cares what they did to us, right?”
The badger snarled. “Fifteen minutes alone. I’ll get that information out of them.”
The lynx/bobcat/whatever grinned—but it wasn’t pretty. “Hell yeah.”
Dominec tucked his chin down and lifted his soda in a salute to the idea, saying nothing more. Nothing else needed to be said. The idea had been planted.
Whiskey appeared in front of him, soda gun in hand to refill his drink. “What are you doing, Dominec?” she asked so softly the words were almost sub-vocal.
He shrugged and drank down the caffeinated sugar syrup. “Just talking to some of my pride mates.”
She frowned, whiskey-colored eyes studying him, but said nothing more, moving away down the bar to check on the rest of her clientele.
It was unlikely she’d say anything to Grace. Sure, they all knew he was dangerous—but it was crazy dangerous, like he was a grenade with the pin pulled and they never knew when he was going to go off. No one expected the crazy asshole to be clever and patient enough to make plans and manipulate others into getting into trouble for him.
A few feet down the bar, the badger and his feline friend were whispering to one another. Already making plans, discussing who to bring along when they went to the barn. Dominec wouldn’t have to say another word.
His probation wasn’t threatened and those Organization prisoners were about to have a shit ton of pissed off shifters to deal with.
Justice.
Dr. Rachel Russell was a gift from the gods.
The stolen hard drives were invaluable, but dossiers and schematics couldn’t teach them how the enemy thought. How they targeted isolated shifters. How they buried the locations of their cells beneath bullshit super-spy codes.
Rachel was the key. By the end of the first five minutes of her interview, they had already learned more about the Organization than they’d been able to piece together in all the previous years combined. They’d interrogated her for hours before the Hawk had finally decided that his precious had had enough and whisked her back to his cabin in the woods.
Grace rubbed at her gritty eyes and glowered across the table at Hugo as Roman, Patch and the remaining advisors lingered to argue.
“The longer we wait, the older the information on the hard drives gets and the more chance the Organization has to move their captives to locations we don’t know about,” she insisted.
“And going off half-cocked only puts everyone’s lives at risk,” the bear shifter rumbled back.
Grace appealed to the Alpha with a look, but all it took was a glance at Roman’s frown to know she wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter.
“You heard Dr. Russell,” Grace pressed anyway. “The so called D-Blocks are for shifter disposal. We can’t just sit around and wait for them to kill our people off.”
A muscle in Roman’s jaw jumped, but he said, deep and calm, “We’ll continue to carefully select future targets—keeping in mind what we’ve learned from Dr. Russell. Right now we just don’t have the manpower for more.”
Two hundred shifters and they lacked manpower. Grace hated the truth of that. Hated how slowly they were moving.
Hated the fact that crazy-ass Dominec might be right.
“Patch?” she appealed to the Alpha’s mate.
The petite cougar sighed. “I’m with you, Grace,” she said, though her tone implied the opposite. “I want to take them all down, but even training volunteers as fast as we can, we’re months away from having the resources to go after more than one target at a time. Mateo will find us the right one.”
Mateo, who was even now back at his bunker, using the information Dr. Russell had given them to find the juiciest target. Mateo, who had been given a new lease on life only hours earlier when Dr. Russell informed him that his sister Caridad had been among those shifters she’d managed to smuggle out and mark as deceased in the Organization records.
Cari was alive and Grace would have liked to think that her worrying over Mateo was over, but the leopard was even more likely to work himself to death now in his relentless need to find her and bring the Organization down.
“What if we appealed to the other prides and packs?”
The other lieutenants had been murmuring amongst themselves, but silence fell over the table with those words.
“We’ve been thinking of our own limitations, but this isn’t just Lone Pine’s fight,” she pressed. “It’s all of
ours.”
“It would take forever to coordinate everyone,” Roman murmured, but he was obviously intrigued.
“Longer than us going after a hundred Organization cells individually?”
“How would you even find all the prides?” Patch asked. “The locations are mostly rumors. We’ve never exactly played well together, so no one shares information.”
Grace shrugged. “The Organization knows where we are. Might as well use that information against them.”
Hugo stirred himself. “There’s a wolf pack north of here. They, ah, they like to keep tabs on the shifter community. Even if the prides and packs aren’t on Organization lists, they’ll be on the Black Lake Wolves’ radar.”
“So we contact Black Lake,” Grace insisted. “The sooner the better.”
“We’ll have to do it carefully,” Hugo rumbled. “They don’t like visitors. If we even touch their territory, we might be inviting a war.”
“This is a war. Against the Organization. And the wolves need to pick a freaking side,” Grace snapped.
Roman held up a hand to quell the argument. “Draw up a plan,” he said to Grace. “We’ll consider it.”
She grimaced. Draw up a plan. Sure. In all her free time. But at least it was something. “Will do, boss.”
Mateo wasn’t the only one who was willing to work himself to the brink of insanity to end this threat.
Chapter Seven
Dominec scratched his chin against the shingles, not caring if Grace heard the sound of his fur rubbing against the roof above her head. It had been three days since he set his plan for the prisoners in motion. He could hear the distant roars of the mob that had gathered around the prisoner barn, but he couldn’t be seen there. Not if he wanted to have any claim to innocence.
He couldn’t violate his probation until he could figure out a way to get his hands on the Organization schematics Mateo was hoarding.
Every lieutenant’s tablet had a copy of the personnel files—the Organization’s dossiers on which shifters they were hunting, capturing and torturing today—but only Mateo had the schematics and he was still refusing to give Dominec a list. The last time Dominec had asked—demanded, whatever—the leopard had said something about giving Grace’s plan a chance to work.
So here Dominec was, eavesdropping—literally—on Grace in an effort to hear this brilliant plan. But she wasn’t talking. She’d barely been in her office at all the last few days—closeted up at the Alpha’s mansion with their pet Organization doctor and the Hawk—and when she was here, none of the other lieutenants came by to discuss plans the way they sometimes did.
Dominec stretched his paws. He hated inactivity. It gave his fractal thoughts too much time to spin around in his head. He’d been biding his time for years, damn it. Now that the Organization was in their crosshairs, he wanted to know what Lone Pine was doing to take the shot and he wanted to know now.
The last of the evening light played across the rooftops around him, but the sight did nothing to soothe him. The distant enraged roaring of the mob at the prisoner barn was music to his ears, but it wasn’t enough.
Dominec moved quickly, leaping off the roof. He crouched beside the porch and shifted form. Reaching between the slats, he collected the fatigues, boots and dark, long sleeved shirt he’d stashed under the porch. Dressing quickly—underwear was a waste of time, slowing his shifting speed—he ran through possible excuses for seeking Grace out.
She didn’t have a secretive nature and he’d seen her bristle whenever someone tried to manipulate her. Grace was a battering ram, coming at problems directly and at full speed. His best tactic may actually be to be straight with her and simply ask what he wanted to know—not a method he had a lot of experience with.
He circled to the front of the porch and clomped up the steps, letting his feet fall heavily to announce his presence. Her door was propped open as usual, revealing the clutter of couches she’d crammed into the space. Her desk was off to one side, not visible from his angle, but he heard the soft click of a laptop closing. By the time he appeared in the doorway, she was lounging back in her desk chair, one eyebrow arched expectantly.
“Dominec. To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”
Battering ram approach. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“Oh, just going over some reports. What’s going on with you?” A feline smile curved her lips.
He glowered. “The entire pride is buzzing. You learned something. From that doctor.”
“We learned a lot of things actually,” she said, rocking her chair with one foot. “That’s what happens when you don’t slaughter all the hostages.”
Agitation pulled at him with a thousand tiny claws. He tried to prowl the office, but the fucking couches were everywhere, interrupting his stride. “I want to help,” he snarled.
“You look like you want to kill someone.”
“Can’t I do both?”
Grace snorted, smothering a laugh. And he wasn’t even trying to be funny.
“I hate the waiting and playing nice,” he growled. “You know I’m useful. So use me. I’ll go crazy if I can’t do something.”
“Go crazy?”
Dominec bared his teeth, knowing it wasn’t his most sane look and Grace snickered, irritatingly amused. He was used to a certain degree of respectful fear, but Grace was entertained.
“Look,” she said, sobering. “I know you can be useful, when you aren’t murdering dozens of potential hostages, and if there’s a way for me to use you, I will. But right now you need to keep demonstrating to the Alpha that you have more control than a rabid badger. Cool?”
The growl built in his chest, his animal side protesting the restraint.
A creak on the porch steps had him spinning toward the open door, fangs bared, claws snapping out in a sharp, painful rush. That fucking cowboy lion Kelly Mather stood on the top step, hat in hand, eyes wary as he took in Dominec’s battle-ready stance.
“You okay, Grace?” he asked, caution in every word.
Grace rocked out of her chair and came to her feet in a rush. “Kelly? What are you doing here?”
She came around her desk so she could see through the open door as Kelly slowly approached, all lazy, rolling swagger.
“It’s seven,” he said. When that failed to elicit a response, he went on. “Date night? We’re having dinner?”
Grace’s expression went from blank to mildly annoyed. “Right. That.”
Kelly’s easygoing smile dimmed a few notches. “Yeah. That.”
And somehow Grace’s lack of enthusiasm made Dominec’s urge to shred Kelly’s face with his claws retreat.
“Sorry,” Grace muttered, moving back to the desk to grab her laptop case and sling it over her shoulder. “It’s been one of those days. Let’s do this.”
Kelly opened his mouth, but then his eyes fell on Dominec again and he swallowed whatever he would have said.
Grace followed his gaze. “Shut off the lights and close the door when you’re done having your temper tantrum, all right, Dominec? And don’t go through my stuff. My office doesn’t even have a lock so you know I don’t leave anything sensitive here.”
Then she was gone. Breezing out into the chill evening air with Kelly at her side.
The urge to savage something with his claws returned with a vengeance. What the fuck was she doing with Kelly? Was that soft-bellied excuse for a lion really what she wanted?
Dominec growled, feeling it pushing at him. That familiar anger. The itch to attack. The need to find that cool, steady place that he could only reach with blood coating his claws. All the agitation faded away when he was there, inside that bubble of icy calm.
It would feel good. Kelly wouldn’t know what hit him.
But Grace wouldn’t forgive that.
Dominec breathed. In and out.
Fighting to keep it together. It was harder than it used to be. He’d let the monster out of its box last week during the raid and monsters never went willingly back into their cages. The door inside him that separated him from the beast hadn’t closed all the way.
If it had ever existed. Maybe he was the monster and his moments of lucidity were just the face the monster wore. Everything good in him had died with Micah. He might as well face the truth of who he was now.
His hands were partially shifted. Claws out and patterned fur across the knuckles. It would be so easy to attack Kelly. His blood would be warm and sweet.
Grace would kill him for doing it. But would that really be so bad? Whatever happened when they died, it had to be better than this. Maybe he would even see Micah.
But he wouldn’t deserve to. Not if he didn’t avenge him.
No. He couldn’t die yet. Not until he’d bled the Organization dry.
Keep it together.
Dominec stripped quickly, leaving his clothes where they fell and shifted. Most shifters had less control in their animal form, but Dominec’s cat calmed him. Things were simpler in this form. The world no longer made of jagged memories and blood.
He didn’t bother with the lights or the door. Grace should know better than to ask such things of him. He bolted out of the bungalow and raced across the compound to the far eastern edge of the developed area where the training field had been built. Obstacle courses, rifle ranges, sparring circles. It was abandoned now, training for the day over.
The tiger threw himself into the longest, most challenging obstacle course. He’d heard the new recruits muttering about American Ninja Warrior—well those so-called ninjas could kiss his fucking ass. He might be a monster, but he was a monster with the course record. He’d always been fast and strong, but whatever the Organization had done to him had pushed him beyond even his own superhuman limits.
He reached the end of the course and didn’t stop to catch his breath, leaping back to the beginning to go again. And again. Until his muscles burned and his lungs ached and even his fucking tail hurt. He collapsed, panting white clouds into the chill air, and sprawled on his side, paws outstretched.
