by Vivi Andrews
He’d already failed Ksenia and Micah. He had to be on his guard at all times. He must not fail Grace.
Dominec was his usual surly self when they left the motel the next morning, but Grace didn’t mind. She hadn’t been expecting afterglow. Her body still felt pleasantly relaxed and her mood was remarkably cheerful—considering they were about to hike into what could loosely be considered enemy territory.
Wolves and lions weren’t natural enemies—but only because their territories never overlapped in nature. The two shifter species had more than a few things in common—both hunting in packs and living in family groups—but they were also both insanely territorial. The shifter wolf packs and lion prides of North America steered well clear of one another, but in the few times border disputes had erupted, the bloody conflicts that resulted had made the Hatfields and McCoys look like good neighbors.
They parked the SUV at a campsite at Meadow Lake and put on their packs in silence, preparing to start the hike into the wilds Black Lake claimed. Grace studied her little band, hoping they looked like ambassadors, but having a nasty feeling they radiated don’t-fuck-with-me predator vibes for miles.
Grace had handed the compass and maps over to Tyler and he started up a trail, leading the way. Kelly followed and Grace fell into step beside Zoe, leaving Dominec to guard their tails.
“How did you get the ambassador gig?” she asked the Texas lioness as they began the first gradual climb.
Zoe shrugged, adjusting the straps of her pack on her shoulders. “You want the short version or the long version?”
“We have time.”
“Long version it is.” She took a few more steps, gathering her thoughts. “I already told you my brother and I were raised in a pride in Florida.”
“Yeah.”
“Decent place. Traditional. Not bad people, but not a lot of imagination, you know?”
Unbidden, Grace found herself thinking of her parents. “I know the type.”
“Yeah, well, predictably, Landon—that’s my brother—grew into a big old bossy bastard and the Alpha started to feel threatened by him. You can probably predict the next part.”
“Familiar story,” Grace commented. Roman had been kicked out of the pride he grew up in as well. It was common practice for the older Alphas to root out younger males who might one day challenge them for control. Greg was the only lion Grace had ever heard of who had broken away from that practice to choose and train his own successor instead.
“Yep. And when Landon got the boot, I went with him. Partially because I love my brother and all that sappy crap, but mostly because I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.”
Grace’s eyebrows flew up and she found herself studying Zoe more closely. It was virtually unheard of for a lioness to make the choice to go nomad. Almost as unheard of as a female lieutenant.
“We traveled around for a while,” Zoe continued her tale. “Drifting from place to place. I liked it a lot more than Landon did—he was always trying to find home, you know? Whereas I’m more of a home-is-wherever-I-hang-my-hat kind of girl.” They went single file as they scrambled up a narrow bit of the path and Zoe resumed her story when they got to the wider, flatter ground beyond. “Anyway, we got to Three Rocks and Landon challenged the dickhead who was running things and kicked his ass out. I never really planned to stay in one place for the rest of my life—not my thing—but I hung out for a while to help Landon ease into Alpha life. I guess it was about a year later when Ava—that’s Tyler’s baby sister—went into heat and my oblivious brother realized she existed and got hit upside the head with the love stick. When things settled down after their mating, I had this great plan to leave, but then Michael—another of Tyler and Ava’s brothers—had a little incident where he went a little too fangy in the local bar. He’s always had trouble with his control, but this time he lost it in front of some humans and all of Three Rocks went on crazy ass lockdown. Which I thought was stupid as fuck—we didn’t even know what people in town were saying!—but Landon didn’t want me to leave when things were unstable.”
Grace noticed that the group had tightened up. Zoe wasn’t speaking loudly, but all of the shifters could easily hear her and Tyler had slowed his pace, obviously listening.
“I was about to be all, fuck that, you’re not the boss of me and go off to do my own thing again, when dumbass up there—”
“Hey,” Tyler rumbled without heat, glancing over his shoulder.
“—decided he was in love with me—”
“That isn’t how I remember it.”
“—and couldn’t live without me and shit—”
“You’re revising history.”
“—so he begged me to stay and be his mate—”
“When did I do that?”
“—and I was all, ‘No! I am a tumbleweed in the wind and I cannot be tamed!’”
“A tumbleweed in the wind? Really?”
Grace bit her lip as Zoe strode on, ignoring her mate entirely as she waxed poetic.
“But then the dastardly Organization assholes caught both of us—”
“Because you never listen to me and wouldn’t just run when I told you to,” Tyler grumbled.
“And while fighting for my life, I realized that Tyler was somewhat decent, as bossy lions go—”
“Thank you, snookums.”
“Anytime, sugarplum,” Zoe called sweetly, acknowledging her mate for the first time. “Anyway, after we escaped, we decided we were going to do the whole happily-ever-after, ride-off-into-the-sunset thing, but I still had a little problem with the idea of living in one place for my whole life—because dear God, how do people do that without dying of boredom?—so Tyler manfully decided to give up his vocation of micromanaging his younger siblings’ lives—”
“Zoe.” The growl was back in the big lion’s voice.
“—and come with me on a diplomatic mission to unite the shifters against the common enemy. And here we are.”
Grace cleared her throat, fighting the urge to laugh. “So, Tyler, you have a lot of younger siblings? Me too.”
The Texas lion instantly took the peace offering. “Four siblings. Caleb, Kane, Michael and Ava. All grown now.”
“I’ve got five,” Grace said conversationally. “Hope, Will, Valor, Honor and Faith. None of them grown. Though Hope likes to think she’s an adult.”
“Your parents had a thing for naming their kids nouns, huh?” Zoe asked. She glanced at the cowboy moving up the path near Tyler. “What about you, Kelly? You got any siblings?”
“Two older sisters,” he called back.
“Yeah, you struck me as the spoiled-baby-of-the-family type,” Zoe said, clearly trying to get a rise out of Kelly—it had become her latest game, trying to rile the un-rile-able lion. He just laughed and kept walking.
Grace tuned out the chatter as Zoe continued to try to goad him. She’d forgotten Kelly had sisters. Forgotten about his parents too. They were friends with her own. A nice lion family.
No wonder her mother was so fixated on the idea of her with Kelly. What would her mother think if she met Dominec? Grace glanced over her shoulder, slowing her pace slightly to widen the gap between herself and the chattering lions ahead.
“Do you have siblings?” she heard herself asking, pitching her voice low so it didn’t carry. She knew so little about him.
“None.”
She let that terse response settle into her image of him, walking a few more minutes before asking, “And your parents? Are they still around somewhere?”
“My father left when I was young. I was twenty when my mother died.”
“I’m sorry.”
Dominec shrugged one shoulder, the gesture somehow extremely Gallic.
“I never hear you speak French,” she observed.
“I don’t anymore.”
She wal
ked on for a couple minutes, wondering if she could push him for more details, ask him why, when he abruptly offered the information on his own.
“The Organization discouraged their captives from speaking any language other than English in the cells. I lost the words over time.”
She wanted to ask him if he’d ever tried to speak French again—she seemed to have nothing but questions where Dominec was concerned, but she didn’t know what was right to ask. She, who had never worried about whether a question might offend someone, didn’t want to say the wrong thing to him.
But she’d never learned how to be tactful.
“Did you speak French with your wife?”
He grunted. “Mostly. Her English was poor. My father’s first language was English, so I learned it as a boy, but Ksenia had only Russian and French when her family emigrated.” His accent was becoming more pronounced, the pattern of his speech shifting slightly. “She wished for me to speak Russian with her, but I took to it slowly.”
“Was she beautiful?”
She didn’t know why she asked that. Petty jealousy, perhaps. A sense of possessive greed. Of course his wife would be beautiful. He had been unbearably handsome—she had seen the unmarked side of his face. But for some reason she didn’t care to examine, she wanted him to lie. To say his wife was plain.
“Yes,” he said simply. “Incredibly.”
Grace smothered her reaction. “She was a tiger as well?”
He hummed an affirmative. “The only female Siberian of my generation I’d ever met. I was nineteen the first time I saw her. She was in heat. The result was not surprising.”
He didn’t say it was love. Not that it mattered. But her stupid brain couldn’t seem to stop fixating on his lack of emotion when he spoke of his wife. Of course, he never really spoke with emotion…unless he was speaking about the death of Organization personnel.
“After the fact I realized my mother had set us up. She knew she had cancer. Knew it was bad. I think she didn’t want me to be alone, so she arranged for a meeting with a tigress. Though I’m not sure she was aware Ksenia was in heat at the time. It worked out, in the end. She got to hold her grandson before she died.”
And then the grandson died as well.
The words hung unspoken between them, but they both knew they were there.
Grace swallowed around a suspicious thickness in her throat.
“Is that all you need to know?” he asked softly. “To prepare to meet the wolves?”
He thought she was asking for the same reason she’d asked him about his captivity the day before. For the mission. She wasn’t sure if it would make things better or worse if she admitted that for a moment there she had completely forgotten about their purpose. She only wanted to know him.
She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we’re ready.”
“Good,” Dominec murmured. “Because I can smell them.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Grace instantly stiffened at his words, her eyes going alert. “We’re still outside their territory,” she whispered, though there wasn’t a shred of disbelief in her expression as she scanned the brush around them.
“I don’t think they care about our maps.” He’d bet the wolves had a pretty fucking solid idea of what was and was not their territory, and from the scents he’d been picking up for the last few minutes, they patrolled this area regularly.
Grace cursed softly and murmured, “Come on.” She picked up her pace to catch up with the rest of their group, who were discussing sibling politics at what was doubtless a normal volume but sounded like shouts now that they knew they were already on wolf turf.
Grace was ahead of him so Dominec didn’t quite catch her low murmur, but the laughing conversation trailed off as defensive readiness rippled through the group. As Dominec joined them, Zoe murmured, “Time to run up the white flag?”
“How can you be sure we’ve crossed into their territory?” Kelly asked—in a far less confrontational tone than Dominec would have been able to manage with the same words.
“Can’t you smell it?” he asked. “This place is saturated in their scent.”
Kelly’s nose twitched, but if he did scent the wolves he didn’t say. Dominec had always had keen senses, but everything had been amplified thanks to whatever the Organization had done to him to turn him into their pet super soldier. It was possible the lions couldn’t smell the canine scent clinging to every freaking branch.
“Has anyone seen or heard anything?” Grace asked, so low Kelly leaned in to hear the words. Dominec barely bit back his growl. “Just because they’ve passed by here often doesn’t mean they’re here now.”
“Just the scent,” Dominec said.
There was a moment as the others scanned the surrounding area, straining their ears for any telltale sign and Dominec rolled his eyes. If the wolves were close, they would have gone silent and still as soon as Grace put the others on their guard. Such a distinct change in behavior wouldn’t have been missed by their watchers.
Grace met his eyes and grimaced, clearly thinking along the same lines, as the others demonstrated their wariness for their potential viewing audience.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Zoe asked with only a tiny shred of sarcastic insubordination—which was an improvement.
“We keep walking,” Grace replied. “But be ready to make contact sooner than anticipated.”
Grace took over the lead, with Kelly directly behind and Tyler falling back beside Zoe, leaving Dominec to once again bring up the rear. He kept his senses wide open as they walked, alert for any rustling leaves or cracking twigs.
They had only been walking a few more minutes and his attention was on the trail behind them when a sudden stillness from the group in front brought his instincts screaming to life. Keeping most of his attention on guarding their backs, he spared a quick glance in front of where the others had stopped. They were in the middle of an almost perfectly circular clearing and directly in front of them, silent as a ghost, stood a wolf.
Alarm shot through Dominec, but he kept his claws from snapping out. How had the animal moved so silently? He hadn’t even heard the damn thing breathe.
It was white, with rusty markings around the muzzle, ears and tail. Slim and leggy, with its tail held low, it was small for a wolf, and far smaller than the smallest lion or tiger. It simply stood, staring back at them, silent and still.
Grace held up her hands to show she was not armed. “We come in peace,” she said—sounding like a bad alien movie.
Kelly shot her a look, clearly unimpressed by her diplomatic skills, and stepped forward, his voice low and undemanding, but sure and clear. “We need to speak with the Alpha of Black Lake on an urgent matter.”
The white wolf bared its teeth and dipped its head, a low growl beginning in its chest.
Kelly tried again. “We are delegates from the Three Rocks and Lone Pine Prides and we have business with the Alpha of Black Lake.”
More teeth appeared as the wolf’s lips drew back farther and the growl grew louder.
“Nice puppy,” Zoe mumbled under her breath.
“Our mission concerns all shifters,” Kelly insisted—and Dominec had to give him credit for his cool. He didn’t even sound aggravated. All calm and patience.
Then he heard it. A rustle of leaves. So soft he would have missed it if everyone in the clearing hadn’t been holding their breath.
Dominec’s attention snapped back to the forest behind them. A flash of black fur. Something tawny and brown moving through the brush. “Grace.”
The warning was soft. And too late.
The tranq dart hit him in the throat—one of the few bits of skin not covered by his bulky winter coat. At the same moment, an earth-shaking thud came from behind him as the massive bulk of Tyler Minor went down. Zoe moaned, “Not again,” and fell as well
. Dominec grabbed the dart at his neck, yanking it out before it could deliver its full load and flicking it aside.
In some corner of his mind, he heard Grace cursing and moving—not down yet, then. Figures melted out of the trees—both in canine and human form—and another dart found the back of Dominec’s neck.
He felt it now, the blur of the drugs, but it was quickly subsumed in a tidal wave of adrenaline. And rage.
He’d been taken once before. Helpless as the Organization pumped him full of drugs, forcing him down, powerless as they killed Micah. Killed Ksenia. He would not lie helpless as another person he cared for was harmed. Never again.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Grace hit her hands and knees and everything fractured.
The shift ripped through his body fast and hard, shredding his clothes. He came to his tiger form roaring, already leaping into the trees to find the bastard with the fucking dart gun. He cleared Kelly’s sprawled form with a jump and the ground flew beneath his paws as he raced after the fleeing shooter. The man was wiry thin with orange-red hair and he spun firing three darts into Dominec’s chest as the tiger pounced on him.
Dominec barely felt the tiny stings as he rode the man’s body to the ground. He lunged for the exposed white of the man’s throat—but the bastard was faster than he’d given him credit for and got an arm up to block. Dominec’s jaws closed around coat and forearm, clamping down until he tasted blood and felt bone snap.
His only thought was to kill this one quickly so he could find and dispatch the others, defend Grace. He flung the man’s arm aside, rearing back to go for his belly, and five more darts thunked into his side. His head suddenly felt enormous, wobbling on the end of his neck. His paws seemed at once tiny and massive, awkward and unwieldy. He swayed, the world in a dizzying flat spin, and collapsed onto his side—only aware of the landing because he felt the dirt against his fur, though the ground seemed to be on the wrong side of him. Above, below, spinning, spinning.
