by Maia Dylan
“Nice try, cos, but jumpers cannot be beaten at this,” AJ said with a grin as he walked over to shake Brendan’s hand.
Not wanting to appear too weakened by what they had just completed, Brendan grasped his hand firmly and gripped AJ’s shoulder. “But you have to admit, I gave you a run for your money right?” Brendan grinned back in response.
“Truthfully?” AJ asked, as his grin widened.
Brendan’s eyes narrowed slightly as he nodded. Yeah he wanted the truth.
“Cos, you almost had me!”
Brendan’s eyes widened as AJ suddenly dropped his hands to his knees assuming the same position Brendan had been in moments before and pulled in great gasps of air.
“Hell, B,” AJ said between pants, “if you had been up against Sam you would have taken him.”
“Like fuck he would have, AJ, you asshole!” was yelled from twelve flights down and had them both laughing. Heightened hearing was another perk of being a shifter.
“I’ll prove it right now! Come on, B, lets you and I have a go mate, right now!” Sam called with laughter in his voice.
“You can fuck right off, Sam Carter,” Brendan said louder than normal, but not shouting. He knew that Sam and all the shifters below could hear him fine. “It’s going to take me at least two days to recover from this beating. I’m sure Cody would be more than up for the challenge,” Brendan added slyly. Brendan laughed heartily as the goading turned to Cody, with the potential for more sporting entertainment for the boys of the firehouse waiting out an endless shift.
As they made their way back down they listened to the long list of reasons why Cody wouldn’t be able to complete the race at this time but would love the opportunity at a later date to prove that he could take Sam in the same race. When he and AJ exited the fake stairwell with two sets of stairs leading to the same roof, Cody was walking backward toward their rig, as the group moved in on him. Brendan was about to join the mob against his brother when the alert sounded calling for EMT assistance—the only thing that saved Cody from having to race his ass up and down those hideous stairs.
Moving quickly, Brendan leapt into their ambulance as Cody started her up and pulled out of the station house, sirens blaring. Checking the communication system mounted on the dash, Brendan told Cody to head out to the truck stop off Highway 82. Molly, the restaurant owner and fellow pack member, had found someone unconscious in the bathroom.
“You know, I truly thought you could take him, bro,” Cody said as he turned on the highway almost on two wheels.
Brendan grabbed the oh-shit handle above him and held on tight. “Shut up, Cody, and watch the road,” he muttered. He sent a small prayer skyward as they hurtled down the road, narrowly missing the gravel verge at the roadside. As much as he loved his brother and his partner from the womb, he hated when Cody got to the ambulance first and drove. His attitude to driving was like his attitude to life, balls to the wall, foot to the floor.
“Truly, I think you could have won.” Cody shot him a glance. “But to make the loss a little less painful I won a grand.”
“What?” Brendan asked incredulously. “You bet against your own brother? That is fucking cold, bro.”
“Yeah, I know.” Cody gave his patented sheepish wolf-could-do-no-wrong look. “But how about I put it on the bar next Friday night for all the boys?”
Brendan laughed as he shook his head at his brother. He couldn’t imagine his life without his brother. They were partners in almost everything. That was the way of things for wolf shifters. The brothers had an unbreakable bond that linked them as brothers, wolf betas, and eventually as mates to their fated one, the one that would make their triad whole.
As was the wolf-shifter way, their families consisted of mated triad couplings, so Brendan and Cody had two men they called Dad and Pop and their mom. Each triad would lovingly raise families, but living in communities where that sort of family grouping was unheard of or frowned on was difficult. This meant that wolf shifters tended to live together in packs and in small towns, weary of outsiders to a certain extent.
Brendan suddenly wrenched forward, narrowly avoiding slamming his forehead against the dashboard of their rig. Well that was one way to bring him out of his thoughts. “Jesus Christ, Cody!” Brendan thought if he had a dollar for each time he yelled that curse at his brother he could purchase a Bugatti! “Are you even driving with your bloody eyes open?”
Cody had been driving at such a high speed he had had to slam on the breaks to make the turn into the car park of the diner. “Nah, B.” Cody grinned in his direction as he brought the ambulance to a rocking halt just outside the entrance to the restaurant. “I’m like a Jedi and use the Force.” Laughing like a hyena at what he no doubt saw as incredible wit, Cody jumped down from the rig, grabbed his assessment kit, and moved toward the entrance of the diner.
Shaking his head, Brendan unclipped his seatbelt muttering down his familial link to his brother. “See, now that is why I know Mom dropped you on your head as a child.”
“You know I’m the pretty one. If anyone was dropped on their head, it was you,” Cody sent back as quick as you please.
Brendan grabbed his own assessment kit and moved to exit the van when a blast of sudden shock slammed straight down their link nearly driving him to his knees. “Cody!” Brendan yelled down their link as he stumbled down from the rig, still reeling.
“Brendan, get the fuck in here, now.” Cody’s voice trembled down their link.
Cody, trembling? He was the epitome of cool, calm, and collected. If he was that rattled then there must be something pretty damn hinky inside.
Using every bit of shifter strength he possessed, he raced into the diner. He expected to see…well carnage—people dead or dying, some crazed bastard with a gun shooting people, some type of mass food poisoning that had people vomiting blood, or something. But all he saw, before he slammed into the back of his brother, driving them both to the floor, were people dining. No blood, no carnage, no vomit.
As the two brothers scrambled to get back to their feet Brendan spoke low to his brother, “What the f—” He stopped as every fiber of his being went on alert.
She was here. Their mate was here somewhere in the diner, and her scent was everything good, hot, and sultry in this world. It reached out and wrapped itself throughout him, tingling through his senses and drawing every spare drop of blood in his body into his dick. My God! He had never had a hard-on that cause physical pain before, but one whiff of that alluring scent of their mate, and he was full mast and standing to attention. A humming had started in his body, exactly how Ty had described it. The Quickening had started. A glance at his brother confirmed that Cody was feeling it as well. He inhaled deeply to draw more of her scent in when he caught a coppery undertone that had him completely enraged.
“She’s hurt, Cody,” Brendan snarled.
“Yeah, B, I got that, too.”
The two wolves followed the scent into the diner, continuous rumbling growls coming from their chests. Shifters who were in the diner all bared their throats, sensing that they were enthralled by the Quickening and knowing wolf shifters were very volatile during that phase. They followed the scent toward where Molly stood waiting for them at the entrance to the hallway that led to the bathrooms and, apparently, their mate.
“Thank God you two are here.” Molly spoke quickly, the worry on her face matched by the wringing of her hands. “I found that young girl in the bathroom, and I can’t get her to wake up. She’s just a little thing. You have to help her.”
Brendan’s wolf whimpered at the fact that their mate couldn’t be roused. That was never a good sign. Cody and Brendan rushed forward and following their noses, pushed into the women’s bathroom.
“Oh Jesus,” Cody moaned from beside him.
Brendan could feel the pain and worry that poured down the link from his brother and knew that it mirrored his own feelings about what they saw.
Their mate was lying on her back
on the floor, there were smears of blood all around her, and it looked like her face had been used as a punching bag. The brothers rushed forward and dropped to their knees beside their mate. Brendan placed his hand at her neck to check for her pulse, and Cody lifted her eyelid to check for dilation, but as soon as they made physical contact with their mate, their bond stretched out from then and tethered itself to her. The feeling was not unpleasant. It was actually quite beautiful to know that they had started the process of being connected to her on the most spiritual of levels.
It was also quite distracting, as she was broadcasting her pain quite openly. Even though she was unconscious before them, they could feel that she was in considerable pain. She was also terrified.
At that realization, Cody’s and Brendan’s wolves threw their heads back and howled. They looked at each other, and Brendan knew a silent vow had been made. Whoever had done this to their mate, whoever had caused so much pain, suffering, and fear in their mate, would feel the exact same emotions for the thirty seconds he would live after they met them.
* * * *
“Vasquez.”
“We found security camera footage of the woman at the truck stop, three blocks from Seth’s apartment. It looks like she got into the cab of one of the trucks.”
“Excellent, track that truck. I want that bitch found as soon as fucking possible”
Chapter 2
Feeling lost, anxious, and panicked was something new for Cody Anderson, and he didn’t like it one bit! He and Brendan had brought their mate to the Grey River Hospital more than six hours ago and they hadn’t seen her since. Their on-scene assessment had some alarming finds, and they had rushed her to the hospital, Brendan insisting that Cody drove for the first time in their entire partnership as EMTs. Cody knew that part of that was because Brendan didn’t want to leave their mate—hell, he felt the same damn way—but out of the two of them Cody was the one that had the lead.
Their mate had cuts across her abdomen that looked like they had been made with a knife and on purpose. She also had bruising on her left ribs with severe bruising on her right. She definitely had a couple of broken ribs, but what had caused them the most alarm was the fact that her abdomen was rigid, which they surmised was a result of the blunt-force trauma she had endured and possibly indicated internal injuries.
Chris took one look at her and rushed her into X-ray, and then she went upstairs to surgery. Surgery! Some fucker had beaten her so hard that she had needed surgery to save her life. Cody ran his fingers up through his hair and to the back of his neck. The muscles there so tight he thought they might actually snap.
He glanced across the corridor at his twin and smiled a little when he saw that Brendan had adopted the same pose, even down to the nervous shaking of his right leg. The two of them still wore their EMT uniforms even though their shift had officially ended hours ago. Their teammates at the firehouse were shuffling to cover their shifts for them for the next week, because they all knew they were not going to be able to leave her side.
Cody thought back to that moment in the bathroom when the bond had snapped into place. The pain that had flooded into him down the fledgling bond to his new mate was so intense he had to throw up a barrier between them in order to function. And goddamn that made him want to kill someone!
Who the hell would hurt someone so small and so beautiful? Even despite the swelling, the contusions, and blood marring their mate’s face they could tell she was beautiful. She had black-as-midnight hair, and it was cut into one of those perky pixie haircuts that just screamed for him to run his fingers through its silky strands. He knew from his assessment that she had stunning violet eyes, and he couldn’t wait to see them sparkling which he had no doubt they would do.
The door to the waiting room they were sitting in opened with a whoosh, and Chris walked in. His expression was tense, and anger flickered in his gaze. Cody was suddenly very sure he was not going to like what he was going to hear. Seeing their alphas walk in right behind him, and he was suddenly on his feet, with Brendan standing right beside him, tension, anxiety and no small amount of dread saturated their bond.
“Chris,” Brendan said, his voice steely, “if you are here to tell us anything that requires our alphas here to step in, then I am not real keen on hearing it.”
Cody was in full agreement with that so stood silently looking at the other three men.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brendan, calm down,” Ty grumbled as he stepped around the doctor.
Cody felt the strength of their alphas dominance flood the room.
“We aren’t here as your alphas, man. We’re here as your friends,” Trent added as he stepped farther into the room and moved to stand close to them. “We thought we’d come sit with you and see if there was anything we could do. Faith wanted to come, too, but she’s out at our parents’ place with Sophia and won’t be back until late tonight. We met Chris in the hallway and just followed him in.”
Cody nodded, never taking his eyes of Chris. “Okay. Thanks, guys. Chris, just tell us, man.”
Chris sighed and ran frustrated fingers through his hair. “The blunt-force trauma you correctly diagnosed on scene was more severe than I anticipated. I had to remove your mate’s spleen and repair some ruptured blood vessels along the way.”
Cody closed his eyes as he absorbed that, his wolf whimpered. A ruptured spleen could kill someone, just how damn close had they come to actually losing their mate before they had even had a chance to meet her? Shit, that was not worth thinking about.
“She has a couple of cracked ribs on her right side, but only bruising on the left. But the most disturbing of all—”
Chris closed his eyes took a deep calming breath. When he opened them to look at Brendan and him again, Cody could see the arctic blue of his wolf shimmering in them. Chris’s wolf was close.
“—someone took to that woman with a knife. Dragged it three times across her abdomen. Two were superficial and didn’t require sutures, but one of them took twelve to close it.”
The growling in the room rumbled off the walls. There were some seriously pissed-off wolves in this room.
“What is it with assholes thinking they can lay their fucking hands on women,” Ty spoke through gritted teeth, and Cody could see the muscles in his jaw flexing. “To hurt any woman is the act of a bloody coward, but to hurt our women, that’s just signing your own damn death warrant.”
Cody couldn’t agree more. He was feeling pretty damn homicidal himself. “How did you handle it?” Cody asked quietly. Their mate Faith had been traumatized for two years before the three fated mates were reunited.
“You handle it because you know the woman you were born to love needs you, too.” Trent’s voice was firm. “You handle it anyway you have to in private, but when you are face-to-face with your fated mate, you show her nothing but understanding and patience, love and protection, and you thank God every fucking day for the pleasure of having her in your arms, despite what her past may have been.”
Ty and Trent had met Faith just over three years ago, and had instantly experienced the Quickening, the stir of emotion that signaled that they had found their fated mate. Ty had likened it to going from a complete standstill to a full-on adrenaline rush in seconds, and now having experienced it for himself, Cody thought Ty was right on the money.
The road to their happily-ever-after definitely had their fair share of speed bumps, and Brendan and Cody had enjoyed baring witness to their journey. Mother Nature had kicked off their reunion with a category three tornado that ripped through a forest just north of Grey River. Faith and six children who had been rescued just after that storm had come to settle in Grey River. Five of the children had been adopted by other families in town, but Judy Jamieson, Ty and Trent’s mom, had insisted on keeping a gutsy young girl called Sophia.
Although their journey ended with a mating and a Binding Ceremony, there was still a chapter of their story that had yet to reach a conclusion. One of their pack
mates was currently hunting a man who posed a huge threat to Faith. They hadn’t heard from their friend Noah in a while, but they knew it was only a matter of time.
“The quick answer, Cody?” Ty moved forward and placed his hand on Cody’s shoulder. “You suck it up and be the mate and partner the fates thought worthy of having a fated mate.” Cody nodded then looked back at his brother who had been very quiet.
“When can we see her?”
Cody heard the desperation in Brendan’s tone. If they could sit with her and be near her then that would calm their wolves and let them know she would be okay. Cody’s wolf was so close to the surface his skin felt tight.
“She’ll be wheeled into recovery in about thirty minutes. Why don’t you head down and get changed out of your uniforms. The last thing your mate will want to see is more medical staff.”
Chris had made a valid point. Cody didn’t want their mate to see them simply as medical professionals. He wanted her to see them as men. Preferably, her men!
Fifteen minutes later, they were back in their street clothes and sitting in her room waiting. “So what’s our plan, B?” Cody leaned against the wall by the window watching his brother as he paced back and forward in front of the door staring out the window periodically.
“Cody, what in my past—my past that you have been a part of since we were in our mother’s womb—leads you to believe I have any clue in what the hell our plan should be with our mate.” Brendan stopped pacing and threw himself into the chair. “I do know that we need to take to heart what Ty and Trent were talking about, and make damn sure we are there for her when she needs us, because that woman is most definitely fated to be ours. As soon as I laid my hand on her, I knew, fucking knew, that she was the missing part of my soul. And before you ask, I don’t bloody have the faintest idea how we go about telling her that, either.”
Cody understood his brother’s frustration. It was frustrating as all hell not knowing who their mate was and where she came from and, more important, who dared lay their hand on their mate. A name would be good there so they knew exactly who to kill. “Do you remember at Ty and Trent’s stag party, when Trent told us about the moment when the talked with Faith about taking their friendship to the next level?”
