by Lynn Graeme
Her expression, so often cool and giving nothing away, was especially, carefully neutral now. Liam knew what she saw, however. She couldn’t miss the dark, jagged lines criss-crossing his left ribcage. She couldn’t help but take full inventory of the broken surface of his torso, parting gifts from the surgical blades his captors had used on him. Nor could she miss the teeth marks that had torn out a good deal of flesh from his waist.
That didn’t even include the hypertrophic scars and irretrievable burn marks scattered across his back.
Liam clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. He counted down the endless minutes until this humiliation ended.
Then he heard a hitch in her breath, and Liam’s head jerked up. He forced himself to take a closer look. He was stunned to see a rosy flush spread across Isobel’s cheeks.
In that moment, he saw that her eyes weren’t cool and distant at all. In fact, they flared with sudden heat, the hazel darkening to a greenish bronze as they traced the corded biceps of his arms, down to the sharp lines of his torso and traveling the ripples of his abdomen.
When her gaze followed the thin line of hair below his navel, right to where it disappeared below his jeans, Liam instantly grew hard, felt himself rise in eager greeting.
He heard her suck her breath in quite audibly. Her breasts began a shallow, uneven rhythm of rise and fall beneath her fitted tank.
Liam was speechless.
Of course, he never knew what to say to this woman, but in this instance, he definitely didn’t know what to say to this woman.
There was no denying he’d entertained a myriad of lustful images starring Isobel Saba over the past several months. Isobel, dressed head-to-toe in that leather she loved so much. Isobel, bent over his kitchen table, dressed in nothing at all. Isobel, backing him into his bed before straddling him for a wild ride.
In his head, there’d be no need for words. Their lips and tongues and teeth would come together in a wild, riotous clash of emotions. He would have her under him, her body writhing madly as he buried his mouth between her legs. In his head, he knew exactly what to do to make her come.
Those scenarios had always remained strictly in the realm of fantasy, as there’d been no reason for Liam to think—to allow himself to think—that the calm and collected Isobel would ever want him as much as he craved her.
Women didn’t look at him that way. Isobel didn’t look at him that way.
He’d thought her uninterested, and so had let her be. Left himself to his own fantastical devices. But he’d been wrong. She was very, very aware of him as a man.
Liam’s mouth went dry. Absurdly, irrationally, he considered walking around shirtless more often. He felt himself grow hot, and this time not from shame.
He hadn’t scented her desire. Still didn’t scent it. It made no sense.
He was confused, aroused, interested—all those hard instincts and disbelieving emotions tumbled around in a huge jumbled mess before being brought sharply to attention.
Then Isobel shook her head and quickly stepped back. The cool, casual, noncommittal look returned, affixing itself on her face. Her shoulders went back. Neither of them commented on the awkward, weighted silence that followed.
Finally Isobel canted her head to one side. “Jackal?”
Liam frowned before realizing she was looking at a particular set of scars by his ribs. Lithe fingers started to lift toward him before she swiftly dropped them to her side.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat, voice rough. “Black-backed.”
Isobel looked suitably impressed. In the pause that followed, Liam waited for her to ask about the other, more vicious scars, the cruel kisses left behind by his captors.
Instead, she lifted her right arm, gesturing at a row of scars that ran down her deltoid and across her triceps. “Side-striped jackal.”
Liam stepped forward. This time it was he who instinctively raised his hand. He froze and glanced at Isobel, but she made no objection. Her regard turned hooded, mysterious, giving nothing away. He gently tipped her arm up for a better view. His fingers felt rough on her clean, soft skin.
A section of those scars didn’t correspond with teeth imprints. Instead, the raised marks trailed to a jagged curve on her inner arm, closer to her armpit.
“Incisor caught on my implant,” she explained. “Ripped it right out. Hurt like hell.”
Implant?
For an instant Liam was filled with both horror and confusion, wondering when Isobel had served in the war, when she’d been captured, what had been done to her.
Then he realized she was talking about contraceptive implants. Many shifter females had them inserted into their upper inner arm as a form of birth control, one that regulated their heat cycles much more effectively. Human women opted for contra-shots every few months.
Liam withdrew his hand and stepped back, struggling to control his breathing. Something must’ve crossed his expression, though, because Isobel’s wry look faded as she slowly lowered her arm. Her eyes ran over his body once more before returning to meet his wary gaze.
“It must’ve been hard,” she said quietly.
He said nothing. He’d never discussed any of it with her. He didn’t know what details she was already aware of, what information she’d dug up on him that he wasn’t ready to discuss.
“Scars are a warrior’s badge of honor.”
Liam flinched. So she preferred the direct hit, then.
Trust Isobel to think in terms of a warrior. He wasn’t a warrior. He was a carpenter with a gift for tracking who got caught up in a whirlwind of bloodshed and death, emerging from that storm with shaky legs and ghosts in his eyes.
“There was no honor in what we did,” he said harshly.
Her gaze never wavered. “Sometimes we have no choice. We do what we have to do and then pay the price.”
“Yeah?” He was angry now. He didn’t even know whether he was angry at Isobel or himself. “What’s yours? What’s the price you paid?”
She didn’t reply. She just looked at him in that way, all too knowing, as if she was already tearing right into his soul and spilling all his secrets out into the open.
Liam took a step back. “Do scars do it for you?” he shot at her, words firing like an automatic beyond his control. “Is that how you get your kicks?”
He’d met women like those. Women with a morbid fascination for the broken, who lusted eagerly for the defective. Just so they could revel in their pain. Whether it was a scarred face or an amputated limb, as long as the spirit was crushed or they were incoherent with pain. That was all it took to get their jollies.
As soon as the words escaped him, however, he instantly wished them back. He wished everything goddamn fucking back.
Isobel’s gaze shuttered. The coolness returned, even chillier than before.
Liam could already feel her withdrawal, even though she didn’t move so much as a step.
“Thank you for staying with Naley last night,” she told him, her tone flat. “I spoke with her this morning. You don’t have to worry about her bothering you again.”
“It’s no bother,” Liam mumbled through a mouth that felt nailed shut. Bleeding shut.
He wondered if Isobel would deactivate his access code now. Wondered if she’d ask him to get the hell out of here. Wondered, bleakly, where he’d go this time.
Isobel didn’t say goodbye, or farewell, or see-you-later. She just turned around and walked away.
*
“Still no word from Jamal?” Malcolm asked.
Isobel shook her head as she maneuvered over to the next lane. Around them, vehicles parted warily at the sight of the Council SUV.
She had an uneasy feeling about this. They’d had nothing but radio silence from Jamal and his team ever since they’d taken off in search of Rupert and Pierry Ogden two days ago. It wasn’t unusual for agents to go incommunicado, depending on how far under they went on a mission. Still, Isobel hadn’t expected them to take this long, especially
since the collars the Ogdens wore were GPS-trackable.
Isobel didn’t like leaving things hanging. It ate at her, having to hand one of her missions off to another agent, even if she did trust Jamal completely. He was a stellar agent, and they’d worked side-by-side several times. There was no one else Isobel would rather have at her back.
Of course, trust didn’t necessarily mean a thing. Take Liam, for instance. They’d lived within shouting distance for over a year, and she’d let him have the run of the place, taking care of her property—hell, taking care of Naley, for that matter, that one day—and apparently all along he thought she had a fetish for damaged warriors.
Hell. It was a good thing she hadn’t let on the degree of her attraction all this while, if that was how he was going to take it.
She could’ve kicked herself for failing to hide her interest when she’d approached him yesterday morning. Of course, she’d known all along that Liam was good quality eye-candy. It was hard not to already be aware of that fact. But then he’d had to have his shirt off, skin hot and glistening from his morning’s exertions, with a hard, muscular body just begging for a woman to run her hands all over it. How the hell was she supposed to have resisted that?
It hadn’t been just a hit of desire she’d felt on looking at him. It’d been an actual blow to her system.
His usual T-shirts hadn’t hidden his defined biceps and strong, wide shoulders. They had, however, hidden a sculpted chest and dense, compact muscles, hard ridges and planes drawing the eye over the vee of his trim hips right down to the impressive bulge in his jeans.
What the hell was a woman supposed to do but feel her mouth go dry with want?
It had fuck-all to do with his scars, and everything to do with Liam being a hard, sexy, spectacularly all-male man.
Oh, she wouldn’t deny having a professional interest and personal curiosity in the marks he bore, but hell, it wasn’t as if they held his key appeal. They weren’t what turned her on.
Or off, for that matter. Agents constantly traded stories and showed off their scars to one-up each other. Retaining scars despite their ability to quickly heal was a big deal, after all. Besides, they couldn’t carry on doing what they were doing for the Council if they were so easily put off by such evidence of violence. It was just a natural consequence of the job. And it didn’t mean they actively went out looking for it in their sexual partners, either.
Or maybe some did, Isobel acknowledged with a troubled frown. Who was to say that some of her colleagues’ way of coping with the harshness of what they saw and did on a daily basis wasn’t to find someone whose personal trauma far exceeded their own?
Isobel felt sick. Was that how Liam saw her?
Damn.
She reminded herself that Liam was her tenant. He’d been through a hard and bloody war. He just wanted to find some peace. If he wanted to be left alone, so be it.
She really had to find someone on her list and get this itch out of her system, and soon.
“What was Jamal’s last pinged location?” Malcolm asked.
She firmly rerouted her thoughts to the present moment. “West Marlowe,” she answered, referring to one of Bloodhaven’s outlying suburbs.
“West, eh?” Malcolm gave her a significant look.
Isobel nodded, knowing too well what it meant. “If they keep going in that direction, they’ll hit the distant woodlands.”
And once the Ogdens got beyond the distant woodlands, they’d be out of the tricity area, and well beyond Bloodhaven’s jurisdiction.
Isobel grimaced. She was loath to transfer the case to another city’s Council, if it came to that. If that other Council was too busy juggling its own caseload, the Ogdens might very well fall through the cracks. After some of the horrific things they’d done in the name of “cleansing the earth of human swill”—as they’d so sweetly put it—there was no way Isobel was letting them get away with their crimes.
“Jamal can handle it. He’s a big boy.” Malcolm shrugged. “At least he’s not Lewski.”
Lewski had already been disciplined by the Council’s Internal Division for his oversight that had led to the Ogdens’ escape. The last she’d seen of him was when he’d emerged from the conference room, pale and subdued. He’d taken one look at her before scurrying for the exit at the opposite end of the hall.
Isobel, on her part, had received a reprimand for leaving the rookie unsupervised in the first place. It hadn’t been a pleasant session.
She tapped her finger on the steering wheel. “West Marlowe is just sixteen miles away.”
“Let it go, Saba. Our meeting with Commissioner Johnson is in fifteen minutes.”
Malcolm was right; they couldn’t miss this meeting. Human-shifter relations were tense enough already without giving the commissioner the impression that the Council couldn’t care less about its human liaisons.
“Jamal can handle it,” he repeated, then smirked. “You just can’t stand someone else taking the lead on a mission, can you?”
Without looking at him, Isobel raised two fingers in an obscene gesture. Malcolm snorted out a laugh as she slid the SUV into the assigned parking space.
Police Commissioner Johnson awaited them inside his office. He was a broad, square-jawed man whose craggy face was softened by a thick, bristly beard as white as his hair.
“We have much to discuss,” he said as he shook Isobel’s hand. She didn’t miss the stack of file folders on his desk. She could only hope that they were just minor complaints against shifters. They’d had their fill of rogues and factions for a while.
The alert came just as they sat down for their meeting.
Isobel and Malcolm snatched up their phones at once, the comm unit attachment blinking bright red. They’d switched their phones to silent prior to the meeting, but the high-frequency pitch now piercing the air—detectable only by shifter ears—was programmed to go off regardless of mode settings in the event of a code-red situation.
Which this undeniably was, as Isobel stared at the screen. She pushed back from her seat.
Johnson, seated across from them, looked startled. “What’s the matter?”
“A small situation, Commissioner,” Malcolm said smoothly, not missing a beat as he grabbed the folders from atop the man’s desk. “We’ll take a look at these and get back to you.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to reschedule this meeting for another time,” said Isobel, opening the door. “We’ll be in touch.”
They were down the hall before Johnson could even sputter his next question. Isobel was already speaking to comm-central.
“Team I-6 requesting backup sixteen miles west of you,” the operator informed her as she unlocked the SUV with a swipe of her thumb. “Other agents and medic unit are on their way.”
Team I-6 was Jamal’s team. Isobel slid behind the wheel. “West Marlowe?”
“Affirmative. Be advised, two agents down. Suspects in the woodlands. Sending you coordinates now.”
“That doesn’t leave us much time.” Malcolm checked his phone as it beeped with the received coordinates.
Isobel wasted no time peeling out of there.
They pulled up at the edge of the woodlands, silently slipping out of the SUV before the engine had even died down. The silence concerned Isobel even more than had there been a cacophony of gunfire and roars.
“I’m shifting,” Malcolm hollered as he unbuckled his weapons belt and tossed it inside the vehicle.
Isobel withdrew her gun from its holster and raced into the woods. Behind her came the sound of Malcolm’s uniform snapping apart, followed by the crackle of bones realigning. The bare earth thundered beneath Isobel’s feet before Malcolm’s jaguar form barreled past her.
She remained in human form as she stalked through the woods, head swiveling as she measured her surroundings. She wouldn’t shift until she knew what they were getting into. Malcolm, always a bit of a show-off, never minded the risks due to his lar
ger size. Isobel’s key strength as a cheetah lay in her speed rather than her physical stature, so she wasn’t about to discard her weapons unless she had to. She wasn’t going into this blind.
It was too quiet. Where the hell was everyone?
A thick, metallic stench quickened her steps. Fifty yards later, she found the two dead agents, their blood soaked into the ground.
Twenty yards away, she found a third.
Then she heard the sharp snap of bone, and she was racing past the trees, zeroing in on the noise that had suddenly exploded into existence. She was only several paces away when she saw Malcolm launch himself into the fray. He crashed down on a tiger whose teeth still dripped scarlet from its victim, a jackal who lay slumped on the ground.
Tiger?
How the hell had Ogden escaped out of his collar to shift?
And where the hell were Jamal and the second Ogden?
The jackal—a Council agent, Rex—struggled to shift back into two-legged form. Isobel ran to his side and pressed one hand to the gaping, newly ripped hole in his gut.
“Don’t shift,” she ordered. With injuries this severe, even shifting would put too much strain on the body without being doctored first. She shoved the gun in her other hand into the back of her trousers and wrenched her comm unit up to her mouth. “Where the hell is medic?”
The jackal’s face flattened. A violent ripple went through his quaking body. Fur receded into skin. Isobel swore as she continued to yell into the comm unit, ignoring the clash of big cats several feet away. Rex gave a gasp as he finally turned human. He started to speak but coughed up blood instead.
“I told you not to shift! Dammit, Rex. Don’t move.” She dropped the comm unit and applied both hands to staunch the brutal gash in his gut. It looked worse in human form.
Rex shoved roughly at her shoulder. “Forget me,” he rasped. “Get h-him. Go!”
Isobel took “him” to mean Rupert Ogden, the tiger Malcolm was battling. She’d recognized his stripes and scent. She ignored Rex’s command. Malcolm could handle Ogden, and Rex needed her.
Suddenly she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Isobel whipped her head up to see Malcolm’s throat between the tiger’s jaws. Ogden slammed the jaguar onto the ground. The earth shook from pure impact.
