She didn’t know, didn’t care why. He was hers, she was his, and that was how it was supposed to be.
She was meant to be with him.
“How old are you?” she whispered.
He chuckled. “That’s your question?”
“Seriously.”
“Forty-nine.”
“No.”
“Yep. Wolves age more slowly than humans. We look pretty normal until we’re adults, then it slows.”
“You’re older than me. I thought you were younger.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
He drew back just enough to gently cup her chin in his hand. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “This afternoon. You will obey me, and it might make you mad, but I will fix this for you. You just have to trust me and not fight me. I can’t be worried about you and do what I need to do. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
A sad smile curved his lips. “I wanted to romance you, sweetheart. Convince you to love me without all this other stuff. I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“I know.” And she did. She felt it pulsing through him and into her soul like a visible wave of light, the way she could clearly feel his emotions. His love.
His regret that this hadn’t been his plan.
“I’ll make it up to you, baby. I promise.”
She stroked his cheek. “Make it up to me by saving my family.”
* * * *
Nami had already freshened up in the bathroom, and they were dressed and putting themselves together, when someone pounded on the bedroom door.
“Time,” Dewi called. “Sorry to be a cock-blocker, but we have to get moving. Finish up.”
Beck leaned over and opened the bedroom door. “We’re ready.” He reached out and caught Nami’s hand, lacing his fingers with hers, squeezing it.
Dewi looked from him to Nami and back again. “We’ll skip the formalities of mate introductions right now. Let’s go give that asshole a few problems he never dreamed of having.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nami tried not to burst into tears again as they drove. She felt overwhelmed and terrified. If anything happened to Malyah because of that son of a bitch Jarome, she’d never forgive herself.
Dewi drove, Ken in the front passenger seat and frantically working on his laptop, trying to get a location. Badger and Martin were already en route in separate vehicles to pick up Da’von from school, were nearly to the campus now. They’d pick him up and send him with Badger, who would then head right to Lu’ana’s job to get her, and then pick up the baby from daycare.
Badger would take them, and Reggie, back to Dewi’s house and have them wait there under his protection, while Martin rejoined Dewi and Beck.
Beck held Nami’s hand, stroking it with his thumb, trying to keep her calm. He’d wanted to leave her back at Dewi’s, but when Nami refused to stay behind, Dewi had agreed she should come. That it was her right to see this through to the end.
Maybe I could come to love that woman, regardless of what her past is with Beck.
That was something Nami would think about later, when she wasn’t terrified her sister might right now be getting raped…or worse.
Beck’s cell phone rang. “Yeah? …Okay, great. Thanks.” He ended the call. “Badger has Da’von. Martin’s heading our way. Where are we meeting?”
Right now, they were heading for Nami’s apartment. If Jarome had Malyah there, it would make life very easy for them all.
They suspected it wouldn’t be that easy, and of course, it wasn’t.
When they reached the apartment, they found Malyah’s car still there. The front door was locked, but inside, a small table along the wall near the front door was knocked over, and Malyah’s purse was still sitting on the kitchen table. Her phone lay on the floor, broken, the screen shattered like someone had stepped on it.
“You ready to track the call?” Dewi asked Ken.
“Yep.” He stood at the kitchen table, his laptop ready.
“Okay,” Dewi said to Nami. “Call Drexler. Keep him talking. See if he’ll give you a meeting place. Tell him you’ll bring Da’von to him, but Malyah has to be there or else you’ll call the cops on him. Keep him talking as long as you can.”
Nami had to take a couple of deep breaths before she thumbed Jarome’s number in the recent calls list and waited for it to connect.
“You see I ain’t kidding with you, right?” the asshole answered.
“I’ll bring Da’von to you, but you better have Malyah there. I don’t see her, I call the cops and report this.”
He laughed. “You won’t call the cops. You’re too scared. Da’von’s a grown man. He can tell me hisself he don’t want anything to do with me. I just want some father-son time with him, that’s all, woman. He ain’t no child. He’s a man, even if you tryin’ to keep him a child.”
“Put Malyah on. I want to talk to her.”
A moment later, her sister’s scared voice ripped at Nami. “Sis? Is that you?”
“Yeah, honey.”
“Please, don’t do it. Call the cops. They want Da’von to do a rob—”
There was the sickening sound of a slap, followed by Malyah’s cry of pain.
Then Jarome returned to the line. “The sooner you get here, the sooner you can take her home and baby her the way you been babyin’ my son. I’ll text you the address.”
He hung up.
A moment later, her phone vibrated from an incoming text. The address was in a run-down section of East Ybor.
Ken shook his head. “Looks like that’s the area where the call came from but I can’t be sure. It wasn’t long enough to trace.”
“So what now?” Nami asked.
Dewi looked at her. The wolfish grin crossing her face sent a shiver down Nami’s spine. “Now we go hunting.”
* * * *
Beck ached for his mate. Her terror for her sister washed off her and into him.
“What’s the plan?” Nami asked as they arrived in East Ybor and approached the house. Fortunately, it sat on a relatively quiet through street where it looked like the crack and meth eras hadn’t yet given way to the gentrification phase much of Ybor was going through.
Fortunately, because it meant there weren’t a lot of pedestrians on the street, meaning fewer witnesses.
Dewi cruised by the address first, doing the speed limit, while Beck scoped it out. “No one outside,” he said.”
“Let’s see if we can find the back way in.” She circled the block, old wooden shotgun cigar worker houses mixed with mid-fifties Spanish influence homes, but few newer ones. It looked like the houses backed up against each other with no alley between them. Fortunately, the houses directly behind the address they wanted didn’t have fences.
They still had fifteen minutes before the arranged meeting time. They drove back to the parking lot of the Colombia Restaurant and waited for Martin to join them. Dewi rolled her window down as he drove up next to them.
“What are we looking at?” he asked after rolling down his window.
She gave him the address, just a few blocks to their east. “You park on that street, one block over. Don’t cruise in front of the house. I’m going to go to the front door with Nami and—”
“Like hell you will!” Beck said from his seat. “I’m going with her if anyone does.”
Dewi turned in her seat and arched an eyebrow at him. “You think they’ll react kindly to a huge white guy walking up there with her? No. And I’m a Prime. You’ll be waiting at the back door with Martin, ready to enter when one of the guys inside opens it for you.”
“How will you know they’ll do that?” Nami asked.
“Because she’s a Prime,” Beck said, dropping his protest as he realized Dewi was right. “Hopefully we can get out of there without a shot being fired.”
Dewi’s expression burned. “No,” Dewi growled. “There will be shots fired.”
Nami started to question her when Beck gently squ
eezed her hand, silencing her. “Better not to ask, baby,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s our job.”
“Ken will drive this car. I’ll send Nami and Malyah out to him, and he’ll get them away. Go immediately to our house.”
Ken frowned. “But what about what you need after—”
“We’ll take care of it,” Dewi quietly said. “Beck can handle it.”
Beck didn’t need the clarification and preferred not to explain it to Nami right then. As a Prime Alpha, after Dewi made a kill, she needed to eat.
Meat.
Usually on the raw side.
It was the only way to slake her instinctive, primitive hunger following a kill. The more vicious the kill, the stronger her emotions ran, the stronger the need.
Ken nodded. “Okay.” He leaned in and kissed Dewi. “Love you.”
She smiled. “Love you, too. Don’t worry, we’ll be a few minutes behind you. Beck, you go with Martin and the two of you get into position and be ready to make the entry.”
Beck stroked Nami’s check after giving her a kiss. “This will be okay. Do what she says, and don’t disobey her. Okay?”
“Okay. Love you. You better not come back hurt.”
He smiled. “Love you, too. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” After he got out, he paused at the driver’s window and looked in at Ken. “Get them out of there as soon as they’re clear of the house. Don’t let her or Malyah see anything.”
Ken gave him a two-fingered salute from his temple. “I got this. I know the drill. They’ll be safe.”
Beck reached in shook with him. He remembered his talk with Ken after the Endquist incident. He’d told Ken then that, if he ever found a mate of his own, he’d look to Ken to help keep her safe.
He never expected it to be this soon.
Beck got into Martin’s car and they drove off.
“Time to firmly re-establish that particular asshole’s place in the food chain,” Martin said.
“Yep,” Beck agreed. “As chum.”
* * * *
Dewi felt her senses heighten as Ken drove them back to the house. He’d stop, double-parked in the street in front of the house, windows up, doors locked, and engine running. Before Dewi got out, she unholstered her concealed pistol and handed it to him, butt first.
“Take this.”
“I don’t have my concealed carry license yet.” He’d taken the class and applied for it, but the state office was backlogged with applications. It’d be at least a couple of weeks before it arrived.
She grabbed his hand and curled his fingers around the grip. “I don’t care. Once you get out of here, put it in the glove box. That’s legal. Do not hesitate to use it if you need it to protect yourself or Nami or Malyah. Understand?”
It wasn’t a Prime order she gave him, but she wanted him to understand how serious she was.
“But what will you use?”
She grinned, feeling her canines wanting to slide into place. It’d be a satisfying kill, and hard to keep from shifting in the process. Most of her recent kills over the past several years had been official edicts, such as for Peckingham, her last one, and the night she’d met and claimed Ken. Executions for heinous acts, like child molestation, or, in Peckingham’s case, selling his own teenaged daughter to a drug dealer as a sex slave to pay off his debt.
Even better, Dewi’s Prime powers made her a portable lie detector. Only twice had she overruled an official edict when she discovered facts that meant a person wasn’t deserving of death.
Although, to be fair, in one of those cases she had kneecapped a wolf who’d admitted to being a statutory-rapey douche, but who it turned out hadn’t actually been behind the wheel of the car that had rolled and killed another wolf’s sixteen-year-old daughter. He’d run from the scene of the accident, and everyone, including the police, had thought he’d been drinking and driving, because it’d been his car.
When Dewi finally caught up with him in a shitty-assed hunting cabin in the middle of a Georgia swamp, the guy had admitted he’d been in the car, but the girl had been driving. The girl had taken the keys from him, but she hadn’t buckled her seat belt and was thrown from the vehicle during the accident.
Despite their grief, the parents had been satisfied knowing the twenty-one-year-old half shifter would spend the rest of his life with a considerable limp, instead of an eye for an eye. Had the girl been of legal age, Dewi wouldn’t have even done that. And their relationship had been consensual, not forced, even if it was skeezy. Dewi had left the guy with the warning that if she ever heard of him sleeping with underaged teens again, she’d blow his balls off instead of his other kneecap.
Dewi got out and opened the back passenger door for Nami, helping her out. Dewi held her hand and leaned in to whisper to her. “Don’t say anything. Let me do the talking, okay? And when we say go, you run straight to the car with Malyah, and you go without hesitating or looking back.”
“Promise me you’ll protect Beck.”
“It won’t be Beck who needs protecting, but yeah.”
An older black man with prison tats carved into the flesh of his neck and arms opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch as they walked up. He wore a dirty, sleeveless wife-beater and jeans with the waist nearly halfway down to his knees, exposing dingy blue boxers.
Well, at least he won’t try to run far or fast in those.
“Jarome Drexler?” Dewi let go of Nami’s hand after giving it a squeeze, mentally willing her to wait there at the bottom of the front steps and to come no farther.
Dewi started up the stairs.
“Who da fuck are you, bitch? And where’s Da’von?”
Dewi smiled and held out her hand. “Dewi Bleacke. Nice to meet you.”
He stared at her hand. When his right started to slide back around his waistband, Dewi shot out her hand and grabbed his left arm.
His face went blank as she poured the full force of her Prime Alpha into his brain. She rarely had to use this much power on someone, but today, she’d enjoy going heavy-handed.
“You aren’t very polite, are you?” Dewi whispered. “You’re going to hand me that gun, slowly, butt first, without a sound.”
He did.
“Softly, how many of your asshole buddies are inside?”
“Three more.”
With the Prime Alpha connection established and standing this close, she didn’t need to maintain contact with him all the time. She released his arm and checked the gun, an old, beat-up Sig 9mm with chipped grips. One in the chamber, only two in the clip. She added the third round back to the clip, replaced the magazine, and rechambered a round, making sure the safety was off. Then she tucked it into the back of her waistband. It wouldn’t fit in her holster, but would stay secure there for a moment.
Then she grabbed his left arm again and gave him a full-on wolfish grin that widened his eyes. When she smelled ammonia, she looked to see a dark stain spreading across the front of his boxers, above his low-riding jeans.
“Aw, Jarome,” she softly said. “Are you starting the festivities without me? If you’re pissing yourself already, I can only imagine how badly you’ll be shitting yourself in a few minutes. Let’s go in and meet your friends. Introduce me as a friend and call your buddies into the room.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dewi walked Jarome into the crack shack. One guy, a black gang-banger about Jarome’s age, was sitting on a disgusting and ripped beige couch, his left hand down the front of his pants and a joint the size of a cigar in his right.
“Who da fuck is she, Jay?”
Jarome’s voice hollowly replied, “A friend of mine.”
A younger Hispanic guy with even more tats covering his neck and arms than Jarome walked in from the hallway. In his right hand he held a gun. “Que fucking hell, man? Who she?”
“You heard him, didn’t you?” Dewi brightly asked. “I’m a friend.” She led Jarome farther into the room and over to the guy on the couch. She reac
hed out and clamped a hand onto stoner friend’s left shoulder, pouring Prime Alpha energy into him, too.
He dropped his joint.
“Pick it up and put it in the ashtray before you burn this shithole to the ground,” she said.
He did, sitting up and awaiting her next order.
“So what’s your name, Sparky?” she asked him.
“Hey,” the armed guy said, pointing his gun at her in a ridiculous sideways thug stance straight out of a cheesy rap video. “Yo, bitch. I asked who da fuck are you?”
Sparky the stoner replied, “I’m Dominic.”
“And who’s your inked up homey over there?”
The homey protested. “Yo, man. Donchoo be sayin’—”
“Emilio.”
“Sit right here a sec,” she told Dominic. She led Jarome over to Emilio, who looked jumpy, nervous, sweating. He smelled like heroin and she realized he was probably overdue for a fix.
She held out a hand, grinning. “Emilio, my man. Que fucking pasa, asshole.”
He frowned, as if trying to process she’d actually spoken to him. “What?”
She grabbed his right wrist, the hand holding his gun, and shoved his hand straight up, twisting his arm hard to the right and hearing a satisfying crunch from his shoulder socket as tendons and ligaments let go. “Didn’t your mother tell you it’s not polite to fucking point guns at friends? Shut the fuck up and take it like a man. Same way you took all those goddamned ugly-assed tats.”
His howl of pain cut off in mid-screech. She took the gun from him and let go of Jarome, snapping her fingers at him. “Go let my friends in the back door so we can get this party started.”
He went to do it.
Dewi stepped over Emilio, who now silently lay writhing on the floor and clutching his ruined right shoulder.
At the end of the hall, from behind a closed door, she heard a man’s voice yell, “Yo, dawg. What’s goin’ on out there?”
She’d seen in Jarome’s mind that Malyah was duct-taped to a chair in the back bedroom. So far, she hadn’t been molested, although she’d been terrorized.
Geek Chic (Bleacke Shifters Book 2) Page 18
