—Elias—
Elias made an excuse to get away from Tess. The fact was there was something strange about this place, something that put him on edge. The air tasted like poison to him; he sensed other shifters in close proximity.
Walking toward the back of the restaurant, his sense of danger got ever sharper. What exactly was he dealing with here? He tried desperately to organize his thoughts. It’d been awhile since this part of his nature had even dared to rise up to the surface of his being.
Sure, his wolf instincts helped him in the daily aspects of his job as an agent, but it’d been a long time since he’d run into other shifters. Had he stayed with the pack, this wouldn’t have been the case. But when he’d left to pursue a career in the human world, he knew that for the most part he’d be leaving his own kind behind.
They’d called him foolish at the time. They told him he’d never fit in. They asked him why he wanted to do it, why he wanted to forsake his pack and go into human society. Because I want to protect them. That had been his answer. But his packmates had just laughed in his face. Protect them? Why? They’re too stupid; they deserve every petty harm that befalls them. That was the only answer he’d heard from the chorus of voices and howls.
But Elias had never believed that. He believed there was something special about humans, these strange, sensitive creatures who were capable of the most extreme suffering, but also great accomplishments. Just look at their societies, the cities they built. New York was a case in point of the genius of the humans. Something about it had always had a pull on Elias, but this wasn’t to say he didn’t sometimes miss his own kind.
The fact was that most shifters in human society were ruthless, tireless villains pulling the strings from behind the scenes, covert criminals out to profit from human misery. That was why Elias always maintained great suspicion anytime he ran across his own kind out in the human world. It usually meant great danger.
For the time being, however, he couldn’t find the source of what was putting him on edge, the locus of energy that had struck a chord with his inner nature. It was then that his mind wandered back to Tess. He’d better head back, he thought. No need to make her suspicious. He turned and walked calmly back to find her sitting at the table, gazing serenely out at the busy street.
He made a mental note of her face in this moment, how the light fell on it through the storefront window. She also awakened within him something of his inner nature. He’d never felt this type of attraction before. It was new and intriguing, and it made him feel lucky to know he’d have the chance to work with her over the coming weeks, even if his stay in this city was to ultimately come to an end.
—Tess—
Elias came back to the table just as a young man, perhaps the older man’s son, brought out our food.
He sat down across from me without a word and started eating. I took that as a cue that I could start as well. We sat there in silence for a while, just enjoying our food. I gazed out the window once more, feeling slightly awkward that we weren’t talking. A strange tension had fallen over the table.
“How’s your sandwich?” I asked cheerfully, trying to break the silence in a nonchalant way.
“Great. Really great. This is a great spot.”
Silence settled over the table once more. I looked up over at him as I took another bite of my sandwich, waiting to make eye contact, but he didn’t look in my direction.
“What was the phone call about?” I asked, trying once again to start a conversation.
“What phone call?” he asked, seeming perplexed.
“You said you had to make a phone call. Remember? When I ordered the sandwiches?”
“Oh, that. Nothing, just administrative stuff I forgot to handle before we left the station today.”
“You seem… off. Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said curtly, as if he was annoyed that I’d even suggest the possibility. He stared me down as if daring me to press the issue.
I looked away and noticed a man walking toward us, late twenties and swaggering, with slicked back hair and a tight t-shirt. His shoes looked like they’d just been polished. He came right up to our table and put his hand on it, leaning in to talk to us.
“You guys enjoying your lunch?” he asked, with a fake smile.
“Yes,” said Elias. “It’s very good.”
“Well, we really appreciate your business. But we’d appreciate it more if you’d hurry up and get out of here. And, with all due respect, never set foot in here again.”
“Excuse me?” said Elias.
“We know what you are,” said the man. “We saw you poking around in the back of the restaurant earlier. If you want to do that in the future, you’d better get a fucking warrant.”
“I’m sorry, I think you have us mistaken for someone else,” said Elias calmly, keeping his composure.
“I don’t make mistakes. Listen, buddy, we know you’re police, or FBI or something else entirely. I got a bad feeling about you in particular. So, you better get the hell out of my fuckin’ deli.”
“As you wish,” said Elias. “Tess, let’s do as the man says.”
Outside on the sidewalk, I confronted Elias about what had just happened inside.
“What the hell was that?”
“Mafia. It has to be. No one else would be that brash with the authorities. No one else would be so paranoid as to have so many cameras set up in a damn deli.”
“Cameras? How do you know there were cameras?” I asked.
“Well, he must have been watching us on something in the backroom. And I saw no less than six cameras myself inside, usually somewhat hidden. It’s just something I’ve trained myself to pick up on. There was something else about that man, too.”
“What exactly?”
“Oh, nothing. He just seemed… different.”
“Elias…” I began hesitantly, but stopped, questioning whether I should risk the conjecture I was about to make.
“Yes?”
“This might be a shot in the dark, but,” I was proceeding with caution, trying to choose the best words to formulate what I knew could be a wild hypothesis. “What if the salon was just a red herring? What if that’s just a coincidence? Maybe this isn’t the dead end we thought it was.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
“Arturo’s is just around the block. If they’ve been coming to this salon for awhile, they know Arturo’s is in the area. It’s a local legend. Maybe each of them stopped for lunch after they were done at the salon.”
“So you think the Mafia could be behind the abductions?” asked Elias, his voice sounding skeptical.
“Well, I don’t know. I know it’s a long shot. It’s pretty improbable I guess.”
“It’s not that improbable,” he said, looking over at me, his eyes conveying a new emotion I hadn’t quite seen before, an emotion I couldn’t entirely wrap my head around.
“So what now?”
“We’re going back to the station. I want to know which of the crime families operates Arturo’s. And I want to know every other building in this City that’s under their influence.”
“OK.”
“And Tess,” he said, his tone gaining a new sense of solemnity. “I want you to be on your guard. This case may have gotten a lot more serious, more complex, more…”
“Dangerous?” I said, finishing his sentence for him.
“Precisely. If the Mafia is in fact behind this, we’re on their radar now. We’ve got to move carefully.”
—Elias—
Elias looked over at the woman walking next to him as they moved down the sidewalk together, away from Arturo’s and toward his car a few blocks away.
He wanted to kiss her. Her hypothesis made sense. In fact, it was one of the few things that made any sense of the crime. But there was still something he hid from Tess, something that confirmed her hypothesis, but something dark that he didn’t dare share.
The man who had approached th
em in the deli, low-level Mafioso that he was, had also been a shifter. Elias had sensed it, and he certainly couldn’t be mistaken about something like that. What was worse, the man had let Elias know that he knew Elias was a shifter, too. We know what you are. Those had been his words. Elias could read the implication. He remembered the man’s tone precisely. Those words were a subtle threat.
If shifters had infiltrated the Mafia, then they were standing on truly dangerous ground. What was brewing here? And why the abductions?
Elias had one guess. These women were being forcibly taken as mates, but perhaps not by the Mafia themselves. Maybe they were just a middleman, a bridge between the human and shifter worlds. He had to admit that things like this weren’t exactly unheard of. Many wolves would pay a pretty price for mates such as these, but many of these shifters were too cowardly to venture into the human world and risk identification.
Fuck. This is getting serious, he thought. Would he have to tell Tess what he was? Eventually, the case could get to a point where it was unavoidable. As it stood, he felt terrible about hiding this important fact from her; she had no idea the type of danger she was in now. But he couldn’t let her know just yet; she wasn’t ready. But if he was going to keep her in the dark on this, he’d have to keep watch over her at all hours of the day. Now that she’d been spotted at Arturo’s, she was a likely target.
Elias wasn’t naïve. He knew that Tess was exactly the type of girl the shifters would be looking for, the type of woman that any shifter would want as a mate. Hell, to be completely honest, Elias had felt intense attraction toward Tess himself: her cleverness, her intelligence, not to mention her body, and that gorgeous face. And her scent.
Enough! he thought to himself. He didn’t want to be distracted right now. Distraction could be fatal at a time like this. He would be her protector. Right now, that was as far as things could go between them.
CHAPTER 9
———
—Tess—
As we got into Elias’s car, I couldn’t help but feel a strange tension. I don’t know if it was something I’d said, but he seemed unresponsive in a way that was hard to describe. It wasn’t anything he said; based on outward appearances and behavior, he seemed totally normal. But something wasn’t right; it seemed like his mind had drifted elsewhere—probably back to the confrontation at Arturo’s.
We parked back at the police station and headed inside, taking the elevator immediately to the eighteenth floor work room Elias had set up specifically for his task force. Agent Henderson and Dr. Geiss were already at work. Elias burst through the door of the workroom sparing no pleasantries whatsoever.
“I want everything we have on organized crime in this city in the last five years. I want names of bosses, capos, associates, henchmen, enforcers. I want to know where they eat, where they drink, where they sleep. I want to know every damn business they’re wrapped up in.”
“You think the abductions are related to organized crime? The data suggests otherwise,” said Dr. Geiss in her sterile, scientific tone.
“I want to look into it nonetheless,” said Elias.
“But why? What’s your rationale? What’s your hypothesis?”
“My hypothesis is that the mob is somehow behind this. Tess and I just had a very strange encounter down at Arturo’s.”
“What? Who’s Arturo?” asked Agent Henderson.
“It’s a restaurant. Deli. An old-school Italian deli. I think it’s a mob hangout.”
“Why were you at a deli? I thought you went to a hair salon or something,” said Agent Henderson.
“We did. The owner didn’t know shit. So we grabbed some lunch.”
“And what happened?” asked Dr. Geiss.
“Some lower-level Mafia guy came right up to our table and told us to leave. He knew I was FBI.”
“And you think that because of this they’re somehow related to the abductions case? It’s probably just a coincidence. The data suggests—” said Dr. Geiss, but Elias cut her off.
“Trust me. I have a sense for these things. Just look into it, OK? We have access to all the police databases, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Link them up with the FBI databases. I want to know everything we’ve got. Start with Arturo’s. I want to know who owns it, and what crime family they’re affiliated with. We’ll circle out from there.”
“OK,” said Dr. Geiss.
The issue now settled, Elias walked over to a separate table strewn with various papers and files. A solitary laptop sat next to a phone on the large wooden table. He sat down and flipped it open, then reached a hand over and dialed the internal line, picking up the receiver of the phone in one smooth motion.
“Hello, it’s Agent Chamberlain. We need an additional setup in the work room. Just one additional laptop. Thanks.”
He slammed down the phone.
“Alright, time to grab this problem head on,” he said, with a slightly sad-looking smile.
I could tell he was troubled. Something about the deli had inspired a change in him. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me, but I didn’t have the courage to ask what it was. Soon one of the Commissioner’s secretaries brought me a laptop and I was able to set to work, wading through the vast amount of information in the database like everyone else.
We worked silently. I wanted to speak to Elias, but I held my tongue. I could tell he didn’t want to be distracted, that any effort expended on anything other than the abductions case would be a waste of energy at this time. So I buckled down and focused on my work, hoping desperately that these dark clouds would pass, that the spark of life that I saw within Elias’s eyes would soon return.
—Elias—
Elias stared at his laptop screen, opening up another file in the vast collection of data the police had accumulated on Mafia activity in the city. Occasionally he looked up and saw Tess sitting across from him; Dr. Geiss and Agent Henderson were at another table across the room. Every now and then, they’d make eye contact and a small smile would creep across Tess’s face, but Elias would always look away.
He couldn’t begin to describe the emotions that went through him every time he looked into her eyes; he hadn’t felt like this in a long time, maybe even ever. There was a bond that held between them, primitive and strong. Elias couldn’t help feeling it had existed before they had ever even laid eyes on each other; it was the only way to explain the strength of the feelings he felt right now.
He had to wonder whether Tess could feel it, too. Did she feel the indescribable, nearly incomprehensible attraction, that nascent sense of desire and attachment? Compounding these confused emotions was the practically palpable threat that hung over them. Elias was under siege; Tess, too. Even though she didn’t know it, she had made herself a prime target the moment she’d walked into Arturo’s earlier in the day.
Elias looked back at his laptop, but he could hardly concentrate on the files that hovered on the screen in front of him. He wanted to tell everyone what he knew, to reveal the key to the case and the source of his surety about the Mafia’s involvement in these heinous abductions. He wanted to scream that it was shifters who were behind this; shifter Mafioso kidnapping these women and selling them at the highest prices into the shifter world.
Sure, this was just a hypothesis, but he knew it in his heart to be true; his senses never betrayed him. But he kept silent. He couldn’t say a word to the others without revealing his own dark identity. And he had a pretty good idea how that would end: him marching with two officers at his side, hands cuffed behind his back, headed toward a jail cell to await trial. He knew what was at stake; he’d been warned by damn near everyone in his old pack when he’d brought up his ambition to enter the human world. They’d said he was foolish, insane even. Maybe he was. But now that he’d gotten himself into it there was nothing to do but press on with his task.
—Tess—
It’d been a few hours since anyone had spoken above the level of a hushed whis
per. Elias hadn’t said a thing and neither had I. A few chance words had passed between Agent Henderson and Dr. Geiss. It was under these circumstances that I’d stumbled upon something interesting.
It was a leasing agreement for an address in the West Village—a leasing agreement for Arturo’s that was dated from four months ago signed by one Mr. Paul Cipriano. Finally, I had a reason to break the silence.
“Elias, you might want to have a look at this,” I said softly, turning my laptop screen to face him. Elias looked up at me then leaned down to focus his eyes on the screen.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It’s a lease. For Arturo’s.”
“How did you find this?”
“I was looking through city records for transactions in the last few months. It seemed like it could be relevant, since the abductions only recently started.”
Elias looked over at Dr. Geiss.
“Evelyn, I need you to look up someone by the name of ‘Paul Cipriano.’ Do you need me to spell that last name?”
“No, I got it. Let’s see what we have here,” replied Dr. Geiss, her delicate fingers typing rapid-fire as she queried the database.
We all waited breathlessly on her response.
“OK,” she said. “Looks like he was booked in the late ‘90s for racketeering, but beat the charge in court. Assault charges, those were settled out of court. He’s a known member of the Giordano crime family. That’s all I can find right now.”
“Giordano. Alright, this is our new focus. Let’s find out everything we can about the Giordano family. Evelyn, is there a birthdate on there?” asked Elias.
“June 6, 1958.”
“OK, so that wasn’t Paul Cipriano who confronted us in the deli earlier,” said Elias as he looked at me. “That guy was much younger.”
“So who was he?” I asked.
The Shifter's Conspiracy (Paranormal BBW Werewolf Romance Novella) Page 5
