by Holley Trent
They’ll help him eliminate his Alpha, all right, but first they have to get Tamara through the odd illness that Bryan seems to be both the cause of and cure for.
CHAPTER ONE
Bryan Ridge threw his shoulder against the heavily indented metal door with a grunt, and then let his tired body sag to the floor. Resignation rode him like a jockey on a thoroughbred.
He’d spent two days in that fucking room, and now she was teasing. Sadist. He should have known better. The Shrews did have that reputation.
The grating whine of metal being dragged across metal several feet above his throbbing head put the cherry on the ice cream sundae of his shitty day. He’d gone far beyond waking up on the wrong side of the bed and had now stumbled into something he imagined resembled the Purgatory of his grandmother’s superstitions. He was paying penance for something, but Lord knew what.
No, he did know. He knew too well. This punishment was because he’d waited too long to act. Was passive when he should have been righteously indignant. Unfortunately, there was a blurred line between passive and complacent, and he’d walked right through it years ago without realizing. Complacency was dangerous. It tricked good people into thinking they were out of choices, when the truth was having choices was simply too big of a responsibility.
“Are you ready to come out?” that little harpy of a woman sang into the tiny door flap she’d slid aside.
He gritted his teeth and counted backward from ten in his head.
That wasn’t enough. His pulse still pounded in his ears, and his hands shook with his fury. Blowing out a long, ragged breath, he closed his eyes and started again at one hundred.
“Bry-y-yan,” she sang in a voice evil things like sirens and leshii used to lure good men to their deaths.
Not that Bryan considered himself to be particularly good, but he was certainly within the realm of redeemable. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be dealing with this woman—wouldn’t be frustrating himself to no end because he needed help only she could provide.
She was no siren, but Tamara Ursu was plenty dangerous.
“Bry-y-yan, why are you ignoring me?”
She really vamped up her Romanian accent when she teased him. Vhy are you ignoring me?
If she were so inclined, she could drop the inflections to sound like the Middle American she most certainly was not. She was good, and from what Bryan had seen, the woman who’d trained her was better.
“Eighty-eight. Eighty-seven. Eighty-six,” he counted down, now aloud.
“Aren’t you hungry, you big, bad Bear?”
“Seventy-four. Seventy-three.”
“I’ve got steak out here. Do Bears eat cows?” She made a little hmm noise on the other side of the door, and he knew without seeing her that she was pressing her index finger to her chin and staring heavenward as she pondered it.
“Sixty-eight.”
“You skipped sixty-nine, you naughty boy.”
“I never skip sixty-nine,” he mumbled, now scanning the room for an air vent, a trap door—anything big enough for a man his size to squeeze through, but of course there was nothing. The little-used mountain bunker was designed so there’d be no outs, and because of that, any shapeshifter desperate enough to use it would have to rely on an outsider to release them after the full moon.
His Were-bear ancestors had built the bunker during the Cold War to replace an aging facility, but they hadn’t lived long enough to ever use it. No one had used it, until now.
“Do you want to come out, Bear?”
“Do you want to live to see tomorrow, Shrew?”
“Aww, was that a little growl? Is the Bear getting cranky? Maybe he’d like a nice fish.”
“It’s easy for you to talk shit on that side of the door.”
“It is easy, thank you. This is good fun.”
He blew out a breath, closed his eyes again, and searched the psychic realm for some hint of calm to grab hold of. He imagined white fluffy clouds drifting by. Rainbows. Barbeque sandwiches. Kegs of cold Natural Light. And just because he could, a stripper. She dangled upside down on a shiny metal pole, grinning seductively at him.
He smiled back at the phantom dancer, and when she crooked her index finger at him, beckoning him, his spirit-self moved closer.
She wrapped her arms around the pole bottom, and performed some hypnotizing gymnastic feat that had her body snaking around the apparatus, with legs spread and face serene. Then she let down her legs and fell in a graceful curl onto the stage. Pushing up onto all fours, she locked her gaze on his and she crawled toward him. Her heavy breasts swayed beneath her, her hips swung side to side with each advancement.
The grin she’d worn before had been hopeful: the kind worn by all dancers hoping for a big tip, and Bryan had seen his fair share of those. But this woman, this phantom in his imagination was something else.
Her grin was predatory. Unsettling.
By the time he realized why, it was too late for him to back away, psychically or otherwise.
Her mouth latched onto his, pulling at his lips, and although he struggled, his dream girl held him captive with her hands fisted in his short hair. Her tongue tickled along the slit between his lips, trying to tease them apart, but he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
The stripper pulled her face back and her pretty lips fell into a pout. “You’re no fun,” she said, and it was Tamara’s voice.
“Get out of my daydreams,” he said, hoping his spirit-self wore the same expression of revulsion his real face wore. Didn’t matter if it was phony.
“Stop putting me in them.” She winked and disappeared.
“Bitch.” Real-life Bryan opened his eyes at the echoing clunk behind him.
The first lock.
Next came a long, grinding screech.
The second lock needed oiling.
He rolled over onto his palms and knees, and was on his feet when the third lock—one like the big wheel on a bank’s vault—began grinding open under Tamara’s inhumanly strong grip.
No normal woman could manage those locks, and that’s part of the reason she was there, and not some other woman he respected, or at least tolerated.
The heavy door creaked outward, and before his temporary warden could shift away from the opening, he was on her, holding her wrists together in one of his hands behind her back, and pressing her down to the floor on her belly.
He straddled her very feminine hips between his knees, and pressed the flat of his other palm against her spine, keeping her still. If she moved, she ran the risk of bruising that cute little nose against the unfinished rock floor. She kicked her legs ineffectually behind him, and growled out an objection he couldn’t translate.
Didn’t matter. Knowing Tamara, it was probably profane and ended with some sort of curse involving his manhood and farm machinery.
“What a cute little growl,” he said, mimicking her earlier taunt, though he couldn’t quite manage the same purring effect she’d had. He lifted his left hand and stroked the back of her blonde head in a soothing gesture.
“Is this the payback I get for helping you?” she asked, cutting her gaze sideways to catch him in her periphery. “It’s not enough my boss doesn’t know what we’re doing, but you have to be a difficult shit, too?”
“Me? A difficult shit?” He gave her wrists a little frustrated shake before he let go of her and struggled to his feet after a long night as a bear in a very small space.
“If you didn’t fucking antagonize me at every turn, we’d get along much better,” he said.
She stood. Her green eyes swiveled pointedly toward the ceiling as she brushed the dirt off her clothes. “You just added another thing to the list.”
“The list.” Bryan grunted and rolled his eyes, edging around her in search of his duffel bag.
That fucking list. The apology list. She was keeping a running tally of every slight. Every perceived transgression. The longer the list got, the surlier the little mercenary became.
He pulled on his boxer briefs, and her gaze, now narrowed and cold, returned to him.
He never knew green could be so frosty.
There was a reason the investigation firm she was employed by was called Shrew & Company, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the owner’s enjoyment of a certain Shakespeare work.
He didn’t know the full story behind how that crew of ladies banded together and why that moniker had stuck, but he knew one thing for sure. At the current rate, Tamara was going to put one of her little booted feet down and tell him, “Fuck you. You’re on your own, Bear.”
He was used to taking orders, and in some situations giving them, but the last time he’d worked with a team had been freshman year in high school. He’d been JV quarterback up until puberty ratcheted up hard and fast. Quarterbacks can’t be relied on to play night games when they turn furry every month for the full moon. He’d kept to himself since dropping off the team, choosing to be lone wolf ever since then.
Well. Lone Bear.
He was out of practice with the social niceties, and that Shrew wasn’t going to let him forget it.
CHAPTER TWO
Tamara crossed her arms and turned with a huff, grinding her teeth as she methodically scanned the quiet road.
Bryan’s rental townhouse was situated in a quiet, older, residential neighborhood in Asheville, and the amenities hadn’t quite caught up to the shiny, spanking new developments closer to the city center. There couldn’t have been much more than one pole light per block, which under normal circumstances would have been disconcerting, but for breaking and entering? The dearth of street lighting suited her just fine.
He squatted on his heels with a flashlight clamped between those teeth he’d bared at her so many times already, working a slim metal tool into the lock of his own front door.
His landlord had changed the locks, and not because Bryan was behind on his rent. Politics were in play. Bear politics. Likely, Bryan had learned an important lesson from the inconvenience: never rent from your Alpha, especially when you’re more alpha than your Alpha. Eventually, there’ll be a rift and you’ll be shit-out-of-luck.
“Have I told you what an idiot you are for renting property from your Alpha?” she muttered under her breath. Might as well put it out there since she was thinking it. Their relationship would have been so much more simpatico if he could glean her emotions like some of her Shrew sisters could. She and Bryan wouldn’t need to talk so much. When they talked, they argued. They’d skipped right over yin and yang and had landed firmly in the oil and water category. They needed either a good shake to bind them, at least temporarily, or for this off-the-books assignment to end.
“Don’t go there.” Bryan growled around his flashlight and kept tinkering.
Gene—the Bear leader, and worst example of an Alpha she had ever seen or heard of—exhibited all the earmarks of a textbook Napoleon Complex case. He was of short stature and small-framed. Probably even had an itty bitty little weenie. Combined, those things would turn any man over sixteen into a raging douchebag. Most douche bags didn’t come equipped with fangs and claws, however.
For someone like Gene to have worked his way to the top of a shapeshifter’s group structure was unheard of. Some groups, like the Were-catamounts, didn’t have a leader. Instead, there’d be a person with senior status who acted as spokesperson and intermediary between them and the public, or them and other shifter groups. Tamara’s boss Dana was married to the local Cat Alpha, Patrick.
Patrick was the reason the Shrews were sort of tangled up in The Smokies. What had started as a missing person case, ended up with Dana and her second-in-command Sara in the middle of a Bear-Catamount pissing contest.
The lines had been drawn, and the Shrews by default were thrown onto the Cat side.
The other Shrews would have been both stunned and agitated if they knew Tamara was working one-on-one with a Bear, especially a Bear known to be one of Gene’s lieutenants.
How had this man who easily cleared six feet two and two hundred pounds in his human form ended up as one of Gene’s underlings? Gene had to have played dirty. Bryan probably took shits that were bigger than Gene.
Unfortunately, Bryan was tight-lipped on the politics that had them, at the moment, burgling his own house.
She scanned the street some more and found it still quiet, still dark aside from one dimly lit window in a bungalow across the street and several houses down. She made a mental note to watch that one carefully, but really she was more concerned with the dark houses. People could be watching that small beam of light Bryan shone, and they didn’t need to turn on their lights to do it.
She shifted her weight, impatience mounting. She hated standing around, always had. The patience she did have was hard earned under Dana’s tutelage. “Do you need some help?” she asked. “You probably can’t manage it with those big mitts of yours. Lock picking is work for women. Smarter. Smaller hands.”
He mumbled an oath, which she couldn’t catch all of, but the gist was that she was an insufferable harpy.
She harrumphed. As if she hadn’t heard that before.
Finally, the lock clicked, and Bryan turned the knob between his glove-encased fingers. “Don’t turn on any lights,” he said as he stood.
“What kind of idiot do you take me for?”
He didn’t respond as he crossed the threshold, but he didn’t need to. The malevolent glint of his dark eyes when he turned his head said enough.
“I can’t wait until this is over with,” she murmured. The man had been trying her nerves for the past week, plying her with more and more demands, and rarely offering anything in exchange. He behaved as if he were the one doing her a favor and not the other way around.
Arrogant bastard.
She shut the door, quietly, and engaged both locks.
Bryan pinched his snug leather gloves off his fingers and tossed them onto the recliner back as he passed.
She followed, keeping her eyes trained on the illuminating beam cast by his flashlight. She hadn’t been in his home before, and though she would have liked to linger and study the dusty trinkets on his tables and peruse the titles in his overburdened bookcases, they didn’t have the time. They had to keep moving, and even being at his house was a risk she had advised against them taking.
As always, he’d overruled her—steamrolled her, really—and she’d added one more thing to the mile-long list of offenses. She never forgot. She avenged. Sometimes subtly, and sometimes years later, but she always made people regret crossing her. She held those slights in her memory like money in a bank. Favors she could call in at the right time. Mercenary? Probably. But, a woman like her needed to take advantage, or she’d be the one being taken.
People thought Shrews were scary even without knowing what they really were.
Marvel or DC might have called them mutants. Close enough, although the way they became what they were hardly rated illustrating. They all had different talents, but the most useful tools in Tamara’s personal arsenal were her strength, her flawless memory, and her ability to infiltrate peoples’ dreams and daydreams. Bryan would probably consider that last one of dubious importance.
She’d already hijacked his daydreams three times. He was just so damned open that she couldn’t help herself. She’d never had a good use for that psychic talent before working with him. Dana had made her practice it anyway.
“I almost never used my baton when I was a cop,” Dana had said in her usual calm delivery during a Monday meeting. “But on the day I finally did, I was glad I had the training. Weapons are dangerous in the hands of untrained users. That includes your fucking brain.”
Those words coming from any other person would have raised Tamara’s hackles, but she could never really be angry with Dana. That would be like a drowning person snapping at the lifeguard who’d risked much to save her. Chances were good Dana was going to boot her from the team after this. Tamara had committed at least three of Dana’s
no-nos, and was about to commit another by walking deeper into Bryan’s lair.
His bedroom.
They stepped into the room at the end of the short hallway, and Bryan made a beeline for the curtained window beside his large, unmade bed.
She scanned the room like she always did in a new place, assessing risks and hazards. Traps.
There was nothing worth noting, and in fact, the room suffered for a complete lack of personality. It was as if he didn’t live there so much as store things in there. White walls, particleboard dresser, and taupe carpet. Hell, she’d seen hospital rooms with more personality. The only remotely interesting thing was the bed, as it had posters that nearly touched the ceiling. Seemed out of place in the utilitarian room.
Bryan nudged the curtains this way and that, examining the window behind them, and finally let them fall as they would.
“Close that door and turn on the light,” he commanded. He discarded his flashlight and folded onto his knees beside the bed without waiting for her response.
Briefly, she considered chastising his boorish lack of manners, but knew it would get her nowhere. They’d had that argument before, and he’d ended it with something along the lines of, “This isn’t a Miss Congeniality contest. It’s a business agreement. I don’t have time for bruised feelings.”
It wasn’t about the feelings. She’d been told enough times in the past that she didn’t have any, but her sense of propriety was bruised all the same. She could thank her ambassador’s daughter upbringing for that.
She closed the door and turned on the light as he’d asked.
When she looked to him for explanation, he was already on hands and knees, rooting for something under the bed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, and pressed his large body flat against the taupe, builder’s grade carpeting. He grunted as he stretched his arm further beneath the frame.
