Walk on the Striped Side

by Jessie Lane

  Her skills were so much more badass than wallet theft. For instance her expert level shooting qualifications. These people simply had no idea.

  While internally trying to guess what species of Other these people might be, she watched as Gage’s grandmother leaned over and whispered into the ear of the man with sat at the head of the table with shoulder length black hair and bright green eyes. He wore power and arrogance like a second skin, but Elena had a feeling that his aura of attitude was well deserved. Perhaps with that kind of surety in power he was the leader of a Clan of Vampires or an Alpha of a Pack of Pride? Whatever Grandmother Ivanov said caused the mysterious man to smile at her, and Elena damn sure appreciated that man’s smile. That was the kind of smile that spoke to a woman. It said ‘I’ll fuck you in ways you’ll never forget and leave you a sobbing, crying mess when I’m done’. It had to be one of the sexiest things she’d ever seen.

  She felt Gage’s fingers squeeze her hand, so she looked over to see him glaring back at her in annoyance. Apparently he didn’t like it when Elena ogled other men in front of him. Whoops. Gage didn’t give her time to find a way to brush it off though, because he pulled her into his body possessively and dropped his mouth so that his lips were touching her ear.

  “Should I take you into the bathroom and quickly remind you who it is that your pussy belongs to?”

  Her breath caught at his blunt words and she soaked her panties at the mental images of what she’d just done in the shower with Gage. When she didn’t answer him right away, he added “I’d be happy to show you that I’m the only man who knows exactly how deep, high and rough you like it love.”

  Knowing that the room was probably full of other shifters that she didn’t want to smell her arousal, she did her best to lock down her libido. She had to get Gage to stop talking or she was going to have a spontaneous orgasm in this very room. Unable to trust her voice to talk without cracking like a prepubescent teenager, she shook her head no instead.

  She felt his teeth sharply nip her ear lobe and then he whispered, “Then keep those flirtatious looks of yours saved for me mate. I’m a very jealous beast.”

  Nodding, she turned her head to face him and gave into the insane urge to kiss the very lips that had been teasing her ear. She wasn’t sure who was more shocked at her actions, her or Gage. And when she felt him falter at the touch, Elena started to pull back, feeling slightly chastised, but Gage didn’t let her get very far. His lips engulfed hers in a short fiery kiss that she swore she could feel all the way down to her toes before she heard Alec sigh on the other side of them.

  “God, not this again. This is why we’re late in the first place!”

  Elena pulled away from Gage so that she could reach over and punch the annoying shithead, but Gage kept her fist from making contact by stepping to the side and pulling her bodily with him.

  “Leave the mate of your brother alone Alec! A good grandson would make his babushka happy if he would go out and find a mate of his own. But NO, you insist on being this whore of the man that Jenna is always speaking of. This does not make me happy.” Gage’s grandmother complained in her thick Russian accent.

  Elena snickered as Alec hung his head to stare at the floor at his grandmother’s poor play on words.

  The only other woman in the room, whom Elena was guessing was this Jenna, happily corrected the woman at Alec’s expense. “It’s man-whore Vera. Remember? Not whore of man.”

  Gage’s grandmother waved her hand through the air as if it didn’t matter. “This is like that other word you tried to teach me. You say asshole, I say hole of the ass, but we say the same thing, yes?”

  Everyone at the table was snickering at Jenna’s bugged out eyes when she responded, “Not really, no.”

  Elena watched the man at the head of the table push a map up on the table in front of him. “Let’s get back to business people. We don’t have time to waste.”

  Gage led her over to two empty chairs at the table where they could sit. As they did, the man in charge looked at her and inclined his head. “My name is Pack Master Davies. Please forgive me for sounding like an uncaring jackass, but I don’t have time to catch you up on this situation. Since Gage insists you be here with him, please sit there, stay quiet, and then you can badger your mate for details later.”

  Elena immediately opened her mouth to deny being Gage’s mate, but the big bastard lightly stomped on her toes in a warning to shut up. He must have considered it a love tap, but it was still hard enough to hurt like hell. Since she was in a room full of people, she couldn’t very well cry out ‘owie-owie-owie’ or punch him in the face like she really wanted to!

  While she was rubbing her offended toes through her shoes, she snarled at the irritating man who was quickly driving her insane. “Just remember, I don’t get mad. I GET EVIL.”

  Gage frowned at the threat, Alec snorted, and Pack Master Davies started speaking again as if Elena wasn’t dangerously close to giving Gage a titty twister.

  “Riiiiight. This from the woman who is wearing a shirt that says she’ll cuddle people hard.” It might have been unwise, but Elena shot Mr. High and Mighty Davies her best death glare. That fast he’d gone from panty melting hot to someone she wanted to take with her on her next trip to the gun range. He’d make a really good target. The man seemed oblivious to her killing looks though, because he just kept talking.

  “I’m sure we’re all terrified of your evilness. Now if we’re done acting like teenagers with our first crushes, lets move on. It’s been three months since Minna informed us of the Corvus Pack’s activities and the precarious situation with Alpha Marcus Corvus. Needless to say, three months is too long. A little over a month ago, I made a phone call to one of my most trusted friends. He’s a vampire who lives in England. I informed him of the situation and asked him to fly over to journey and do some surveillance for us.”

  “That was risky, telling someone outside of us what’s going on.” Jenna stated somberly.

  The Pack Master snarled at the Jenna woman, flashing his canines while doing so. Elena watched in fascination as the red haired man wrapped his hand around the back of the woman’s neck and gently squeezed. A silent warning. The reaction from this Davies character seemed a little harsh to Elena, but from what she’d learned of shifter politics so far, the Pack Master was the head enchilada of wolves in a specified area. So, Jenna confronting him with something like that was probably the equivalent of Elena chastising the President of the United States to his face. In other words, it’s a no-no.

  After a tense moment, the Pack Master tucked his fangs back up into his mouth and moved on. “Baines is particularly good at blending into crowds and not being seen when he doesn’t want to be. So he’s been spying on the Corvus Pack for me for close to a month now. Following some of the Pack members as they go in and out of town, in their favorite bars, and their usual activities in general. He’s tried to get close to their compound, but there’s no way to do it without being discovered. Early this morning he contacted me with time sensitive information. We have to go in. They’re planning to assassinate Marcus Corvus.”

  The room was deathly silent after the Pack Master dropped that little bomb. Elena couldn’t help but wonder just who important this Marcus Corvus was, and why in the world someone was going to kill him?

  Jenna was the first one to speak again. “Did your friend hear why they want to kill him now? After all this time?”

  The Pack Master shook his head. “No. Baines would have told me had he heard something to that effect. He stated the whispered conversation was quickly cut off by someone else exiting the back door that the two men had been talking by. Once they were interrupted, they both went back inside the bar.”

  The younger looking version of the Pack Master finally spoke up. “So we get Minna in here. We go over the diagrams of the compound that she’s drawn us, and we start planning. We can’t let them kill Corvus.”

  The Pack Master nodded, and then scanned the room,
scrutinizing each of them. “I don’t think I really need to say how dangerous this mission is going to be. We’ll be headed into another wolf pack’s compound without knowing exactly how many of them are inside. I’m sure Baines can surveillance the place between now and then to give us a heads up on guards on the perimeter and such, but otherwise we’re flying blind. That being said, I can’t make any of you go except Gage and his team. The rest of you, it’s your choice. You have until Minna gets here to make it.”

  Once done with his speech, the dangerous Pack Master stood up from his chair and left the room. Much to Elena’s surprise, Vera was right behind him. She’d never considered the fact that shifters of different species intermingled relationship wise. Which was ridiculous now that she thought about it. Why wouldn’t they? After all, they spent most of their time as human. Their beasts didn’t entirely rule them. So of course they might find someone on the other side of the fur fence to get freaky with. It was the ultimate proof that dogs and cats really could get along.

  Speaking of getting along, why did the Pack Master say that Gage was the one person who didn’t have a choice about going? She didn’t think that one species of Other had any authority over another. So why would a wolf have the right to tell a feline shifter that he had to go? Was Gage in some kind of trouble that she didn’t know about?

  A tug on the handcuff still attached to her left wrist brought her attention over to Gage. “What are you thinking about?” His low voice rumbled.

  Turning her body in the chair to face him, she crossed her legs and got comfortable. She didn’t want the pesky cat to know that she was worried about him, so she’d have to give him something else to talk about. It was fact finding time. “Who’s this Corvus guy and why does some Pack of wolf shifters want to kill him?”

  Gage leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees and clasped his hands around the ankle Elena had dangling from her knee in front of him. “Marcus Corvus is, or was, the Alpha of the very Pack that holds him hostage. That they managed to subdue him at all is somewhat amazing because he’s a very old, powerful shifter. We’re not quite sure what exactly has happened, but we know that somehow, the wolves in his Pack have turned into a bit of extremist group. A few months ago, a few of their Pack came here and caused a lot of trouble. That’s how they came to be on our radar.”

  “What did they do here?” Elena asked.

  “Went into a high end restaurant and held some Senators and their families’ hostage.” Nodding his head in the direction of Jenna, and then across the table at pretty boy. “Jenna and her partner Kent are on the Wilmington Police Department’s SWAT team. They were the ones to go in after the first SWAT team failed. After Jenna and Kent’s team neutralized the situation, Jenna told her Uncle, the Pack Master, about it. It’s unusual for Others to do anything that would put the public spotlight on us, but it seemed like these guys were doing it for the attention. They claimed to the Police and the Press that they were doing it for a ransom, but once we started investigating the situation, that didn’t seem right. The Corvus Pack is loaded. Its members shouldn’t need to do anything drastic like that for money.”

  Elena threw her hand up in the universal stop gesture, and then leaned closer to Gage to whisper. “Back that truck up, did you just say Jenna’s uncle is the Pack Master? The same Pack Master that just threatened her with his snarling, cranky rabies and fangs impression?”

  Gage leaned into her space to whisper back. “Yes, that’s her Uncle. And I hope you know this whispering is pointless because every person in this room just heard what you said.”

  Elena tried really hard not to blush in embarrassment as she looked up and found the room’s inhabitants smiling at her. Looking over to Jenna, Elena apologized hesitantly. “Ummm… sorry?”

  Jenna snorted in amusement before looking at the red haired man who still held the back of her neck and was basically invading the woman’s space in every way he could. “Do you think I could get away with telling Uncle Owen I think he has rabies?”

  The red haired man shook his head. “Not if you want to keep breathing you won’t.”

  CHAPTER-SIXTEEN

  Gage

  He watched as his mate turned her back on the others as they joked and faced him again. His hands were still holding the bare skin of her ankle. He couldn’t help himself. Both man and beast were anxious to have some type of physical connection with her since she’d yet to accept their matting. He started rubbing his thumbs in slow circles on her baby soft skin and it took everything he had not to purr at the contentment the action gave him.

  Elena studied him for a few seconds before she asked, “So you’re going on this mission to rescue this Alpha who’s being kidnapped?”

  Nodding his head, “Yeah. This is important. We believe this Pack has terrorist type plans for the future. We know that they have extreme prejudices against humans. We need to rescue the Alpha because he can give us the information we need to shut whatever his Pack is planning, and because he doesn’t deserve to die this way. The man’s a fucking legend in our world. It wouldn’t be right to let some twisted, sadistic idiots kill him.”

  “I get it Rambo, you need to save the world. What I don’t understand is why the Pack Master said that you were the only one here that he could make go on the mission.”

  Gage shrugged his shoulders. “The Spec Ops group you saw me working with in the Army does more than military missions. Part of the reason we exist is to help keep the Other Community in check. The heads of the world’s government organizations agree that the world isn’t ready to know about us. So if we hear about something that could potentially out us to the humans, it’s our job to go investigate and shut it down if need be.”

  “Wait a second. I thought humans didn’t know about you period, point blank, end of the damn story. You’re telling me that the government knows?”

  Gage shot her an amused grin. Sometimes her naivety was just so damn cute.

  “Do you honestly think that in thousands of years no government official has figured out what we are?”

  Completely flabbergasted, Elena’s mouth opened and shut a few times before she said “How can that be? In my entire life, I’ve never heard a serious rumor about vampires, werewolves or demons! So how can you sit there and tell me that some of the human population knows? Certainly something would have leaked out by now?”

  Gage shook his head. “You’re thinking the wrong way baby. I never said human, I said government official.”

  He watched as the light went off in her head. “So there are Others who are in government?”

  “Exactly. We need them there. We have to know what’s going on. You’d be surprised how man demons and shifters are in government positions.”

  “No vampires?” She asked curiously.

  Gage shrugged. “A few. It’s harder with their severe allergic reactions to the sun.”

  She giggled at his lame joke and he felt his chest squeeze at the sound. He’d do almost anything to hear that sound from her every day for the rest of her life.

  Squeezing her ankle to get her attention he murmured, “I have to call my team now. It won’t take but a minute.”

  Whipping his cellphone out, he dialed Tyson who picked up on the first ring. Relaying the essential info, he promised to debrief him further once the man arrived in Wilmington. The Lion was going to have to get their unit ready for action and there was no time to delay. As he hung up the phone, Gage was already running a mental list in his head of what equipment he was going to have to grab from his house. Tyson would have the plane so transportation for the group wouldn’t be an issu-.

  “So Mr. Puss In Boots, you’ve got an interesting conundrum on your hands.” Elena suddenly announced.

  Gage cocked an eyebrow in question and waited for her to continue. She looked all too smug at the moment in his opinion, which meant he wasn’t going to like whatever it was that was about to come out of her mouth.

  One side of her mouth ticked up in a smir
k. “Are you going to take me on the mission with you…” She raised her handcuffed hand, which of course raised his own hand, and held them in the air in front of him. “Or are you going to uncuff me now?”

  He narrowed his eyes at Elena. The scheming little shit. She was just a little too smug about something.

  Alec scoffed “Of course he’s not taking you. I don’t care if you are an Amazon, you’re still a vulnerable human. That would be like leading the lamb to the wolf buffet.”

  Elena lost her smug look to shoot an incredulous glare at his brother. “The wolf buffet?”

  “Would you prefer it if I had said that it would be like leading little Red Riding Hood to her Grandma’s House of Doom?”

  “I’m not completely helpless you know!” She snapped back.

  “Sure, that’s why you’re handcuffed to my brother, because you’re not helpless.”

  Elena’s face turned red in anger. “I was in the Army jackass! You don’t think they taught me a thing or two while I was in?”