Alex ran his thumbs across her cheeks, trying to dry the tears. “I’m sorry. I just can’t…I can’t control myself around you,” he growled.
“Then maybe we shouldn’t be around each other anymore.”
He took a long step back, ignoring the clench around his heart when those words landed. He counted three breaths and met her eyes again. “I need you to understand, we are hunting a monster. When Maggie and I came up with this plan, we assumed we would have to capture you, too.”
“I’m not sure that’s as comforting as you intend it to be.” She crossed her arms and the suit coat bunched just enough that he could see the curves of her body beneath, much as she’d tried to hide them.
He missed the other Julianna. The one who wasn’t hiding from anyone.
“I knew as soon as you mentioned your father, you didn’t have anything to do with the reason we’d come here.”
The elevator dinged and just behind her, a whoosh sounded. Julianna whirled around and stood in front of Alex with a wide gait. She didn’t have a gun or any protection, and he put one hand on her waist.
The doors slid apart to reveal Andrea, Dani, Hannah, and Donovan, all in their hotel uniforms again.
The Texas wolf frowned and held up a pile of folded blue clothing. “Where’s Niko?”
Alex pointed to the open door of the security room. “In with Maggie.”
All three of the women gave him the up-and-down as they filed past, and Donovan did his best to avoid all eye contact.
Alex waved them off. The judgey looks were starting to piss him off.
He wasn’t Rain.
Only, he had been forgoing the mission when it suited him, to answer the call of the magick. He was exactly like Rain. Maybe they had a right to be pissed at him. But the ugly truth was, the magick was irresistible. No way he could have done anything other than what he had done.
His gaze wandered across Julianna’s face, down her body. She was so damn beautiful, even all severe and neutral, like this. Flat out gorgeous.
He couldn’t live his life without her. He had to make her his.
Alex grabbed her shoulder and whirled her around to face him. “You and I belong together, Julianna. I know you feel it, too.”
Her eyebrows pinched together. “Please, don’t.” She tried to shake his hands off, but he had too tight a grip on her. “I can’t take any more of this today.”
“Your father has been haunting you all your life. I want you to be free of him.” He tried to recall the words of the spell he taught his students. “Chun tú Geallaim mo chroí—”
Andrea’s voice cut the air. “Alex. Get the hell in here.”
He rounded on her. “Dammit, Andrea, I was trying—”
Maggie burst through the door, her eyes wide and frightened. “Don’t you dare bond with her, Alex.”
Julianna wrestled out of his grip. “What exactly does that mean?”
But Maggie ignored her and pointed in Alex’s face. “You bond with her, and her father will know it. You think you can hide those tattoos?”
“Tattoos?” Julianna echoed.
“I need both of you.” Maggie thumbed back at the security room. “Now.”
Alex’s skin felt itchy, like something crawled underneath it. The magick. He’d felt it, so strongly, pushing him, then it practically relaxed.
He grabbed Julianna’s hand and pulled her into the security room. Fuck all of this. First chance he got, he was going to bond with this woman. She was his mate. He knew beyond the shadow of a doubt. He just needed to protect her, to bind her to him, so she would never be under her father’s thumb. Never again.
Chapter Eleven
Alex waited for Maggie to say she was joking, or to make the candid cameras jump out or something. Instead, she just stared at Julianna and repeated herself.
“We need you to take us onto the island.” Maggie wasn’t asking, and she wasn’t hedging. It was almost an order.
“Nope.” Alex stepped between them. “That is absolutely not happening.”
“She’s our only chance, Alex. Look at this.” Maggie flipped the computer’s mouse and pointed to the screen. “This is only a monitoring station. I can’t shut anything down from here.”
Donovan crowded toward the monitor and pointed at one of the screens in the bank. “But that is a control station.” He ran his finger along the display, outlining a short, squat building. “See, it has the same bank of computers that this one has.”
“Then how do you know they can’t see us?” Julianna’s voice rose in a panic and Alex reached for her, taking her hand. He expected her to shove him off or wrench her hand away, but she squeezed it instead, leaning into him.
“I turned off the cameras up here before we got in the elevator.” Maggie held up her tablet. “I’ve had access to the mainframe for a week, but there are some channels that are only in this hardwired system.”
“That’s also why they were expecting us,” Niko said from behind the bank of screens, pulling on his blue coat. He kicked one of the bodies on the ground. “But we got the drop on them.”
Julianna peeked around and saw the bodies. Her brows wrinkled in concern and she squeezed Alex’s hand harder.
“Can we just get back to this hells-to-the-no-Julianna-is-not-going-on-the-island thing for a sec?” Dani said, and everyone’s gaze centered on her. “Because that’s bullshit.”
“Her father is a monster.” Alex pulled his mate under his arm and hugged her into his body. “He sees her on that island, he’s going to know something’s wrong.”
“We need to get in to that control center.” Donovan pointed at the screen again, the snap of his nail on the glass sounding loud in the silent room. “She’s the only person we know who’s on our side who has access to the island.”
“Then we’re going to have to come up with a different plan.” Alex glared at Maggie. “I can’t believe you would ask this.”
“We all have to take risks, Alex.” Maggie’s voice rose. “Just because you found your mate doesn’t mean we all get to ride off into the sunset. We still have to find Adrian and…do what the alpha council told us to do.”
“Wait.” Julianna swallowed, her hand in the space between Maggie and Alex. “Are you going to kill my father?”
Alex’s tongue slid out to wet his lips. He hadn’t expected push-back from her on the death of Adrian. “He’s not your real father.”
“So you say.” She gestured around the room. “Which I’m supposed to believe because Niko turned into a wolf—if that’s even what really happened.”
Maggie groaned. “Humans.” She sighed. “Look. You have to know, deep in your heart, that he’s different from you. If you want to wait around another three hours, we’ll have the results of that DNA test, and we can tell you exactly who he is. But here’s what we know for sure.” She held up fingers, ticking them off with each point. “Adrian kidnapped a bunch of wolves more than thirty years ago and ran a brothel. Somehow, seven of his charges escaped, and then a priest in Guadalajara went to a pack of wolves in the mountains and they closed down the whole place. Your father isn’t your real father, but he’s raised you, for some reason, to think that he is.”
“You forgot,” Andrea held up her pointer finger, “Adrian Rossi is a psychopath.”
“We can’t call the police, because they couldn’t handle him. If they could even manage to prove that he’s done anything wrong, he’d just shift into a wolf and tear out their throats.” Maggie pulled at the scarf she had around her throat. “Like he tried to do to me last week.”
The room fell completely silent and Julianna’s fingers reached out toward Maggie’s wounds, but froze in midair. The scars were faint, but jagged. The doctors had sewn up the places that hadn’t healed on their own, and the faint outlines of small stitches ran from Maggie’s shoulder, under the fabric of her tank top, and up her throat.
Julianna stopped breathing. Alex hugged her tighter, but it didn’t help. She bit her bottom l
ip as it quivered.
“I’m sorry.” She dropped her hand to her side.
A hot burn slid up the inside of Alex’s throat, climbing up higher until he thought he could feel the beginning of tears. Julianna didn’t appear to have the kind of close relationship with her father that he had with his own, but it still couldn’t be easy to have someone stand in front of you and say your father tried to kill them.
“It’s not your fault.” Maggie wrapped the scarf around her neck again. “I’ll heal.” She pointed at the screens. “Those kids won’t. Not if he can help it.”
Julianna stared at the screen and everyone else followed suit. There were kids of all ages, some dressed simply, some in fine clothes. Every five or so seconds, the screen would flicker to a different angle on that building. There were children everywhere. Some, very young.
But none old enough that they would’ve started shifting.
Alex’s whole body shuddered. What had Adrian done with them once they started shifting?
“I want to help,” Julianna said.
Alex opened his mouth to argue, but she squeezed his hand hard.
“But I can’t go to the island.” She tapped another of the screens. “My father sees me, and…” A shiver made its way through her body and Alex could feel it shake her limbs, even after it had passed. “He’ll see us coming from miles out.”
Maggie’s shoulders dropped. “We have to get on that island.”
“I can probably get you on the island.” Julianna pointed to one of the screens. “Look. There’s the boat now.”
A big cruiser pulled away from the dock in one shot and kept going in another. It was visible in yet another screen. Alex indicated the last screen. “She’s right. Adrian is on that island right now. He’s going to know we’re coming if we try to get there.”
“That was Luther,” Julianna said. “His head of security and transport. He’s probably headed here to see what the problem is.”
“How long do we have?” Maggie pushed the chair back and moved the dead man’s foot from in front of the door.
“About fifteen minutes until he’s here through the interior elevator in the penthouse,” Julianna said.
Niko practically growled, “What if he’s a wolf?”
“We can go to my… To the penthouse I have for the weekend. He’ll never come there.” Julianna was out from under Alex’s arm, and through the door, before he could stop her.
Maggie looked around the room. “Don’t anyone forget anything. Let’s go.”
Alex followed his team to the elevators, but he couldn’t get the image of those kids out of his mind. It had been hard enough to stomach, when he’d first heard the idea of a werewolf brothel, but thinking of Adrian still breeding children turned his stomach.
He continued to clench and unclench his fists, all the way down the elevator ride, and all the way up to the other tower. The speech his father had given him when he was ordered to go with the team to Mexico kept playing in his head.
We have to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.
That island was full of a lot of wolves under Adrian’s control, and even Julianna, here on the mainland, was his pawn. They had to find a way to bring some justice to Adrian Rossi.
No sooner had they reached the rooftop suite where she and Alex had spent an amazing forty-eight hours, the phone in the room rang. The lobby had been quiet when they passed through, a couple at a time.
A few guests laughed and drank in the bar, but all the shops were closed and the ambient lighting made it easy for them to slip across the hotel and up to the other tower.
Niko or Nicholas—whatever his name was—and Danielle had split off while they were downstairs in the main lobby. Their shifts had started at midnight.
Julianna rounded the corner and hurried through the kitchen to the phone in the bedroom. Whatever emergency had prompted Diana’s call, she preferred to have a modicum of privacy from these…werewolves.
It still didn’t sound real. Even after seeing Niko change in front of her eyes.
“Hello?” She said, pressing the receiver to her ear.
“Ms. Rossi, Luther is at it again. He called me and ordered me to send staff to your father’s floor for clean up. Did something happen again? We can’t keep losing staff at this rate. What do I do? He told me not to tell you. Something is going on with your father.”
“Is Luther here?”
“Yes,” Diana sighed. “He said he’s waiting in the hallway for the staff. But whoever I send will have to get fired again.” Her assistants voice turned into an annoyed whine.
Julianna sympathized, if not for her newfound understanding—if it could be called that—she’d feel the same way. “Send the new staff. I’d rather have to fire the newbies than more reliable staff.” Julianna didn’t need to tell Diana that about half of their new hires would probably quit soon anyway.
“Only Nicholas and Danielle are on the clock tonight. They just started their shift. I saw their card swipes in the system.”
“Call in the others. Just tell them it’s an emergency and they need to come in too.”
“Yes, ma’am. Luther is an asshole.”
Julianna snorted out a laugh. It was true. The pillar of muscle was a cold-hearted jerk that never showed emotion—ever. Probably why her father hired him as his head of security for the island. “Just do what he wants. It’s not worth rocking the boat. Thank you for keeping me in the loop.”
A huff of exasperation filtered through the receiver. “If it wasn’t for you, this entire hotel would disintegrate in a matter of days. You make this place, Ms. Rossi.”
She smiled, touched by the vote of confidence. “I couldn’t do it without you, Diana. If you need something else, call me. Otherwise I’ll see you in the office tomorrow…I’ll probably be a little late.”
“No worries.”
She put the handset back on the cradle and looked up.
Alex was leaning against the wall in the opening. “Everything okay?”
“I sent your team to clean up their mess. Luther is already in my father’s penthouse. Diana will fire them tomorrow.”
“Probably for the best.”
Julianna nodded. “I assumed none of you planned to stay here long-term.”
His mouth tightened at her comment, but he didn’t speak again when she pushed past him and headed toward the dining room again.
A Generic cell phone ring came from the front of the suite. The small woman named Hannah answered. The call only lasted a few seconds. “Mag, we’re getting called in to clean up the penthouse floor.” Hannah glanced up at Julianna. “Was this you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s better that way.” Maggie looked up from her perch on the couch in the center of the living area. “How long can we keep this room? We’re going to need some time to figure out a way onto the island.”
“I have it through Monday morning and can arrange to keep it for longer. It’s not a problem. The obvious and easiest way onto the island would be through Luther. He’s the one that does all the supply runs and is in charge of the boat each time is comes into the bay here. One of you should be able to seduce him. That seems to be what your team does.” The words were acid in her mouth, but she had no other recourse. They’d invaded her life. Lied to her. Used her. Turned her world upside down.
She was going to help them. She believed them. But it didn’t erase the hurt and anger than burned in her breast.
“Julianna.” Alex’s voice was barely a whisper behind her.
Donovan, Andrea, and Hannah filed out of the room. Maggie disappeared back into her tablet screen.
Alex’s slipped his arm around her waist from behind and tugged her body against his. His touch was a balm to her pain, but she wasn’t ready to let it go.
She wrenched away from him and whirled to face him. “I’m pissed you lied to me. If you really cared about me, you should’ve trusted me.”
“There wasn’t a choice
. Not at first. We thought you were a wolf and in on the whole thing. Then when we realized you were human, everything changed.”
“You used me. My father has been using me this whole time, but at least I knew he was an asshole who didn’t give a shit about me.” Julianna shook her fists in the air.
“Call me an asshole. Anything you want. Please, just give me a chance to make it up to you.” He stepped closer and she shook her head.
If he touched her she would feel something. She didn’t know what it was between them, but his touch was like an aphrodisiac. Thinking straight with him around was hard enough, but when they touched it was like everything bad in her life evaporated.
“You are an asshole. You’re a whole team of assholes. All lying to me. Using me. Then you seduced me and I let myself care about you.” Julianna backed up another step, but the kitchen counter blocked further escape. Her breath caught in her chest and a tear welled. She didn’t want to cry.
Alex stepped forward and caught her shaking hands. “I never meant to hurt you. Please. Forgive me.”
The anger and fear fled from her mind as warmth from his touch flowed through her entire body. The air tingled around them and a shiver flitted down her spine.
He leaned forward and nuzzled her neck. Then, he slipped an arm around her waist, tugging her torso flush to his hard chest.
Their breath shared the same air and she licked her lips, hoping he would kiss her. Hoping for even more. Her body hummed, knowing what was coming next as he walked her backward through the kitchen toward the bedroom.
She might not have wanted to forgive Alex and his team already, but she had. Strange as everything was, she did believe them. Julianna believed her father needed to be stopped.
Permanently.
Alex growled and nipped at her earlobe. “I started falling for you from the very first second in the club.”
They’d nearly made it to the bedroom and the only thing left on Julianna’s mind was kissing and making love to Alex.
Seducing a Wolf: Moonbound Series, Book Five Page 9
