Wolf's Choice

by Laura Taylor

  “Really?” Baron seemed unusually intrigued by that.

  “What of it?”

  “Based on that information, then I daresay I’m the man who killed his predecessor,” Baron said, a hint of satisfaction in his voice.

  “How do you know that?” Miller asked. “That was a long time ago. There were a series of raids, back about ten years ago-”

  “Five raids, carried out over a period of eight weeks,” Baron interrupted. “June through to August. The hits were purposely coordinated to take out some of your highest ranking officers, and instigated by a highly successful attack against us. It was originally believed that you had wiped out the entire shifter pack in England. Until we started showing up in unexpected places and blowing up your men.”

  Miller rubbed his face, amazed at how the pieces of history fit together in such unexpected ways. “You did that?”

  “I did that,” Baron confirmed smugly. “And while I can hardly claim it was a solo effort, I’m also sure – with no misplaced pride – that without my organisational skills, the attacks would never have been successful. Now, what were you saying about Jacob?”

  “Uh… I was saying I’m offering him to you because Jacob is the most significant strategic target I can give you, without risking all your lives in the process. It should be possible to get to him with a small team, two, maybe three people, a minimal risk while doing maximum damage.”

  “An interesting idea,” Baron mused. “Why can’t you just show us a picture of him, and we do the rest?”

  “There are no pictures of him,” Miller stated flatly. “Skip went through all the information she got off the Noturatii’s database at the start of the year, and there’s not one single photo of him. And I’m damn sure you won’t find anything in any public files. At an official level, the man doesn’t exist.”

  “Well, that’s all very interesting,” Baron said drily. “But that happy little coincidence means that this operation would be neatly placing you squarely back on Noturatii turf. A little convenient for you, don’t you think?”

  Miller had anticipated this objection to the plan. He was learning how Baron thought, picking up on his priorities and concerns about safety… and being wholly impressed along the way. “It does,” he admitted easily. “And I realise you still have your doubts about my intentions. But one way or the other, you’re eventually going to have to decide to either trust me… or put me out of my misery. So we can keep skirting around the issue for the next month, or year, or ten years, but sooner or later, some situation is going to come up where I have the opportunity to betray you and you’re going to find out which side of the fence I’m really on. This plan weighs the risks in your favour more than most would. You’d only be risking one or two of your team, you’d be fully prepared for me to do something stupid, and if it all goes south, then at least I’m out of your way before I learn anything about Il Trosa that could really make the shit hit the fan.”

  “You know the location of our Den,” Baron pointed out darkly.

  “And given the skills and discipline of your team, you could have the entire place locked down and prepared to evacuate in less than half an hour. Losing this estate would be bad. But if I understand the structure of Il Trosa correctly, then there are dozens, maybe hundreds of other Dens across Europe who would happily take you in. I’m not saying the plan is without risk. I’m just saying that at this point in time, those risks are quantifiable and controllable.”

  “Miller has a point,” Caroline spoke up finally, not having yet said anything throughout the meeting. “We accepted him into this Den on the basic assumption that he had turned his back on the Noturatii. And if we don’t really believe that, we’ve got no business keeping him here.”

  Baron’s mouth twisted into a hard line… but then he nodded. “Fair point. Go on.”

  “This assassination would need some careful planning,” Caroline continued, “and I’d certainly not want to go ahead with it without assessing all the risks and creating a few contingency plans. But if we can take out the leader of the British arm, we’d be buying ourselves significant time to implement other strategies in the plan to end this war. So call me crazy… but I think it’s worth a shot.”

  Genna stood in the tent in the Grey Watch camp, concentrating on the metal bucket in front of her. It was bigger than anything she had successfully made disappear before, well beyond the limit of her powers, but Sempre refused to take no for an answer. And so Genna had been standing here for well over an hour, her muscles cramping with every new effort, her head aching, her skin tingling as her body protested the overuse of magic.

  It had been like this every day since Sempre had discovered her abilities, test after test to probe the limits of her powers. At first, Genna had deliberately fumbled the experiments, returning the objects earlier than Sempre had wanted, protesting that certain items were too large or too far away, and the ruse had worked to a certain extent. She’d rationed her successes, making Sempre wait a few days for each new improvement in her abilities, becoming devious as she spent the time honing her skills in private, while feigning ineptitude in public. But in reality, she knew that all she was doing was buying time. Sooner or later, Sempre would tire of her claims that she had reached the limits of her powers, and start delving into darker methods to enhance the magic.

  Pleading exhaustion had also become one of her staple forms of self-preservation, but now the exhaustion was no longer a ruse. Lita had joined Sempre in the sessions, creating more and more challenging tests. Could she target an object that was hidden from view? Could she perform the feats in wolf form as well as human form? Did it matter what the object was made of; wood, versus stone, versus metal? The tests had been endless, each question answered creating a wave of new ones.

  Fed up with the ongoing bullying and torment, Genna resolved to end the session, for all that it would annoy Sempre and lead to a vigorous scolding. Reaching out with the magic, she focused on the edge of the bucket and sent out a wave of static. A chunk of the bucket vanished, a section perhaps six inches wide, leaving a gaping hole in the metal and rendering the bucket useless.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped out, swiftly returning the chunk of metal to the table, her hands cramping up again as the magic took its toll. “I can’t do it. It’s just too big.” She was swaying on her feet, desperate for a break, and for once, her protest was genuine. The bucket was simply too large for her to grasp it with the magic.

  Sempre looked outraged at her failure. She picked up the bucket, examined the hole, then tossed it to the ground. “Foolish girl,” she snapped, then slapped Genna hard across the face. “You think we have enough resources lying around that you can just go around breaking things? I’ve done everything I can to help you learn to control this gift, and you throw it back in my face like this? Get out!”

  Genna didn’t waste any time, just darted out of the tent and away across the clearing. She was desperately hungry, but too tired to hunt or fight for a coveted piece of bread, so she simply shifted, then stopped to take a drink out of the water bucket before collapsing in a sheltered spot at the edge of the camp.

  After about fifteen minutes, she heard footsteps approaching, and opened her eyes. Luna was standing beside her, and the woman lowered herself to the ground, running a gentle hand through Genna’s fur.

  “Here,” she said, reaching into her cloak and pulling out a fist-sized hunk of meat. “It’s the end of last night’s roast. I know you haven’t eaten all day.”

  Genna sat up and took the meat, licking Luna’s hand by way of a thank you, before swiftly devouring the meal.

  Luna was an unusual one, and Genna wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. She was kind and generous in private, offering words of encouragement to the lower ranking wolves and handing out favours like the piece of meat with no thought of getting anything in return. She was strong, confident, and had risen three or four places in the pecking order in the last few months. But she was also cunning, agr
eeing with Sempre and the senior wolves when it suited her, criticising the younger wolves when it would earn her favour in the ranks, and keeping her acts of charity strictly under the radar. Genna could never quite decide which side of her personality was the real one; the side that cared for those more vulnerable than herself, or the side that was slowly manipulating her way up the ranks.

  Several days later, the library was once again buzzing with activity. All of the Den’s best fighters were seated around the long table, notebooks, laptops and maps spread about, grim faces all around. Miller was also there, a key component in the developing plans to assassinate Jacob Green, along with Skip, who was providing advice on the technological aspects of the plan.

  “So my first question,” Andre was saying, “is do you want this to be a clean hit, or a messy one?” Having worked as a professional assassin for years, his input would be invaluable. “For example, if you have a politician who wants to make a journalist disappear, that’s a clean hit. No witnesses, no links to the guy who ordered the kill, no collateral damage. On the other hand, if you have a crime lord taking out a rival drug dealer, that’s a messy hit. Audible gun fire, bystanders caught in the crossfire and bodies showing up five miles down the river in two weeks time. Everyone knows that the guy was taken out by a rival criminal, but at the end of the day, no one really cares, so they don’t bother covering their tracks any further than is necessary to keep them out of jail.”

  “Messy,” Caroline spoke up immediately. “Given who Jacob is, the Noturatii are going to assume we were responsible, no matter how well we cover it up. And we already know they’re not going to get the police involved. And given that Miller said everyone else on the property is fully in the know about what the Noturatii is doing, I don’t have any particular reservations about taking out a few extra security guards along the way.”

  Andre smirked. “Messy it is. Should be an interesting change of pace from what I’m used to. Okay, Miller. What have you got in mind?”

  “The nuts and bolts of it is simple,” Miller began. “Jacob’s apartment building is on the east side of the complex. There’s an underground parking lot beneath his building where he parks his car at night. Security on the premises is concentrated at the entrance gates and the perimeter fence, so there should be minimal interference inside the building. So we need to get a small team into the carpark late one afternoon, lie low while we wait for Jacob to arrive, shoot him, then get the hell out of there.”

  “Simple enough,” Baron conceded. “But what about this security force? How are we going to get inside without getting noticed?”

  “The main entrance to the complex is a boom gate with security guards,” Miller explained. “Getting in will be the hardest part. I’m hoping that Skip can create a fake work order for some sort of maintenance work – an electrical fault, maybe – and we can pretend to be tradespeople.”

  “That means the driver will have to be someone the Noturatii won’t recognise,” Caroline pointed out. “They know some of our faces.”

  “Simon could do it,” Skip suggested. “He’s not on the database. He’s got decent driving skills, and can join in a fire fight if anything goes wrong. Assuming he’s okay with it,” she added. “I’m guessing this is going to be a volunteers-only sort of mission?”

  “Right,” Baron confirmed. “I’m not dragging anyone into this one without their agreement.”

  “Getting out of that gate will be messier, but easier,” Miller went on. “If everything goes flawlessly, we might be able to just show our security passes to the guards and they let us go. But if anyone sounds the alarm or they hear gunfire nearby, then the plan is basically to ram the boom gate, mow down anyone who gets in the way and hightail it out of there.”

  Andre laughed at that one. “Well, we did say it was going to be a messy hit,” he pointed out, at Baron’s pained look.

  “But one serious downside to that part of the plan is that it would trash your van,” Miller pointed out.

  “Don’t worry about the van,” Baron said. “We go through at least one of those each year, so buying a new one is no drama.”

  “Okay. So after we get in, we head down into the underground car park. There’s an electronic gate that needs an access code to open it, but if we get the appropriate security clearance from the main gate, they should give us a code. After that, we just hang out in a quiet spot for a while. There are security cameras down there, so Skip would need to hack them and feed a false loop through. Then we wait for Jacob. He always travels between home and the office with a security detail tailing him, but once he’s inside the complex, they should head off, so if we’re lucky, it’ll just be him. If not, we might have a small fight on our hands.”

  “Body armour,” Andre said to Tank, who was taking notes about the whole plan. He nodded, and jotted down the detail.

  “And then, after Jacob’s dead, we get the hell out of there as quickly as possible,” Miller concluded. “Simple, quick, effective.”

  “So who goes in?” Silas asked next.

  “Me,” Baron replied. “And Miller, because I need him to point out Jacob. And a driver. That’s it.”

  “This is an extremely high risk operation,” Tank pointed out. “Strategically, putting the alpha of this Den at risk is a bad call.”

  Baron shook his head. “That’s not up for debate. I chose to let Miller stay, and if the shit hits the fan, first of all I need to be onsite to make sure he’s dead.” He levelled a cold glare Miller’s way. “But secondly, I can’t in good conscience risk someone else’s life for my mistakes.”

  “Our mistakes,” Caroline jumped in, looking pissed. “You can’t take all the blame for Miller. I jumped on that bandwagon right alongside you.”

  “And if you fall, there’s no one in the Den who could replace you as alpha right now,” Baron said grimly. “But Tank is right. This is a high risk operation with a good chance of going south. So if I get taken out, then Tank, you step into my place as alpha.” He could see Tank grinding his teeth, clearly unhappy with the cold assessment. But he nodded, grim and resolute. “Andre, you’re out as well. I know you’re the best fighter we’ve got, but…” He paused.

  “But what?” Andre prompted him. Baron’s gaze flickered unintentionally across to Caroline… and she rolled her eyes as she no doubt picked up on his line of thought.

  “You and Caroline… Well, you’re still pretty much on your fucking honeymoon, aren’t you?” Baron griped, feeling awkward at his own uncharacteristic moment of tenderness. “I’d feel like a right shit if I went and got you killed when you’ve only just got here. Besides which,” he added, wishing he’d thought of this first, “if I’m not here, I need you to look after John.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Silas said softly.

  “No, you’re not-”

  “If the shit really does hit the fan, you and Simon are going to be sitting ducks. Particularly if muggins here decides to jump ship,” he said, jerking a thumb Miller’s way, who, to his credit, took the repeated doubts about his integrity with remarkable calm. “You’ll need another strong fighter on your team if you’re going to have a hope in hell of getting out of there alive.”

  Baron sighed, weighing up the options in his mind. “Fine. Silas comes. Which doesn’t mean I think you’re expendable in any way,” he added, levelling a serious look at the man who had been the backbone of the Den for longer than Baron had been alpha.

  “I’m touched,” Silas said drily.

  “Okay, so we have a reasonable primary strategy,” Tank said, keeping the conversation moving. “Some of the details need to be hammered out, but it’s a good start. But we need to talk contingencies. One of the big ones would be what to do if the van is somehow disabled or the exit is blocked. How are you going to escape if that happens?”

  “We could have four of us waiting outside the gates with motorbikes, as a backup getaway plan,” Caroline spoke up. “Even if the van does make it out, you could be tailed, and the
bikes would make us far more manoeuvrable, if we’re trying to take out enemy vehicles.”

  “I like it,” Baron agreed. “Assuming we can make it out the gate, we could catch up with you as wolves, and then ride pillion on the bikes.”

  “We could always provide a diversion if you need help getting past the fence,” Caroline suggested. “Nothing like a nice exploding grenade to get people’s attention.”

  “How close is the complex to civilian premises?” Andre asked Miller.

  “Across the street. The Noturatii owns the entire block, so you’d have a road’s width of a margin on any given side.”

  “That’s enough to make it work,” Andre said. “But if it comes to that, there’s a high possibility of civilian witnesses, so you’re all going to have to be careful when and where you shift.”

  “Noted,” Baron said. “All right Miller… let’s talk about alternative exit points. Out of the basement, as well as off the property.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Miller sat nervously in the back of the van, listening to the silence coming through his earpiece.

  “I have control of the security cameras,” Skip informed them suddenly, her voice tinny over the radio link. “You’re good to go.” She was stationed in a small car around the back of the Noturatii’s complex, discreetly parked and far enough away that there shouldn’t be anything to link her to the main operation. Tank was with her, a bodyguard in case of emergencies, but all going well, she should be well clear of any real danger. Much to Miller’s relief.