Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  People told her things. Whether they wanted to or not. People connected to her. Whether she wanted them to or not. It was a blessing and a curse. Maybe it was her supernatural gift.

  “You’ll give me everything,” she assured.

  Joe Peluso didn’t laugh off the challenge. Instead, he seemed to mull it over. His brows winged together. His eyes went distant. He interlaced his fingers, cuffs clinking against the tabletop. He watched her watch him. Nate shifted beside her, obviously unsettled by the standoff, but he wouldn’t have asked her along if he hadn’t thought she could handle it.

  She could handle this. She could handle him.

  She knew Joe was guilty…and she knew she was just that good.

  * * *

  His new lawyers were slick talkers in expensive suits. Fine by him, since the public defender who fucked up his last trial was a dumb shitbag who couldn’t string a sentence together, much less a defense. And he knew these guys were in it for the headlines. It sure as shit wasn’t about the money, because he didn’t have any to pay them with. The woman, though, he couldn’t figure out. Secretary? Paralegal? They’d introduced her at the beginning. First name Neha, last name something with a lot of syllables. She’d spent most of the hour scribbling on a yellow pad, occasionally looking up at him and tapping her lips with her pen.

  They were good lips. Full. She wasn’t wearing lipstick. Someone probably told her to wipe it off before coming out to the jailhouse in case the sight of Posy Pink incited a prisoner riot. The problem was, she couldn’t wipe off that she was hot. Black hair pulled back into a prim ponytail. Huge doe eyes. Smooth brown skin. What he could see of her above the table was bangin’. Her tits looked like they’d be a perfect handful. Makeup or no, the woman was a total fox. Enough to start a riot all on her own. Which was why he figured it was a play. Nobody brought a beautiful woman into a prison unless they wanted something.

  “You’ll give me everything.”

  Problem was, Joe didn’t know what he had to give. Blood? Sweat? Been there and fucking done that. He had nothing left. She wasn’t going to break him. She wouldn’t even come close. But he liked hearing her say it. So serious. Intense. Like she wasn’t a Disney princess who’d stumbled into the wrong movie. Like he couldn’t snap her in half with one hand. She probably teased tigers for fun. Poked bears on Sundays after church or temple or whatever. Maybe that was why they thought she could tangle with him. Just another animal for the circus tamer.

  “You’re a shrink,” he concluded out loud. “I get free therapy with this gig now?”

  Her big, dark eyes narrowed. The fancy suits—Feinberg and Taylor—looked uncomfortable but curious. They were waiting to see how it all unraveled. He’d played worse games. Hell, he’d won a round of hoops with some punk asses in the showers last week—and his head was the ball.

  “I’m a lawyer,” she said, all snotty and self-assured. She thought she had him pegged already. “I also have a PhD in psychology and am here to utilize my skills as a profiler. But any official psychological evaluation you require will be handled by someone not affiliated with our firm. We don’t cross the streams. We won’t risk contaminating your defense.”

  Fuck. If she looked like a princess, she sounded like a phone-sex operator—all husky-voiced and pitched low for the bedroom. And Joe could imagine just how she would “contaminate” him. How she’d “utilize her skills.” That mouth on him. Sucking him down. It wouldn’t be because he was in control. No. It’d be because she set the rules. Because having him in her mouth meant she literally had him by the balls. He sprang wood pretty much instantly at the thought, and he was glad for ugly orange coveralls and chains. A con’s equivalent of a coat to button up over your junk.

  The irrational lust raged through him like someone lit him on fire, burning him down to the bone. And there was a whisper at the back of his brain, a low growl he couldn’t make heads or tails of. It didn’t make sense…but then again, not a lot had made sense since the military docs shot him up full of shifter juice. “There may be side effects,” they’d said during one of those early debriefs. “Some species have reported instances of imprinting.” The fuck was imprinting? Like he was a damn duckling except with the urge to bone a complete stranger?

  One thing was for sure: he couldn’t remember the last time he actually had sex. He’d killed people more recently than he’d fucked anyone…and he could just imagine what his not-so-sainted nonna, who’d spent every day in church, would say about his life choices. Fortunately, she was dead—and hopefully rotting in hell. He wondered if he needed to say all of this to this lawyer-psychologist. She’d probably find it significant that he associated his sex life, or lack thereof, with a formative female relative. The shrink he’d seen before the Corps approved his fancy upgrade and handed him over to his new unit sure had.

  He stared at his panel of would-be saviors until they started to fidget. It was a game of chicken he never lost. He could stay quiet for hours. Days. Years. When they started shuffling papers and making to wrap things up, he cleared his throat, tapped the table with his knuckles. The white-haired guy, Feinberg, looked up first. His sharp-dressed wingman next. The woman didn’t have to…because she hadn’t taken her eyes off him this entire time. She caught him staring and gave it right back. Fuck you, too, buddy.

  “Did you need something, Joe?” she wondered.

  He needed a lot of things. A Heineken. A decent burger. A room with an actual door. A flight outta this joint. He rattled off the list just for kicks. “And a 1963 Corvette Stingray. Can you get me that, too?”

  “Right after your trip to Disney World and a massage from a supermodel,” she said, like he’d asked for the most reasonable things in the world. Smart as a whip and cool as a cucumber, this one. But there was fire there, too. Burning close enough to the surface that it wouldn’t take much for it to rage. That interested him. More than anything had interested him in a long-ass time.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to you,” he told her. “Whatever you want. You and me, we’ll chat.”

  And maybe they’d do more than just chat. Maybe they’d get to be alone. Sitting real close as he spilled his guts to her. Braiding each other’s hair and shit…or unbuttoning each other’s buttons. He knew which option she’d prefer, and which one sounded better to him. She didn’t pick up on what he was already imagining…which was a good thing, because he’d be slapped with extra charges so fast. Whatever the opposite of “contempt of court” was.

  He had absolutely no contempt for this hot shrink-who-wasn’t-his-shrink whatsoever. Probably because he’d never been able to resist a woman telling him what’s what. Because it had been too long, and he’d missed someone talking to him like she saw him. Sure, she didn’t like what she was seeing, but he didn’t much like himself either. And his dick did not give a good goddamn that he was facing twenty-five to life. It only cared that he was facing someone beautiful. It only wanted to listen to that growl coming from deep inside him. He hadn’t understood the growl before, but he heard it clearly now. Saying “take” and “have” and “mine.” Imprinting. Quack, quack. His beast and his brain and his body all plotting together, because it beat the alternative: remembering why he was actually here.

  Of course, his brain had to go and ruin it as the lawyers walked out and he got yanked out of his chair by the guard. You really think she’s going to do more than talk to you? Knowing what you’ve done? Knowing what you are? You’re a killer, Joe. A thousand times over. And maybe he wasn’t all that sorry for all the things he’d done, but it was a lot to ask of anybody else. Especially a woman like the doc. Somebody with a brain and a heart and morals. Murder didn’t tend to curl a lady’s toes, did it? And shifters weren’t exactly prime dating material. Fuck. He was one deluded motherfucker, wasn’t he? She’s not for you, buddy. She’s never going to be for you.

  He could just imagine what Kenny would have to say about that. “Joey,
since when do you have troubling getting laid? Shit, if you can’t get pussy, where’s the hope for the rest of us?”

  “You watch your mouth, kid,” he’d say back. “There’s more to women than pussy. Don’t disrespect ’em that way.” Kenny Castelli, the closest thing he ever had to a brother, who fucking hero-worshipped him and probably died because of it. Joe was always great at giving him advice that he’d never actually taken himself…and that Kenny didn’t take either. And now here they were. A dead man and a dead man walking.

  The trip back to his cell—if it could be called that when he was being shoved most of the way—stripped the rest of the swagger right out of him. Every ounce of attitude he’d displayed for Feinberg, Taylor, and the doc just faded away. He couldn’t afford to forget why he was here, a “guest” of Kings County. He’d taken human lives without an ounce of regret. Too many lives. And he wasn’t supposed to add one more spectacular body to the count.

  Chapter 2

  Her knees should’ve been wobbling when they collected their things and left the correctional facility. Her guts should’ve been in a twist. But she walked out onto Atlantic Avenue on steady legs, with a serious craving for chicken and dumplings from the soul-food place just up the block. That it still existed despite rising rents and weekly ICE and Supernatural Regulation Bureau raids was one of the world’s small miracles.

  “Damn, Neha! You’ve got balls!” Dustin gave a low whistle of admiration and shook his head. “Glad we brought you in on this.”

  “Ovaries,” she corrected. “I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘ovaries of steel.’”

  He laughed while Nate suppressed a smile, his eyes serious. “You did good today, Neha. Keep it up.”

  “Don’t worry; I will.” She was pretty confident—you didn’t get through law school without at least a little bit of a high opinion of yourself—but the validation still felt good.

  Papa and Ma had wanted her to go into something “safe” and high-paying, expecting her JD to land her a legal-eagle husband and not a stack of alleged criminals to defend. Now, one of their biggest nightmares was that she would pick up a man in Kings County Criminal Court. To be fair, they also thought that if she opted to hang her shingle out as a therapist, she’d be bound to fall in love with a patient. They watched a lot of Indian soap operas on satellite—their respite from a far-more-bonkers reality.

  Joe Peluso was a character they could never dream up. The basics were easy to check off. He was forty-two years old, Italian-American, with a blue-collar upbringing in Queens. What they could access of his military service record was spotless. He’d had tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan and never faced disciplinary action of any kind. He seemed like the typical white American male who liked beer and guns and his country. But there were so many unanswered questions. From what little she knew about shape-shifters, they were born, not made…and yet there was no indication that Joe’s family were anything other than human. When had he been turned and by who? Why hadn’t he killed Vasiliev’s men in his supernatural form? Why hadn’t he taken on that form during almost a year in a jail? She would have to dig for the truth…and the challenge made goose bumps break out on her skin even though it was a perfect autumn in Brooklyn. What had turned this guy into a murderer? What could they use to reduce his sentence or, miracle of miracles, put him back on the street?

  Yeah. Okay. Maybe they should have had a few moral qualms about setting a killer loose. But he hadn’t exactly gone after six Girl Scouts. He hadn’t committed carnage, letting his beast run wild all over New York. She was going to sleep at night by reminding herself that a few dead sex traffickers were no great loss to society.

  It was depressing to put it into words, but from a purely PR standpoint, they were infinitely lucky that a decent percentage of the country still believed Nazis were bad. That Joe Peluso had kind of done a public service by taking out guys who sported Wolfsangel and swastika tattoos and sold young girls into sexual servitude. There was, of course, still a percentage who thought Joe’s victims were “very fine people.” Very fine people who had cats and helped old white ladies across the street when they weren’t stuffing teenagers into shipping containers and yelling slurs at anyone brown. God bless America.

  Theoretically, you weren’t supposed to put the victims on trial. But more often than not, that was the job. Arguing why certain people deserved to live and others deserved to die. Sometimes you just had to park morality at the door and look at the shades of gray. It didn’t help that the world had changed in the past few years. Practicing law in America, practicing medicine, practicing basic humanity…none of it was like it had been when Neha was growing up. There were more shades of gray than anything else.

  Yeah, she would’ve made a lousy wife to a nice, well-adjusted guy her parents approved of. To that staid L-school son-in-law they were still dreaming about. Maybe she would’ve been safer, but safety was overrated. Hell, when you had darker skin—no amount of Fair & Lovely skin cream could turn her into a white girl—safety was a flat-out lie.

  Nate and Dustin grabbed a private car back to the office. It was only a ten-minute walk, but Neha wasn’t surprised they wanted to keep the dust off their Ferragamos…and avoid the drone sweeps that had become part of daily American life these past few years. Part of the deal that kept the Sanctuary Cities running was mandatory surveillance. The footage was flagged for criminal activity by algorithms and then pored over by a joint federal-state task force. Ostensibly impartial, the group was composed of humans and a few warlocks who’d been cleared for intelligence work. There were countless task forces and bureaus these days. They all amounted to the same thing: control. She was probably on multiple watch lists already, and her serviceable DSW pumps had seen better days and many a block. Even cell blocks. And they’d be seeing a lot of Joe Peluso in the weeks to come.

  She’d had a choice back in that visitation room. She could’ve called him “Mr. Peluso.” She’d gone with “Joe.” For all the classic reasons. It created kinship with the person, established power dynamics, blah blah blah. She also knew herself. She’d just wanted to hear how it would sound. How it would feel to call a merciless brute by his first name. It felt powerful. She felt powerful.

  For someone who had to speed up on the sidewalk and curl her fingers around her keys when she heard a noise behind her, that was a heady feeling. Addictive. She couldn’t do anything about the assholes on the street, or safe in their places of power, but the ones on the inside…? For just a little while, she held their fates in her hands.

  That was fucked up. She was aware. She’d had friends tell her that fifty percent of a psych degree was a “heal thyself” thing. They were not altogether wrong. But she’d take empowerment where she could get it. She sure hadn’t found it with her last two boyfriends. One had kept bugging her to learn to cook saag paneer and be more Indian—a rich request from a guy named Brad who grew up in Connecticut—and the other one tried to make erotic choking a thing…a surprise thing. No thank you. She preferred to negotiate her kinky play beforehand. A man like Joe Peluso probably didn’t ask first, either, but she’d find details like that out. She had to. How he treated women would help set a baseline for how he viewed humanity in general. Mass shooters, for instance, often had a history of domestic violence. Joe Peluso didn’t—or at least he’d never been arrested for it—and one violent act didn’t necessarily mean he was a violent person overall. They needed to prove he was a victim of circumstance, or someone who had acted irrationally for the first time in his life, not point to a pattern of behavior.

  Ugh. Neha wasn’t sure she was up to the challenge. Human behavior was a specialty of hers. Human misbehavior was her job. Supernatural misbehavior… Well, it was about to become her new field of expertise.

  It wasn’t something little girls dreamed of. Not something she’d dreamed of. She’d wanted to be a princess or a fireman or a princess who fought fires. But she was goo
d at this. At the mountains of paperwork and equal amounts of legwork. She wouldn’t have made it through L-school and the DA’s office otherwise. She’d make it through this case, too. Nate, Dustin, and Joe Peluso were counting on it.

  By the time Neha got back to the firm, it was mostly deserted. Some of the first-years were milling around. Assistants, too. But the partners were all gone. Nate and Dustin had likely turned their hired car toward the city. They loved knocking back shots with hedge-fund bros. She couldn’t say she shared the fascination. Most men of that set thought she was a ballbuster, a bitch, and had an overly high opinion of how hot she was. In a guy, that kind of attitude was just considered confidence. In a woman, it was somehow the worst thing in the world. Women needed to be modest and subservient and accommodating. Fuck that.

  She wouldn’t have survived long in criminal justice without some steel in her spine. She wouldn’t have made it through that first meeting with Joe Peluso either. If she were the good and sweet Neha Ahluwalia, with coconut oil braids and a terminal case of the blushes, he would’ve been the wolf to her Red Riding Hood. And, sorry, but she refused to walk through the woods unprepared.

  Sure, she was little bit fucked up…and she refused to be fucked over.

  * * *

  There was nothing bearable about being in prison. Anyone who said they liked the rec room or the yard or, hell, even the three squares a day was a damn liar. The nights were the worst. Everything echoed. Joe was in a max-security unit with a bunch of repeat offenders who were looking at first or second degree and would probably end up at Sing Sing or one of the border camps after their trials. There were a handful of other supes on the block. A yaksha who accidentally killed someone during a bank robbery. A vamp who took out some MTA workers in a frenzy.