Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  That was where Third Shift came in. For all intents and purposes, it was a PI and security firm, staffed primarily by people who needed a second job in a gig economy. Several military veterans. A few lawyers. Cops like him. IT pros. Doctors. They were a ragtag crew who moonlighted fixing other people’s problems. Except the ragtag crew included some werewolves and vampires and sorcerers. And, these days, many of their clients happened to be highly placed government officials sympathetic to the Resistance—and their problems involved weapons smuggling, petty dictators, and circumventing global crises. And, oh, putting down supernaturals who were aiding in those endeavors.

  One such supernatural crisis was occupying the team now: the ever-increasing Russian shifter foothold in American politics and the criminal underworld, and the blurring of lines therein. Danny would be lying if he said it wasn’t personal.

  “Hey. Hey, you know you can call me any time, right? I’m here for you.”

  “You don’t understand. Danny, it’s too dangerous.”

  “Not for me. Never for me. Yulia, I can handle it. I have connections, too.”

  Eight months. It had been eight terrible, nerve-wracking months since he’d last seen Yulia Vasilieva in person. The surveillance photos from a few days ago didn’t really count as anything but proof of life. And they were only transmitted to his personal tablet because Finn thought he was “helping.” Third Shift’s founders, Elijah Richter and Jackson Tate, didn’t exactly approve of using company resources to track women you had a thing for, but rules had never stopped Finian Conlan. Neither did rope. Or a gag. The vampire was impossible. He’d somehow secured shots of Yulia outside her brother’s club, Kamchatka. “We’ve our eye on Vasiliev anyway. What’s a few extra pictures?” he’d reasoned. “Consider it an early birthday present!” As creepy a gesture as it had been, Danny cherished the photos. Because they told him Yulia was alive.

  Tired-looking. Too pale. Perhaps a bit thinner. But alive. Her dark-blond hair longer than he remembered, well past her shoulders. Poured into a sparkly cocktail dress that overemphasized how hot she was…but made him miss the Yulia who’d dressed how she liked to dress, just as gorgeous in long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans as she pulled pints and filled cocktail shakers.

  Elijah’s voice cut into Danny’s sentimental ruminations. A lion shifter, Elijah had one of those voices. What Danny’s sister would call “panty-melting” in a romantic context, but what was just plain authoritative and, if need be, scary in a professional one. He’d just walked off the elevator from the public-facing floor to this one, the secure inner sanctum. A burner cell phone was practically surgically attached to his ear as he growled into it, “Four weeks? I want in. Get me on the detail for the event.” And then he snapped the flip phone shut and raked his gaze across the rows of cubicles. Until his dark, penetrating eyes landed on Danny.

  “Heard you got a present today?” It was less a question and more of a statement. Because of course. Nothing happened around here without Lije’s knowledge. He stopped by the short wall of Danny’s cube, leaning one thickly muscled arm across the top. “You know how we feel about misappropriation of resources.”

  Yeah. It was why he didn’t even steal pens from the office—just in case they turned out to be spy pens or something. But this was different. This was about Yulia. “Finn’s a regular Santa Claus,” Danny acknowledged with a sigh and a what-can-you-do shrug. “But I can’t say I’m sorry he broke protocol. I’m glad to know Yulia Vasilieva’s okay.”

  “For now,” Elijah said grimly. “Vasiliev’s days might be numbered. Our contacts abroad tell us that his friends are none too happy with him at the moment. Mirko Aston, especially. He’s been increasingly dissatisfied with Vasiliev since Peluso hit that club last year and got in the way of that shipment of women. He’s up to something even worse now, so the pressure is on for Aleksei to handle Peluso once and for all and prove his worth.”

  Joseph Andrew Peluso. Age 42. Depending on who you asked, he was a hero or a hoodlum. Former Marine turned construction worker, he was the kind of headline-grabbing vigilante that gave a lot of people hope…but turned others into cynics. Danny fell somewhere in the middle. He knew full well what could happen if someone who looked like him or like Elijah shot at a bunch of white guys. And throw in the fact that Peluso was, according to their contacts, a turned shifter from an elite intermilitary unit…? In the same position, he and Lije probably wouldn’t have lived to see a first trial, much less a second. As for Peluso’s impact on the local shifter-controlled Russian mafia…well, that had the potential to blow back on a woman that Danny cared about. That was a fear he would never be able to shake.

  He didn’t really give a rat’s ass about Joe Peluso himself. But Elijah and Jack were invested in the case for reasons at least two levels above his pay grade. As far as he could tell, they considered Peluso another piece of the larger puzzle they’d been putting together for years. Human-shifter alliances. Government corruption and conspiracy. Peluso taking out Vasiliev’s men and dropping a dime on their trafficking plans had messed with something much more complicated. Something involving a Slovakian arms dealer who went by the name Emeric “Mirko” Aston. So many people, so many crimes, so many wrongs to right. Whatever the bigger picture was here, it wasn’t a pretty one. But Danny wasn’t in this for watercolors, was he? The past few years in the Divided States of America had fixed his path more securely than his time at the police academy or his experiences on the beat in Flatbush and Kensington.

  He was going to fight for freedom and equality in the only ways he could—and protect innocent shifters like Yulia, or die trying.

  Chapter 4

  Neha had no solid explanation for why she was walking back into Brooklyn Detention just a week after Nate and Dustin had introduced her to Joe Peluso. There were other cases on her desk; she had plenty of other things to do. It wasn’t strictly necessary to do a follow-up visit this soon. And yet here she was. Because there was a puzzle to solve, and she hadn’t even started cataloging all the clues.

  “So, what’s your assessment of our client?” Nate had asked a few days ago as they doctored their respective coffees in the DGS break room.

  “He’s an asshole,” she’d said simply. Because it was the truth. The rest of it… That was much harder to piece together. “But something about this just doesn’t feel right. I know he says he did it, and the forensics back it up, but…he held himself back. He didn’t tear them to shreds. Everything we’ve heard about monsters, and he proved it all wrong. That has to count for something.”

  Her favorite senior partner had stared at her for one beat. Two. Those ice-blue eyes seeing entirely too much. “So figure out what it means. That’s why we brought you in. Because his life could depend on it.”

  The directive had haunted her. And overachieving Indian-American that she was, she’d been unable to resist taking another crack at the mystery. At the man tilting back his chair legs as far as his cuffed hands would allow.

  “Back so soon?” Joe Peluso arched a dark brow at her, looking just as uncooperative and bruise-mottled as he had upon their first encounter.

  “I don’t want you to think DGS is ignoring you,” she said as she took the chair across from him and dropped her recorder and notepad on the table. “We take our clients very seriously.”

  Especially when all sorts of city movers and shakers were calling for said clients’ heads. Dealing with this kind of tricky political bullshit was new for her, but Nate and Dustin were used to it. They’d sat next to her last week like they were holding court, firing off questions like nothing big was at stake. For them, maybe that was true. They were basically two of the city’s best criminal attorneys, working largely with the underprivileged population—usually those impacted by the new Patriot Acts instituted in late 2019. Immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, low-level supernaturals accused of petty crimes. But thanks to good looks and boatloads of charisma, they were also
veritable rock stars, minor New York celebrities. The kind of men who got shout-outs in gossip columns and took models out to dinner at the trendiest Greenwich Village hot spots. Dickenson, Gould, and Smythe also handled big-money corporate litigation and high-profile divorce, which was why Nate and Dustin could afford to be pro bono and pro boning. Between the two of them, they had twenty-five years of trial experience and a mind-blowing number of successes.

  Neha had barely a quarter of that. She was still making a name for herself. How she handled assisting on this case, how she handled Joe Peluso, could either be the most promising career move she’d made in years…or her biggest disaster to date. And her good looks and charisma? Well, those things weren’t seen as assets in women. Neither was a healthy sex life. All she could count on was her dedication and her skill.

  It was already clear where Joe’s interest was. Not in those things. He paid little attention to her introductory chatter and answered her in monosyllables whenever possible—the same act he’d pulled with Nate and Dustin that first day. All while making sure to focus on her mouth. On the high collar of the blouse she’d chosen to wear today—buttoned all the way up—and the loose fit of her suit jacket. He certainly hadn’t done that with his male lawyers.

  If this was how all their meetings were going to be, Neha was already over it. But she knew better than to let him see her frustration with his games. “Why don’t we talk about your military service?” she suggested. “The prosecution won’t overlook your time in the Marines, so neither should we.”

  He rolled his eyes and made a dismissive hand gesture—or at least a truncated one, since his hands were secured to the table. “I know what this is all about, you know. You and your Brooks Brothers buddies, you want me to get up there and talk about what it was like over there. Paint me as some kind of wounded war veteran who went ‘off’ because of PTSD. That ain’t me, Doc.”

  “Then who are you?” She followed up with the obvious question.

  He gave her another one of those long, slow clothes-stripping looks. “You haven’t figured that out yet? Babe, I’m a guy who can’t stop thinking about you.”

  After seeing her once? Yeah, right. And hell was experiencing a polar vortex. Neha understood what he was going for now. It wasn’t so much sexual harassment as distraction, distraction, distraction, “Cute. Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere, Joe.”

  Her shutdown didn’t even faze him. “You think this is flattery? I barely know you. It’s been, what, a week since you walked your ass in here with Feinberg and Taylor? This ain’t flattery. It’s obsession.”

  His dark eyes glinted. No, they smoldered. And if she hadn’t guessed it was mostly an act, it would’ve been a damn good smolder. As it was, the back of Neha’s neck prickled uncomfortably and she had to flip through her notes to refocus herself. “It’s unproductive, is what it is,” she said. “Can we please stay on topic?”

  “You are my topic,” he insisted. “What if you’re my real way out of here, Doc? What if you’re my only hope?”

  “Bullshit.” Neha snorted at the dramatic intensity in his voice. Intensity that she didn’t buy for a minute. “You’ve been watching too many prison movies.”

  Joe immediately dialed back the swaggering jailhouse Romeo act, relaxing in his seat and huffing out his annoyance. “Yeah, because I’ve got nothin’ to do in here but Netflix and chill.”

  “I’d suggest switching to The Great British Bake-Off,” she said, dryly. “It might keep you from hitting on your lawyers, and you’ll learn how to perfect a Victoria sponge to boot.”

  He laughed at that. A genuine laugh, not something manufactured for her benefit. It wiped some of the years from his face, took away a little of the smarm and the menace, too. “You old enough to remember that guy who used to host his cooking shows drunk? Graham Kerr? My nonna loved that guy. Him and Julia freaking Child.”

  It was a surprisingly personal detail for someone pretending he didn’t want to share a single thing with her besides bodily fluids. Neha’s fingers itched, but she let the digital recorder capture what she didn’t dare write down, lest Joe become a semi-silent sleaze once more. “Yan Can Cook and Ming Tsai,” she murmured instead. “We were all about the Asian solidarity in my house.”

  She waited for him to say something blatantly flirtatious in response. Or something gross and racist. But the moment stretched between them like their reflective smiles. It was…nice. A real connection, an honest one, over something as simple as cooking shows. It didn’t do a damn thing for Joe’s case…but it made all the difference to her. It reminded her that there was a person at the center of this. Joe wasn’t a gentleman. He didn’t say all the right things and observe all the social courtesies. He clearly didn’t give a damn what anybody else thought. And he didn’t seem to care if he lived or died. He was still entitled to the strongest possible defense, still entitled to basic human decency.

  Maybe it reminded him that she deserved decency, too. Because he made another little motion. A go on. “So, what else you got for me, Doc? And I don’t just mean TV suggestions.”

  Neha tried not to let the thrill of the small point in her favor show on her face—and she tried to ignore the goose bumps on her arms telling her it was equally thrilling when his gaze eventually drifted back to her lips. Not deliberately. Not provocatively. Naturally. Like it wasn’t an act at all.

  It’s obsession, he’d claimed.

  No. It couldn’t be. There was way too much at stake.

  * * *

  He liked her. The doc. He didn’t want to like her. That was totally different from wanting to get in her pants. From wanting to eat her like a meal. It made things complicated. The last thing Joe needed right now was anything complicated. So he couldn’t let her know it. Couldn’t let anyone see that side of himself. He repeated the pep talk to himself several nights in a row. While in line for chow. While watching his back in the showers. And it was the pep talk he gave himself when she came in for a third time. A week or two after the second one…which, in prison, felt like months ago. The one where she’d suggested he watch Bake-Off. Funny how that was what he came away remembering from the visit. Not any of the legal shit she’d had for him. This time, though…this time there was no getting away from the legal stuff.

  She was already waiting for him when the guards brought him in. Dressed in one of her cute little suits, hair all tied back. Sitting up straight, with her hands folded on top of her notes. Ready for any crap he might throw at her. Asking him about the night he hit the club. About the tip he called in to the cops. Making him go over things he’d already gone over way too many times with Feinberg and Taylor. He let her hammer it all at him until he just couldn’t handle it anymore.

  “What’s the point?” he blurted out, shocking her into silence. “How long do you think I got in here, Doc? Be real. Odds are, I ain’t even gonna make it to my trial. There’s gonna be another ‘accident’ in the shower. Or someone’s gonna take me out during a transfer. This ain’t the movies, you know? No one’s getting an Oscar for my story.”

  She’d flinched when he mentioned getting taken out. But her response was light. Joking. Trying to “reestablish rapport.” “Well, damn,” she said huskily, her pretty eyes twinkling. “I was hoping they’d get a Bollywood actress to play me!”

  “No Bollywood actress could come close,” he assured her. And then immediately wished he could take it back. That he wasn’t all cuffed up so he could hit himself upside the head. Way to act like she doesn’t mean shit to you, jackass.

  Her cheeks went a little pink. Not so anyone human would notice. But he could sense the blood rushing beneath her skin, hear her pulse skipping. She was flattered. Fuck. And that made him feel flattered. Like when Tasha Vega had let him get to second base in the Aviation High auto shop. But falling for Tasha hadn’t had consequences beyond teenage fuckheadedness. Beyond a breakup after she caught him going down
on a senior girl at a party. He didn’t remember the girl’s name—Melissa, Melanie, Mel-something—but he sure as shit remembered the four-letter words Tasha had thrown his way when she hauled him off the bed and hit him with whatever brick was in her purse. More than twenty years ago, and he could still feel that blow. Worse than any bullet he’d ever taken in the desert.

  This doc, Neha, she’d hit him with more than her purse if he didn’t watch himself. So he had to watch himself. Wanting her was fine. But liking her? Caring about her? Actually being obsessed with her like he’d pretended to be the last time she was here…?

  Fuck, no. He had to draw a line. There was way too much to lose if he didn’t.

  Chapter 5

  Her apartment felt like a furnace even though it was relatively cool outside, so Neha positioned her ancient box fan a few feet from her couch as she settled down to work. Central air was a luxury most New Yorkers could only dream of, especially since older buildings weren’t built for it, but she wasn’t about to complain. Her one-bedroom in Kensington, just blocks from the F train, was $1,300 a month—practically a steal in this neighborhood, where you couldn’t even get a studio for under $1,000 anymore. The window AC unit in her bedroom had been a splurge, and a welcome one given the humid city summers, but she wasn’t about to curl up in bed to work. Not this kind of work. It felt wrong to be that cavalier and casual when she was swiping through the mug shots and rap sheets on her tablet. A veritable rogue’s gallery of ugly.

  If she’d thought Joe Peluso had a face only a mother could love, it was only because she’d discounted his victims. Six brutes she wouldn’t want to meet on the street. Each with a record longer than her legs. Drugs. Assault. Domestic violence. None of them had spent more than a few years in prison, though—which told her they worked for someone with deep pockets and high connections. Autopsies had revealed that four of them were bear shifters, just like Aleksei Vasiliev was rumored to be. The other two had “as-yet undetermined supernatural characteristics.” They could be anything from sprites to goblins to god-only-knew-what.