Heart of the Wolf

by D. B. Reynolds

  “No. There’s a larger safe in a second office where he keeps most of the client documents. That’s the only one I can get into and there’s nothing there. I checked.”

  “What about a home safe?”

  She frowned. “Maybe.”

  “All right, give me his home address, and I’ll pay him a little visit.”

  She gave him a vicious grin and said, “I’ll write it down for you. Let’s hope you have to beat the truth out of him.”

  Apparently, Westgate hadn’t endeared himself to his secretary either.

  Chapter Nine

  Ren entered Kathryn’s building from the garage, giving the uniform in the lobby a nod in greeting before stepping into the elevator. He’d driven himself over after a brief stop at his apartment to change into clothes more suitable for the evening he had planned—a turtleneck sweater and black denims, leather jacket and heavy boots. Westgate’s house was across the bay in one of the pricier suburbs of the city and, bad weather or not, Ren wanted to get there tonight. But he had to see Kathryn first.

  Marla opened the penthouse door before he could knock, alerted by the doorman downstairs. The housekeeper was still a little twitchy but less nervous of him than she’d been the other night. Maybe because she understood he meant to keep Kathryn alive.

  “I’ll tell Mrs. Avinger—” Marla started, but Ren interrupted her.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll walk myself back.”

  Marla’s protest went unheeded. Tommy was waiting around the corner.

  Ren approached the big man carefully, not wanting to make a scene. So far, Tommy and Marla were the only people he’d met in this fucking city who evidenced any loyalty to anyone.

  “Tommy,” he said, with a quick nod. “She around?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  Ren inhaled, drawing in the essence of Kathryn. She was there, and she was awake. “Not anymore.”

  The bodyguard’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, but he still didn’t move.

  “I can’t help her if she won’t talk to me, Tommy.”

  Tommy gave a resigned sigh. “She’s in the bedroom suite. Her personal suite,” he clarified. “It’s—”

  “I know.” Ren circled past the bodyguard and followed the clear scent down the hall and around the corner to a set of dark red lacquered doors.

  Why red? He wondered. Was it something she’d chosen for herself? Was any of this really hers?

  He could hear her inside, could smell her awareness of him. He suppressed a groan of mingled desire and frustration, feeling himself harden almost instantly. She was young and female and it was nearly the full moon, a time of hunting and of mating. Ren could feel his wolf revving itself up for battle, heart thumping, blood rushing to muscles and nerves, adrenaline pouring into his system to make him ready to fight, to kill if necessary to claim his mate.

  Except she isn’t yours, pal, he reminded himself silently.

  The hell she isn’t!

  He smiled grimly. Arguing with himself was never a good sign.

  He rested his forehead against the door and closed his eyes, fighting for control before knocking softly.

  Chapter Ten

  Kathryn stared at him over the back of a low sofa on the far side of the room, her eyes wide and pale. She was wrapped in a fringed shawl, and her fingers clutched it in front of her like some sort of shield against him. Her nerves did nothing to calm his, and he realized his situation was doing nothing to ease her stress.

  He stepped inside and closed the door, raising his hand, palm forward. “Give me a minute,” he said in a rough voice.

  “I can shower,” she said quickly and scrambled to get up. “It might—”

  The image of her naked body with warm water streaming all over it kicked the testosterone into an even higher gear, and he groaned out loud. “Gods, no,” he pleaded. “Just give me a minute,” he repeated.

  Get it together, Roesner. You’re better than this.

  He was usually. But this was Kathryn.

  “You should be at Clanhome,” he said in a low voice.

  She stiffened, her eyes sparking silver with defiance. “So my father could dangle me as a prize for his wolves? No, thank you. I’ll take my chances.”

  Ren stared at her through half-lidded eyes and felt his lips draw back. “I’m a wolf, too,” he reminded her.

  “Well, but you’re…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away.

  “I’m what, Kathryn?” he growled. It came out as a low rumble of sound, and he heard her heart begin to race, saw a sheen of sweat pop out over her succulent upper lip, her mouth open as her breath shallowed out and she began to pant.

  Ren felt his own gut tighten, his cock pressing hard and heavy against the stiff fabric of his jeans. He started toward her, a slow predatory glide, dropping his leather jacket behind him with a shrug.

  Kathryn stood there watching him come, seeming frozen beneath his heated gaze. She licked her lips nervously, and he followed the path of her tongue, seeing it in slow motion as it painted first her full upper lip and then the lower, leaving a wet gleam behind.

  Ren circled the couch and reached out for her, tugging the shawl away from her clutching fingers and tossing it to the side, sliding his hand over the curve of one hip and drawing her closer.

  “Ren,” she whispered.

  “Kathryn,” he drawled and buried his face in her neck, inhaling the scent of her, her arousal, her youth, her fertility. He growled and tightened his hold.

  “Ren!” Kathryn gasped. She shoved a hand between them, pushing against his chest. She didn’t have the strength to stop him, if he didn’t want to be stopped. She had to know that. But she also knew he’d stop anyway.

  Ren froze, lifting his head to meet her stricken gaze.

  “I can’t do this,” she whispered, almost in tears. “It’s not, I don’t know. I mean…”

  “What?” Ren demanded. “What is it, Kathryn?”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know who I am anymore!”

  Ren closed his eyes. He started to draw a breath but changed his mind. His head was already clouded with the scent of her, and this was hard enough already. He stepped back and spun away. Glancing around, he spotted a wet bar against one wall and headed that way. He found an open bottle of scotch and poured himself a healthy shot. It wasn’t Glenmorangie, but it was smooth and heady, and it burned all the way down.

  The searing taste of the scotch dulled his senses somewhat, enough that he could face her again. She’d wrapped herself in that stupid shawl again, holding it tight across her breasts. She rubbed her cheeks, wiping away tears.

  “Why are you here, Ren?” she asked dully.

  He drained the rest of his scotch and forced himself to set the crystal tumbler down without a sound. The discipline helped center him, so when he answered, he was very nearly calm. “I visited Lewis Westgate this morning.”

  “Lucky you,” she said sarcastically.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s a worm who started hitting on me five minutes after Preston was dead. Hell, he didn’t even wait until Preston was dead, if you want the truth. He’s been rubbing his skinny little dick against my ass every chance he gets for years.” She closed her mouth quickly on the crude words. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He wants to sell you this.” He tossed the case gently from across the room.

  She caught it and turned it over curiously. Her face blanched when she saw Preston’s label on it. “Did he say where he got it?” She sounded like she was having trouble breathing, and Ren started across the room, but she held up a hand to stop him. “I’m okay.”

  She looked at him, her gray eyes boring twin holes into his head. “Did you watch it, Ren?”

  He regarded her curiously. Her reaction seemed out of sync with what he’d seen on the disc. Granted, it wasn’t something a wolf wanted broadcast, but…

  “No,” he said slowly. “Or not all of it, anyway. Westgate show
ed it to me in his office. I saw three minutes, maybe less. Enough to know it’s not something you want ending up on YouTube.”

  Her face heated with embarrassment, and she turned away from him. “I knew there was one missing—”

  “One?” he asked in disbelief. “There’s more of these? How many times did that bastard lock you up for the full moon?”

  “That’s what’s on here?” she asked, her voice filled with relief.

  Ren jerked back in surprise, then squinted at her curiously. “What did you think was on there, Kathryn?”

  She refused to meet his gaze, instead standing and crossing the thick carpet to the fireplace. She opened the case and snapped the disc in half. Ren saw what she was about to do and crossed the room in three quick strides, catching the disc before it fell.

  “Don’t throw that in there. Christ, have you completely lost your sense of smell?”

  Kathryn gave him a dirty look. “Sorry,” she snapped, “I’m not up on the latest data destruction. But I’m sure you are.”

  “You have a shredder? Never mind,” he added when she looked around vaguely. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Her hand snapped out, grabbing hold of the two pieces of DVD before he could slip them into his coat. Her eyes met his, filled with distrust.

  “Kathryn,” he said evenly, “I’ll destroy it for you.” He met her gaze, unflinching, until she released the disc and turned away. “You never answered my question,” he said.

  Kathryn sat down on the sofa, tucking her feet up under herself, as if she was cold. “What question, Ren?” she asked wearily.

  “What did you think was on that disc?”

  She ignored him, staring out the window instead. He shook his head in frustration. “I’m not leaving here until you tell me, so you might as well come out with it.”

  “What does it matter what I thought?”

  “Because someone’s trying to kill you,” he said, using his most patronizing tone, “and I’m trying to stop them. Which means I need to know if there’s a reason someone wants you dead. Or at least a reason I don’t know about.”

  She tossed a scathing glance his way and huddled deeper into the cushions.

  “Kathryn,” he said sharply, losing patience.

  Her deep sigh was clearly audible, even if he hadn’t seen her shoulders move. “Is that the original?”

  Ren ground his teeth at her stubbornness but said, “No. Westlake’s selling me the original for ten million.”

  She turned around then, eyes wide with surprise. “You’re paying him?”

  “Of course not. But he thinks I am.”

  “Oh.” She sighed again. “That should make my father happy.”

  Ren raised his eyes heavenward in a mute plea for pity.

  “Fine,” she snarled. “I told you Preston knew I was Wolf when he married me. That’s why he married me. He hated getting old, hated the weakening of his body, his mind, and especially hated knowing once he was gone he couldn’t control the Avinger money any longer.” She shrugged. “He thought it was like all those werewolf movies. He wanted me to bite him so he could become a wolf, too, and live forever.”

  Ren made a disbelieving noise.

  “I know,” Kathryn agreed. “And I tried to tell him it didn’t work that way, but he wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Surely, your father didn’t—”

  “Yeah. Surely my father, Alpha of the North American wolves, wouldn’t mislead a human, right, Ren? Especially not when he was getting a big chunk of Avinger stock in return.” She stood again and paced over to the window, one hand reaching out to the glass as if to touch the falling snow beyond it. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dom ever actually told Preston I could change him. Not in so many words. I think he just let Preston believe what he wanted to believe and didn’t bother correcting him.”

  “Fantastic,” Ren said in disgust, regretting he’d ever agreed to step back into the mess that was Dom Bartek’s territory. “So what’s that got to do with the DVD?” he persisted. The look she gave him confirmed his suspicion that Kathryn had hoped to derail him from that line of query. He quirked his eyebrows at her in question.

  “Preston was quite the little voyeur. He liked to take pictures. I wanted to post an anonymous notice in his office building, warning the female employees not to use the restrooms. Filthy pervert probably had cameras built into the walls.”

  “And?” Ren asked, not liking where this was going.

  “And the first morning I was here, the morning after he all but raped me on our wedding night—”

  “Goddamn it!” Ren roared and swung about instantly as Tommy opened the door.

  The bodyguard took in the scene quickly, the distance between Kathryn and Ren, her grim face, his anger. “Kathryn?”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay, Tommy. Ren’s angry at someone else, not me. Aren’t you, Ren?” She said the last in a tiny voice that broke his heart.

  “Hell, yes,” he said viciously. “I’d kill the bastard if he wasn’t dead already.”

  Tommy’s face lit up with understanding, and he nodded soberly. “I’ll be outside if you need me.” He gave Ren an even look and backed out the door before closing it.

  Ren ran both hands through his hair, tugging at the thick strands. “Goddamn it, Kathryn.”

  She eyed him dispassionately. “It gets better. Preston was full of all sorts of misconceptions about wolves, but he was right about one thing. Stress brings out our wolf. When the trauma of my first sexual experience wasn’t enough, he decided to let his inner sadist out to play.”

  Ren stared at her in disbelief. “He didn’t. He wouldn’t dare.”

  “He did. And it worked, too. Unfortunately for Preston, my wolf was more than happy to play with the stupid human.”

  “Jesus Christ, did you call your father?”

  “I did,” she said with fake good cheer, “and I told him the whole thing, all the sordid, embarrassing details. He thought it uproariously funny, didn’t understand why I wasn’t laughing.”

  “That fucker,” he swore, but inside he was sick. How had Dom fallen so far without anyone noticing? Was that the real reason he and the others had been kept so far away all these years? So they wouldn’t see what their Alpha had become?

  “Yes, well,” Kathryn continued, “Preston never tried that particular trick again. Not that he gave up entirely, mind you. What you have there”—she gestured with her chin at the pieces of disc tucked away in Ren’s jacket pocket—“that’s the first time he tried to catch me on a full moon. He had that room built specially, with silver in the walls, the ceiling, the door. The door handle was solid silver. No price too high for Preston. He drugged me at breakfast and waited for the moon to rise, then said he’d let me out if I agreed to bite him.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I bit him. More precisely, I nearly tore his arm off.”

  “Now that I’d pay to see.”

  She flashed him a brief smile, a smile he’d waited ten years to see. “I hired Tommy right after that. He’s been with me ever since.”

  “Why not just divorce him? Or him, you?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t speak for Preston, but I suspect he was afraid of what my father would do to him. He’d seen what I could do, and I was just a woman. Imagine a full-grown male and a powerful Alpha to boot. For my part, I had nowhere to go. I sure as hell wasn’t going back to Clanhome so my father could raffle me off to the next highest bidder. Besides, if I stuck it out five years, the prenup gave me a whole lot of money. Enough to make a life for myself far away from my father and everyone else. But then, Preston became ill and there was no reason to leave at all. If anything, it gave me endless pleasure to stay, to remind him every day that I was alive and he would soon be dead.”

  Ren drew a deep breath. “Are there any other videos I should know about?”

  “No,” she said shortly. “Or at least I don’t think so. He only managed to catch my wolf on camera tho
se two times, and I already destroyed the other disc. After that stunt with the silver room, Tommy took me out to the country house every full moon, and I shifted in the woods. I can’t speak for any nude shower scenes, though.”

  She tried to say it lightly, but Ren heard the misery in her voice.

  “Kathryn,” he said intently and waited until she turned to look at him. She was biting her lip nervously, and Ren prayed she wouldn’t draw blood. His control was already on the ragged edge, although Kathryn appeared completely unaware of how close he really was. She seemed to have lost all of her instincts when it came to dealing with other wolves. “Why didn’t you call me?” he ground out. “I would have come for you.”

  “I didn’t know where you were, Ren,” she explained simply. “And besides, after my father, I didn’t think I could trust anyone. Not even you.”

  Ren ran his hands back through his hair again, nearly tearing it from his head. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll get the disc back and take care of Westgate. You stay right here.”

  Her head came up, eyes flashing with stubborn anger, and he rounded on her tightly. “I have enough to worry about with this scumbag lawyer of yours,” he snarled. “The last thing I need is you running around with a big target on your back so whoever the fuck is trying to kill you can get a second shot. It’s a fucking blizzard out there, anyway. So stay the hell inside until I tell you it’s goddamn safe!” His voice had risen to a shout by the time he finished, and he didn’t wait for her to respond. He grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him so hard it rattled in its frame. Tommy was waiting, looking a little worried.

  “She doesn’t go anywhere, Tommy, you got that? Nowhere. I don’t care if you have to—” He thought about Kathryn trapped in a silver-lined room and didn’t finish the sentence. “Keep her here, Tommy. Keep her safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It took him nearly three hours to get to Westgate’s house, which was twice as long as it should have taken. The weather had closed in, shutting down roads and snarling traffic throughout the area. The snowplows were out, but they were focusing on the big interstate and main roadways. Ren had stuck to the cleared routes as long as he could, but eventually he’d been forced onto the narrow back roads leading to the enclave of expensive homes where the lawyer lived. These roads were plowed, too—the rich could hire their own—but they were slick with the still-falling snow.