by Terry Spear
Rourke bolted for the guest bedroom where he’d slept before and locked the door behind him. He was beginning to shuck his clothes when he heard the back door squeak open.
He should have brought the evidence of Chris’s involvement in here.
“You’re not hiding from me, are you?” Chris asked. “You’re supposed to be a big bad wolf now, not a rabbit, Rourke. Are you still a rabbit?”
Rourke swore under his breath as he stood naked in the guest room, unable to the shift.
“Are you in one of the bedrooms?” Chris asked, heading down the hall. “Hmm, only one door closed. Are you hiding behind Door Number 1? The big question is why?”
“How did you know I was here?” Rourke asked, hoping that he could delay the inevitable so that Finn and Meara would have a chance to arrive.
“I just happened to be leaving Meara’s house when who should I see roar lickety-split down the road in his truck past the place but my buddy Rourke, who was supposed to still be at his apartment. So I followed you here. Found where you hid your vehicle and gave the order to disable it, if you thought to leave again anytime soon. You weren’t supposed to be driving, you know.”
Someone else was with Chris? Hell, he’d never get out of this alive. “You said that already, Chris.”
“Yeah, well, you seem to need more direction. So why are you here, and why, when you saw me at the door, didn’t you let me in? You didn’t think I’d just go away, did you?”
“Hunter’s on his way here.”
“Really. Well, a little birdie told me he’s having a rough day of it on his own. I’d planned to oversee operations at the safe house, but… well, this seemed like something that needed looking into right away.”
Rourke’s heart was beating so hard that he figured Chris could hear it through the door. But no matter how many times he tried to tell himself to shift, it wasn’t having any effect. “How did you learn where Hunter is?”
“That’s the wonder of a mate who wasn’t a wolf. She was worried about Hunter and called Dave to see if he could check on him. Since Dave is in the middle of a crisis, trying to track down a runaway teen, he asked me to look into it. That’s all I needed to wrap this up. The location of the safe house.”
If Chris managed to kill Hunter because of Tessa’s mistake, she’d never be able to live with herself.
Again, Rourke tried to will himself to shift. Nothing. Hell, why was it that just when he thought he had the shifting down pat, it eluded him?
“So exactly why are we having this scene?” Chris asked with an odd tone to his voice. Like he was ready to end this now. But Rourke figured Chris was dying to know what Rourke had learned and possibly who he had told.
A lockpick was shoved in the bedroom door lock, and Rourke glanced from the door to the window, wondering what he could do even if he escaped that way when he was naked, when he heard the familiar click that told him the door was unlocked and ready to open.
Rourke expected Chris to open the door by throwing it aside. But instead, he did it in his usual quiet manner, slowly, no doubt listening to see if Rourke was a wolf ready to pounce. Rourke figured Chris probably hadn’t shifted himself yet.
“Rourke,” Chris said, his voice low and cold, testing to see if Rourke could still respond as a human.
But Rourke wouldn’t ease Chris’s mind one bit and kept silent, while he kept praying he’d shift.
Chris didn’t push the door open wide enough to allow Rourke to see him. Then Chris moved away from the door. “Just for your information, Cyn should be here any minute now. The supposed squabble that cabin renters were having at Meara’s place? Really just me and Cyn making some last-minute plans. He’s the one who is sabotaging your vehicle. He wanted a piece of you, too. He doesn’t like newly turned wolves at all and reporters in general, but I’ve waited long enough for this, and you’re all mine.”
Rourke heard Chris’s zipper slide down. Chris was going to strip and shift.
Rourke cursed his inability to shift at will. He really loved being a werewolf, but he wouldn’t be one for very much longer if he couldn’t summon the ability to become a wolf like—now!
A tingling started rushing through his veins, heating him to the marrow of his bones, the muscles stretching, welcoming the wolf side of him, and for a moment, he felt relief. But just as he shifted and looked up from the floor, Rourke saw Chris standing in the doorway, a wolf ready to rip him to shreds, his amber eyes and mouth wickedly smiling.
His fur standing on end, his heart thundering, Rourke figured maybe he should have thought this out a little more. While he’d still had the chance, maybe he should have attempted to flee out the window, and then shifted and run like hell until Finn showed up.
It was now or never. Chris growled with a second of warning, then lunged at him.
***
Finn figured the reason Meara couldn’t reach Hunter, Anna, or the rest of the SEAL team on the phone was because they had shifted into their wolf forms and were possibly in a fight. Meara was trying not to show how anxious she was, but he was certain she was even more worried about Rourke than she was about her brother or the others. They were trained in combat. Rourke was not. And he was alone.
“Does he still have problems shifting?” Finn asked, not having been around newly turned wolves much.
“Yes. That’s why he’s always got to have a mentor when he’s out. He’s not supposed to be driving until he can prove he’s got this shifting business under control.”
Finn hadn’t even thought of that. He could just imagine a newly turned wolf trying to drive, getting the urge to strip and shift, and veering off the coast road into the Pacific Ocean.
Meara suddenly stopped, and Finn grabbed her arm as he heard a man’s voice at the house.
“Chris,” she whispered, her voice fearful.
“Stay here, Meara. I’ll take care of it.”
“No.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll speak with him. He supposedly wants me. I’ll distract him. Then you can get the drop on him. But if you just go in, he could kill Rourke first.”
“It’s too risky. Stay here.”
She ground her teeth, knowing that Finn was used to operations like this, but she still thought her plan had merit.
Finn stripped off his clothes shifted in record time, and looked back at Meara as if doubting his decision to leave her alone. When she motioned for him to go, he turned and raced through the woods toward Hunter’s home.
As soon as he was nearly out of sight, a twig snapped behind Meara, and she swung around and gasped.
“You want me to shoot Finn, I will, Meara,” Cyn warned, his hair longer than she’d remembered it, his amber eyes gleaming with power, his voice threatening. “Come here,” he growled.
She moved away from the cliff and toward Cyn as slowly as she could without aggravating him further.
“You and your damned brother ruined everything for me,” he said, his voice low and menacing.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought you wanted to date me. But I guess that wasn’t the master plan, was it?”
He snorted. “As if it would ever have worked out with your brother running things. My sister wasn’t supposed to die the way she did.”
She knew it. He would kill her for revenge because his sister was dead. But why would someone have changed the location of the meeting on the beach? If the team had gone to the other location, they would have all died and so would have the hostages.
Knowing the answer to the question, she asked anyway, wanting to hear him say it. “Why do you want me dead?”
“Hell, Meara, I wanted you. Period. I genuinely liked you. But you told Hunter you didn’t wish to see me. That I wasn’t good enough for you like I wasn’t good enough for Hunter’s precious team.”
She scowled at
him and folded her arms at her waist. “That’s not true. I told Hunter I wanted to see you.”
He turned to look in the direction of Hunter’s house where they could hear the sound of growling wolves. “Damn your brother for lying to me.” He looked back at Meara. “I thought you decided I wasn’t worthy to see you. Hunter told me as much and then said the same thing about including me on his team.”
“It wasn’t so.” And knowing Hunter, he wouldn’t have said anything so cruel. She figured that Cyn had heard what he wanted to hear. “Why did you want to be on the team so badly? To save your sister?”
He laughed mercilessly. “She was human, you know. And she’d overheard my plans as I was talking to one of my men over the phone. She was suspicious of me. Knew something was different about me after I was turned. So we used her as one of the hostages. She was worth a hell of a lot more than a ransom to me.
“When she died, I’d inherit everything that she was to get. And you know how it is. When a human learns of our existence, they either have to be turned or die. It’s our way. No way in hell was I making her one of us. So it was the perfect solution. Kill her off in a hostage-taking situation, and I would get the inheritance.”
Meara stared at him in disbelief, unable to fathom how someone could hate a sibling that much. “So you planned the whole affair? Had the women taken as hostages so you could get the money? But you didn’t intend their release?”
“That’s about the gist of it.”
She couldn’t imagine anyone so unfeeling that he would kill for a handful of money. “What did your sister ever do to you?”
Cyn narrowed his eyes at her. “My parents didn’t like me, didn’t like what I was doing, and when they died, they left every bit of their million-dollar estate to my sister. Hell, I received a dollar to show they hadn’t forgotten me in the will. A frigging dollar!”
Meara took a deep breath, wondering how his parents had died and what he had done to deserve being cut from the will. “Why did you send the message to Hunter to change the location of the beach landing?”
“Hell, I didn’t do that. I certainly didn’t have his email address. One of your own pack members did that. Chris Tarleton was the defector.”
She still had a tough time believing Chris could be behind all this. Chris had always been quiet and had absolutely no sense of humor, but he did a good job as one of Hunter’s sub-leaders. “Why had he been involved in all of this?”
“Hell, Meara, think about it. Hunter hasn’t been around that much over the years, off fighting one cause or another. Chris is tired of playing second fiddle, so to speak. He kept thinking Hunter would get killed on a mission, and that would solve that, but the Navy SEAL just wouldn’t die. And then when the fire destroyed your home in California, Chris had the perfect opportunity to convince a bunch of the pack to mutiny and—”
“Chris did that? He split the pack up completely! Damn him.” Even now the pack was split up, with some living in southern California without any plans to return.
“Yeah, well, he hadn’t exactly meant for that to happen. Those who went to southern California weren’t supposed to. Chris would have succeeded with the group he took off with if they hadn’t wound up in a red wolf’s territory in Portland. Leidolf, I think the pack leader’s name was, wasn’t about to put up with your pack’s encroachment. Chris was forced to return to the coast with the rest of the pack. Then Hunter had the trouble with that gray pack, and Chris thought that would be the end of him.”
“But Hunter survived.”
“Yeah. He always managed to survive. And he took up with that woman photographer. It looked as though he was giving up his contract work and staying here with her for good. No more missions. No more leaving the pack under Chris’s control. And that wouldn’t do. So Chris contacted me. Said he’d pay me again to gather a group of men and get rid of Hunter and his team for good.”
“So this wasn’t about me.”
“Hell, yeah, it’s about you.”
About revenge for her not wishing to see him further, so he thought. “The two of you concocted the hostage crisis?” she asked.
“Me and my own team and Chris. We wanted the money. Chris wanted your pack. You were up for grabs.”
Right. As if she’d go along with it.
“What about the Knight of Swords?”
“The what?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Although she suspected that Chris was the Knight of Swords, she wanted to know if Cyn knew for certain. “Someone left the tarot card as a calling card of sorts with Allan when he was shot.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Feeling chilled with the cool ocean breeze whipping across her skin, she asked, “Didn’t you have Allan shot?”
“No, Chris did.”
Finn would kill Chris if Hunter didn’t do the job. She felt nauseated all over again. How could they have missed the signs that one of their own pack members had been a traitor? “So you hadn’t intended for Hunter and his team to die on the beach?”
“Hell, yeah, we had. If I’d been with the team, I would have been the only survivor. Somehow I don’t see Hunter as the kind of guy who would have allowed me to take the ransom money after making sure my sister was dead. Some of the women would have made it out with me, so I would have gotten all the honors. I would have been a team leader instead of just a team member, and the ransom would have been paid to the bad guys. Which would have been me and my men.
“Only it didn’t work out as planned. And we didn’t get any of the ransom money. My sister had changed her will so that charity would get every dime of her inheritance, should she die. I hadn’t planned on that. Not only that, but she left a message that if she died an accidental death, the investigating officer should check me out because she suspected I had killed our parents.”
“Had you?”
He smiled. “In any event, she was killed in a terrorist activity, and no one suspected me. Although you can’t imagine how angry I was that she had changed her will and I didn’t receive anything from it.”
He waved his weapon at the trees. “During the operation, Finn returned fire and hit me in the leg, although he didn’t know it, and then rescued the women who were still alive. It took me a while to recuperate, devise the forest-fire plan, and then come after you and Hunter.”
“And Chris?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? He couldn’t fight Hunter fair and square as a wolf, but he has been running the pack. Then Hunter mated, planning to settle down and really run the pack full time. The last straw was when Hunter accidentally turned that reporter, decided to go on a honeymoon with his mate, and stuck Chris with baby-sitting Rourke. You don’t even want to know how mad Chris was about that.”
“Hunter would have continued to watch over Rourke. He really likes the guy. He wouldn’t have given the job to anyone else in the pack except someone he really respected.”
Cyn shook his head. “Maybe so, but Chris didn’t see it that way.”
“Who set the fire?”
Cyn ground his teeth and looked in the direction of the wolves growling. He turned back to Meara and said, “I meant to get Hunter and his whole blasted pack that time. I came to get you, and then some wolf was skulking around after a woman who was taking pictures of the fire—the woman who became Hunter’s mate. When the wolf saw me in the vicinity, he chased me off. So I missed my opportunity.”
“But Chris couldn’t have wanted you to set the fire that destroyed all of the pack members’ homes.”
“No, he didn’t know I’d set it. But he did take advantage of the calamity and convinced Hunter’s pack to mutiny.”
Bastard. “So this all started with coveting money, wanting your sister to die because she’d learned your plans and gotten all of your parents’ inheritance, and wanting to get even
with Hunter for not taking you on his team. And revenge against me because you thought I chose not to see you any longer.”
“That about wraps it up.”
“So now what?”
His eyes took on a maniacal gleam. “You come with me, or you die here.”
Meara didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t strip and shift and have a chance against an armed man. She couldn’t run away. She couldn’t fight him for the gun and wrest it away from him. Not when he was a SEAL, trained for any kind of confrontation.
“Come on, Meara, you really don’t have a choice here.”
She knew that, damn it. All but one. She’d never believed she’d need someone as much as she needed Finn now. Nor that she’d do what she was about to do. Not when she was a wolf. The pack leader’s sister. A woman who had rescued others when they had needed her help. But it was her only choice. And if she could, she’d kill Cyn herself for making her do this.
She filled her lungs with air and screamed.
***
Finn had tried to poke his nose through the wolf door to Hunter’s house, but it was locked. Damn it. He could hear the growling inside, two wolves fighting, and he feared for Rourke’s life. But when Hunter and his mate had gone on their honeymoon, he must have locked the wolf door. And Finn couldn’t get in.
Finn suspected that Chris hadn’t locked the door after he most likely picked the lock. So wasting more time, Finn shifted into his human form and grabbed the door handle, twisted, and found the door locked.
Without a lockpick, and seeing nothing on the patio that wasn’t bolted down, Finn was fresh out of luck.
“Hold on, Rourke,” he muttered under his breath, naked as the day he was born and headed down the path to the beach to locate a good-sized rock he could use to break a window.
His heart racing with concern, he was at the bottom of the steep incline before he found a rock he thought might do.
Rock in hand, he headed back up the steep path. Halfway up it, he heard a woman’s blood-curdling scream. He froze. His first thought was that it couldn’t be Meara. Never in a million years would she scream about anything. But there was no one else out here. He shifted into his wolf form, silently apologized to Rourke and prayed he’d last until Finn could return, and dashed back to where he’d left Meara all alone.
