Cole slowly got to his feet. “She’s beautiful,” he said quietly.
Dana never knew how to respond to that. Was the prettiness of her daughter really a compliment for anyone besides Piper? “Thank you,” she said anyway. She started after Piper, unable to look at Cole. She went into the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?”
“I’m fine.” Cole stood at the edge of the living room, still staring at Piper.
“Cole…”
He looked up. “This is a mistake, Dana. I can’t take you away from… I should go.”
“No, wait.” She didn’t want him to leave.
“You don’t understand. What I’d need you to do… you’d have to pretend to be my prisoner. Enoch made it pretty clear to me that I had to choose between you and the cause. I’d have to show him that I hadn’t chosen you. We’d have to make him believe that I’d kidnapped you. Just long enough until we found out where they were, of course, but I think it’s too dangerous. And I think I… I should go.”
“Don’t go.” She went to him. “Listen, I think I could handle that. I think I could pretend to be a prisoner.”
He shook his head. He looked her over, and there was something in his expression that she’d never quite seen before. “You’re a mother, Dana. You have a… I knew that you did, but now I’m looking at her, I… You belong here. You belong with her. You belong with her father.”
He didn’t suspect, then. She’d thought… from the way he was looking at her, that maybe he could tell. Sometimes Piper made certain expressions, and she looked exactly like Cole. Dana sometimes worried that Avery noticed them. But if he did, he never said anything.
Or maybe Cole did notice. Maybe he was very aware of the fact that Piper was his, and he was deliberately saying that Avery was Piper’s father because he didn’t want anything to do with the little girl.
Dana twined her fingers together. Cole was going to leave, then. He was going to walk out of her life, and she was never going to see him again. That was the way things should be. She wasn’t meant to be with a man like him.
She swallowed. “Yeah, okay. I guess you’re right.”
Cole nodded once. He turned and started back the hallway.
Dana shot a glance at her daughter, who was engrossed in her blocks, not paying either of them a bit of attention. Then she went after him.
She caught him by the shoulder and tugged him into the open bedroom, out of Piper’s sight.
He was confused. “What are you—”
“Just once, and then you go,” she whispered.
She kissed him.
Hard, fast, quick—just a taste of his lips and tongue. Then she pulled back, her fingers going to her mouth. What the hell was she doing?
Cole made a strangled sound in the back of his throat and reached for her again.
But she pushed him away. “No, don’t. Just once. Now, leave.”
His jaw worked. “Dana…” His voice was a rasp. “Are you happy?”
“I…” She dragged her hands over her face. “Yes. I think so. If… if I’m not, then it’s not his fault.”
“What does that mean?” Cole said.
“I don’t know.”
Neither of them said anything.
He massaged the bridge of his nose.
She picked at her thumbnail.
He took a step back. “You wanted me to leave, right? I’m leaving.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“Dana—”
“I’ll help you. Tell King I’ll help you. Tell her I’ll play whatever games you want me to play. But it doesn’t mean… It doesn’t mean that I’m not still with Avery, you know?”
He looked confused. “Your daughter—”
“I can get a babysitter. I mean, how long do you think it’ll take anyway? A few weeks?”
“Less,” he said. “Probably only a few days.”
“Well, see, that’s nothing then. Someone else can watch Piper, and I can… I can help the SF. I need to do something, Cole. I can’t just sit around here anymore. And it has nothing to do with us. It’s only about wanting to help.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Okay,” he murmured. “Okay.”
“Good,” she said. “So, go talk to King, all right? Get it all set up.”
“Dana, this could be dangerous—”
“You wouldn’t let anything happen to me,” she said. “Would you?”
He rubbed his chin, almost as if he missed his beard. “You might trust me, but I don’t think Brooks will.”
“Let me deal with Avery.” She tried to smile, but inside her head she was panicking. What the hell was she getting herself into?
* * *
Avery was sitting on the couch in the living room. He looked beaten, as if someone had taken all the fight out of him. “You’re not really doing this, are you?”
It hurt Dana to see him this way. She shouldn’t be doing this. She was tearing him apart. And it didn’t make any sense. She should let Cole go. Why couldn’t she let him go? What the hell was it about that man? Why did she always choose to ruin her life for him?
She reached across the couch to touch Avery’s leg. “I have to help stop any more people from being killed.”
Avery moved away, not letting her touch him. “Fuck that, Dana.”
She put her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“I told you that if you went off with him, it would be the end of us. Did you hear me when I said that?” His voice cracked.
“You’re overreacting, baby. It’s not like that. It’s just a mission for the SF, that’s all.”
He shook his head. “You’re not listening to me.”
She chewed on her lip.
“Things are different than they were,” he said. “It’s not like before, when you and I were just occasional fuck buddies. It ripped me up when you were sleeping with him back then, but I didn’t even know… Dana you are my wife. You are my mate. You are the other part of me. You can’t do this. Please.” Tears were glittering in his eyes.
Shit. What kind of monster was she? “I’m not doing anything with him. Just working with him.”
“No,” he said. “You can’t expect me to believe that. I know how you are with him. If you go away with him, you’re going to fuck him. You’re going to fuck him, and you’re going to break me.”
“Avery, I’m not.”
Tears started spilling over his cheeks. “You are.”
She didn’t think she’d ever seen him cry before. It made something in her break loose too, and tears were starting to form in her eyes as well. “I’m sorry, baby, but it’s not about sex. Really. It’s about… I just feel like I lost myself somewhere.”
“What are you talking about? How does Randall help you find yourself?”
“It doesn’t have to be him. I need—I need to be doing something besides staying home with Piper all day. I need to do something important. I need to see other grownups. I need time to take a shower. It’s like I’m not even a human being anymore. I have to do this, because I need to be working for the SF again. That’s who I am, and I need to do it to be me.”
Avery scrubbed at his face with the heel of his hand. “Fine. Fine, then. You can go back to work. We’ll make that happen. Don’t go away with Randall, though. Please don’t do it.”
She massaged her temples. “But the SF is in danger. If Cole and I don’t find the people who are trying to hurt us and stop them, I’m not going to have a job.”
“You don’t know that. Hell, you don’t know he’s not making all of this up.”
“He’s not making it up. The thing in California—”
“Maybe he doesn’t know anything about that. Maybe he’s just using it so that he can take you from me.”
“He’s not taking me from you. I’m coming back.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, Dana, I can’t. I can’t let you have some little tryst with him and then have you come back to me lik
e nothing happened.”
“I can’t have a tryst with him,” she said. “I’m mated to you. Remember? It would hurt me—physically hurt me—to be intimate with him.” Of course the kiss earlier hadn’t hurt, but it usually took a few minutes for the pain to kick in, if she remembered correctly.
He sank his hands into his hair and stared up at the ceiling. “Come back still mated to me, and we’ll see. We’ll see.”
“Okay,” she said. Good. He was being a little more reasonable.
He got up off the couch. “But you won’t, though. You’ll come back mated to him.”
“No, Avery—”
“Every time you see him, you end up mated to him.”
“I… I won’t this time.”
He planted his hands on the breakfast bar and bowed his head. “You’re lying to yourself about it. And that will make it easier for you. Because when it happens, you can pretend like it was some big accident, like you didn’t mean it.”
She stood up too and went to him. Her voice was soft. “Avery, I swear to you that—”
He whipped up to face her. “Don’t make promises like that. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
She bit down on her bottom lip. She wasn’t sure what to say.
His eyes flashed. “You’re not taking Piper away from me, no matter what happens.”
She furrowed her brow. “Why would you even say that?”
“You think I’m an idiot?” He was angry now. “You think I don’t know that she’s not mine?”
She swallowed. “Avery, of course she’s—”
“It’s like all you do is lie to me.”
She twisted her fingers together. “I didn’t lie. I just… I wasn’t sure. She could have been… I was with both of you…”
“She looks like him.” Avery’s voice was a sob. He turned away and pressed his fists into his eyes.
She reached out, tentatively placing a hand on his back, right behind his shoulder blades. “We don’t know anything for sure. She could be yours. I want her to be yours.”
“She is,” Avery muttered. “She’s my little girl. I’m her daddy. And if you mate with him, even if he becomes the alpha for my little girl, I’m not giving her up.”
“I’m not going to mate with him.”
He chuckled bitterly. “I wish I could fucking believe you, Dana.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cole lounged against the wall in Ursula’s office. Ursula was sitting behind her desk, and Dana was sitting on the opposite side.
“So, if they think that you’ve captured Gray, then they’ll believe you’ve chosen their cause over your feelings for her, and they’ll let you back in?” Ursula asked.
“That’s the plan,” said Cole. He wasn’t sure any of this was a good idea. When he’d walked into Dana’s house and seen her daughter, seen how everything was different, he’d realized there was no place in Dana’s life for him anymore. He was ruining things. But God help him, he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. “Maybe it will go down easy. Maybe once they see her, they’ll text me their location. If that’s the case, I’ll turn that over to the SF, and this will all be over.”
Dana glanced at him, and then looked away. “And if it doesn’t go down easy?”
“Well, they’ll probably want proof. They’ll want to see you,” he said.
“I need to be sure that Dana’s life isn’t in danger,” said Ursula. “They wouldn’t want to kill her, would they?”
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” said Cole.
“Well, to be sure,” said King, “I wonder if it isn’t a good idea to have a team following you. They can hang back and stay out of sight—”
“That’s probably too dangerous,” said Cole. “No offense to the SF, but surveillance is not exactly your strong suit. You guys are trained to hunt down rogue wolves, not stick to the shadows.”
Ursula sighed. “I guess you’re right.”
“You can have a team ready,” said Cole. “That way if I call, you can send people if things are going south. You’ll be able to track our phones, right?”
“Right,” said Ursula. “What about if you don’t check in for a certain amount of time, I send out the team to the location of your phones?”
Cole nodded. “That works.”
“Okay,” said Ursula. “So, I should hear from you… what? Every two hours?”
“Make it an hour,” he said.
Ursula scribbled some notes down. “Look, what we’re doing here is pretty unconventional, and I’m only authorizing it because these people are a threat. We don’t have a lot of resources here in terms of protecting ourselves. We have guards, but they’re all armed with tranq guns. We have a fence, of course, but I can’t imagine that anyone would refuse to unlock it with a gun to his head. I’m hoping we could keep them out of the building, but we do have lower level apartments with windows, and I… We need to stop these people, or else I’ve got to try to turn a building full of office workers into fighters, and I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’ll get their location,” said Cole. “Either they’ll give it to me, or they’ll take us there. And once I’ve got it, I’ll let the SF know where they are.”
“Good,” said Ursula. “With a location, we can work with law enforcement to take them down.”
“Honestly, locking up Enoch would probably stop the entire thing,” said Cole. “That’s who I’m going to be looking for. He probably won’t have his entire force with him. He communicates with like-minded individuals, and they all gather to carry out actions like what happened in California. The rest of the time, they’re scattered all over the place. I think, in this case, it’s probably a matter of cutting the head off the dragon.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” said Ursula.
Dana nodded as well. “So, when do we start this thing?”
“As soon as possible,” said Ursula.
“Tomorrow?” said Cole.
“Okay,” said Dana.
Cole watched her. She wasn’t looking at him. It was as if she was deliberately keeping her eyes off of him. Maybe that was the best. He couldn’t help but remember the kiss. The quick kiss in the bedroom that she shared with Avery, her mouth on Cole’s.
Damn it, what the hell was he doing?
There was a time, back in Brockway, when he’d thought he could do the domestic thing, as long as it was with her. He thought that maybe, if he was free from the SF, he could settle down with her. Back then, it had seemed like it would be as natural as breathing.
But he didn’t know anymore. He’d spent years out in the wild, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to stand being human. He liked his long stretches running inside the skin of his wolf, just him and the moon and the sky. He wanted Dana. He always had. But he didn’t think that he could handle everything that went with it.
Dana had a child. She was a mother.
Cole didn’t think it was a good idea for him to be around children. Besides, it was Avery’s kid. The whole thing was too weird.
In so many ways, Dana had been claimed and taken by Avery. The wolf part of Cole wanted to respect that. She belonged to another pack, and she wasn’t his to take.
But in some ways, she seemed so much the same. She was still Dana, and Cole couldn’t help but think of Dana is his own.
Which was why this whole mission was fucked.
“I’ll be ready,” said Dana. She turned to look at Cole again, briefly.
And he wanted to touch her so badly that it hurt.
* * *
The rest of the day passed in a flurry of preparation. Dana hired Melba Stein to babysit Piper. She was an elderly lady who lived with her daughter Jenna, who worked in the board office. She met with Melba, telling her about Piper’s schedule. Avery would be there in the evenings. So she would arrive in the morning and leave when Avery came home from work. She let Piper have some time to get acclimated to Melba, but Piper was an outgoing child, and she tended to love everyone.<
br />
Dana was nervous about it. She wasn’t sure that it was going to be good for Piper, but she assured herself that it would only be a few days. A little girl could handle having a babysitter for a few days, couldn’t she?
She had to go to the grocery store and plan out meals for the time she’d be gone. She erred on the side of caution and bought enough for a week, even though Cole claimed they wouldn’t be gone that long. She bought things that were easy to prepare and she posted a meal plan and directions in the kitchen for Avery.
She did her best only to focus on what she needed to get done, not to think about the emotional rifts in her family, but occasionally, thoughts crept in.
Avery had slept on the couch the night before, claiming he couldn’t be close to her anymore. He said he had to start separating himself from her, since she was pulling away from him.
Dana thought he was being overly dramatic. She really believed it was possible for her to go and do this mission with Cole and then come back in a few days, with nothing in her relationship changed.
Of course, then she thought about the fact that Cole had a pardon. He was free now. Really free.
That changed things.
Not because she wanted to be with Cole. She didn’t want to be with Cole.
Okay, maybe part of her wanted to be with Cole.
But she couldn’t do that. And she wouldn’t. She couldn’t hurt Avery that way, and she couldn’t destroy the security of her family.
Of course, wasn’t she doing that now, going on this mission?
She tried to put all the thoughts out of her head.
But even when she succeeded, other thoughts crept in. Thoughts about the campers in the woods and the bright, sweet tang of their blood as she ripped their bodies apart.
Maybe she didn’t deserve her family anyway.
* * *
Dana stood next to a car that the SF had provided for her and Cole. They were out in an abandoned lot a few miles from headquarters.
Cole had the trunk of the car open, and he was pulling out a coil of rope.
Even though they’d driven here together, they had barely spoken to each other. They weren’t even looking at each other much. They were alone now, with no one to see them, and it made Dana nervous. It seemed to make him nervous as well.
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