Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

I wanted to curl up in the chair, draw my knees to my chest, and rock myself back to some sort state of normal. Instead, I just nodded. “Y-y-yeah.”

  “Well, Elise, I think you’re right. Think we have ourselves the wrong woman.”

  “What gave it away?” I asked, my old habit of smarting off choosing to kick in at the worst moment possible.

  He didn’t laugh. “Got a mouth on you, Miss Not-Lilith, don’t you? Not good for a person’s health to talk like that to strangers.”

  “Sorry.”

  He sniffed and continued to tap the gun on his thigh like he was keeping time with a song I couldn’t hear.

  “If you just leave, I won’t call the cops or anything, I swear. I don’t want to get wrapped up in whatever this Lilith chick did.”

  “Smart mouth, smart girl.”

  “I swear I won’t,” I said again, on the verge of tears. “I haven’t even seen your face, mister.”

  Tap-tap-tap against his thigh. Another sniff, another heavy breath. “No, I believe you. I don’t think you will.”

  I licked my dry lips, holding my breath. Was he going to leave?

  He brought the gun up, the chrome pistol rising in the air. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t think you will.”

  I sucked in my breath and flinched away as the barrel came level with my head.

  Cloth brushed against cloth as he opened his jacket and put his gun away. He handed me back my ID. “Breathe a word of this, Elise Moon, and I’ll be visiting you down in New Mexico. Hear me?”

  My breath returned with a gasp as I nodded “Yes, sir. Absolutely. Loud and clear.”

  “Good.” Then he was moving to the front door, opening it.

  I turned just as he was about to slip out the front. “What did this Lilith chick take, anyways?” My stupid ass couldn’t keep my mouth shut, could it?

  “Something that belonged to us.”

  He shut the door quietly behind him, and his footfalls seemed to echo down the little concrete walkway of the second floor as he made his way to the stairs.

  I broke down. The tears just started to flow.

  With everything she’d put me through, with everything she’d put my pops and my mom through, now this? My God, what in the world did she get herself into?

  I shook my head, pulled my beanie from my hair, and threw it on the table next to me as I sobbed into my hands. I might not understand what had just happened, or know where my little sister had run to, but I did know one thing. I couldn’t be in this room anymore. There was no way in hell I was going to be alone in this dingy room, waiting for random thugs to shoot me in my sleep. I got up from the chair, wiping the tears from my eyes.

  As a kid, whenever I’d start to cry, I’d always go stand in my bedroom or in the bathroom. I’d look into the mirror there, focus my attention on the tears flowing down my cheeks. I did that same thing now, stumbling to the bathroom and turning on the light. I stood in front of the vanity, the old incandescent bulbs casting a yellowish pall on my skin and eyes as I wiped the tears from my face.

  “You can’t do this, Elise. You can’t break down, not now. Eve needs you, even if she doesn’t know it. You’re going to find her. You’re going to make sure she’s safe.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding in agreement with myself. “You got this, Elise. Don’t let anyone say otherwise.”

  Chapter Fourteen – Peter

  Gen Richter came into Peter’s office and set a cup of hot coffee on the edge of his desk, the office lights catching the white strands that highlighted her red hair. “You look like you could use it.”

  “Thanks, Gen,” he said, mildly surprised. Gen might have been their secretary, but she wasn’t exactly the bringing-the-boss-his-coffee type of secretary. She was more like the Frost Security honorary den mother.

  She went and shut the door behind her, settling her older frame into one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Peter, I wanted to talk to you. Just to check in.”

  “About what? Or who?”

  She knew all about them, about their abilities to shift, but she just treated them as any other group of young men. Which meant she treated them as a bunch of headstrong, cocky idiots who could barely see that most of their problems were created by themselves.

  “Who do you think?”

  “Mary or Jake?”

  “Jake?” she asked, settling back in her chair, giving him a sideways look from behind her thick glasses. “What about Jake?”

  “Don’t tell anyone, but he’s thinking about leaving after his vacation.”

  “Well, can you blame him? He used to be a detective, and you handle mostly security work.”

  Peter shrugged. No, he didn’t blame him. This was all one big experiment, after all, pulling all these different guys together. The only thing that had really bonded them was their time in the service, and the fact that they could turn into wolves. Other than that? Not much.

  She waved it off. “That’s not why I came in here, though. I came into talk about Mary, see how she’s doing.”

  Mary Waynescott, the newest addition to their pack. Orphaned by someone, or something, that had murdered her whole family in cold blood, then burned the aftermath to try and cover the tracks. She’d gone home that night to find the destruction. One of Peter’s old war buddies was working in the office that caught the case and gave him a call since it met the description of cases Peter had been looking for. Last summer, he’d traveled down to Oklahoma and, with the help of Gen, brought her back to stay with him.

  Things had been rocky, with her barely doing her schoolwork and getting into fights with other students, but they’d been able to finally connect this past fall. They’d even had a good holiday together. And she’d finally begun to come out with the pack on their hunts.

  Peter shuffled the papers on his desk. “Still not talking about what happened, if that’s what you mean.”

  Gen shook her head. “I want to know about her schoolwork, whether you two are actually getting along. And she said she finally went out on a hunt with you last night? All of you?”

  He grinned at the memory of her taking down the rabbit. “Yeah, she did alright. I mean, she’s not the biggest or the fastest, but she’s got heart. That matters.”

  His secretary settled back in the chair and patted her thighs a little. “That’s good. I just wanted to make sure she’s doing well. Grades gotten any better?”

  “No problems so far with this semester, and she managed to almost pull herself out of the hole by winter break. So, yeah, I guess so. Her math teacher and I are almost on a first name basis. Mr. Hawk. Seems like a nice enough guy and thinks she has promise. There’s that.”

  Gen grinned at him.

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  Peter shrugged. “Nope.”

  “You know what you sound like? You sound like a proud father.”

  “Uncle at best.”

  “Well, let’s just split the difference and settle for proud. How about that?”

  Peter chuckled. “I’ll give you that. Anything else?”

  “Jake, huh?”

  He frowned. “Yeah. He’ll be missed.”

  “Well, he’s not gone yet, Peter. Don’t give up hope. He might come to his senses.”

  “Not with the way he was talking. I think he’s kind of miserable.”

  “What about this side case he’s working? This girl he met at the diner?”

  “You mean the one I had to go down and talk to Sheriff Peak about?” Peter slowly shook his head, frowning a little. “I think this is just the start of something bad. Bad, with ties to things we don’t even want to deal with. Organized crime, maybe.”

  Gen nodded. “Well, he’s a big boy, he can take care of himself.”

  “Believe me, I know that. We’ve had worse cases than this. Hell, look at the one Frank got us wrapped up in last fall. This one, though? He’s leaving town to investigate it, and talking about following it all the way to the end. Once he gets far
enough away from us, we won’t be able to provide any backup, or any kind of support. I might have been out of town when Richard had his big blowout with those bikers last summer, but the rest of the guys got back in time to help him. And same thing with Frank. It was a threat, but we were all there to deal with it.”

  “Worried about him?”

  “Terrified, Gen. I mean, we’re hard to kill, and we have the best training the US government could provide. But that doesn’t mean we’re invincible. We can still get hurt. And he’s taking this girl, Elise, along with him because it’s her sister.”

  “Him and Elise? Is she…?”

  She trailed off, but Peter knew what she was going to say. Was she his mate? When a shifter found their mate, they stayed with them for life. With Richard and his fiancée, Jessica, they’d met and almost immediately fell in love. Sometimes, though, things didn’t work out immediately. Or both people had to change enough for it to finally click, for them to be ready for the weird, but everlasting bond that would form, like it had with Frank and Ashley.

  “He’s attracted to her, that’s for sure,” Peter answered. “All the same, I don’t know how much that had to do with him helping her. I have a feeling he’s been looking for a case like this since he got here.”

  Gen nodded, twisting her lips to the side. “Probably didn’t hurt.” She sighed. “Any other cases? Like Mary’s, I mean?”

  “Being awfully inquisitive today, aren’t we?”

  “Just trying to look out for my boys, Pete. If you’d prefer I just go back up front and mind my own business, though, I’ll be more than happy to just make copies all day.”

  “We still make copies? Thought Lacy had us all digital.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Peter grinned. “No. No other cases. Whoever it is hunting shifter packs, they’re quiet for right now. Maybe they decided to move to another country? I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do if…if they come to The Rock?”

  Years ago, his own family had been victims of whatever killed Mary’s. Same MO. He’d found other burn sites all across the country. Places with the walls covered in distinct, ritualistic markings, all burned to the ground. All destroyed. Even now, he could smell the scent of wolfsbane and charred flesh in his nostrils.

  Mary, though, had been the first survivor he’d found. The first of a pack or family who had been orphaned by these phantom killers.

  The only problem was, she wasn’t talking.

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. My plan has always been to find them first. Take the fight to their patch. Never have particularly liked being prey.”

  “Big surprise there.”

  Peter grinned and took a sip of his almost forgotten coffee. It had cooled a little, but was still warm enough to be enjoyable.

  “What about you? Life treating you okay?”

  Gen shrugged. “I think Lacy and her boyfriend are getting more serious.”

  “That Terry kid?”

  She nodded, a certain look in her eyes.

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  She sighed. “He’s okay. I just…”

  “You want her to leave Enchanted Rock, don’t you? For her to go to school, or something?”

  “Well, I don’t know about leaving. Not for good. But she should go out and see life. I never really got to, you know. I haven’t even seen the ocean before.”

  “The ocean? It’s something, alright. Know the mountains?”

  “Yeah…”

  He grinned. “It’s like the exact opposite of that. Stretches all the way to the horizon, and the sky and water meet.”

  “Haha, Peter. Is your teasing me your way of telling me I should leave you alone and go home?”

  He glanced down at the phone on his desk and checked the time. It was well past five already. “Actually, I do need to call it a night. Told Mary we’d watch a movie when I got home, and I don’t want to disappoint.”

  Gen rose from her chair. “Definitely not. What kind of precedent would that set?”

  “Look at you,” Peter said on her way out, “breaking out the ten-dollar words.”

  She harumphed at him. “Night, Peter.”

  “Night, Gen.”

  As she gathered up her belongings and packed up to leave, Peter grabbed his own things. He pulled his sidearm from his desk drawer and holstered it beneath his shoulder before shrugging into his heavier overcoat. As he got ready to leave, his thoughts kept straying back to Jake Wayne and Elise Moon. He hadn’t talked to her at the crime scene, but he had seen the way she looked at Jake.

  It had been all over her face, whether she realized it or not. There was no doubt about it—she had a thing for him.

  Peter just hoped she’d figure it out. For her sake. And for Jake’s.

  Chapter Fifteen – Jake

  I slammed my way into the front office of the motel, the door flying open so hard the top pane of glass that read “Management” nearly shattered as it hit the wall.

  A heavyset guy in his late fifties came stumbling out of the back as I stomped into the office, the wind blowing past me through the open door and sending paperwork flying.

  “Hey!” he yelled, swiping a hand over his greasy hair, flipping it back over his bald spot. He rushed around the small administration desk and came right at me. “What the fuck you doing, asshole?”

  “Depends,” I said as I crossed the room and met him, grabbing the front of his button-up shirt before he could figure out what was even going on, “you the guy who let some hitter into my girl’s room?”

  “What? What? Hey, mister, that wasn’t me!”

  I didn’t normally lose my temper. Right then, though, I was seeing red and had been since I’d gotten the call from Elise when I was halfway home.

  I threw him back against the wall, hard enough to knock the air from his chest.

  He slumped forward into my hands.

  “Wasn’t you that gave that asshole the key to her room, huh? Called him up last night when she got in and you caught a look at her?” I shook him hard, slamming his head against the office’s cheap wood paneling, producing a squawk of pain.

  “I ain’t got any idea what you’re talking about, man!”

  I pulled my fist back and slammed it into his face.

  He screamed as his nose crunched beneath my fist, the cartridge breaking, blood pouring down into his open mouth. He looked up at me in shock, like a five-year-old who just had their toy taken away.

  “That jog your memory?”

  “Fuck!” he roared, his voice nasal and stuffy. “You just broke my fucking nose!”

  I shook him again, the blood coming down over his chin now and dribbling down his shirt. “Starting talking, or I’m gonna do a helluva lot worse, asshole. Talk!”

  “Shit, mister, I just—she’s been on the radar.”

  “The radar? Whose radar?”

  “They’ve had feelers out on her all over the area. They found out she stayed here and if I didn’t say something, I’d be dead! Out of business, at least!”

  “Feelers, huh? Who? Tell me!”

  He cringed, trying to twist out of my grasp. “Who? You don’t know?”

  I shook him hard again, got in his face, the smell of his blood filling my nose, my anger growing hotter. “Who?” I growled.

  “The Denver Mafia, man! The Florentino Family!”

  “Florentino?” I asked. I released my grip on him, letting him slide down the wall to the floor, to the carpet that looked like it hadn’t been redone since the Clinton administration. “What the hell do they want with her?”

  He shook his head and tried to touch a hand to his nose, but just winced. “I don’t know. Drugs, I think. Something about a package going missing.”

  “Well it wasn’t her, fucker. What do you think of that?”

  He cringed. “I know, I know. The guy came by, told me I could fuck off for wasting his time.”

  “Who? Who came by?”


  He looked up at me with terror in his eyes. If he was scared of me—and believe me, he was—the man who’d been here earlier had been some sort of existential horror. The kind you wake up screaming about in the middle of the night. He just shook his head. “No. No, I can’t tell you that.”

  I leaned down close and got in his face. “Well, asshole, here’s something to think about. That asshole is out there somewhere.”

  He nodded.

  “This asshole, though?” I pointed to my chest. “He’s right here. Now talk.”

  He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fishing lure on a pond. “Okay,” he said finally. “Trigger Thomas.”

  “Trigger?”

  “That’s what they call him.”

  “Cause they need someone that can pull it?”

  He nodded and licked where my fist had split his lip. “Yeah. I think so.”

  I stood up, pulled out my wallet, and doled out three fifty-dollar bills. I dropped them in his lap. “This is for the room. She’s canceling the rest of her reservation.”

  He leaned his head back again the wall in pain and just silently watched me go.

  “Jesus Christ, Jake!” Elise said as I climbed into the truck. We’d stuffed her bag at her feet, and she had to sit sideways so her knees and lower body were pointed towards me. “What the fuck happened to your hand?”

  I glanced down at it dismissively and just grunted with a grim smile. “Guy was an asshole who gave some fucker your key. What’d you expect me to do? Buy him a beer and bring him flowers?”

  She ran a hand down her face, a hint of a smile curling her lips. “Is it broken or anything?”

  “Think I don’t know how to throw a punch?” I asked as I started the old truck up and threw it in reverse.

  She just shook her head. “Just get us out of here. I don’t wanna see this motel ever again unless it’s in the rearview.”

  We took off down the highway that led north toward to my place, which was down the road from Peter’s. It was a smaller piece of land, but I had more trees. As I drove, I told her what the motel manager had told me.

  “Drugs?” she asked when I finished, her face twisted into a mixture of anger and agony. Throw a splash of gin in there, you’d have a nasty cocktail. Call it the Mad as Hell. “Dammit, Eve. Of all the shit in the world, she had to get wrapped up in drugs?”