by Alisa Woods
Or that he’d had sex with a witch on the office furniture.
She balled up her fist and pounded it against the wall of the elevator, again and again. It wasn’t fair. Not to Jaxson, and not even fair to her. She knew she could never get close to someone, not the way Jaxson wanted, but she’d never had anyone come into her life and make her want that so badly.
She stomped her way across the ground floor. It was dark outside. The drama of the rescue had carried into the night, and then her heart-stopping love-making with Jaxson kept them even later. It had to be past midnight. Her body still thrummed with the pleasure he’d given her, but her face was a sopping mess of tears over having to leave him. But she had to… it was better to walk away now before it got any worse. Any more heart-breaking.
She managed to hail a cab even though she could barely see through the tears.
When she got home, she tore off her clothes—they reminded her too much of Jaxson—and crawled into an oversized sweatshirt. Then she curled up in a ball in her bedroom and sobbed until her head ached more than the broken-hearted pain in her chest.
She didn’t remember falling asleep.
The next morning flooded her room with light. Every muscle ached, so she dragged herself to the shower and tried to wash away all the salty tears and lovemaking that still clung to her. All traces of Jaxson swirled down the drain.
Her phone buzzed all morning, which she spent eating ice cream and watching whatever was on the free TV channels. And trying to not think about Jaxson and everything she would never have with him. When she finally checked her phone midday, there were a dozen messages from him. She deleted them unread and turned off her phone.
She’d told him she was in love with a man she could never have… and that was true. Only the man was Jaxson. She could never be his mate, and Jaxson deserved to have a mate—someone to share that magical bond with and lead his pack with and raise pups with. Shifter pups. She couldn’t give him that either. Only some kind of half-breed, like she was.
She didn’t know how that worked for shifters, but it was dangerous enough with witches. She couldn’t even imagine what crossing a half-witch with a full-blooded-shifter would produce. Something unstable for sure. Her half-witch powers certainly were. Unstable. Uncontrollable. Better left stuffed away and unused.
Her mother was a witch; her father was a human; now they were both dead because of her. She couldn’t think of any better reason not to mess with the laws of nature than that.
Maybe she should quit Riverwise.
The idea churned her stomach even harder, so she pushed it away.
This was why she never got close to anyone—never allowed herself to get too close. She hated to admit it, but she had picked all those loser guys intentionally. They were the kind who would cheat on her eventually and give her an easy out. A reason to leave. A reason never to get serious. Because she couldn’t afford to love anyone.
Then Jaxson dropped into her life, as unexpected as a thunderstorm on a sunny day. Only she had a dangerous power deep inside her, like a lightning bolt waiting to strike. It had already struck her parents out of the blue, for no reason at all.
Except even that wasn’t true.
She had been angry with them. She couldn’t remember what she had been upset about, but her twelve-year-old self had been really, really pissed over something that was probably nothing.
Her mother made no secret about being a witch, and Olivia had tried to please her by learning to conjure spells. She could do the simple things—glamours and spells that curdled milk or rattled cabinets. But anything real—anything powerful—and Olivia had been one big disappointment after another.
Until one day when something… switched on.
It was like a lifetime of static buildup discharging all at once. She had turned her parents to ash. Both of them, gone in an instant.
Olivia had huddled over the tiny pile of gray dust that, a moment before, had been the two people she loved most in the world. Aghast. Horrified. Unbelieving that she had done this horrible, terrible thing. If the spell she had unleashed hadn’t caught their apartment on fire, Olivia probably would have stayed there, frozen, until she died of hunger or thirst. Or a broken heart. But the fire department came, and the firefighters pulled her from the building.
She didn’t remember that part, but people told her about it later. She just woke up in the ambulance, sucking in oxygen through a mask and remembering… remembering that she had killed her parents.
With a power she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.
So she’d locked it away.
And away it had stayed. Successfully. But there was no way she could afford to get close to someone like that again. And no way in hell she was risking the life of someone as brave and good and decent as Jaxson River. She had spent her entire life trying to keep people like him from orbiting into her life… and trying to find a way to make her life count for something. To make up for the past by doing something good with the future.
She thought Riverwise was a place she could do that, but now…
Now she was certain she would have to leave. The sooner the better. Staying would only hurt Jaxson. The sooner she was gone, the sooner he could go back to holding things together and taking care of people and rescuing shifters.
The only problem was that leaving felt like ripping out her heart and stomping on it.
Olivia flicked off the TV and curled tighter on the couch. She let her head fall against the edge of the sofa and closed her eyes. A torrent of emotions swam behind her eyelids. She would need all her resolve to march into Riverwise and quit.
Today was Saturday.
It could wait until Monday.
By then, she would have cried out all her tears.
Jaxson searched yet another restricted access-only database but still came up empty.
Olivia’s digital footprint was incredibly light.
He’d wandered home in a daze after she stormed out of the office, crying and claiming to love another man. His wolf howled at that, jealous and heartbroken, but Jaxson couldn’t believe it. He knew she had been hiding something, some dark well of sadness that would bubble up at the strangest of times, but he never figured her for the kind of woman willing to be just something on the side. A fling for some asshole who just wanted her for the hot sex.
His wolf’s howl turned to a growl that wanted to tear something limb from limb.
Preferably the asshole.
Jaxson shook his head and focused. He’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, tossing and turning, before he was back in the office, using Riverwise’s considerable investigative resources to figure out who the hell Olivia was seeing. He wasn’t going to storm up to the guy’s house and take him out… probably… but he definitely needed to know what the competition looked like.
And why Olivia was drawn to him.
He’d spent half the morning searching everything he could find on her, but her story just wasn’t holding up. Either she was lying or the asshole had supernatural security protocols in place such that he never left a fingerprint on her life. Possible, but everyone slipped up.
And assholes weren’t usually that careful.
Jaxson pushed away from his desk where he’d been hunched for an hour. He ran two hands through his hair, took a deep breath, and stretched the aches from his back. It was past noon, and Olivia still wasn’t returning his calls. Which meant she was definitely ignoring him. He considered a stale sandwich from the vending machines downstairs, but opted to just slam back the half cup of cold coffee he had at the desk. He’d tracked down every facet of Olivia’s life that could be gleaned from the public, and less public, databases, and he still had only the barest sketch of her days on the planet.
Foster care. Odd jobs. Tax forms filed, but income too low to pay much in the way of taxes. In fact, he was amazed at how little she got by on. No wonder she was so concerned about the rent. He logged on to Riverwise’s account and authorized an advance
on her next three paychecks to be direct deposited to her bank today. No matter what happened between them, he wanted to make sure she had some cushion going forward.
The idea that some asshole was bedding her but leaving her vulnerable to being kicked out of her apartment… Jaxson had to shove away from the computer again and pace his office a while to get his rage under control. How could anyone spend more than two minutes with Olivia and not understand how special she was? He would give anything to have the chance to take care of her, and this guy was just…
He stopped his pacing, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples. Focus, Jaxson.
He stalked back to the computer and dove into his research again.
Maybe he didn’t go back far enough. Maybe there was some connection in her childhood, before foster care, to this creep. Jaxson had access to even the most confidential files, but it only took a simple search of the newspapers around the time of her placement in foster care to pull up what happened to her parents.
She had told him they were dead. He didn’t know they had died in an apartment fire that almost took Olivia’s life as well. The official report said the cause of the fire was unknown, but maybe there was something there… some connection that the asshole was holding over her… Jaxson searched the gossip rags and underground newspapers and e-zines. He focused on her parents. Sometimes the most tenuous connections would be whispered in the digital shadows…
Olivia’s mother was a witch.
Jaxson’s hand froze on the mouse. He’d stumbled into a darknet forum thread titled, Hunters, Witches, and Other Black Arts. His search had pinged Rowan Lilyfield in that thread, and it was clear that someone thought Olivia’s mother was a witch. There was a whole thread on her: suspected dark art spells performed, a description that matched the other online images he had found of her, and most telling of all… she was raised in a well-known coven on the south side of Seattle. She was a full-blooded witch, although apparently she had married a research professor of some kind rather than taking a male witch for a husband. Then again, male witches were almost as rare as female shifters.
Jaxson slowly lifted his hand from the mouse and leaned back. If Olivia’s mother was a witch, then Olivia was at least half witch. But her mother died when Olivia was only twelve… maybe she was never introduced to the dark arts. Either way, the agitation made him rise up from his chair and pace the room.
Did she know? Was she one of them? His mind was a hurricane of confusion and torment. He couldn’t square the Olivia he knew—smart and kind, gentle with nervous job applicants, steady head in a crisis—with what he knew to be true about witches. They toyed with shifters like cats with mice. If one of them had gotten inside Riverwise… Olivia now knew all the members of his pack. Could identify them in public. And he’d given her detailed information about three other packs as well. If she was infiltrating them, secretly working for her mother’s coven…
Jaxson stopped dead in his frenetic pacing. An icy dread trickled into his stomach.
What if he was all wrong about Olivia from the start?
He stared out his window at the Seattle skyline and just shook his head slowly. Olivia as an undercover witch invading his pack? That just didn’t fit with the tremulous girl he’d made love to last night. Witches were nothing if not sexually experienced—and that’s not something a person can easily hide. Either Olivia was an academy award-winning actress or last night was the first time someone had properly made love to her. Besides, witches used the dark arts to gain advantages in all spheres of their lives, including the marketplace. None of them worried about the rent.
Jaxson’s shoulders relaxed.
The most likely explanation was the simplest. Olivia was exactly what her digital life portrayed—an orphan who scrabbled her way out of foster care and through a series of deadbeat jobs, looking for some kind of meaning in her life. What had she said, that first time, in the library? My work is important to me. At the time, he didn’t really understand, given she’d just left her job at the paper. But now he could see it—she’d been trying to make something of herself, doing something that mattered. That’s why she tried to rescue him in the alleyway. And how he’d enticed her to Riverwise in the first place—another chance to help him out of a sticky situation. She’d leapt into that with both feet and stolen his heart in the process.
That was the person Jaxson knew. And loved.
Whatever Olivia’s parents had been, they were long dead. She had been surviving on her own ever since, and she deserved better than this mysterious asshole boyfriend who obviously didn’t treat her right.
And Jaxson very much wanted to be that better man.
He glanced at his phone—a quarter past one. He’d give her one more call, but if she didn’t pick up, he was going to her apartment and banging on the door until she let him in. This time, the phone didn’t even ring… it just went straight to message. Which meant she had turned it off.
Dammit.
That’s it—he was going over there to talk to her. He grabbed his keys and headed toward the door of his office, only to see Jace dashing around the common room and peering into the offices.
“Jace?” Jaxson stopped at the threshold of his office. He hadn’t seen his brother since he had cleared out the Wilding pack, hopefully taking them to the safehouse outside the city. “What’s up?”
“Hey,” Jace said, a little breathless as he jogged up to Jaxson. “Have you seen Jared?”
“Nope. Just me in the office this morning.”
Jace gave him a cockeyed look. “Why are you even here, bro? I thought you’d be spending the weekend in bed with a certain hot office assistant.”
“That’s… got some complications.” Jaxson grimaced. “I’m on my way to see her now, actually.”
Jace shook his head. “Man, why are you even messing around with her? I mean, I did what you said and stashed Terra at the safehouse, but she is so ready for a mate. It was all I could do to keep her from climbing into my bed last night.”
“At the safehouse?” Jaxson’s eyebrows hiked up. The safehouse was their family estate in the mountains outside Seattle, and their mother was the caretaker.
“I know, right?” Jace looked disgusted. “Mom would’ve stirred up a shitstorm if she knew. Now, if it was you bedding Terra, I think Mom would have made you two breakfast and started planning the wedding.” He smirked.
Jaxson rolled his eyes. Their mother wasn’t just on the bandwagon to find him a mate—she was driving the wagon train. The estate had been a halfway house for all kinds of shifters ever since Dad died, so she was probably used to a few bed-shakings in the middle of the night. It wasn’t like his mother didn’t know the passionate nature of wolves and other shifters. But only a Wilding would try to seduce one of her sons while under her roof.
“Thanks for running interference on that for me,” Jaxson said, still grimacing. “So what’s up with Jared? I thought he’d already taken off for the mountains for the weekend.”
Jace frowned. “I thought he had—but he must have found reception last night because he eventually returned my call about the mission to rescue Cassie. I told him all about it and the warehouse and everything. He was pissed that he’d missed out.” Jace huffed a small laugh and shook his head.
“I’ll bet.” Of the three of them, Jared was the most intent on direct assaults from the beginning. Only problem being that they didn’t know where to point the assault team. “So is he coming in?” Jaxson asked, glancing around at the darkened offices.
“That’s just it. I thought he was coming to the safehouse. We were all tired, so we crashed pretty much right away. When I woke up, he still hadn’t showed. I’ve been calling, but he hasn’t been picking up. I thought maybe he’d come here…” Jace’s voice drifted off as his eyes went wide.
Jaxson figured it out at the same time. “He went after the warehouse.”
“Shit.” Jace grimaced. “Oh man, I shouldn’t have told him.”
“It’s
not your fault, Jace.” Jaxson rubbed his hand across the stubble on his face. “But if he’s not answering his phone…”
“Shit, shit, shit. He’s in there, isn’t he? They got him.” Jace took his frustration out on the door frame, leaving a small dent.
“Hey!” Jaxson gave him a glare. “It’s all right. We’ll get him out.”
“What if they move him? What if he’s not even there?” Jace was running a rough hand through his hair. “If I’d been infiltrated, I’d decamp right away.”
“Right. Which is why Jared went after them, I’m sure. Because he didn’t want them slithering off into the night.” Damn, this was a mess. “All right, did Murphy go to the safehouse last night or did he go home?”
“I just took the Wildings to the safehouse. Everyone else went home.”
“Murphy lives closest to the edge of town where the warehouse is,” Jaxson said. “We need eyes on that immediately. Get that in place, then round up a team. Maybe ten. If we’ve got surveillance, they can’t decamp without us knowing. And if they’re still inside, we might have to wait until dark to move in.”
“Understood.” Jace already had his phone out, dialing Murphy.
“I need to make a stop at Olivia’s,” Jaxson said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Jace held up his hands in a questioning way, but Murphy must have picked up because he turned away and took the call. Jaxson left his unspoken question unanswered and jogged out of the office, heading for his car. He needed to make sure Olivia was all right before he dove into a mission he knew he might not come back from.
He had to pound on Olivia’s door ten times before she finally opened.
“Jaxson, for God’s sake—” she said, but he just brushed past her and stepped into the apartment.
He peered around before saying anything. If asshole boyfriend was here, he would take care of that first. But the place was clear.
