“Why didn’t she tell us that?” Blade asked.
“Shock.” Pryce opened the window, to let some fresh air in. Then he tied the liner of the garbage can full of vomit. “She could have blocked him out entirely on a conscious level, but subconsciously she knew he was a threat to her.”
“Or her wolf recognized him," Blade said.
Damien closed his eyes. He hoped Blade was right because if her wolf had been the one to recognize Ian’s scent, then her wolf was still alive. He’d have to tell her Blade’s theory and pray it would be enough to convince her to stay. Her pack was gone, and she needed a pack, a family to watch over her, to help her heal.
“We’re missing something still,” Hayden said. “Why did he scare her into shifting only to stop her mid-shift and hold her there?”
“She would have shredded him had she finished shifting. He was a weak shifter, no match for her,” Damien said.
“I get that, but then why force her to shift at all? And then later put her in a cage that was too small?” Hayden countered.
“Could be they were testing theories of how much control she had versus what’s instinctive,” Pryce offered.
“Damn humans think we’re lab rats,” Blade said, fully pacing now.
“There’s only one reason for throwing her in a cage too small to shift in,” Callen said. “To keep her from shifting.”
“But why?” Hayden asked.
“Put the videos in chronological order, Hayden,” Pryce said.
Hayden changed the videos on the three monitors on the wall. The first was of Tess in a large cage with Ian whipping her the moment she started shifting. The abuse ended the moment she stopped shifting.
“Negative reinforcement. Take the pain away when the result is achieved,” Pryce said, pointing to the first video.
The second video showed a technician giving her an injection while she was unconscious. “I spoke with Alex this morning,” Pryce continued. “There’s evidence of a virus in her system. That could be what they’re injecting her with.”
In the last video, she was being released from a cage too small for her to shift. She climbed out, clearly stiff. She had trouble moving after weeks in the cage. That’s when Ian came at her and punched her in the face, sending her sailing against a wall. It was a surprise attack that should have automatically triggered her wolf to emerge. Instead, Tess lay crumpled against the wall, stunned and in pain, with a split lip and a bruised cheek. The defiance in her eyes was clear, even as Ian yanked her up by her right arm.
Pryce paused the video. “This is how she dislocated her shoulder.”
Blade punched a wall. “She didn’t dislocate her shoulder. That bastard did that to her.”
Callen eyed Blade closely, then Damien, no doubt confused as to why Blade and not Damien was having such a strong reaction.
“Resume,” Damien said, meeting Callen’s burning eyes with a glare. The enforcer started to shift, which put Damien’s wolf on edge. There was no reason to shift here, except to challenge Damien. Callen must have realized what he was doing for he averted his eyes, and his wolf never emerged.
Damien said nothing to Callen, as he might have on any other day. Right now, Damien had to remain detached from his feelings. To watch what the WSSO had done to Tess, to hear and see her in agony and let himself feel would send his wolf and him into such a rage that his shifters would have to literally break his limbs to keep him from charging out and killing every last remaining human in that lab.
Killing the bastards wouldn’t do a damn thing to help Tess or figure out the WSSO’s next move. This was but one research lab. Destroying it and the people within was like cutting off a lizard’s tail. Another would grow back. Damien needed to cut off the head of the WSSO.
“Look, there,” Frank said, causing Hayden to pause the video. Ian was towering over Tess’s beaten body, searing an electric cattle prod into her back. The action was not a simple jolt of electricity to get her moving either. He was holding it against her skin until smoke rose from her blackening flesh.
Twenty-two burns. Damien watched the video. This torture session was different from the others, though. Ian wasn’t burning her while she was in mid-shift. She was still in her human form. “Replay and turn up the volume. Right as he burns her. I want to hear what he’s saying.”
“Shift, bitch, shift. Shift, and I’ll stop.”
Blade punched the wall again, leaving a sizeable dent in the wood this time. “Too bad the bastard’s dead. I’d really like to do to him exactly what he did to her.”
“This torture isn’t random, it’s to see if that injection those assholes gave her worked,” Frank spoke for the first time since the group had started watching. “Ian’s trying to force her wolf to come out and defend her, but she can’t because Ian and the WSSO killed her wolf.”
“Ah, hell,” Blade said, staring over their heads toward the door.
Damien turned. In the doorway, watching and listening, stood Tess.
* * *
TESS
Tracking had been fun and informative, up to the point where she had slipped on a rock on the river bank and had fallen in the mud. Several of the teens had slipped and fallen as well, but they didn’t care about stripping out of their muddy clothes and continuing with the lesson stark naked. That’s when her presence became awkward. When it came to training the teens, males and females were separated for a reason, and today’s group consisted of boys only. She should have waited for the girls’ group tomorrow. Being naked before and after shifting was common among shifters, and no one really thought about it, except the teens who were battling hormones on top of their new ability to shift. Separating the sexes made for better focus, less physical contact, and fewer students getting lost in the woods that they knew better than the backs of their hands—or paws depending on the moment. With that in mind, Tess was hardly going to strip in front of a bunch of hormonal boys and wait for her clothes to dry, so she hiked back to Damien’s house to get cleaned up.
She heard Damien swear in his office. Since he was back early, perhaps they could have a little hormonal fun of their own, sans the mud. When she heard Blade’s and Hayden’s voices, she sighed and put her idea on hold. She’d stop by for a quick hello to the guys and then head up to shower.
Hayden’s, Blade’s, and Callen’s voices became quite loud suddenly, but it was Pryce’s softer voice that caught her attention. Or maybe it was what he was saying. Something about her blood showing signs that she’d had a virus. He’d taken her blood and other samples days ago, but had never given her the results. She was surprised the guys were discussing it without her, but then again, she was supposed to be gone for a few more hours.
Tess peeked through the open door, and what she saw stunned her. There were three monitors along the back wall, all of which had videos of her at the research lab. In one, Ian was burning her back with a cattle prod, screaming at her, and kicking her in the ribs. The memory came back suddenly and viciously. With each kick he called her a bitch, in between screaming at her to shift.
It was as if she were there, in that cold, lifeless room again. She smelled her flesh burning, like meat on a grill, while pain shot through her. Her back was on fire. Inside she screamed and begged her wolf to help her. The horror of hearing nothing from her wolf, not even a whimper to acknowledge the pain, was overwhelming then and now. She had wanted to shift and tear Ian apart so he’d never touch her again, but she couldn’t.
“Ian’s trying to force her wolf to come out and defend her, but she can’t because Ian and the WSSO killed her wolf,” Frank said.
He’d summed it up so none of those listening could misunderstand. She couldn’t shift because her wolf was already dead.
* * *
DAMIEN
Shit! Tess was at the door. Damien didn’t know how much she’d heard or seen, but her face paled as the truth hit her. Her wolf was gone and wouldn’t return. Damien pulled her into his arms, but she stood there, unmoving
, her face emotionless. He carried her out to the sofa in the great room. She was staring up toward the windows that covered the front of his house from above the door all the way to the vaulted ceiling. When he squatted before her, she continued staring past him.
“Tess, it’s not the end of the world,” Hayden said as the rest of the shifters followed.
“Might as well be,” Blade said.
Damien growled at Blade.
Tess wouldn’t look at Damien or accept the glass of water Frank put against her hand. Eyes wide open and breathing, she was a living statue. She started shaking.
Pryce draped a blanket over her. “She’s in shock, Damien. Get her upstairs.”
“No,” she said, her teeth chattering. “Take me home.”
Damien smoothed the hair from her face. “You are home, Sweetness.”
She shook her head. “My home. Florida. Where my pack won’t care if I’m… human.”
He traded glances with the others. She knew that her pack was dead. “They’re gone, Sweetness. We’re your pack now.”
“Stay here?” Her voice cracked mid-way through the words.
“Yes. Here, with me.”
“And me,” said Hayden. And one by one the others sounded off, formally accepting her as one of their own, part of the pack. It was a moment of pride for Damien, one quickly dulled by the terror in her face.
“I can’t,” she said, tear-filled eyes finally looking at him.
“Why not?”
“You said no humans allowed. No exceptions.”
That had been his policy, before he’d found her in that cage. Evidently, she had heard Blade call him on it when Damien had carried her to the truck.
“You’re still shifter,” Blade piped up, saving Damien’s ass, which was oddly fitting, since he’d been the one who’d mentioned the rule in front of her that night. Blade and his wolf had their own issues with humans, but the shifter had heart.
“They turned me into a… a human.” She struggled with the word, then squared her shoulders as if she was trying to own the change in her body, her life. “And you can’t change policies because it suits you, Damien.”
“The hell I can’t.” Sometimes the facts had to be ignored, as did stupid-ass policies he’d made out of ignorance. Damien ran his hand up and down her arm, hoping to soothe her.
“My pack, my rules. Shifter, human, or something in between, Tess. It doesn’t matter. Call yourself whatever you want, but to me, you’re simply Tess, and you’re part of our pack now.”
She didn’t acknowledge a word he’d said as she reached for the glass of water Frank had set on the coffee table.
A knock at the door broke the strained silence. Callen opened the door to Mason, one of Callen’s guards. “Pryce, patrols have your guy from Boulder.”
“Alex? He wasn’t supposed to come out here. He must have found new information, since we talked.” Pryce glanced from Tess to Damien.
“Go, see what your contact has to say.” Damien eased the glass from Tess’s hand.
Pryce and Callen both left with Mason.
“Now what?” Blade asked what seemed like an obvious question, but an impossible one to answer.
“Meet with Drake and Liam, I guess,” Damien said.
Hayden pushed past Frank and headed out the door, not even bothering to shut it. Frank quietly closed the door, as if afraid one more interruption like slamming the door to vent his emotions would break Tess, who appeared so very fragile in that moment. All color had drained from her face and tears trailed down her cheeks.
“Sweetness, why don’t you go upstairs and rest while I talk to Blade and Frank.”
“I… Can I stay?” With the back of her hand, she swiped at her eyes, trying to clear the tears pooling there, but they continued to spill over onto her cheeks.
“Certainly.”
Damien settled against the sofa and began caressing Tess’s back, as she laid her head in his lap. Each time his fingers glided over a scar from a burn, the need to destroy the WSSO rose within him.
“Someone better talk, soon, or I’m going to lose it.” The tension in his voice must have scared Tess for she lifted her head from his lap. “No, stay,” he said, kissing her forehead and gently pushing her head back down. “You’re the only thing keeping me sane right now.”
“It’s still bothering me about Ian,” Blade said, making no attempt to avoid mentioning the one name that made Tess shudder.
Damien pulled the blanket up to her neck, and she clung to it so hard her knuckles turned white. Blade must have noticed because he sought Damien’s guidance for whether or not to continue. Damien nodded, his hand now stroking her hair.
“Why help the WSSO? Ian was shifter; one of us. I’ve never even seen him get into a fight.”
“The humans must have offered him something we couldn’t give him,” Frank said.
Damien shook his head. “What could they possibly give Ian? He had everything here, including the freedom to leave if he didn’t want to be part of our pack.”
“Power.”
Damien’s head lifted. Hard as it was to take his eyes from Tess, Frank’s reply had caught his attention. “Explain.”
“Ian was a weak shifter. That meant he got the shitty work details, could only attract a weak female, and didn’t get much respect. If you want a better deal, you have to fight for it. It’s how life works, here and in the human world. In prison, the weak prisoners got the shit beaten out of them, and worse, unless they had a skill that enabled them to buy protection. Now imagine being a weak shifter, Damien. Feeling trapped, unable to get what you want. You buy what you need. You use your skills instead of your might.”
“What skill did he have that the humans would have needed?”
“Not a skill, but a commodity, something they needed for their experiments.”
“Shifters,” Blade finished for him.
“Hell,” Damien said. “We never did figure out how they knew our people would be in Devil’s Peak that day. Ian set them up, and then he went along so he’d get captured and have a cover story. Damien still had trouble processing the fact that someone from his pack had been a part of the WSSO, that Ian had turned on his fellow packmates, leading them to slaughter.
“What the hell did the bastards offer him?”
Frank released a deep breath. “Money, maybe. So Ian could leave.”
“But he didn’t leave our pack after we rescued the group. Ian stuck around. And the entire group kidnapped from town was only gone for three weeks. Tess was held captive for nearly a year.”
Tess was staring at the wolf tattoos on Blade’s arm, as if in a daze. He needed to get her away from this conversation. Hearing all of this couldn’t be good for her.
“That’s not the only time Ian’s left the pack,” Frank said. “I can remember at least a dozen times he crossed the border into Liam’s pack, supposedly to visit a cousin. There were other times, when he said he had to get maintenance parts, but sometimes he’d come back empty-handed. No one thought anything of it. We don’t question our own shifters.”
“Maybe we should,” Damien said, wondering if he could have prevented this if he’d had tighter control over his pack.
“I never talked to him much, personally. He was always complaining about the smell over by the septic tank,” Frank said.
“Who hasn’t?” Blade asked.
“Yeah, well, he worked there, so he had to put up with it more than the rest of us.”
“There has to be more to it than someone being disgruntled over his work assignment. If Ian wanted to live among humans, he could have left at any time. We would have given him money to get established. I’ve made that option known to everyone in the pack. Instead, he chose to work with a bunch of monsters to torture one of his own.”
“We’re missing something,” Blade said.
“Damn right. You think you can get back into the facility again soon?”
Blade shook his head. “I barely got in th
is last time. The place is crawling with security now. Independent mercenaries. The WSSO was still searching for gaps in security when I infiltrated. It’s the only reason I was able to get in and out unseen.”
“Then we keep digging through the files, to see if we missed anything. Talk with the unmated males as well as the shifters Ian worked with on the sanitation team. Find out all you can about him, especially who he associated with and any trips he took. And scrutinize everyone else we rescued. Whoever killed him was probably working with him. And Hayden…” Damien turned around and remembered his second was gone. “Hell, Blade, track Hayden down and haul his ass back here.”
Tess sat up. “What happened to Hayden?”
“He bolted when I mentioned talking to Drake again.”
“Then you need to find Hayden.”
“Blade can go. I’m not leaving you.”
“Afraid I’ll run?”
“I hadn’t considered it, but now that you’ve mentioned it, yes.”
“With all your faith in me, I might have to.” She stood up, wiped her face and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To find Hayden.”
Damien chased after her. He wasn’t going to let her out of his sight until he knew she’d be okay, and they caught Ian’s partner.
* * *
TESS
Tess couldn’t take any more talk of Ian and motives and criminal activities. She needed to get away from everyone who now served as a living reminder that her wolf was dead, including Damien. Except he wouldn’t leave her alone. He was following her like a pup. She winced. She had to stop thinking in terms of wolves.
Tess found herself down by the cookhouse. She stopped, confused. This wasn’t the right direction. She wasn’t going to a class or to discuss becoming Trenton’s teaching assistant. Those were ideas she’d had back when she thought she was still a shifter, when she had been considering joining Damien’s pack. That dream ended when she learned her wolf was dead.
Damien’s Dilemma Page 17
