Truth or Wolf: A Small Town Shifter Romantic Comedy (Wolf Brothers Book 1)

Chapter 7

Seven

Make yourself a sheep and the wolf will eat you.

— GERMAN PROVERB

Iwas so lost in dirty, happy thoughts about Alice that I did not pay attention to my surroundings.

Wolves were predators, hyper-aware of their habitats and potential opportunities for chasing prey, and I was the wolfiest of the wolfy. But I was also close to our den, in our territory, and distracted by desire to make Alice my forever mate by biting her, so I’d let my guard drop.

I didn’t hear the Range Rover pull up behind the kennels or recognize that I had company until the pack was almost inside the barn. Lucky Jansen gave an obnoxious, braying laugh, and the males accompanying him—Big Joe and Carmine—laughed along. It was fortunate Lucky’s daughter, Sanye, had already left because they had not spoken in ages. I understood her refusal.

Lucky and my deadbeat daddy had been business partners and Iron Wolves pack members together once upon a time. For a short while, Maverick, as the oldest brother and our daddy’s heir apparent, had run with the Iron Wolves, but then he’d got out and cleaned up his act. My brothers and I had made it clear we would have nothing more to do with Lucky ever again.

We didn’t even have to defend that decision to the good folks in Moonlight Valley. Most people knew Lucky as Mr. Jansen, the sleazy but successful politician who’d suspiciously gotten himself elected to state office last year and split his time between the Tennessee State Capitol and doing “business” in Moonlight Valley.

What most people did not know, however, was that he was a werewolf and his “business” consisted of extracting “business taxes” from various wolf-owned businesses in the state. He had ways of forcing his targets to pay up, and I was not okay with that.

Scrappy wriggled in my hand. We’d been listening to country music together, keeping each other company. He was a baby opossum we’d rescued from the compost bin behind the general store. Black eyes twinkled up at me from his gray-and-white face. Scrappy needed to be fed with infant formula six times a day, but eventually he’d grow up and we’d release him into the woods.

For now, though, I tucked his baby blanket around him and set him into his cardboard box. Then I slid him out of sight. I didn’t need to corrupt the opossum’s morals by exposing him to the likes of Lucky Jansen and his crew.

Big Joe and Carmine were nothing more than jackals and hangers-on. They took orders and didn’t possess a single independent thought of their own, although from the scratched-up state of Carmine’s face, he’d been on the wrong end of a wolf fight.

I’d known Lucky since I was a pup. He had come by our house more than once for Sunday dinner when Momma had been with us, and he had brought us Christmas presents. Once upon a time, I had believed he was a decent man.

As an adult, I knew better. He was a con man, a liar, and a bad businessman.

“Hey, boy.” Lucky tipped his head at me, his eyes scanning the barn.

I reached over and hit Pause on the album playing on my iPhone. Lucky spoke so low and fast it was like listening to a whole other language, one I had to strain to pick familiar words out of.

“Lucky. Big Joe. Carmine. What are y’all doing here?” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans. I had no intention of shaking their hands or of making nice.

“That’s no way to speak to your Uncle Lucky.” Lucky shot me his slick politician’s smile as he straightened his suit jacket. His neatly trimmed beard framed preternaturally white teeth.

That he used a laser tooth-whitening service in Nashville was an open secret in town. The gleaming toothiness made me think shark. Worse, though, he had the superficial charm of my daddy, all surface and no substance.

“We’re not family,” I responded flatly.

Not by blood, and not by choice. Though my daddy had partnered with him, Lucky Jansen meant nothing to me, and I intended for him to know it.

“You must be Ford,” Big Joe piped up from behind Lucky’s right shoulder. He looked disappointed. “We were hoping to see Atticus. He’s a real nice guy, plus he’s a businessman who knows how to respect a fellow businessman.”

“It’s not your lucky night, then. He’s not here.” I rested my hands on my hips. I wanted the wolves out of the barn and off our property.

“Hold your horses, boy,” Lucky rasped. He raised his hands up in front of his shirtfront, as if he thought I should slow my roll or calm down. “We’re here on business. I’ve got a proposal you’ll want to consider.”

“Hard pass.” The manners Momma had worked so hard to instill in me meant I couldn’t say Fuck off, I’d rather be dead than working with you.

She would have been proud.

“Now, you listen to me.”

“No. You all have a nice night now.” I pointed to the barn door, then half-turned back to the work bench and the baby formula I’d been measuring.

“You don’t turn down free money,” Big Joe whined.

“Nothing’s free in this life, and I don’t want anything to do with you all.”

I’d stop them if they started anything stupid, and never mind that they were used to dominating anyone they approached. They lived on fear and nerves, but they couldn’t hurt me. I knew how to handle myself, no matter how dangerous they were.

“Why not?” Lucky asked neutrally, as if we were discussing what color I wanted him to paint my barn.

“I’m not breaking the law.”

“What about to keep your family safe?”

A chill ran down my spine, insistent and damned unpleasant. I turned and glared at them. They were making threats, and no one threatened my brothers and me. Carmine, who’d moved closer to me with Big Joe, winked at me.

“Are you threatening me?”

“Not at all,” Lucky said.

“You bet,” Carmine chirped. He wasn’t one to speak up unless it was with his fists.

Lucky talked over him, getting the words out before I could evict him and his goons. “You hold your horses, boy. Nobody has to get hurt here, but if you want to keep your brother out of jail, then you hear me out.”

“Keep my brother out of jail? You’re gonna have to explain that to me.”

Big Joe grinned. Unlike his boss, he hadn’t had a dental cleaning in far too long. “Maverick.”

“Mav?” I scowled. “Nope. There is no way. I am utterly unconvinced. He broke up with y’all years ago.”

“Sure did, but before that he ran a little illegal import business for us.” Carmine sounded sure of his facts. Gleeful, too.

“So now y’all are thinking to turn him in? You do that and you’ll be his plus-one in jail.”

“Boy, I told you to hear us out.” Lucky sounded impatient and more than a little exasperated. The jovial smile had vanished from his face.

“Go on.” I braced a hip against the workbench, figuring that I did need to hear it all. Then they could go, and I would figure out my next steps. It had to be bullshit.

“Your daddy and your momma had themselves a real big argument out in the woods about a year ago. I’m not sure what he was doing to the lady.” Lucky paused, and I fought to control my temper. This was not the time for my eyes to go amber, not in front of an audience.

“Whatever it was, it was loud and it was messy. That brother of yours, Maverick, he busted in on them, and there were words between your daddy and him. And then he goes for your old man, and there’s a fight the likes of which I’ve never seen.”

I hadn’t been there that night, but I’d never once stopped wishing that I had been. Maybe I could have stopped our daddy from trying to give Momma the bite and bring her over.

She’d told him more than once that she didn’t want to go over wolf, didn’t want to try for the change, but in the end he had ignored her as he always did. The only thing that mattered was what Darrell Boone wanted, and he’d wanted to make his wife into a werewolf.

This wasn’t the time, however, to think about how much I missed Momma or to wonder if there was some way to bring her back.

Because our daddy had almost succeeded that night. He’d made her into a wolf, but then she hadn’t been able to shift back.

She was stuck.

“It’s not news to me that they fought, Lucky.”

“Seeing as how your brother was there and now the lady’s gone, I’d bet there’s a body buried out there in your woods.”

He was wrong. There wasn’t a dead body—Momma was running around in her wolf form—but most people thought she’d run off because she’d up and disappeared, never to be seen again. Lucky had taken it one step further and decided we must have hidden her body.

“Don’t be talking about Momma.” I shoved off the workbench. This fool needed to shut up now. I was done listening.

Turned out our old man had hedged his bets. He’d married Momma for her money, money that had bought the Boone farm. He’d wanted to turn it into cash, but she’d set it up as a trust for her boys and he couldn’t undo that because it had been her own, separate property before the marriage.

He’d insured Momma’s life six months before he’d tried to turn her, figuring he’d come out ahead either way. That was how he thought, and I only wished it had come as a surprise to my brothers and me.

After he’d tried to turn Momma and mostly failed, however, he’d had to answer to the Wolf Council. Werewolves in America mostly liked to keep to themselves, but the council dealt with any problems that cropped up and came down hard on wolves who broke our laws.

They’d made our daddy disappear. He was doing hard time now in the remote wildlands of Alaska. Worse, he’d be trapped in his wolf form for the rest of his life because once the mating bite was given, a wolf couldn’t be away from his mate for more than a full turn of the moon. He’d shift into his wolf and be stuck.

That was what had happened to our old man shortly after he’d left Moonlight Valley so involuntarily. Ranger had spoken for all of us when he’d said he hoped the old man ran into a hungry polar bear sooner rather than later.

“Your daddy and I were in business together,” Lucky pointed out. “He’d joined my pack.”

“And?”

“And he owed me money. First he said he’d put the Boone spread up as collateral for the debt, but then your sister’s boyfriend, that Oliver Holmes, swept in and charmed your momma into letting him put all her property into a trust.”

“Oliver isn’t Mack’s boyfriend.” He had, however, been a friend of Momma’s and then later Maverick’s adviser at university.

When our daddy’s less-than-stellar character had become obvious, Mack had convinced Momma to draw up a trust and put all her assets into it and make her kids the sole beneficiaries. She’d trusted us to take care of her, and we had failed her.

Lucky ignored me and swept on. “Your daddy was understandably upset, but he promised me that he would make good on what he owed, but instead he up and ran away. Rumor says the Wolf Council sent him packing, but for sure he’s gone and I’ve got to do it all on my own. That’s where there’s room for you and your brother.” Lucky surveyed the barn.

“So, you’ve got an opossum problem? A raccoon that needs relocating?”

“Your daddy handled business problems for me…”

I stared at Lucky, not knowing what he was getting at. I was, however, sure he would tell me.

He made an impatient noise. “He worked as the enforcer for my pack.”

Lucky Jansen’s pack was more of a biker gang that got furry. What they couldn’t terrorize with their fists and their bikes, they dominated with their claws and teeth. I’d thought they stuck to their own kind, but maybe I’d been wrong.

“You and Atticus, you two are gonna handle the problem cases for us.” Big Joe spelled it out even as I realized what Lucky was driving at. He wanted me to go beat up on anyone who had the guts to stand up to the Iron Wolves.

I made a sound of disgust. “Hell no, I’m not doing that.”

“Hell yes, you are. You do what I tell you, boy.”

“Hell. No. I am not your boy, either.” Punching my visitors in the mouth was growing in appeal by the moment.

Lucky must have cottoned on to my rapidly fading patience because he inserted himself between me and Big Joe before the two of us could get into it. “We got video of your brother going after your daddy. Shot by an unknown source, of course.” He winked, pulled out his phone, and pecked at the screen. “I’ll send that video to you now.

“The funniest thing happened during their fight. One minute, there’s your brother standing there, and then there’s some kind of magic, something entirely unnatural, and he’s turned into a wolf.

“You and I both know the truth about shifting, but it’ll come as a shock to most of the fine people in Tennessee. Imagine something like that running on the local news. Or YouTube. TikTok. It would be one of those viral sensations.”

The phone in my back pocket buzzed, and my blood ran cold. This was bad. Beyond bad. Not only would Maverick be in trouble with the council for letting out the big lycanthropy secret, but Lucky would hold it over his head.

“I could sell that video to one of those television shows that hunts unnatural creatures. Or I could drop a word in Alessandro Aymes’s ear. Let him know that there are unsanctioned wild wolves running around your property.

“Either way, someone’s gonna come hunting for your brother, and I bet they find him.” Lucky stared at me. “Or one of you.”

“No one will believe you,” I said. “They’ll say you fabricated the whole thing.”

Lucky’s teeth gleamed unnaturally. “Or say that I share the first part of that video, boy. No one’s seen your old man alive since this fight; it’ll look like your brother went after your old man and killed him. It should be more than enough to see him arrested, tried, and convicted by the fine state of Tennessee.

“And if that don’t work, there’s a little surprise for you at the end of the video. Watch it. Think on it. I’ll give you until the full moon to decide.

“You come on out to the Iron Wolves’ bonfire that night and you can shift and run with your new pack—or I’ll send a copy of this video to the local police chief and his teenage son. It will be all over the internet before you can say wolf.”

I reminded myself to think and plan out my next steps, not just growl and snarl at anyone who came my way. Lucky and his goons had told me they had copies of that incriminating video stashed on multiple servers with instructions to upload it to YouTube if anything suspicious happened to one of them.

I thought about texting Maverick, but there was no point. Maverick was now a law-abiding wildlife biologist who taught science courses at our local community college and who was also up in the Smoky Mountains. He was looking for hognose snakes for some paper he was working on and was completely unreachable other than by satellite phone.

As this was not a conversation I wanted to be having in a public space, it would have to keep until Maverick came home.

Given that Lucky Jansen had extended his “invitation” to me and my twin, I had no choice but to bring Atticus in. He had a level head and gave good advice, plus there was the whole secret twin communication thing. I did not keep secrets from him.

I had no intention of including my other brothers in that conversation, however. If it turned out that the only way to keep Maverick out of jail was shaking down local business owners for Lucky, we would do it alone.

Having a copy of the video on my phone made me nervous—Ranger had drilled it into us all that anything that went on our phones also went up into the cloud where it could be accessed by him, the U.S. federal government, a billion hackers, and probably God himself.

Trying to mitigate the exposure, I downloaded the video to my phone, deleted it from my online storage, and turned off all my syncs. I doubted that would be enough if I was hit by a bus and someone went through my phone, but at least I’d tried.

To be on the safe side, I went way up the mountain where there was no internet and my phone got only one sad bar of service. I put it into airplane mode for good measure and opened the video.

Maverick hadn’t ever said much about that night when he’d confronted our daddy and Momma hadn’t made the shift back to human.

What I saw on my phone made me see red.