Chapter 9 Adri #3
Rafe raised his head, searching his eyes. “Don’t say something you don’t mean to make me feel better. I don’t need false hope.”
Adri reached up to cup his jaw, leaning forward to press a soft kiss to his lips.
The need to take some of Rafe’s pain outweighed all his efforts to hold himself back.
“No. You need real hope. Enough to balance out a lifetime of loss and guilt. I can give you that much. I’m not ready for you to claim me today or tomorrow, but I’m so fucking gone for you, Rafe.
I have been since that night you got on your knees for me on the dirty changing room floor all those years ago. ”
“So, next week, then?” Rafe teased, sparking another laugh from him.
“I take it back. Least patient wolf ever.”
Their moment was interrupted by an urgent patient at the clinic, and a string of messages Rafe needed to deal with that had him stuck downstairs.
Adri used the time to make the overworked doctor a meal that would be easy to heat when he was ready, before slipping out the back entrance as soon as Angelo texted to tell him his bodyguards were there.
The two women who’d be shadowing him blended into the background despite the air of danger that came from their wolf sides.
They quickly set him up with a tracker—a tiny dot pressed into his skin that they said would stay with him even if he shifted—along with a few spares he could use on the fighters he was targeting if he got the chance.
He was more grateful for their invisible presence than he thought he’d be when he returned to the gym.
It was suspiciously easy to get a couple of the newer guys to bring him along with them to what they called a selection waiting point, where fighters could be picked up for the evening’s entertainment wherever this unsanctioned ring was operating from.
Either the ring was desperate for new fighters because they kept killing off the ones they had, or someone had identified Adri as a problem and was luring him into a trap. He suspected the latter.
Confirming his theory, Axel and Bo—the two guys he’d targeted for this—seemed nervous as they led him through the city on foot.
Their conversation was a stilted back and forth of the type of toxic masculinity fighter bullshit Adri didn’t have time for.
He wasn’t worried about the guys jumping him.
He’d seen them in action at the gym and knew he could take them both if needed.
What he was worried about was how far into vampire territory this meeting point was.
It was pinging all his jaguar’s instincts.
An ambush predator could sense when it was walking into one, and the dead-end alley overlooked by three storeys of dark windows he couldn’t see into was the last place he would’ve chosen to linger.
“Do you always meet here? How many fights have you done with these people?” Adri asked, his nose wrinkling at the smell of old garbage and spilled alcohol—smells that were strong enough to hide anyone’s approach.
Axel glanced back at him. “Having second thoughts, Crusher?”
Before he could answer, they reached a grimy metal door, and Axel raised his fist to knock on it.
A skittering noise from behind them had Adri turning away to search the shadows of the alley for any threat as the door’s hinges squeaked in complaint at their use.
Shifting his eyes so he could see better in the darkness, Adri scanned his surroundings, wondering how far back Angelo’s guards had waited to stay out of sight.
A loud crash startled him into jumping to put his back to the wall.
The door had slammed shut behind the two men he’d been following, leaving him alone on this side.
Swearing to himself, Adri didn’t hesitate, sprinting back toward the road.
Metal flashed from a window overhead, and he shifted mid-stride as the concrete where his head had been a moment earlier exploded in a burst of gunfire.
Pain and a sharp impact in his shoulder had him staggering when he landed on four paws, but a flash of movement ahead showed Angelo’s people had finally joined the fray.
Leaping up onto the nearest fire escape, Adri pounced before the figure taking potshots could get another one off, squeezing his teeth around their skull and using his grip to throw them into the alleyway below.
If the attacker was human, they probably hadn’t survived the rag doll treatment of being thrown that way.
Too bad. Adri wasn’t fucking playing. Angelo’s guards could scrape whoever it was up off the ground.
Ignoring the blood oozing from his aching shoulder—the same one he’d almost lost to the feral fighter the other day—Adri carried on scaling the fire escape up to the roofline that was his own personal highway in the city.
Padding on silent feet, he stalked across the building, nose twitching as he drew in deep breaths of air, searching for the scent of the two men he’d been following.
There was no way they’d be staying in the building now that it had been used to try to take him out.
Sure enough, as he crouched peering down onto the darkened streets like some sort of gargoyle sentinel, he caught a brief flash of colour a block over that was the same as the garish blue shirt Axel had been wearing.
It was followed by the sound of a revving engine.
In the time it took him to bound closer, they had already disappeared, leaving only the fading trace of their scent.
Snarling in frustration, he slunk back to the meeting point he’d arranged with Angelo’s people if they got separated.
At least he’d managed to press one of the tracking stickers behind Axel’s ear when he’d greeted him in the gym by clasping him behind the neck like the wolves often did.
Marco’s tech guy, Luca, should be able to follow the signal.
That didn’t sate his jaguar’s need to tear into them for the injury he’d sustained that was still seeping blood and hurt like a bitch, though.
It must’ve been a silver bullet from the burning sensation searing in his skin.
Rafe was going to kill him.