Chapter 8
A Well-Fed Wolf
JOEY RESISTED being overwatch as long as he could, and then Pearson broke her leg and he absolutely couldn’t avoid it.
The year had gone by fast after the dog-bite case (as they called it, to Crosby’s eternal discomfort). After four weeks, Crosby was back on the job, but this time with a coffee cup that Joey had picked out, one of adorable puppies tumbling across the ceramic surface.
Crosby had given Joey a horrified grimace. “Really? I thought you liked me, sort of.”
“I love you, man,” Joey said, and he meant it, and now he knew that he meant it, which for him was a big deal. “Just remember that sometimes a puppy is a cute fluffy animal, and sometimes….”
“It’ll kill ya,” Crosby said, laughing a little in spite of himself. He gave a mock-salute with the mug. “Thanks, man. I’ll try not to shove it down the garbage disposal or something.”
Everybody laughed then, and Gideon—oh God, after those delicious, fraught moments, it had to be Gideon, at least in Joey’s head—winked at him before they started their morning debrief.
And after that first hurdle of learning to love his teammates like the family he’d always wanted but had never had, he seemed to take all of it—the psychology classes, the electronics classes for surveillance, the communications classes—to heart.
He’d joined the military because it got him away from his father. He’d stayed there because he seemed to have skills compatible with survival there.
But that one dumb fuckup—as he’d thought of it then—that one refusal to bow to the power because the truth was power was corrupt, had brought him here. And here—here he didn’t merely survive.
He thrived.
He was a respected member of an amazing team. A member who’d managed to avoid the ultimate responsibility of overwatch until two things happened.
The first was that Kylie, funny, voluptuous, va-va-va-voom Kylie, had gotten married and gone on a month-long honeymoon.
It wasn’t that she didn’t deserve a honeymoon or didn’t have the leave coming, but goddammit, Harding still hadn’t been able to find anybody to replace her, and he’d been searching!
Gideon and some guy named Blodgett, whom Harding consulted a lot, as well as Natalia, spent a lot of their time leafing through folders, trying to find the right fit.
They’d actually found more than one candidate, but unfortunately, by the time they got to the person, they’d either resigned in disgust with the entire law enforcement system, gotten promoted to a place where they could invoke change, or—and this had apparently happened more than once—they’d been killed, often by their own squad, for being insubordinate or “just not fitting in.”
And right when Harding got a line on somebody—undercover, yes, but Harding seemed really excited about this agent’s potential—Gail Pearson had to go do the other thing that landed Joey on overwatch and break her goddamned leg.
The worst part was, he’d been there when it happened—it could have happened to him.
The thing to remember about Gail was that she may have looked like the Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate girl—or, as Crosby called her, Elsa from Frozen, which Joey understood now, but she was, in fact, fierce as a snow lynx, quick, ruthless, and unafraid to shed blood.
So partnering her and Joey was probably a bad idea.
But Kylie was out, Gideon was overwatch, and Harding and Natalia were needed to interview the zillionaire who had given his thug the kill order for a sweet older couple who owned a mom-and-pop business.
Apparently the zillionaire didn’t like being told “no” when he asked them if he could purchase their bodega at half its value—go figure.
While the zillionaire told Harding and Natalia that “I didn’t think Gregor would take me seriously,” Joey and Gail were chasing Gregor through a back alley while Crosby hauled ass around the block to cut the behemoth off from the other side.
What they hadn’t counted on was the stacks of pipes in the alley, apparently all ready to get laid to replace leaky plumbing, and how easy it would be for their perp to shove a pallet of them over so they clattered and clanged on the concrete and each other and the brick wall across the alley.
Joey, skills honed by running through the forest in the winter, dodging trees, animal lairs, holes under the snow, managed to dance his way through the minefield, but he had just cleared the mess—and Crosby had just rounded the corner to take out their fleeing perpetrator with the bulk and fearlessness of the football player he’d been in college—when Joey heard it.
A horrible, sickening snap, and as he turned in slow motion, Gail’s leg bent backward, in a way no leg should ever bend, and as Joey watched, horrified, she went down, whiter than a ghost, and the rest of the pipes battered her slight body.
“Fuck!” Carlyle screamed, and then, before he could control himself, his mind replayed that “snap” and he bent over and threw up, barely missing his own shoes.
He recovered quickly—he had to—because Gail was whimpering and Crosby was…
Well, brushing past him, saying, “Get our suspect—he’s down and cuffed but feisty.”
“I’ll call it in,” Joey said, wiping his mouth and trying to recover from the ignominy of blowing chunks at a takedown.
Crosby spared him a glance, and because it was Crosby, it was a compassionate one. “Been there, brother,” he said before getting to Gail’s side.
Gail didn’t want Joey anyway, he thought as he started speaking immediately into his comms unit while pulling their suspect to his feet.
Gideon, who was running overwatch from his department issue, parked haphazardly at long-term in Kennedy airport, where he’d spotted their rich douchebag—had already called for an ambulance at their location.
“I heard the snap,” he said sickly.
“Did you hear me blowing chunks?” Joey asked, disgusted with himself.
“Yeah, well, good thing Crosby was there, because I almost hurled out the door. God, that fucking sound.” They both shuddered and then got to the business of handing their suspect over to the flatfoots who had arrived on the scene, broken and panting after being ditched at the start of the chase.
Once that was done, Joey had no choice but to human.
Crosby had shoved his leather coat under Gail’s head to shield her from the concrete as he lifted the pipes off her body. Joey helped with that and then took off his own coat to cover her shoulders while they waited in the fall chill.
Nobody, he noticed, could look at her leg.
“God, it’s bad,” she sobbed. “If neither of you bozos will give me grief about it, it’s gotta be bad.”
Crosby sank to one side of her, and Joey sank to the other. Crosby smoothed flyaway strands of her blond hair back from her brow, and Joey thought that she looked unbelievably young.
“Elsa, I can’t lie,” Crosby rumbled. “You’re gonna be on your ass for this one. But don’t worry. We’ll treat you with the same care and consideration you showed me when I was out.”
“Aw fuck,” she groaned. “I’m never gonna hear the end of it. Gail Pearson, taken down for trying to lay pipe.”
Joey was surprised into sputtering laughter—and even more surprised to see he was sputtering a few tears.
Oh God. This was what being human did to him, wasn’t it?
It made him feel for his fellow humans, and right now, the perky, fey little assassin who could keep up with him in a chase was making him wish he was injured instead.
It was scary. Terrifying. But it didn’t keep him from holding her hand, like Crosby, until the EMTs arrived to stabilize her leg and take her away.
When they were gone, Carlyle found he was leaning against Crosby, vision black, because the pop and squelch of flesh as they stabilized the wound almost destroyed him.
“Easy there, Carlyle,” Crosby soothed, and Carlyle straightened almost angrily. He had killed people. He had thrust his knife between an enemy combatant’s ribs and shoved it until it thudded in his attacker’s heart.
But you’ve never held a friend’s hand while she cried out in pain.
Somehow he made it through the rest of the day.
The wait in the hospital, Harding sending them the paperwork that they all signed with their phones as they paced.
Finally—finally—Gail was out of surgery, and everybody got to go home, even Crosby, whose roommate sitch with his old college friend was still insane and showed in his shadowed eyes every day.
And without quite knowing how it happened, Joey was in Gideon’s department issue, being ushered up the stairs to Gideon’s brownstone apartment, being settled on the couch with a rum and coke—something he’d discovered he enjoyed this last year as he and Gideon had hit music venues with things like two-drink minimums.
Gideon didn’t hoard a full bar, but the liquor he did have, wine, beer, a few spirits, tended to be top shelf.
The first swallow of rum was absolutely bracing, and Joey let out what felt like his first full breath.
“I didn’t use to be like this,” he said, not sure it was going to come out of his mouth.
“I know it,” Gideon said on the other side of the couch, nursing his own R&C. “I am well aware.”
“I hate this feeling. Hate it. Hated it with Crosby. Hated it with Gail. Why can’t I make it stop?”
Gideon let out a sigh. “Because you care about your unit, Joey. It’s not a bad thing.”
Joey took a breath and then another. “But… but I’ve killed people!” he explained, taking another swallow. The rum was good—so good—and it didn’t burn down. It slid, satisfying and almost fattening, the way a really good cock sometimes filled his throat.
That image made him widen his eyes—and almost made him choke on that oh-so-smooth drink.
Oh, it had been a long time since he’d gotten laid. Either sex. Yeah, sure, he’d spent his first six months wandering around the city, hooking up when he felt like it. Condoms and PrEP and he could fuck an army and be nothing but a little sore in the morning.