Chapter 5
Chapter five
Warrick
Three a.m., and I was parked outside a woman’s apartment building, wondering when exactly my life had gone sideways.
Not the interdimensional exile at thirteen.
Not the years of living as a tiger Shifter on a planet that didn’t believe in Shifters.
Not the Friday ritual of pressing my hand against dead stone and hoping for something to spark into life.
Those were all terrible, but they had a certain narrative logic—tragic backstory, noble vow, grim determination.
I could work with that. I’d built an identity around that.
No. The moment my life truly went sideways was when I’d scented my mate, met her, didn’t claim her, then drove to this apartment building.
I’d told myself I was just doing a routine security check, but then I didn’t leave.
That was six hours ago. The coffee was cold.
My back ached, and my tiger was purring with a contentment that made me want to punch my own steering wheel.
Mate. Close. Good.
This is stalking.
Protecting.
There’s a legal distinction, and we’re on the wrong side of it.
My tiger didn’t care about legal distinctions. He cared that she was forty feet away, behind walls and locked doors, sleeping. Safe. And as long as we were here, she’d stay that way.
I drained the last of the coffee. I’d lived my life as an apex predator, a PI with a good case record, an exile who’d learned to survive in a world that wasn’t his, and here I was, running a one-man stakeout on a woman I’d met once and spent ten minutes answering my questions.
I’d told her I’d follow up if I needed anything else.
I was fairly sure this wasn’t what she’d imagined when I’d said that.
Her light was out and had been for hours. I should go home. I should sleep. I should do literally anything other than sit in this SUV watching windows that had nothing to tell me.
I still didn’t leave.
My tiger had been mapping the street. Who belonged on it, who didn’t.
He’d decided the building where she slept was ours, and the three parking spots between me and her door were ours, and the stretch of sidewalk she’d cross in the morning was ours.
If I didn’t get him under control soon, he’d have this whole side of town down as our territory.
Around midnight, a couple came home, arguing about whose turn it was to walk the dog.
A delivery driver went to the wrong building at one-fifteen, swore at his phone, and left.
At two, a raccoon committed a methodical crime against the recycling bins near the side entrance, and my tiger tracked it with more interest than the situation warranted.
Nothing else. Just the hum of the streetlights and the occasional tick of my engine cooling.
Forty minutes later, I saw headlights; a car turning onto Birch Street, and I went still. It was moving slowly, the way you drive when you’re looking for an address.
Dark sedan. Tinted windows. Expensive.
It rolled past the first cluster of buildings. Past the mailboxes, past the fire hydrant, past the spot where the streetlight was out, and the road went dark for thirty feet. Then it reached Lucy’s building, and the brake lights flared.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Long enough that it stopped being a driver checking an address and started being something else.
PREDATOR.
My tiger pressed forward. I held him back. Watched.
The sedan rolled on. Reached the end of the block, turned east, and disappeared.
I grabbed the notebook from my dash and wrote down the plate number.
I pulled up the database on my phone; it was a subscription service, not strictly legal, but it returned registered owner information in under a minute. Typed in the number. Waited.
The screen loaded.
Registered Owner: Reynard Auto Rentals, LLC. 2024 Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
A rental.
I’d broken into better systems than a mid-tier car rental company. Took me four minutes to get past the login, another two to pull the rental agreement tied to the plate.
The name on the contract was James Whitfield. The credit card on file traced back to a company registered in Delaware. But the driver’s license number—that was harder to fake on short notice, and the photo attached to the Illinois DMV record matched the face in Sarah Alcott’s case file.
Andrew fucking Coleman.
What the fuck? Different name, different card, but the same guy who’d defrauded Sarah Alcott out of her savings was now renting Mercedes sedans under aliases and driving them past my mate’s apartment at three in the morning.
How the hell did an accountant get an alias so quickly?
Something about Andrew Coleman wasn’t adding up.
I couldn’t believe that fucker had driven past me.
Right past my SUV. Close enough that if I’d known, if I’d seen his face through the tint, I would have been out of this vehicle and through his window before he’d finished pressing the brake.
But I hadn’t known. I’d sat there like a good fucking PI and written down a plate number while Andrew Coleman cruised past the building where my mate slept. Why? Why was he tracking her?
My tiger rammed against my ribs.
My vision went silver. My spine bowed, and I heard the first crack of bone trying to reshape. I bit down on my own tongue hard enough to flood my mouth with blood.
FIND HIM. HUNT. KILL.
I forced my hands flat on my thighs. Breathed.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
The way I’d taught myself in the first year after the gate, when the Shift would come on without warning, and I’d have to wrestle it back in gas station bathrooms and under highway overpasses, thirteen years old and terrified that someone would see.
He knew instinctively that Coleman was stalking our mate.
Was this about the investigation? Did he think she knew something that would incriminate him?
Or was he a jilted ex who couldn’t handle rejection?
Either way, he was a predator, a danger to her.
My tiger was right, we’d have to get rid of him.
Coleman’s car would be long gone by now, but he knew where she lived.
He was watching her. And she had no idea.
I waited until she left for work. Watched her come out the front entrance, keys laced between her fingers.
She moved fast, her head up, scanning the lot before she stepped off the curb.
Halfway across the lot, she stopped. A cat, gray, skinny, one ear notched, had come out from behind the dumpster near the side entrance and was sitting on the asphalt watching her with a flat stare.
Lucy set her bag down. She knelt, extended one hand, palm down, fingers loose, and waited.
The cat didn’t move. Lucy didn’t either.
She just stayed there, knees on the cold pavement, perfectly still.
Then the cat came to her. Took about thirty seconds, which meant either the cat was less feral than it looked, or Lucy was better than anyone I’d ever seen at making something wild trust her.
I had a feeling it was the second thing.
She scratched its chin, the cat purred, and Lucy’s whole face lit up.
She kneels for small things, my tiger said. She makes herself small, so they won’t be afraid.
I know.
We are a very large thing. And she was not afraid of us either.
He was right, she hadn’t been scared of us at the shelter when she took me to the break room to talk. I just had to hope that when she found out the truth about us, she wouldn’t be afraid of us then, either.
Lucy put the cat in her car, talking softly to it the whole time. I followed at a distance as she drove to the shelter, making sure I was the only one following her. I pulled into the parking lot after her. Through the window, I could see her already inside, talking to Dani at the front desk.
Since his car had cruised past her building, I’d had time to think about Coleman.
Part of me wanted to handle it without her ever knowing.
Track Coleman, put him down so he would never be a threat to her again.
She’d never have to know he’d been on her street.
Never have to feel that whatever she’d done to rebuild her life might be yanked out from under her.
I wanted that for her. The not-knowing. The peace of it.
But I’d worked enough cases to understand what happened when you kept someone in the dark about their own danger. I had to warn her.
Dani looked up from the front desk as I walked in. Her eyes narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again.
“He’s back,” she called toward the hallway. Then, to me, quieter: “She said you were regular weird. I’m upgrading you to ‘interesting weird.’ Don’t make me regret it.”
Huh. Interesting weird. I’d been called worse. Usually by people who’d seen me Shift, so on the scale of things, this was progress.
Before I could answer, Lucy came through the back door carrying a stack of folders. She saw me and stopped.
Her heartbeat kicked up, and the jasmine in her scent brightened, cutting through the cedar and cat hair and antiseptic like someone had opened a window in a closed room.
I couldn’t stop my body from responding.
The urge to go to her, to gather her up in my arms and kiss the fuck out of those soft lips was so strong, I had to lock my knees to stop myself from doing just that.
“Mr. Kassar.”
“Warrick, please.”
She smiled, a brief upturn of her lips. “Warrick, then. I’d say this is a surprise, but you were here yesterday too, so I think it’s just becoming a habit.
” She set the folders on the counter. “Should I set up a loyalty card? Ninth visit, you get a free cat. We’ve got a three-legged tabby named Keith who’d really round you out as a person. ”
Dani leaned forward on her elbows. “Keith bites.”
“Keith has standards,” Lucy corrected. “There’s a difference.”
I looked between them. “Does everything in this shelter have a name and a criminal record?”