Chapter Ten
Melinda glared at Louis through eyes puffy and red from crying as he blocked her from leaving.
The sight of him, sleep tousled and naked from the waist up, a dark brush of hair trailing down washboard abs disappearing as a thin line beneath low slung gray sweats, almost derailed her line of thinking.
He didn’t understand. She had to get back to her apartment.
Make sure the bullets had destroyed her hard drives.
And check on Manchu. Her poor baby was probably frightened out of his mind.
Then… She blocked the image of the man on the floor, the blood, that threatened to overwhelm her.
She didn’t know what she was going to do.
Louis shook his head at her, his easygoing smile gone, his lips pressed together in a determined line. “You can’t go back in there, mon amour. It’s not safe.”
“I have to go back in. I have to…”
Pierre entered the room, also naked from the waist up. Also wearing gray sweats that left little to the imagination. And she could imagine a lot. Especially knowing he was, without a doubt, going commando.
In one hand, he had two shopping bags and her backpack. In the other, her cat carrier, with a hissing and snarling Manchu inside.
Melinda dropped her laptop on the table and crouched in front of the cat carrier. “Manchu.”
Amber eyes fixed on her for a second, then he hissed and spun away.
“Melinda, I’ve made sure your hard drives aren’t salvageable.” Pierre turned to his twin. “I wiped down your prints, Louis, but we can’t stay here.” His dark gaze swung her way, no less resolute than Louis’. “And neither can you, mon amour.”
Pierre had checked on her hard drives? It confirmed what she already knew. There was only one reason someone would do that. Melinda rose from her knees, unwilling to be at a disadvantage. “You know I’m a hacker.”
Louis and Pierre shared a look, some sort of silent communication passing between them.
Pierre set the cat carrier and the bags down. “We like to know who we share a building with. People in our line of business always do. It’s a habit.”
People in their line of business? Wolf Enterprises? “And what line of business would that be, exactly?”
Louis disappeared into his room, returned with his wallet and handed her a card, white with an image of a howling black wolf’s head and the words Wolf Enterprises in elaborate silver beneath it.
It didn’t escape her notice the design on the card looked an awful lot like the silver motif on their leather wrist cuffs.
Her hands shook as she turned it over. Because of the last half hour’s events, or because she feared what she would find? Maybe both.
The back was blank. No website, no phone number, no email, not even a bricks-and-mortar address.
Louis stood there, hands on his hips, watching her. “We’re in security. Technical division. Computer experts.”
Technical division. Computer experts. Of course they were.
It all made sense now. Why she’d found so little on them.
Why they hid their tech when they had guests over.
Their awareness of the cameras. The twins were hackers.
Like her, only they worked for a corporation.
A highly secretive, exclusive one by the looks of the card. “Why are you in London?”
Louis shrugged, drawing her gaze to the play of muscles across his chest. “We had a job to do.”
“There’s nothing more we can tell you, Melinda,” said Pierre. “Client confidentiality.”
Melinda could understand that. They couldn’t tell her any more than she could divulge information about her client, MysticMage.
Or any of her clients. But their vague answer had her on edge.
Or was that because barely fifteen minutes ago, someone had tried to kill her?
And now there was a dead man in her flat.
She couldn’t say she was sorry about that. Better him than her, but that didn’t change the fact Louis had just killed a man. How could they be so calm after what had happened tonight? What the hell sort of security work were they involved in?
Her body shook, her knees weakening. Had Louis and Pierre not burst in, that shot would have found its mark and she’d be little more than a police report filed in the morning.
If she stayed in her flat, she’d be in a police report for an entirely different reason.
She slumped down on the sofa, her head in her hands. What the hell was she supposed to do?
The sofa dipped, and a muscled arm pulled her close. “Melinda. You’re not alone. We can help you.”
Pierre.
She shook her head. She couldn’t involve them.
That wasn’t right. Not if she did what her heart was telling her she should do.
Find MysticMage. She needed to make sure the woman was safe.
Melinda’s mother had never left her father, but she’d heard all the threats of what he would do if she ever tried to.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow any more violence to happen on her watch. Not because of her.
Pierre grasped her about the waist, and suddenly she was sitting not on the sofa, but on his lap, engulfed in his warmth, surrounded by his scent. Was it wrong if she took comfort from it? If only for a minute?
Louis dropped to his knees in front of her. Now they surrounded her, blocking out the world, and she longed to give into it. To stay here forever.
Louis cupped her face. “We can help you, Melinda. We have resources far beyond your imagination.”
“Can you get me to San Francisco?” Her sarcasm hung in the air.
A shrug of shoulders from behind her. “Oui. You want to go to San Francisco? We can get you there.”
Seriously?
For the second time in the last twenty-four hours, Melinda extricated herself from their embrace. “Thanks, but… This is not your concern. I’ve involved you enough already.”
Louis got to his feet and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Please, Melinda. Someone tried to kill you tonight.”
The concern in his hazel eyes was touching. She tucked her laptop into one shopping bag, threading her hand through both bags’ straps and her backpack, and grabbed the cat carrier. “I’ll be fine.”
Would she? In all her years creating new identities for people, some very unsavory, she’d never encountered this situation. She guessed it’d only been a matter of time.
Pierre unfolded himself from the sofa. “How are you going to get out of the country?”
She pinched her brows together.
“Whoever sent that man to your apartment to kill you tracked you somehow. The moment you book a flight, the moment you hand over your passport at the airport…” Pierre rubbed his chin. “Who knows what they’re capable of, what connections they have.”
He had a point. She could hunker down somewhere in a seedy motel under a fake name until she could organize a new identity and passport, but that could take weeks. Did she have that sort of time? Not if she wanted to save her client from the same fate that had nearly been hers.
“And what are you going to do with your cat?” asked Louis. “Leave him at a shelter? You’ll never get him through customs.”
As though Manchu knew he was being discussed, he let out a plaintive meow. How could she leave him behind? Through some of her darkest days, he’d been her only friend.
Pierre crossed his arms over his gloriously naked chest. “We can.”
The question in her eyes must have been obvious.
“Wolf Enterprises has a private jet.” Pierre’s lip quirked up. “And our brother lives in San Francisco. He’ll have a place where we can lie low while you do what you need to do.”
It was tempting, but… “You can’t just go gallivanting halfway across the world on a whim. Don’t you have work to do?”
Pierre shrugged. “Nothing that won’t improve with a bit of patience and time. Besides, I wouldn’t mind catching up with our brother Gabriel. We haven’t seen him since before Christmas. What do you think, Louis?”
Louis gently pulled the bags from her grasp, setting them on the coffee table. “I’d like to see our brother, too.”
Pierre nodded. “It’s settled, then. We’re going to California.”
Melinda gaped. They weren’t serious? They barely knew her. She barely knew them.
“Louis, grab our stuff.”
Pierre got on the phone, speaking in rapid French Melinda had no hope of understanding. By the time he ended the brief call, Louis was back, now wearing a shirt, with two overnight bags and two laptop bags.
Where the hell did they hide those when I went looking for them?
Pierre caught the shirt Louis flung in his direction and slipped it on. It boggled Melinda’s mind she had room in her head to be disappointed they’d covered up.
Pierre hooked his hands through her bags and took the cat carrier, and a hissing Manchu.
Numb, and a little bewildered, Melinda allowed the twins to lead her from their flat.
She was doing this. Getting on a plane, a private jet, with two men she’d met only a few weeks ago.
Flying to another country. She must be mad.
If she wanted to get to MysticMage before her husband did, Melinda didn’t see she had a lot of choice.
Pierre and Louis had saved her. That had to count for something.
It wasn’t until she was safe in an Uber, sandwiched between the twins, her head resting back against the seat, did the vision of her attack and rescue come back to her.
Not the dark shape of the intruder, or the flash of the red laser beam of his gun.
No. The man, the twin, Louis, with half his body, the top half, contorted, shifting, changing as he tore the throat out of her attacker with his bare teeth.
Perhaps it was stress, the adrenaline of the moment, but Melinda could have sworn, in the shadowy darkness of her office, Louis had partly transformed into a wolf.