7. Paul #2
That relief vanished when there was a thud, and suddenly my brother dropped the phone.
“Jackie!” I cried, staring at the closeup view of his expensive tile floor. “Jackie! Hang in there! We’re on our way!”
I heard more crashing sounds and punches being thrown, then finally some growling before the back door of my car opened and Cherry practically jumped into the seat.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked, looking at me with those wide, mismatched eyes of hers. “Pedal to the metal, man!”
I couldn’t agree with her more. Thankfully, my brother had pressed the button on the sensor clipped to my sun visor, and the garage door was already halfway open. I floored it and just barely missed scraping the roof of my car as we flew out of the garage.
I broke more than a few speed limits as I drove—it was a miracle we didn’t get pulled over—but I could still hear the faint sounds of a struggle as we pulled up in front of Jackson’s building and parked illegally.
My car was barely out of traffic, but it would have to do.
We all barreled out and ran through the front entrance.
The doorman didn’t stop us, likely recognizing me from my many times being there to clean up my brother’s various escapades or act as a particularly hostile alarm clock.
As Cherry and Chris went to the elevator, I chose to run up the stairs.
I was a wolf, after all.
As I burst through the door to the stairwell, I shifted, calling upon a form that I rarely used. Mother had always encouraged us to shift more, to spend as much time wild as we did civilized, but with my lifestyle, I found myself using my canid form less and less.
Clearly, that was about to change. I bounded up the stairs, flying over several at a time, my paws striking with certainty even as my dewclaws clicked harshly against the concrete.
One would have thought that such an expensive (I would know since the rent for it came out of our family’s finances) high rise would have fancier stairwells, but then again, I doubted any of their residents ever used them.
They would probably rent a jet-pack to get down to the ground floor before using the stairs if there was an emergency.
But I ran. And ran. And ran . My lungs were beginning to ache. I looked at the floor number as I ascended yet another set of stairs, sure I had to be there by now.
Floor twenty-seven.
Thirteen more to go.
It was much faster than any human could have done it, of course, but by the time I stumbled out of the stairwell passage on my brother’s penthouse floor, I was panting and my chest was heaving in a way that was most un-wolf-like of me.
I really needed to spend more time as a lycanthrope, that was for sure.
I shifted back into my human form, my shirt stained with sweat and still heaving a bit, just in time for the elevator door to ding. My brother and Cherry stepped out.
“Are you okay?” Cherry asked, looking as fresh as a flower.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said bluntly before lifting my leg to kick open my brother’s door.
Except my foot never made contact, because the door suddenly opened. The momentum of having nothing for my foot to collide against sent me slamming into the foyer of my brother’s place.
Ow.
I didn’t know which hurt worse, my pride or my cheek where it had slammed into the light-switch cover.
Thank God for our accelerated healing. If I’d ended up with a black eye from that, whoever had tried to attack Jackie would have succeeded in killing a VanMarche, because I would have died from embarrassment.
“Whoa, sorry there, Paulie. Didn’t realize?—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence because I whirled and pulled him into a hug, crushing him harder than I probably should have.
Twice! Twice now someone had tried to take him from me. I knew my baby brother had his issues, had shit he needed to work on, but he was a kind, artistic kid trying to find love and approval in all the wrong places.
“You’re okay,” I murmured, unable to stop the rumble radiating throughout my chest. Although I had never been in line to inherit the pack, I had the alpha designation just like Chris and Luther.
I still felt the need to protect, to cherish, to support, and raise.
And my inner wolf was extremely pleased to see our charge was not only alive, but seemingly quite well.
“Where’s your attacker?” Chris said, shoving past us. He’d never been much of a hugger, that one.
Now that I thought about it, only our mother and Jackson were huggers. Strange how that worked.
“Oh, right,” my younger brother said, gently extricating himself from my embrace.
Once we parted, I felt a bit strange. I straightened my shirt and hair as if I were arranging myself.
I didn’t quite have the verbiage for what I was feeling, but it was almost…
unprotected in a way? Like I’d exposed myself too much and now was pinwheeling to recover and be even-keel, always professional Paul.
But then I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. Cherry was staring at me with that enchantingly mismatched gaze of hers. But instead of piercing through me, or looking into the beyond, her expression was quite soft—kind, even.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to build the wall up.”
Build the wall up?
I didn’t know what she meant. I also didn’t have the time to ask her about it before she followed my brothers.
I had a lot of micro-theories floating around in my head of what had happened, including my brother’s attacker jumping through a window and running away like Batman, but none of them involved a darkly dressed, balaclava-clad figure hog-tied on the floor in Jackie’s living room with?—
“Are those deGiotto silk ropes?” I asked once my brain processed what I was seeing. “Why do you have those?”
“Why ask questions you don’t want the answer to?” Jackson asked, flopping down on the couch across from the assailant.
“How do you know those are Shibari ropes on sight?” Chris challenged at the same time.
Shit.
“He never said Shibari ropes,” Cherry commented, looking like she was having the best time. “Just the brand, deGiotto.”
“Shit,” Chris muttered.
“Ah, bet you guys didn’t know you’d be learning that about each other.
” She laughed as she traipsed over to the assailant and pulled the knot at the back of his head, releasing the silk bandana that had been gagging him, and then pulling off his balaclava.
“Also bet you thought your night was going to go a lot differently.”
“Fuck you!”
“Hey, I’m not the one tied up with kinky ropes right now, mate,” Cherry said, grabbing a cushion from the high-end, up-ended loveseat nearby and plopping down on it in front of the attacker, like he hadn’t just tried to kill my brother. She was either incredibly confident, or incredibly crazy.
Or psychic and seeing something I’m not.
“Kinky ropes?”
“Eh, you can search it on the internet later. We have more pressing matters to talk about, don’t we, pookie?”
“ Pookie? What the fuck are you on?”
“What I’m on is you trying to kill my friend here.
I’d like the general why you’d do it, who sent you, ya know, all the usual procedural stuff,” Cherry said with a shrug, pulling her phone out and flicking through apps until she clicked on a digital notebook.
I guessed even psychics needed a little help with their memory. Fair enough.
“What? Who said anything about killing anyone? I was just tryin’ to rob the place.”
That seemed pretty unlikely, and my suspicions were confirmed when Cherry leaned forward and booped the man on the tip of his strong, slightly crooked nose.
“If I tell you I’m a psychic and just about the last person you wanna lie to, will that help us skip all the rigmarole of you pretending you’re not an assassin?
” She paused, looking above the man’s head as if she was seeing something the rest of us couldn’t. “Huh, and a pretty novice one at that.”
“Novice!” he spat. “Who you callin’ a novice?”
“You, because you are one. Way too many rookie mistakes, ya know? But really, that works out well for you.”
The man’s gaze flicked to the rest of us, and while I was still catching up with everything that had just happened, I had enough wherewithal to really glare him down like he deserved.
It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that I was looking at someone who’d just tried to kill my brother. While what had happened at our house with Luther and our father seemed impossibly professional, meticulous, and even unsolvable, this was the complete opposite.
“How so?”
“Because if you were an elite assassin with a line of bodies as long as the sea is wide, we wouldn’t be able to help you work out a deal with the cops. But, since you’re all fresh as a daisy, I’m sure we can put a good word in, maybe get you off on a robbery charge.”
The assassin glanced from one face to another. Strange how Cherry talking to him made him seem real, like an actual person, rather than a boogeyman.
But if he was indeed a novice, then how was he connected to the murder of my father and older brother? Things weren’t adding up.
“And why would you do that?”
“Well, we wouldn’t, at least not right now. But if you were to just answer a few questions, help us figure out a few things, then we can pull some strings. Right, Paul? Chris?”
“Right,” I answered quickly.
“Uh, right,” Chris answered after a beat.
“What about me?” Jackson objected.
Cherry batted her eyes at him. “Would you like me to pretend that you would be the one talking to the cops or just save time acknowledging that you’re going to be waist-deep in some sort of shifter-affecting spirit once we’re done here?”
“Ah, good point, and if I may say, good idea.”
I would have groaned, but I withheld it for the sake of the assassin. Or rather, for the sake of the illusion that we were all functional adults. Somehow, I didn’t think the guy was buying it.
“Why would you do that?”