Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
Sex with Reece was really freaking awesome.
Delainey almost hated to admit it, and she wasn’t sure she should feel bad about the fact that she and Reece had inaugurated just about every surface in the cottage with their newfound exercise. What Nico didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Still, she was going a bit stir-crazy. She and Reece were getting along well. Better than well, if she was honest.
Crazy good, really. Scary good.
Probably just because of the hormones. But there had been no progress on breaking the tether in the last several days. Every call Delainey had made to the coven, and one slightly disastrous visit, had ended with no breakthroughs.
She was starting to fear they might be bound together permanently, and a small part of her wondered if it would be so bad to be stuck with Reece.
She told that part of herself to shut the fuck up.
Even if she didn’t hate the grumpy werewolf, even if — fine, she admitted to herself — she maybe sort of liked him a little bit, in a totally physical “just for the sex” kind of way, it didn’t mean she wanted to be stuck within thirty feet of him for the rest of her life.
Thirty feet had seemed like a godsend after the manacles, but now, after nearly two weeks, it was another cage.
Delainey was sitting on a stool at the kitchen bar when Reece handed her a bowl of oatmeal prepared exactly the way she liked it, with cinnamon, brown sugar, and blueberries.
She hadn’t ever had to tell him. He observed, and then one day he made her breakfast. She was a simple girl.
She wasn’t going to complain about that.
But Reece noticed things. It was a little disturbing to know that he noticed her.
He was in his usual gray sweats and a worn black t-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders, barefoot on the cottage’s wood floor, his red hair damp from a shower and pushed back from his face.
“Has Cole heard anything back from Dawson yet?” she asked between almost-too-hot bites, blowing across the next spoonful before putting it in her mouth.
Reece was eating his own oatmeal. He grabbed her half-empty cup of coffee, refilled it from the pot with a bit of cream, and handed it back.
Okay, a girl could get used to this.
“I would have told you if I had,” he said. He leaned his hip against the counter across from her, the coffee pot still in his other hand, and took a sip from his own mug before setting the pot back on the burner.
The old Reece, the one she’d been dealing with before they started fucking, would have snapped that at her. But sex had mellowed Reece out a little bit.
Her too, if she was being honest.
The edges were a little softer. She didn’t know if it was because they were going at it like bunnies, or because, heaven forbid, they had gotten to know each other and this was like a relationship.
Nope. Absolutely not.
This was convenient during a forced confinement. The second the tether broke, they would each walk away with the satisfaction of knowing exactly what it felt like between them and move on with their lives.
You’re lying to yourself, a voice whispered in Delainey’s head, and she studiously ignored it.
She ate a few more bites of oatmeal while she thought, then tapped her spoon against the edge of the bowl. “What if we do a little investigating of our own?” she suggested.
“What did you have in mind?” Reece set his empty bowl in the sink behind him without turning around, the ceramic clinking against yesterday’s dishes.
It wasn’t a no, which was good. He had to be climbing the walls as well.
“We could go to the warehouse where Austin held Nico and Elise and see if we can pick up any hints about where he might be hiding these days, or if he had any friends.” It was definitely a long shot. More than a long shot, probably. It was a wild goose chase, but it would get them out of the house.
It was that or head into town and wander around Target for a few hours, and honestly, Delainey could go for either one.
“It’s been four months since Austin kidnapped them,” Reece pointed out.
“Almost five now. Any evidence will be long gone.” He crossed his arms over his chest, his default stance, the one that made his forearms cord with muscle and his shoulders look even wider than they already were.
He added, “That is pretty deep into Iron Runner territory.”
“Are you a chicken, wolfie?” She narrowed her eyes at him and watched the taunt land. Reece balked. He crossed his arms, and his jaw dropped open in affront.
“What are you calling me?” One corner of his mouth twitched upward despite himself.
“Bawk, bawk!” Delainey made a chicken sound. “You’re really telling me you don’t want to get the upper hand over a few Iron Runners? Are you really that afraid of them?”
It wasn’t wise to go into their territory in broad daylight and poke the beast, so to speak, but Delainey was so bored. She needed to do something.
“Any scent will be far too old to follow,” said Reece. “Do you want to scan for magical resonance and see if you can follow the trail?”
That was an odd thing for a werewolf to ask.
Maybe Reece spent more time around Elise than Delainey thought. But she didn’t tease him about it. If he was starting to soften on witches, that was probably a good thing for the future in general.
Not their future specifically, she hastily added that in her mind, because there was no future for them, and that was totally fine. That was what she wanted. She did not need Reece beyond, hopefully, the next few days. This thing needed to resolve itself, and soon.
They finished their breakfast and got into Reece’s car. Delainey wanted to drive, but he had held onto the keys like a wild man.
Too bad for him, his car was a push-to-start. Delainey ran for the driver’s seat before he realized what she was doing and was buckled in before he even touched the car. He glared at her from the outside.
She raised her eyebrows in challenge. Was he going to let her get away with this?
Yes. He stalked over to the passenger seat and got in.
“It’s my fucking car,” he said. His knees were jammed up against the glove box, since she was the last one who’d been a passenger, and at his height, he looked folded in half.
“So you’re going to enjoy the ride!”
It was a nice day out. She rolled the windows down so they could enjoy the breeze.
Late morning sun sat high and white over the foothills, and the air coming through the windows was warm enough that Delainey rested her elbow on the door frame, the wind pulling at her curls where they escaped her headband.
They didn’t pass any other pack members as they drove out of the territory, and Delainey was glad.
She didn’t need anybody reporting back on this little unauthorized mission.
Hopefully, they would come back with answers and be greeted as returning heroes, and not need to be rescued by her coven or his pack.
That would just be embarrassing.
Delainey was a fighter. She wasn’t Elise, who was a very skilled healer but quite weak when it came to aggressive magic. Delainey had fought beside Reece before and knew how skilled he was, how well they worked together.
If they ran into Iron Runners, they could handle it.
The warehouse looked a little pathetic in the harsh light of day. It was a long, low building with a flat roof, the kind of place that could have stored anything from auto parts to stolen goods, set back from the road behind a cracked asphalt parking lot where weeds had pushed up through the seams.
The area was run down, with broken windows on the side of the building and cracks in the foundation that the night had hidden when they all came to rescue Nico and Elise.
There were no cars in the parking lot, which Delainey took as a good sign, but she parked a block away just in case there were werewolves doing patrol.
No reason to make it easy for them.
She and Reece headed that way. They walked close enough that their arms nearly brushed. Delainey cast out her magical senses, trying to pick up on the resonance Reece had mentioned, but it was just a warehouse with nothing out of the ordinary.
They found a door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Reece tried to force it, but even his werewolf strength wasn’t enough to get them inside. The metal door sat in a steel frame bolted into the concrete, and it didn’t budge more than a quarter-inch when he put his shoulder into it.
“We’ll have to go around and look for an entrance somewhere,” he said.
Delainey shook her head and waved her hand at him. “Let’s see if I can handle this.”
She put her hand on the doorknob and sent a burst of magic into it.
With a bit more finesse, she would have used a lock-picking spell, but hers was more of the lock-breaking variety.
A bluish-gold glow flared around her fingers for a half-second.
She felt the mechanism shatter, and the door swung open.
She and Reece stepped inside. Delainey braced, waiting to hear an alarm go off somewhere, but there was none. It was pretty dim inside the warehouse, with only light coming in from the broken windows.
The windows were set high along the walls, just under the roofline, and the light they let in fell in dusty shafts that didn’t reach the floor; most of the space sat in a gray half-dark.
There were just as many boxes lining the concrete floor as there had been all those months ago, though someone had cleaned up the mess where they had slammed into boxes and fought Austin’s wolves.
Clearly the place hadn’t been standing empty for four and a half months.
“Do you hear anybody? Or smell them?” Delainey asked.
“People have been here,” Reece confirmed. His head was tilted at that canine angle she’d gotten used to, nostrils flaring as he worked through whatever catalogue of scents his wolf was sorting. “But I don’t know if any are here right now. Stay alert.”
That she would do.