Chapter 1
Now
Alan Carman dragged his eyes open to a room flooded with sunlight. He’d always liked the light, but this time he flinched away from it. And then suddenly, she was there.
Tonya.
Officer Tonya Kappes sat by his bed, her face drawn with worry, her hands gripping his arm tightly.
“What’s wrong?” he rasped.
She blinked twice before speaking, her voice heavy with irony. “Nothing’s wrong except you’ve been running a temperature higher than a volcano for nearly a week.”
Huh.
Is that why he felt like an overbaked biscuit? God, even his skin seemed to crackle when he moved. Thankfully, she brought him water, and he drank from the cup greedily.
Flashes of memory returned to him.
He’d been abducted right in the courthouse parking lot. Then that damned cage and all the who-knew-what that had been shoved into his arm.
Evil Einstein and that cougar bitch. She had been the worst. Einstein had just looked at him like a science project, but that bitch had sat and stared at him.
Hours upon hours just like a fucking cat, and she hadn’t said a word.
At least not English words. There’d been weird chants and strange potions shoved down his throat.
And all the while, he’d felt the caress of her like slime on his skin.
And then…
Oh, hell. “Did I shift?”
Tonya’s gaze slanted away. “Sort of.”
He looked at her face, seeing the stark fear that she tried to hide.
And then he remembered the rest. The prickly agony of fur spiking out of his skin.
Not in a regular way, but in patches. The horror of a nose and mouth elongated.
Teeth that were sharp and irregular inside his mouth.
And the fever. He remembered the fever sapping his strength and the bitch hissing in his ear when he was too weak to move.
And he remembered how much he hated her.
“So I’m a freak now,” he said as he looked at his arms before him. Same bones, but the skin was patchy with dark spots. Same hands except the knuckles were larger, the fingers blunter.
“No!” Tonya said, gratifyingly vehement.
“It’s okay. I was one already, though in a different way.”
She turned to look at him, her blue eyes laser bright. “What do you mean?”
He meant a lot of things, none of which he could process or explain right now. “How’d you find me?”
“Mark turned on your phone. Used the GPS.”
Right. Good idea. But… “Why’d it take a week?”
Silence.
He looked at Tonya, and a familiar ache settled into his chest. Good God. He’d been gone for a week, trapped in that cage while Einstein experimented on him. He’d missed two court dates and at least one Gladwin pack meeting. And in all that time…“You guys didn’t even realize I was missing.”
She swallowed. “Carl got a text saying you had met someone. That you’d be gone for a while.”
“Because I’m so irresponsible that I disappear for a week without finding a replacement, without emailing everyone at least twice. Without—”
He’d been covering the Gladwin clan’s paperwork almost since he could read. His father had never been happier than when Alan announced the intention of becoming a lawyer. The Gladwins needed a lawyer in the family because good ones cost too damned much.
So he’d gone. He’d studied. And he’d become his brother’s right-hand man for everything that the shifters were too twitchy to deal with. Paperwork. Court filings. Hell, he even did the taxes. Alan handled all the details of living in this modern age.
And no one had fucking realized he’d been missing.
“I’m sorry. We’re all really sorry,” she said.
Yeah. He got that. Except sorry wasn’t cutting it. Fury itched right beneath his skin. A red haze of hatred rose up from his gut and choked off his words. Tonya was saying she was sorry. Tonya, the woman he’d loved since he was ten, was apologizing for not noticing him.
Like that was fucking unusual.
“Get out,” he said. Except it didn’t come out in cold, clipped tones. It wasn’t his precise, businesslike way. No, the words were snarled, the meaning ripped from his heart and thrown at her face.
“Alan—”
“Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
Carl would have blustered at him. Becca, Carl’s fiancée, would probably pat his hand and offer to get him some pie. Tonya, however, was a straight line in his mind. No bullshit, no fudging. She’d screwed up. They’d all screwed up, but she took the brunt of his rage because she was here.
“If you ever want to talk, just call me,” she said as she straightened up. “Day or night.”
He glared at her. “Not going to happen.”
She dipped her chin, and her short honey-blond hair brushed over her eyes. He didn’t know if it was an apology, an acknowledgment, or if she just had that much trouble looking at the freak he’d become. Whatever it was didn’t matter. After a moment, she stepped out of the room and was gone.
Six hours later, he was wide awake in his bed.
It was night, the floor was quiet, and the nurses gossiped in low tones down the hall.
Thanks to Becca he had a change of clothes.
Thanks to Carl’s visit an hour after Tonya’s, he had a good idea of just how bad everyone felt for not realizing he’d been abducted.
Somehow that didn’t mean jack shit to him.
Now it was night, and he was dressed.
He snuck out of his room and slipped down the stairs. Ten minutes later, he was hotwiring a motorcycle. He’d never stolen so much as a kiss from anyone, but he was stealing this Harley.
When he roared away, he relished the throb between his thighs and nursed the hatred in his soul. He couldn’t deal with the Gladwin grizzlies. He refused to think about a single one of the ungrateful, self-absorbed bastards. Instead, he focused on the cat bitch.
He was going to kill her.
He was going to rip her heart from her chest, then laugh as the light died from her eyes.
And he was going to do it alone.