Chapter Three
R afe had cooked in worse kitchens.
Field tents with half-burned stoves. Safe houses with nothing but a single pan and a knife that wouldn’t hold an edge. Apartments abandoned in a hurry, where the cupboards held more dust than food. He could adapt to almost anything.
Riley Quinn’s kitchen, though, tested him in a different way.
It wasn’t the lack of equipment, though that didn’t help. One decent pan. Two mismatched mugs. Utensils that had seen better decades. It was the space itself. Too small. Too quiet. Too loaded with fear that hadn’t yet bled out of the walls.
Behind him, Riley sat at the small table, wrapped around a mug of coffee like it was an anchor. She watched him without trying to hide it—not in the way of someone curious, but the way of someone cataloging exits, threats, changes in routine.
He didn’t blame her.
Dorian leaned against the counter, arms crossed, posture loose enough to read as relaxed if you didn’t know what you were looking at. He caught Rafe’s eye and tipped his head toward the cupboard.
“Pan’s warped,” he murmured.
Rafe snorted softly. “Of course it is.”
He cracked the eggs one-handed, grimacing when the movement pulled too sharply. Dorian noticed. Of course he did. But he didn’t comment. Brothers didn’t need commentary for things like that.
“So,” Riley said quietly, breaking the fragile silence. “You’re shifters.”
There it was. The fear in her tone that they feared.
Rafe turned the heat down and faced her, leaning back against the counter to take some of the strain off his side. He kept his voice level, calm. No sudden movements. No looming.
“We’re human,” he said. “And we’re not.”
Dorian huffed. “Great start.”
Rafe shot him a look and continued. “Then, yes, we’re shifters. Wolf shifters to be exact.”
Her breath caught. In fucking fear and it had his stomach turning.
“Wolves,” she whispered. “He—he is a wolf. He hurt me. A lot.”
The words hit him hard. Rafe had to fight his animal for control, demanding it stand down, not wanting to frighten their mate. “Take a breath, beauty. We will get to him soon. Just know that you are safe with us.”
“Safer than other beings on this planet if we’re honest,” Dorian said gently. “We are not like him, whoever he is. I promise you that.”
She smiled faintly at that, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders.
Rafe turned back to the stove before his instinct got the better of him. He stirred the eggs slowly, deliberately. The act grounded him.
“So,” Riley said hesitantly, though there was no missing the curiosity in her tone. “Where do you both fit into all of this?”
Rafe turned the heat down another notch and chose his words carefully.
“We work for an organization called E.S.E.,” he said. “Elite Shifter Enforcers. Think of us as shifter law enforcement. When one of us goes rogue—hurts people, ignores pack law, or decides they don’t answer to anyone—we’re the ones sent in to stop it.”
Riley nodded slowly. “So ... shifter police.”
“That’s the simplest way to think about it,” Dorian said. “Most shifters are born the way they’re meant to be—wolves, bears, lions, leopards. Old lineage. Natural ones.”
“And then there are hybrids,” Rafe added. “They’re new and very much not natural. Created by humans who think they can improve on what we are. Make something stronger. Easier to control.”
She was quiet for a moment, and Rafe left her to it, cooking steadily to give her space to process. He watched the way her eyes sharpened, how her focus narrowed instead of fracturing. She was observant. Had always been. That was why this had happened to her in the first place.
“This group you’re talking about,” she said finally. “They’re called Chimera, aren’t they?”
Rafe paused. “Yes. Had you heard of them before tonight?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course you were eavesdropping.” He and Dorian answered that with matching grins, entirely unapologetic. “No. Until the guy who showed up tonight to warn me mentioned them, I’d never heard the name.”
Before he could say more, his phone vibrated on the counter.
Victor.
Rafe picked it up and answered without ceremony. “Go.”
“The Leopards’ hacker has pulled more threads,” Victor’s voice came through low and clipped. “Basically Chimera’s funding is fractured. There are multiple routes but some of the money’s being diverted.”
Rafe’s jaw tightened. “Diverted where?”
“That’s the problem,” Victor said. “They are proving hard to find and these channels don’t belong to Chimera.”
Rafe glanced at Dorian, who would have heard every word thanks to his enhanced hearing and noted that his brother’s expression had gone still, eyes sharpening.
“Say that again,” Rafe said.
“Not all of this funding is getting to where it was supposed to,” Victor continued. “Someone’s trying to clean up messes before they’re seen. This isn’t about keeping Chimera alive. It’s about controlling the narrative.”
Rafe exhaled slowly. “Understood. We’ll be heading back soon.”
He noted that Riley flinched at that, but didn’t draw attention to it, and ended the call and set the phone down.
Riley was watching him closely now.
“That sounded bad,” she said.
“Yes,” Rafe agreed. “It is. It means that this might be a case of the two headed snake. It’s not just Chimera we’re after, but another actor in play.”
He plated the food as best he could and carried the plates to the table. Dorian took one without comment and passed the other to Riley.
“Eat,” Dorian said. “You look like it’s been a while between meals.”
She startled, then huffed. “That obvious?”
“To us,” Rafe said.
They ate in companionable quiet for a few minutes. The food was simple. Filling. Real.
Afterward, they cleaned up together, Dorian drying, Riley insisting on helping despite his protests, and took their coffee into the living area.
Rafe sat across from her, posture open, careful not to crowd.
“We need to ask you something,” he said.
Her shoulders tensed immediately.
He wished he could take it back.
But this was the job. And more than that, it was how you protected someone properly. You had to have all the information.
“What happened,” he said gently, “during the forty-eight hours he had you, and what is his name?”
The color drained from her face.
Her hands shook.
Rafe swore under his breath and leaned forward. “We can stop. You don’t have to—”
“No,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “I know you need to know. And ... I need to tell you. Hell, tell someone.”
She took a breath. Then another.
“I’ll tell you,” she said.
Rafe nodded, every instinct in him coiling tight as he prepared to listen.
And as soon as he had this bastard’s name, to hunt.
****
R iley didn’t start with the forty-eight hours.
She couldn’t.
Those memories were sharp glass and dark corners, and if she reached for them too fast, they would cut her open before she was ready. So, she began where the thread had first snagged—where everything had gone wrong long before blood and fear and locked doors.
“I have to start at the beginning,” she said quietly.
“And that is a shift I had in a clinic. As a medic, you can pick up shifts at private clinics if you are after a bit of extra cash, and I was. I signed up to a clinic I hadn’t worked in before.
I’d been contracted in for a short rotation—disaster relief after a severe weather event and was on the trauma stabilization team. ”
Rafe didn’t interrupt. Neither did Dorian. They sat still, present, the room held in a careful silence that didn’t press her to fill it.
“Halfway through my shift, there was a transport reroute due to the weather,” she continued. “It was a last-minute schedule change, and no real explanation as to why. For me, it was just a name added to the incoming patient manifest and a warning that he was ... unstable.”
Her hands twisted together in her lap.
“When they brought him in, I knew something was wrong almost immediately. His injuries didn’t make sense. Bones that should have shattered hadn’t. Muscle density that didn’t match his frame, and with what he had suffered, he should have died.” She swallowed. “At first I thought I was imagining it.”
She took a breath to calm herself.
“I tried to set his arm,” she said. “And it moved under my hands. Not just shifted—changed. Like the structure itself was ... rearranging itself into the right place.”
Her voice wavered, but she forced herself on.
“When he woke up, his eyes—” She shook her head. “Gleamed a pale blue like nothing I have ever seen before. Not light reflecting but almost as if they were emitting light.”
Rafe’s jaw tightened. Dorian’s fingers curled slightly, then stilled.
“He looked at me like I belonged to him,” Riley said. “Not gratitude. Not confusion. It was total and utter possession.”
She took a breath. “His name was Christian Bidois.”
Both men reacted to that, not visibly, but she felt it, the air in the room tightening.
They asked questions then. Calm ones. Clarifying ones.
“How long were you alone with him?” Rafe asked.
“About twenty minutes,” she said. “Longer than protocol allowed, but we were short-staffed and he was crashing.”
“Anyone else see what you saw?” Dorian asked.
She shook her head. “Not the bone movement. Not the eyes. A nurse noticed his vitals stabilizing too fast even for shifters, but she brushed it off.”
“Did he speak when he woke?” Rafe pressed, voice steady.
“Yes,” Riley said quietly. “My name. He knew it. I hadn’t told him, but he probably read it on my ID.” She swallowed. “He said it like he was testing how it sounded.”
Riley felt a surge of anger within her.
“I knew I had to report what I had seen, and my boss fired me for it,” Riley said.
“Not because he thought I was wrong—because what I described wasn’t on any list he was allowed to acknowledge.
He said if something like that existed, it would be controlled.
Filed. Accounted for. And if it wasn’t, then the problem wasn’t the thing I saw, it was that I’d seen it at all. ”
Her jaw tightened. “When I insisted, when I refused to amend my report, he terminated my contract. I didn’t lose my job for being wrong. I lost it for being inconvenient. He cited mental instability that effectively put my career on hold and said I should seek evaluation.”
She huffed a humorless breath. “That label follows you. Turns out it’s real useful for discrediting people.”
Rafe felt something dark and hot twist under his ribs. He kept his face neutral, but the wolf surged, offended on her behalf.
“Fucking bastard,” Dorian muttered.
After that, she told them about the fear. The sense of being watched. The shapes in reflections. The way her phone battery drained too fast. How she stopped sleeping, stopped trusting familiar streets.
“And then he took me from the parking garage of my apartment,” she said.
This time, she couldn’t keep her hands from shaking.
“Forty-eight hours,” she whispered. “He beat me. Dragged me from place to place. Told me I was his. That I’d been fated to him, his mate.” Her voice cracked. “I saw him shift. Fully. Into a massive wolf.”
She flinched despite herself.
“He is a grey wolf,” Dorian added, carefully. “That eye color you described—arctic blue—that’s a trait. These wolf shifters are not common, and that trait is very specific.”
She caught the brief look they shared—fast, loaded, and gone before she could read it.
Riley stared at them. “What? I saw that look. What are you not telling me?”
“We are the same,” Rafe said. “Grey wolves.”
Her stomach turned. Images surged unbidden—teeth, fur, glowing eyes. Her breath came shallow.
Dorian noticed immediately. He softened his posture, lowered his voice. “We won’t shift in front of you. Not unless you ask us to, or we need to protect you.”
She nodded, grateful.
“Did he threaten you with his wolf?” Rafe asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he...” Dorian swallowed hard. “Hurt you with his wolf?”
She nodded and pushed up her sleeves. Pale scars crossed her forearms, healed but ugly. She lifted her pant leg just enough to show the marks there, too.
The growl was immediate.
Low. Dangerous.
Both men’s eyes flashed, that same pale bright and lethal blue under the gray.
Riley tensed instinctively then realized that there was a difference. There were no flickers of insanity in their eyes as there were in Christian’s. That was very clear.
They stopped. Immediately.
“I’m sorry,” Rafe said at once. “We didn’t mean to scare you.”
She shook her head. “I was startled. Not ... petrified. Not like I was with him.”
Silence settled again.
“He called me his mate,” she said quietly. Their reaction this time was absolute. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“No,” Rafe said, sharp but controlled. “That’s not possible.”
“When I asked what that meant,” Riley said, “he said it meant that I was his, and no one else’s, whether I understood it or not didn’t matter.”
Dorian leaned forward slightly. “We’ll explain what that means in our world, just ... not yet. Keep going.”
She told them about escaping. About the neighbor who called the police. The report that went nowhere. How the mental illness notation poisoned everything she said.
“And when I realized he was circling back,” she finished, “I left. I sold what I could, packed what mattered, and I ran.”
Rafe looked at her like she’d done something extraordinary.
“You’re so brave,” he said simply.
“And strong,” Dorian added. “Stronger than most.”
The words warmed something she hadn’t even realized was frozen.
“We want you to come with us back to E.S.E,” Rafe said. “Let us keep you safe.”
Riley didn’t hesitate. “Where is it?”
“Near Spokane,” Dorian answered. “We’ll take a flight to Seattle, pick up our vehicle and drive there.”
Spokane, Washington. On the other side of the country. That sounded like a great place to be.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?” Dorian asked.
A flicker of her old self surfaced—sharp, stubborn, alive.
“I ran once,” she said. “This time, I want backup.”
Hope, fragile but real, settled in her chest.