Chapter 12 #2
Peter started. Did he just hear a soft Irish accent cutting through the growl? The same Irish accent haunting him for the last nineteen hours?
Strong fingers dug into Peter’s shoulders. “Damn it, man. Did you say Yolanda?”
“O’Connell?” The name fell from Peter’s lips. The accent. The name. “You’re O’Connell, aren’t you!”
The man leapt to his feet, fluid and fast. He flung his gaze around the room, dragging trembling, bloody hands through tangled black hair. “Shit. They’re not here!”
Peter climbed to his own feet, staring at the naked man. He raised his gun. Pointed it at the man’s bare chest. “Tell me who the fuck you are now!”
“Look around you, Peter,” the man snapped, ignoring his order. “Your sister. She’s gone.”
Peter closed his finger firmer on his trigger. “Good. At least she’s safe from you.”
Those grey eyes turned cold. “But not from your partner.”
“What do you mean, my partner?”
“The blonde. Slight German accent? How long she been your partner for?”
Peter’s chest tightened. “Why?”
“She’s a plant. I’m guessing she’s been playing you from the start.
” O’Connell stepped forward, completely mindless of the fact he had a blood-oozing bullet wound in his chest and a loaded Glock aimed straight at it.
“Yolanda Vischka works for the very man I’ve been trying to save your sister from! ”
Peter’s mouth turned dry. He shoved the Glock’s barrel harder to the man’s chest, punching the raw flesh of the wound with its metal tip. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
O’Connell’s lip curled and his grey stare flicked over Peter’s body. “I can smell her on you. She’s marked you as her own. She’s touched you just about everywhere.”
Peter’s eyes widened and he bit back a curse, blistering guilt surging into his gut.
Christ. How did the man know? Another surge of guilt crashed over him and he choked back a groan.
What had he been doing all day? Trying to find his sister, or letting a woman he barely knew control his actions?
His heart squeezed, as if a force stronger than the creature he’d fought was trying to rip it from his chest. “What the fuck are you?”
Hand a blur, O’Connell snatched Peter’s gun from his grip before he could react. “The same kind of monster after Regan. A werewolf.” His stare turned dark. Dangerous. “And if I don’t go after her now, Nathan Epoc will kill her before you can draw her face into your mind.”
Peter stood, frozen. For exactly one second.
He spun on his heel and sprinted across the room, heading for the door.
A dark blur whipped over his head, a gush of displaced air sucked at the hair on his crown and suddenly O’Connell stood between Peter and the door, snatching his arm in a brutal, inescapable grip. “No. You haven’t a hope. Only I can take Epoc out.”
Peter glared at him, tugging against his hold. “Get the fuck out of my way.”
O’Connell’s eyes flashed silver. “Don’t be an idiot. I almost killed you.”
“Get. The fuck. Out of my way.”
Those eyes shimmered silver again before, hands raised to his shoulders in a display of surrender, his right still gripping Peter’s gun, O’Connell stepped aside.
Peter tore through Rick’s house, his chest growing tighter with each pounding step.
Fuck! Reggie? Yolanda? Every second of the day ripped through his head in multi-colored, sickening detail.
Yolanda’s arrival, her seduction, her supposed vulnerability, his stupid, stupid capitulation to the power she held over his body, his hungry longing for every inch of her, despite his suspicions.
He’d thought there was something wrong about her from the beginning, but his growing desire for her had taken control. Lust and his desperate desire for her to be something she clearly wasn’t. Bloody hell! Could he be that stupid? That lonely?
Fuck, Reggie. I’m sorry…
He burst through the front door, staring wildly up and down the night-shrouded footpath. Empty. He spun about, sprinting to his car, hope and fear crashing over him, through him.
It sat, exactly where he’d parked it. Locked. Empty. No Regan. No Yolanda. Nothing.
Snapping about, he stared up the street again, pulse thumping in his neck, blood roaring in his ears. Where was his sister? Where was Yolanda? An icy fist squeezed his heart, his throat. “Reggie?”
“She’s gone. Your partner’s taken her to Epoc.”
Peter spun around and glared at the man standing behind him. Cold fury and burning guilt consumed him. “Where is she?”
Hooded, angry grey eyes bored into him. “I told you. Vischka’s taken her to Nathan Epoc.”
“Give me my gun,” Peter demanded. “I’m going after them.”
“You don’t have a ch—”
“She’s my sister, mate,” he snarled through gritted teeth, cutting O’Connell short. “I’m going after her.”
“You’ll be killed before you get past the gate.
” O’Connell shook his head again, his pale torso almost ghost-like in the engulfing shadows of the night.
“What is it with you Thomases? Didn’t you hear me say werewolf?
Didn’t you just spend the last fifteen minutes fighting to stay alive as one tried to kill you? ”
Peter stared hard at the man, keeping his voice low, controlled.
“That one being you.” He stepped forward, clenching his fists to stop jabbing a finger into O’Connell’s chest. “Now listen to me, mate. She’s my sister.
My sister. I’m not going to trust her life to someone, something, who just tried to kill me.
” His knuckles cracked and he shook his own head.
“You obviously don’t have one or you’d understand. ”
Dark rage rolled over O’Connell’s features, before—with a blink—his grey eyes grew lost, swimming with a grief so intense Peter found them almost too painful to look at. “I do,” he whispered, shoulders slumping slightly. “I did.” He took a step back. “And I understand completely. Let’s go.”
Gut churning, Peter narrowed his eyes. “What? Am I to trust you now? A man standing naked in the street with a bullet wound in the heart, who only seconds earlier tried to tear my throat out?”
The man gave him a wry grin, his pale, muscled body already taut and sprung for action.
“I plan on becoming your brother-in-law someday soon,” he answered, holding Peter’s gun out to him, butt first—an offering of peace.
Of partnership. “If we both live through the night. Does that help make up your mind?”
Muffled voices wafted through her head. Indistinct. Distant. Like the speakers spoke through cotton wool from the other side of the world.
Awareness returned slowly. A slow incoming tide bringing with it a world of pain. Dull pain in her jaw. Hot, angry, terrible pain in her shoulder.
Regan moaned, her head lolling to the side. A low roar vibrated through her aching body and she shifted, her hip grinding against something cold and hard.
Vivid images ripped through her mind and she snapped open her eyes, staring in horror at the bare white, metal wall before her. The sound of an engine changing gears filled her head and fear sank into her gut. Shit. She was in a van.
Shit! Declan! Peter!
The vehicle hit a pothole in the road and she bounced, head and shoulder and hip smacking the metal floor in a sharp series of agonizing thumps.
Fuck, that hurts.
Warm liquid seeped from her shoulder and down across her chest. Blood. Her blood.
Anger rolled through her and she tried to move.
Slicing pain cut into her wrists and ankles and she bit back a curse. Cable-ties. The blonde bitch had cable-tied her. What the hell was she to do now? How was she to get back to Declan? To Peter? Where the fuck was the blonde taking her?
Epoc.
The name floated into her head and she sucked in a swift breath.
Oh, no.
“So you are awake, yes?”
The woman’s voice came from Regan’s left and she twisted on the van’s floor, pain shooting into her shoulder.
The blonde looked at her from the passenger seat, her face composed, the fingers of her right hand loosely gripping a Glock nine-millimeter.
Her eyes however, looked uneasy. “I thought I may have hit you too hard.”
Regan glared at her, struggling against the thin strips of plastic cutting into her wrists and ankles. “Untie me, bitch and I’ll show you what a hard hit feels like!”
“Told you she had spirit.”
A low chuckle followed the accented words and Regan’s blood froze, her heart leaping into her constricting throat.
The van’s driver swung his head around, leering at her from behind the wheel, his red-gold eyes glowing with a hunger Regan recognized all too well.
God, no. No no no no.
“I’m so glad to see you again, lass,” McCoy drawled, lips stretching into a cold grin, long, sharp teeth glistening in the dim dashboard light. “We’ve got some unfinished business to attend to, don’t we?”