Chapter Fourteen #3
I let him go. A running wolf was not a threat. He was information. He would tell Declan what had happened here, and that was its own kind of currency.
The seventh and eighth were still circling. Caution had replaced whatever plan they’d started with. They moved with the careful, measured tread of men who had just watched five of their own hit the concrete and were recalculating the math in real time.
One feinted left. The other hung back, waiting for an opening that wasn’t coming. I had them both by the forearm and the throat when I caught movement at the far curve of the garage.
A man standing still. Not fighting. Not running.
Not doing anything except watching with the patient stillness of someone who had come to confirm rather than to win.
Lean frame. Angular features. Close-cropped dark hair going silver at the temples.
Pale gray eyes that held the glint of a man who had seen enough violence that it no longer registered as noteworthy.
Declan Morrow.
Our eyes met across thirty yards of blood-wet concrete.
The fluorescent tubes caught the silver at his temples and turned it the color of old nickel, and the expression that surfaced on his face was brief and satisfied—a smirk, nothing more, the curl of a mouth that had just gotten the answer it came for.
He held my gaze for one suspended second. Then he turned, unhurried, and walked toward the exit ramp with the measured pace of a man who had decided his work here was done.
I dropped both men, and then I was moving. Full run across the garage. Blood on my hands, shoulder still bleeding freely, the wolf still pushing me to shift and chase on four legs because four legs were faster than two and the sedan was already pulling away.
I hit the ramp at a pace that would have shattered human knees, the incline nothing against the momentum, and came out onto the sidewalk into gray Portland daylight with my lungs burning and the city noise hitting like a wall after the garage’s muffled acoustics.
The sedan was fifty yards west, already merging into traffic, accelerating toward the on-ramp that would take it onto the highway heading west.
West.
The direction Ashe had taken Jai and Grace.
The sedan’s plates were obscured—mud, or something applied deliberately—and the windows were tinted dark enough that the interior was a smear of shadow.
Declan was in the passenger seat. I saw the shape of him through the glass, the lean angle of his shoulders, and then the vehicle rounded the corner and was gone.
I stood on the sidewalk with blood running off my fingers onto the pavement. My shoulder had soaked through the jacket entirely now, the warm wet spread of it registering as a distant fact rather than a problem.
The wolf pushed against the inside of my skin, urging chase on foot, and the rational part of my brain—the part that still functioned when the rest of me was running on instinct—did the math cold.
I could not outrun a vehicle. My staged SUV was in the garage. Declan had a head start measured in minutes, not seconds. The highway offered three viable routes west, and Declan would take the one with the fewest cameras.
I pulled out my phone and called Ashe. The line picked up on the first ring. “Declan is mobile,” I said. “Heading west. Dark sedan, plates obscured. He’s on your vector.”
“I have it.” Ashe’s voice came through clean. No hesitation.
“That’s not good enough.” Blood dripped off my knuckles onto the screen.
I watched it bead and slide. “Use the secondary route. The back access road to the estate. Don’t stop for anything.
If he’s behind you, lose him before the tree line.
If he’s ahead of you, turn around and take the coastal route. Do not bring him to the estate.”
“Understood.”
I terminated the call. The screen was smeared red. I wiped it on my ruined jacket and kept moving.
The staged pack SUV was where Ashe had left it—black, nondescript, the kind of vehicle that disappeared into traffic by design rather than accident.
I got behind the wheel with blood on my hands and my shoulder still leaking freely down my arm, and the leather seat absorbed the wet without comment.
The engine caught on the first turn. I pulled out of the garage heading west, jaw set, hands steady on the wheel despite the split knuckles and the warm slick of blood between my fingers.
The cleanup team was already en route to the garage. The video feeds from the building’s internal cameras had been flagged for wipe thirty seconds after the first howl registered.
Every contingency I’d planned for and hoped not to need was now running in parallel, and the weight of it settled across my shoulders with the heft of something I had been carrying for longer than I cared to admit.
I merged onto the highway and calculated where Declan’s sedan would be when the on-ramp delivered me to the westbound lanes. The math was not comforting.
He had three minutes, maybe four. Enough to establish a lead that would require pushing the SUV past speeds that attracted attention, which meant police, which meant complications I did not have time for.
The wolf paced behind my ribs. The dominance pressure had banked to a steady hum rather than the white-hot conflagration of the garage, but it was still there, still live, still pushing me to drive faster than the vehicle was designed to go on a public road in daylight.
I did not let it. Control was not something I practiced. It was something I was. The certainty settled into my chest as the city began to thin around me. Not a resolution. Not a vow. Something simpler and more fixed: the fact that I was not going to let Declan Morrow get between me and my mate.
The word had weight. It had always had weight. But standing in a garage full of blood and broken men had crystallized it into something that lived below thought, below instinct, in the place where the oldest parts of me made decisions that the civilized parts merely executed.
The SUV carried me west. The shoulder wound had stopped bleeding, or the jacket had soaked through enough that the wet no longer registered as separate from the fabric. My knuckles had begun to stiffen. The split skin along the ridge of bone would need cleaning.
None of it mattered.
What mattered was the road ahead, and the fact that somewhere on it, Declan Morrow was driving toward the same destination with the confidence of a man who believed he had already won.
He was wrong.
I had known that since the moment Jai Flynn walked into my office with a baby from a cardboard box and looked at me like I was a problem he intended to solve whether I cooperated or not. Some truths arrived fully formed. This was one of them.
The wolf settled. The road opened. I drove.