Chapter 1 - Cillian
The sun shone in through the large window, highlighting the gorgeous day outside as spring came to a close and summer began to emerge.
The big problem was that it made it nearly impossible to focus on the meeting Camden was trying to hold. Cillian listened to his alpha droning, but his eyes kept straying away from Camden and back out to the sky and its stunning blue hue, so he really only heard every other sentence.
“Anyway, that’s about it,” Camden said after what felt like an eternity.
Cillian pulled his attention back away from the window and to his boss.
“Any questions?” Camden asked.
Franco, Jasper, and Cillian all shook their heads. Based on the slightly glazed expression on each of their faces, Cillian hadn’t been the only one struggling to focus at the moment. Camden looked at each of them and sighed, rolling his eyes.
“Have you guys been paying attention at all?” Camden asked.
“Not in the slightest.” Cillian flashed Camden a grin, which was returned by an exasperated stare and a magnificent eye roll from the alpha. Cillian shrugged. “You asked.”
“Just go do your jobs,” Camden said. “And if you forget any of the stuff I just told you, then that’s on you.”
The other three nodded, but no one made a move to leave at the moment.
“Are you going to help me train tonight, Cillian?” Jasper asked.
Ever since they rescued the women from the Ironbrand pack, Jasper had been training them in self-defense, giving them tips and techniques for them to use to get out of thorny situations.
Over the last couple of months, Cillian had stepped in and begun helping, with the classes seeming to get more popular by the week.
Cillian thought for a moment, considering for the briefest of moments to check his mental calendar. It didn’t take long, considering how empty it was.
“Yeah, I should be good for that,” Cillian said, kicking back. He put his feet on Camden’s desk. Camden scowled. Cillian grinned and didn’t move his legs. “It’s not as though there’s a whole lot for us to do right now. Things have been quiet ever since the Lucas debacle.”
“There’s always administrative work,” Camden pointed out. “You know, the job that you’re supposed to be doing instead of resting your dirty shoes on my desk.”
“They’re not dirty,” retorted Cillian, laughing when Camden finally shoved Cillian’s feet back down to the floor.
“I don’t care,” Camden groused. “I don’t want them on my desk.”
“Does anyone else think it’s almost dull?” Franco asked. “Not in a bad way, but man, it’s a bit quiet. I’m used to more excitement.”
“Joys of being retired,” Cillian said. “We actually get to breathe instead of having to go from one mission to the next to the next.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference between that and bored,” Franco pointed out. “I don’t know. It just feels unnatural, like we should be doing something.”
Cillian didn’t respond, but he understood what Franco meant.
They had been trained for years to follow the mission.
Having an open schedule now felt almost like they were committing an egregious crime.
It didn’t help that all of them preferred having something to do, something active that didn’t involve sitting in the pack house, listening to Camden drone on.
That restlessness that spread through him whenever he was idle for more than a couple of days was what had convinced him to help Jasper with training the women who used to be under Alpha Sier’s thumb in the Ironbrand pack.
Granted, it had other perks as well. Some of the women there were very easy on the eyes.
His phone rang. Glancing down, he blinked at the name. Isaac. One of his team members from his time with the Onyx Team, before he joined up with Camden and the others. His smirk slipped, then melted away entirely. He hadn’t spoken to Isaac in years. If he was calling, it was bad news.
“Gonna take this,” he grunted, pushing himself up to a standing position and slipping out of his seat.
“You good?” Franco asked, frowning, his head tilted.
“Yeah.” Cillian waved him off and disappeared into the hall. Once the door was closed and he was out of earshot, he answered the call. “Isaac?”
“Cillian,” Isaac’s gruff but friendly voice sounded through the phone, but Cillian didn’t miss the slight edge to the words, some tension that others might have missed but that he picked up on thanks to years of working with the man. “Been a while.”
“No kidding. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
There was a pause. Cillian waited, listening to his old teammate’s breathing on the other end of the line. Something about Isaac’s tone set him on high alert. He stiffened, his hand gripping the phone tightly.
“Isaac?” Cillian said.
“Yeah, sorry. Just not a pleasant topic. You remember that group up north? The ones who called themselves the Night Pack?”
It took a moment for Cillian to respond.
Not because he didn’t remember the Night Pack—he doubted he would ever forget them, not after everything they had done—but because he hadn’t expected to hear about them ever again, despite the fact that they had a permanent residency in his thoughts.
His fingers around the phone clenched, grasping tight.
“Hard to forget. What about them?” he asked.
One of Cillian’s first missions when he was in the military had been to go after the Night Pack, a group of shifters who had wanted to take over as many packs as possible, using whatever tactics they could.
They had killed hundreds of innocents during their rise to power.
Eventually, Cillian’s crew had been sent to dispatch them.
But somehow, the Night Pack got word of the attack ahead of time, and some of them had managed to get away before the attack.
Cillian’s group had killed the leader, and the Night Pack had vanished, but Cillian had never forgotten that some of those bastards had gotten away.
It still gnawed at him—some of the Night Pack slinking into the dark while the rest got what they deserved was one of the few big regrets in his life.
During his reconnaissance for that mission, he had gone through the town that the Night Pack had taken over, talking to some of the locals.
He’d never forget the terror on their faces.
The women had blanched whenever he had mentioned them, and he hadn’t missed the way some townsfolk had unconsciously prodded at bruises or cuts on their bodies when Cillian made inquiries.
It had been one of his first missions, and it had never left him.
Although he tried to keep it hidden—it wasn’t the type of thing he wanted strangers or even some of his friends to see—he had a dark side hidden behind his casual demeanor and quips.
If he had the opportunity, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill every single one of the Night Pack for what they had done. They deserved nothing less.
“One of the ones who got away has crawled out of the woodwork,” Isaac said. “Dustin. Got word that he was spotted near the Redwood Pack. You settled in Silverrose, right? That’s not too far away.”
“It’s not.” In fact, it was only a couple of hours from here.
Cillian began to think. He vaguely remembered what Dustin looked like.
It wouldn’t be too hard to go over there and see if Dustin knew anything about where the other Night Pack members might be.
And, after Cillian got some answers, he’d make sure that Dustin could never hurt anyone ever again.
A grin flicked across his face. After all these years, he might actually be able to finish off the Night Pack, to make them pay for everything they had done.
“I’m worried about what it might mean,” Isaac said, drawing Cillian back to the conversation.
“How so?” Cillian asked.
“I want to know why now,” Isaac explained after a moment.
“I’ve been getting rumblings, and not just about Dustin.
This is just the first time I’ve heard of something one of us can do something about.
From my sources, Dustin is asking around and trying to recruit for ‘something big.’ I don’t think he picked now to show his face by coincidence.
My guess is he might be planning something. ”
I have a funny feeling I can make him give some answers, Cillian thought.
Already, he was plotting the fastest way to Redwood.
Would it be easier to shift and run there?
Or take a car? Would he need to get a hotel room?
Maybe. How long would he be gone? That depended on how many names he wrung out of Dustin.
If the Night Pack was trying to make a move, he was going to stop them before they could cause any damage.
He was going to get a savage satisfaction out of tearing Dustin and any other Night Pack member he came across limb from limb.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Cillian grunted.
“You want some backup?” Isaac asked, and Cillian couldn’t miss the eagerness in his old colleague’s voice. “I’ve been itching to settle the score with those assholes.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to do anything yet,” Cillian said.
Isaac laughed. “Liar. I know you. You’re already plotting the fastest way to get to Redwood, aren’t you?”
“I’m neither confirming nor denying that,” Cillian said.
Another laugh, but Isaac didn’t press. “Let me know if you want help, Cil,” Isaac said after a long moment. “But either way, I hope you teach those fuckers a lesson.”
“I plan on it.”
Cillian hung up. He stared down at his phone for a long minute, considering.
After all this time, he had never expected to have the opportunity to finish off the Night Pack.
It had haunted him for years that some of them had gotten away.
He had researched the names of the ones they knew had escaped, but had always come up blank.
For the first time, he might have a way forward.
There was a chance he could put something that had always eaten at him to bed.
Was it too risky, though? There were any number of ways this could go wrong. He’d always been a bit on the impulsive side, and this felt like another time when he was jumping head-first into a problem he should deliberate further on.
Those thoughts were barely out of his head when he realized with a jolt that he was already running through a mental checklist of what he’d need for his self-assigned mission.
“Everything all right?”
Cillian turned to see Franco and Camden walking up to him.
“It’s fine,” Cillian said, tucking his phone into his pocket.
He glanced outside, trying to figure out his next words carefully, still reeling from the phone call.
For a moment, he debated telling his friends the truth.
They would understand. They would also insist on helping.
Something about this mission, though, made him want to keep it private.
This didn’t have anything to do with them.
It was something he wanted to take care of on his own.
“Look, there’s something I need to take care of,” Cillian said. “I’m going to need to take a few days off.”
Franco and Camden looked at one another, eyebrows raised in silent bemusement.
“All right,” Camden said, drawing out the two words, making them almost a question, inviting Cillian to step in and elaborate.
He didn’t.
“Thanks,” Cillian said. “Tell Jasper I’m not going to be able to help with training tonight after all. I’m heading out of town.”
“And I’m guessing you aren’t going to tell us why or where you’re going?” Franco asked.
Cillian flashed him a grin. “See? I knew there were some brains somewhere in there.” He clapped Franco on the back, winking and strutting past them out of the pack house.
As he walked away from the pack house and toward his home to shove clothes into a suitcase, his smile began to fade, that jovial demeanor he tried to maintain around others beginning to slip away, replaced by a cold rage as he began to plot out his next move.
The first step was finding Dustin and seeing if he had any information on the other members of the Night Pack.
He also needed to find out why he had shown up now after years of silence.
After which, he’d make sure that Dustin wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again.
Then he’d hunt down any names that he scrounged from Dustin. Rinse and repeat.
They had gotten away from him once already. He wasn’t going to let it happen again. He wasn’t going to let them restart their old tricks. Not when there was something he could do about it.