Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Marcus
I come down the stairs and stop dead. Jessa’s up a ladder in the living room, on her toes to pin something to the molding, and the whole thing wobbles under her.
I cross the room and get my hands on her hips before she can fall. “What are you doing?”
“Setting up.” She keeps pinning. “For your birthday. The girls wanted to do something fun.”
The words take a second to sink in. My birthday. Today. “I haven’t done anything for it in years.”
The last one I celebrated was when my father and brother were still alive.
Daniel and I had gotten drunk and come home to a dinner Hannah had planned out.
A decade has passed since. My hands stay on her hips.
Ten years I’ve let the day go by without a word, and here she is stringing paper across my wall because two little girls asked her to. My throat goes tight.
“Then it’s about time.” She smooths the banner, and it drops open across the wall. “Mia and Bella wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
I steady her while she reaches for the next corner, my hands spanning her waist. “And you just went along with it?”
“Why not?” She glances down at me. “Everybody deserves a birthday.”
She steps down a rung, and I catch her, lifting her clean off the ladder. I set her back on the third rung so her chest sits level with my eyes. “So. The party. Is it for the girls, or do you want it too?”
She loops her arms over my shoulders, lacing her fingers behind my head. “Maybe I want it too.”
I lean in. “I’ve worked something out about you.”
“What?” Her breath catches, and I want to hear that sound again the second I’ve got her alone.
“You’re all bark.” My mouth’s almost at hers. “The second you let me in, you went soft on me.”
Her cheeks flush. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“I do.” I brush her lips. “Right now I’d rather have you.”
I kiss her slowly, and she lets me, her fingers tightening in my hair. Then a pair of gagging noises breaks it apart. Mia and Bella are in the doorway, balloons bunched in their fists, faces screwed up.
“The two of you have the worst timing,” I tell them.
“You can’t do that here,” Bella says. “We’re decorating.”
I turn, and Jessa’s arms slide down to circle my shoulders from behind. She’s still up on the rung, me standing between her knees, and she rests her chin on the top of my head, content to stay.
“All right.” I look at the girls. “What’s the plan? What do I get?”
“We’re baking a cake.” Mia bounces on her toes. “Adrian’s taking us to the store for the stuff. And we need more balloons because Bella popped all of them.”
“I did not.” Bella rounds on her. “They just exploded.”
Mia snickers. “You exploded them.”
“You did it too.”
They’re off, and Jessa cuts across the squabble between them. “You can buy more. What are we fighting about?”
“Lunch or dinner?” I ask. “I might not make it back midday.”
“You have to come home for lunch.” Mia plants her hands on her hips, fierce with it. “There’s a tea party at lunch, then cake and a real party at dinner.”
“So I get two parties.” I look between them. “Greedy little things.”
They nod, delighted with themselves, and I catch Jessa’s eye. “This whole thing’s for the two of you, isn’t it?”
She grins. “Don’t look at me. I’m only the cook.” She tugs me closer by the shoulders. “Anything you actually want to eat?”
“You tell me.” I catch her fingers and play with them. “You’re the one cooking it. We can order in, if you’d rather not cook.”
“No.” Her chin sets. “I want to cook.”
Her eyes go soft, and my gaze drops to her throat, to the faint mark my teeth left there in the night. I have to quit doing that, or one of these times I’ll sink my teeth in and make her mine for good. The wolf strains toward the thought, and I can’t pretend I hate it.
“Homemade pizzas,” I say. “The girls build their own.”
The two of them light up. Jessa laughs, low and pleased. “Now that’s a plan.”
“I’ve got things to sort out today anyway.” I squeeze her hand. “Starting with your lease. If you’re moving in—”
“Which we basically are,” she says.
“—then it needs canceling. I’ll handle it.”
“I can handle my own lease.”
I bring her knuckles to my mouth. “Consider it done.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Marcus.”
I head for the door. “When I’m around, why would you do anything alone?” I crouch to the girls’ level. “Have fun. Don’t leave Adrian’s sight, either of you.”
They promise. I kiss Jessa once more. She catches my collar and makes it last. “I’ll try to make lunch,” I tell her mouth.
“Where are you going?”
“My uncle thinks the old investigation files are sitting in one of the record warehouses.” I straighten. “I’ll take two of the men and look. Adrian will stay here with you.”
“Be careful.” She catches my sleeve. “I mean it.”
I kiss her again and go.
The house has gone domestic on me, and I don’t know when it happened. Jessa’s finally let me in, and now I get to watch her with her guard all the way down. Wanting it this badly should scare me more than it does.
The warehouse sits two, maybe three hours out, deep inside pack land.
My wolf paces the whole drive, and it’s been worse lately without a reason I can point to.
Every time I’m near Jessa, the animal claws at me, and in bed I have to fight it back off her, snapping and desperate.
Everywhere else it stays quiet. She’s the only thing that undoes it, and I don’t understand the grip she has on it.
It should worry me more than it does. An alpha with no hold on his own animal is a danger to everyone near him, and lately I’m barely holding it.
I let the thought I keep circling come all the way up. What if she’s my mate?
The wolf all but sings.
A bond would have hit me, though. I’d have known her the second I saw her ten years back.
Unless the wolfsbane buried it. Sloane’s dose, the same night I met Jessa.
Nobody’s studied what that poison really does, and if a controlled amount can drop a shifter, maybe it can smother a mate-bond too.
It would explain the silence back then and the pull I can’t fight now.
My hands tighten on the wheel. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes, and my stomach turns.
The track gives out at nothing. There’s no warehouse here, no fence, no gate, just scrub and a dead end.
I cut the engine and get out, turning a full circle in the dirt.
Nothing’s driven up here in weeks. The only building on the lot is a low concrete shell with its doors sagging open, and when I step inside, it’s been stripped to the studs, an old archive room gutted years ago.
Files, my uncle said. Warehouse, he said.
I scrub a hand down my face. He’s had me driving the better part of three hours on coordinates he pulled from memory, and this is what’s at the end of them.
Wrong lot, wrong side of the valley, knowing him.
I pull out my phone to tell him he’s sent me to the wrong place, and the call rings through to voicemail.
I try Adrian next. His doesn’t even ring. He knows better than to go dark with my family in his care, so I call Jessa, and her line dies to voicemail too. The dust hangs in the light around my boots while I stand there listening to nothing at all, and the irritation curdles into something worse.
Then I’m running.
The house sits dark and locked when I get back, both cars gone.
I made the drive from the warehouse in under two hours, foot to the floor, my head so full of them I don’t recall a mile of it.
She said she was after party supplies. The town’s only got three markets, so I hit the nearest and go through the doors at a dead run.
I’m down the first aisle before they’ve swung shut behind me, dragging the air over my tongue, hunting any thread of her.
The air comes back floor wax and cold meat, a hundred strangers layered under it, no trace of Jessa, none of the girls.
I take the place end to end at a near run, checking faces, doubling back on the rows I’ve cleared, and she isn’t here.
Back in the car my thumb slips off the screen because my hand won’t hold still. Adrian’s phone rings out. I try Cole, and he picks up on the second ring.
“Marc?”
“Something’s wrong.” I’ve got the engine turning over already. “Adrian’s not answering, and Jessa’s phone’s dead too.”
“Where do you need us?”
“The town markets. Bring Tomas.”
“On our way.”
The second market eats ten minutes I can’t spare. I scent my way down every aisle, past the checkouts, out into the front lot, and there’s nothing of them here either. By now I’m talking out loud, to no one, telling her pick up, Jessa.
Adrian’s car sits crooked near the doors of the third market when I swing in half out of my mind.
I’m out of my car before it’s stopped rolling.
Relief comes up stupid and fast, loosening something behind my ribs.
If he’s been parked here all afternoon with a dead phone in the console, I’ll drag him out through the window myself.
The car is empty when I reach it. The wind swings around, and every hair on my neck lifts at once. Under the gas and the hot asphalt, there’s something wet and wrong.
Blood.
It’s coming off the trunk. My heart’s slamming hard enough that I feel it in my teeth.
I get both hands under the lid, wrench it up, and the sound that tears out of me isn’t a human one.
Adrian’s crammed into the space, barely breathing, his throat opened along one thin red line.
His skin’s gone gray under the lot lights, his lips near white, and the mat beneath him is soaked black with everything he’s lost.
Not him. Not him too.