Chapter 3
Chapter three
Warrick
Igot in my truck. Closed the door. Sat there.
Jasmine.
The scent of it was on my clothes, my hands, the air I was trying to breathe. My tiger thrashed against my ribs.
GO BACK. CLAIM. OURS. SHE’S OUR MATE.
Not yet.
My tiger growled. I ignored him. Not because he was wrong.
She was ours. Every cell in my body knew it.
I’d never been that certain about anything, not my survival, not my revenge, not my vow.
Nothing. But I’d seen her hesitate at the thought of talking to me, seen something dark behind her eyes when she’d said Coleman had actively discouraged her from going into his office.
A woman like that wasn’t going to be won by me walking back in there and announcing she belonged to me. She’d run.
I looked down at my hands on the steering wheel. Three of my nails had gone dark and hooked, leaving shallow scores in the leather.
Shit.
I forced them back. Flexed my fingers until they looked human.
The mate bond was old magic. Older than the gates. It didn’t negotiate, and it didn’t let go. But I was a hunter. And I knew something about patience.
I started the engine. I had work to do.
My office was in a strip mall off Route 71. Kassar Investigations. There was no signage on the door, just a listing in three databases that the kind of people who needed me knew how to search. Scott was at his desk when I came in. He looked up, his nostrils flared once, quick, then he blinked.
“You okay? You look like you got hit by a car.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where your jaw gets tight, and you’re grumpy as fuck. Usually means a case went sideways.” He leaned back in his chair. “How’d the Coleman interview go? The ex-girlfriend, Lewis, right?”
I moved past him to my desk, sat down, opened my laptop, and clicked on the Coleman file. “She confirmed he kept files at his home, off the main system. Didn’t have access to those records herself.”
“It at least corroborates what we have so far. She got any idea where he is?”
I didn’t answer right away. Scott’s voice had come from a long way off.
For a moment, I was back in the shelter.
She had scent-caught me before I’d registered her face.
Jasmine, cedar shavings, soft traces of wool.
My tiger, who had not shut up in fifteen years, had gone silent.
And one word had come up out of that silence, slow and inevitable, like a shape surfacing out of deep water.
MATE.
It felt like the whole floor had dropped out under me. I remembered gripping the doorframe as her fucking gorgeous face turned toward me. Then I came back to the office the way you come back from an anesthetic. Scott was still waiting for an answer, his pen turning between his fingers.
“No,” I said slowly. “She’s been out of Coleman’s orbit for nine months. Made a clean break.”
“Yeah? Anything else?”
Yes, she’s my mate. Mine.
“She was careful,” I said instead. “About the personal side. She shut it down with a clean, ‘It wasn’t working out.’ End of story.”
“Ex-girlfriend doesn’t want to talk about her ex. That’s not exactly groundbreaking.”
“Yeah.” I stared at my screen, thinking.
Scott was watching me. He was good at watching; it was half the reason I’d hired him. “She made an impression on you, then?”
I scowled at him, knowing he was picking up on my emotions through my scent.
He grinned back at me, then held his hands up in a peace gesture.
“Okay, so I have Alcott plus three others so far, two women, one man. Coleman used the same playbook every time. Builds trust, gets into their finances, bleeds them dry. You know if we can nail this guy, it could be a big payday for us.” Scott was all about the big paydays.
Sarah Alcott had walked into this office three weeks ago with a folder of bank statements and hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
Coleman had managed her investment portfolio.
By the time she’d figured out what was happening, he’d drained most of it and redirected funds into accounts she didn’t control.
He’d taken out lines of credit in her name, buried the evidence under layers of paperwork designed to make her feel stupid for asking questions.
She wanted us to find documentation. Evidence.
Something she could take to a lawyer and use to get her money back, and make sure Coleman couldn’t do it to anyone else.
“Alright.” I leaned back in my chair. “Next steps, we’ll need to run Lewis through the standard background. If she’s going to be a witness, we need to know her credibility holds up. Previous addresses, employment history, education, any arrests.”
The tiger stretched inside me. He was settled now, content to let me work if it meant we found out more about our mate.
Mate. How the fuck, after all these years, had I found my mate?
And a human, at that. What the hell was I supposed to tell her?
“Hey, so don’t freak out, but I’m a Shifter from another world, I change into a tiger, and, oh yeah, we’re destined to be together forever. Wanna go to the movies tonight?”
I shook my head. This whole thing was so fucked up.
“I’ll get on it. You eat today?” Scott asked without looking away from his screen.
“Yes.”
“Liar.” He opened his desk drawer and tossed me a protein bar. It landed next to my keyboard. “You forget to eat when you’re on a case. Then you get mean. Meaner,” he corrected. “You’re already baseline mean.”
I unwrapped the bar. He wasn’t wrong. “I’m not mean. I’m efficient.”
“You made the FedEx guy cry last week.”
“He was about to leave the package in the rain.”
“It was a drizzle, Warrick. A light misting. The man was doing his job.” Scott shook his head, but he was smiling. “This is why I handle the client calls. You’d have us out of business in a month.”
“You handle the client calls because you like talking. I don’t.”
“I like billing. Talking is how you get to billing.” He laced his hands behind his head. “Speaking of which, Alcott’s retainer runs out at the end of the month. We’re going to need to have a conversation with her about extending if this thing goes much longer.”
Always the money. Scott tracked our billable hours the way I tracked a target: with focus and without sentiment. It was one of the things that made him good at what he did.
“The case will be solid before then,” I said. “She won’t need to extend. She’ll need a lawyer.”
“A lawyer who’ll refer more clients to us, ideally.” He pointed at me with his pen. “That’s how a business grows, Warrick. Happy clients tell other people. It’s called networking. It’s what normal business owners do.”
I sighed, pulling up a browser to start my searches on Lucy. “I’ll take your word for it.”
I finished the background that evening. I read it over at the cabin, sitting at the table by the window with a beer going warm beside me.
Lucy Ann Lewis. Twenty-six. Born in Champaign. Graduated from Champaign Central High School—honor roll. After that, there was a string of jobs starting a month after graduation: hostess, retail, receptionist at a medical billing office. All in Champaign. All full-time.
I noted it and kept reading. After the Champaign jobs, she’d surfaced on a vet tech course, but dropped out with six months to go.
I checked; it overlapped with the end of her relationship with Coleman.
Then nothing until Millbrook, six months ago, and her shelter job.
She had a one-bedroom apartment on Birch Street, second floor.
No social media presence; no Instagram, no Facebook, nothing.
For a twenty-six-year-old woman, that was unusual.
I took a swig of the beer.
Outside, the trees were going dark. Friday was six days away. Six days until I’d drive to Starved Rock and press my hand against dead stone and wait for nothing.
The mission. The gate. The vow I’d made fifteen years ago in the dark: I will come home. I will destroy Torek. I will finish what my father started.
That vow was supposed to be the only thing that mattered.
I opened a new document and built a timeline, Coleman’s known victims on one axis, dates and dollar amounts on the other.
Alcott, eighteen months. The man in Peoria, fourteen months.
The two others Scott had found, both shorter engagements, both cleaned out.
Coleman worked them in sequence, overlapping slightly.
He was methodical, patient. A predator who understood that trust was a long game.
I checked the notes again. One thing didn’t sit right.
The man in Peoria … Scott had put him down as cooperative, at first. He’d given us a statement, handed over bank records, agreed to a follow-up.
Then nothing. His phone was disconnected, and his landlord said he’d broken his lease in the middle of the night and left no forwarding address.
Scott had written it off as a guy who got spooked about testifying.
Maybe. But people who’ve been robbed don’t tend to disappear.
They get angry. They hire lawyers. They make a stink.
They don’t pack a bag at midnight and vanish.
Next, I went through the company records.
The entity behind Alcott’s missing funds was registered in Delaware through a Wyoming holding company.
But the holding company traced back to a Nevada LLC with a registered agent in Miami.
It was four layers deep. Not the most complicated fraud case we’d taken on, but four layers was more aligned with laundering infrastructure.
Either Coleman had built it for himself, which meant the financial advisory firm was a cover for something with a much bigger footprint, or he’d built it for clients I hadn’t found yet.
Both answers changed who we were looking at.
My phone buzzed on the table, and the screen lit up with Davan’s name.
I picked up. “You’re calling late.”
“Boy.” His voice was low, unhurried. “You sound tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“Mmm.” That sound. The one that meant I heard you, I’m choosing not to believe you, but we’re both going to pretend I didn’t notice. He’d been making it since I was thirteen.
“Gathering’s Saturday. Mika’s place, seven o’clock. You coming?”
“Saturday’s tight,” I said. A lie. Saturday was empty; unless something came up on a case, it was always empty.
Davan was silent.
Damn it. He knew I didn’t want to go. Just like I knew, if I went, he would push for me to take Kess as my mate and lead our merry group of exiles. Of course, the fact that Kess was more interested in Julia Morton than me had completely escaped Davan’s notice up to now.
The silence stretched, and I sighed. I owed Davan my life. He had found me two weeks after I’d come through the gate. He could have killed me, should have when he found out I was the son of the man who’d exiled him. Instead, he had taken me in and taught me how to survive here.
“If I can move things around, I’ll be there.”
“It’ll be good to see you, Warrick. Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah, you too.”
I hung up and sat with the phone in my hand.
Davan had been leading the tiger Shifters on Earth for longer than I’d been on this planet.
Twenty-six tigers, scattered across central Illinois, held together by one man’s stubbornness and a monthly gathering that half of them pretended they didn’t need.
The difference between them and me was that most of them had chosen to be here; all the old ones, anyway.
They had all come through the gate before my father had destroyed it, knowing they would never return to our home.
They wanted this life. Needed it even. Some of them running from grief, some running from trouble.
Others wanted a fresh start, opportunities to learn and work that they would never have had back home.
Some were second-generation, earth-born Shifters like Scott, who could never visit the homeland now that the gate was dead.
My nose wrinkled as I caught the scent of jasmine again. Hours later, miles away, sitting in my own cabin, and I could still smell it like she was standing behind me.
Go back, my tiger demanded. She’s alone. Unprotected.
I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling. The jasmine on my shirt curled through the room like smoke, and every breath I took pulled her closer.
Maybe if I didn’t knock on her door, if I stayed in my SUV. I could just drive to Birch Street and make sure no one was lurking outside her building. That was it. That was all.
My tiger said nothing. He knew I was already reaching for my keys.
I drove with the windows down. Birch Street was quiet. I parked three spots down. Cut the engine. Her building was dark except for one window on the floor above hers, where the light was on.
My tiger settled low in my chest. Not satisfied. He wouldn’t be satisfied until she was in our arms, in our home, in our bed, but he was quiet for now. Watchful. This, he understood. You don’t rush a hunt. You find the high ground, and you wait.
I sat back in the seat and watched her building.
Just tonight, I told him. Just to be sure she’s safe.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. We both knew I’d be back tomorrow.