Chapter three
“We were wondering when you were going to get back,” Xander said as Mike walked into the SWAT compound training room an hour and a half later to find all sixteen werewolves in his pack waiting for him.
“I would have interrupted your conversation with that woman at the crime scene to let you know we were leaving, but it looked pretty intense.”
Mike sighed. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Spotting the pizza boxes on the table in the front of the room, Mike followed his nose and headed that way. Grabbing a paper plate, he helped himself to two slices of pepperoni, then grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge before taking a seat at the table with everyone else.
“So, is she really your fiancée?” Xander asked. “Lark, right?”
“Yeah, Lark was my fiancée,” Mike said, picking up a slice of pizza and taking a bite. Man, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “She still is, I guess.”
At least, she was still wearing the engagement ring he’d given her when he asked her to marry him. That was part of the reason it’d taken him so long to get back to the compound. After talking to Lark, he’d spent a good fifteen minutes in his SUV processing that she and his son were alive.
Seeing her again had been like getting hit with a ton of bricks.
All he’d been able to do was stare and wonder if she was really there or his mind was playing tricks on him.
But when he’d gazed into her periwinkle blue eyes as her lavender scent wrapped around him, he’d finally figured out it wasn’t his imagination.
And all he’d wanted to do was take her in his arms and never let her go.
Instead, after they’d talked, he’d watched Lark walk back to her rental vehicle before climbing into his SUV, even as his inner wolf howled at him to go after her.
Then he’d sat in his truck flipping through the photos she’d texted him of Kal, in awe of how amazing he was.
While most were recent photos of Kal, she’d also sent him a few of their son over the years.
Seeing him go from a baby to a toddler to a ten-year-old boy in those pictures had made him realize how much he’d missed.
It had been enough to bring tears to his eyes.
Opening the bottle of water, he took a long drink, aware of the surprised looks his pack mates were exchanging. Most of them didn’t even know he’d had a fiancée and child, much less what he’d thought happened to them.
Gage Dixon, the SWAT Team commander and alpha of their pack of alphas, was the only one who knew the whole story. And from where he was sitting at the far end of the table, he was clearly going to leave it up to Mike to decide how much he wanted to share.
Xander had joined the SWAT Team a little while after Mike, so he knew some of the story. Not the part about how badly Mike had lost his shit in the fallout of seeing his fiancée and child supposedly die, though.
Carter was the only other member of the Pack who knew about his previous life, and that was only because Carter had been having doubts about taking the leap with his own soul mate and had needed a push in the right direction.
Mike cringed as he remembered admitting to him that he’d been convinced Lark had been The One for him, that unique person out there for every werewolf who loved them despite what they were, even though he hadn’t even been a werewolf back then.
That was a joke. What soul mate could walk away like Lark had from him?
Xander leaned back in his chair. “When Lark asked me to let you know she wanted to talk to you, I couldn’t miss the fact that she smelled...different, I guess you could say. Did you notice it, too?”
Was Xander talking about the intoxicating lavender scent that seemed to envelop her? When he and Lark had been in the pack-and-ship store, it had completely surrounded Mike, making his inner wolf definitely take notice for reasons he didn’t want to think about right now.
He picked up the other slice of pizza, giving his pack mate a wary look. “Different how?”
Xander shrugged, reaching for his own slice. “Kind of like a werewolf, but not like any werewolf I’ve ever smelled.”
Oh, that.
“She’s a werewolf, all right,” Mike said. “In fact, she’s the same kind of werewolf as the ones we’ve been seeing around town the past few weeks. They’re part of her pack.”
Carter’s blue eyes went wide. “Seriously?”
Mike finished the bite of pizza he was chewing before answering. “Turns out she was a werewolf when we first met. Actually, she’s been a werewolf since the day she was born.”
If his pack mates had been shocked before, they were completely stunned now. Most of them were sitting there with their jaws hanging open, food forgotten.
“I know you’ve never been the type to talk about your past, but your fiancée faking her death and taking your son, only for him to get kidnapped by a crime boss you tried to put in prison, sounds like something out of a movie,” Trey said.
Mike noticed Trey wasn’t the only one who thought that. Crap, he really didn’t want to talk about this. Reliving it with Lark had been bad enough. But he couldn’t hide it from his pack mates any longer.
“I was recruited into the narcotics undercover unit straight out of the police academy,” Mike said, deciding to get through this as fast as he could.
“One minute, I’m graduating, and the next, I’m buried in a cartel drug trafficking operation on both sides of the Mexican border.
After that, I did another undercover job inside a biker gang, and then another in a high-end chop shop.
By the time I ended up in Cassius Roman’s organization, I’d already been undercover for more than three years and barely recognized how far from normal my life had drifted. ”
“Roman was nasty as hell,” Gage added. “He was involved in the typical organized crime stuff—drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, illegal arms, gambling, and grand theft. But the thing that made him and his crew stand out was the level of violence they went to. They were downright vicious. Lots of innocent people died when they got between him and what he was after.”
Mike nodded. “That’s a pretty good description of the filth I spent years swimming in as I worked my way up through the ranks of his organization until I was on the edge of his inner circle.
And just when all our hard work was about to pay off, Roman somehow figured out we were moving in and fled the country. ”
“I remember hearing about that right before I joined SWAT,” Xander said. “But where do Lark and your son come into this? Don’t tell me you were trying to have a relationship with her while you were undercover?”
“Actually, I did,” Mike admitted with a sigh.
“I’d been in Roman’s organization for a while when I met Lark at Rockwall Harbor.
You know, the waterfront entertainment area over at Wayne Hubbard Lake?
I went there whenever I needed to get away and regain my sanity.
Lark and I ran into each other in one of the stores and started talking about how humid it was outside and how nice it was in the air conditioning.
Lark was new to Texas and hadn’t gotten used to the heat yet.
” He smiled a little at the memory. “She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a place that got this hot. ”
Carter frowned. “If she didn’t like the heat, why’d she move to Texas? The two go together like peanut butter and jelly.”
“I asked her that myself,” Mike said, remembering the conversation like it had been yesterday.
“At the time, I had the feeling she was hiding something from me, but I wasn’t concerned about it.
She was a beautiful woman, and the two of us immediately clicked.
We ended up spending the whole day together.
And then we kept seeing each other. Of course, an hour ago, I learned she was hiding something from me. ”
“That she was a werewolf,” Xander said.
“Yeah.”
“Is that why she left?” Trey asked. “Because she was afraid you’d find out?”
“That was part of it. And after becoming a werewolf myself, I get that,” Mike admitted.
“The other part was that she was afraid Kal wouldn’t be safe as long as I was an undercover cop.
Looking back on it, getting serious with her while still undercover in the organization of one of the most dangerous men in the world probably wasn’t the best idea.
Especially since Roman tried to kill Lark and Kal to get back at me. ”
That said, Mike wasn’t sure he would go back and change anything.
Well, except for Roman trying to murder them, and Lark and Kal disappearing out of his life for the past decade, of course.
Mike didn’t bother pointing out Lark had become the only thing that had kept him sane as he was drawn deeper and deeper into Roman’s organization, when it had seemed like he was only days away from losing himself completely.
“Did you give Lark your real name when you first met?” Trey asked.
“Yeah, I gave her my real name,” Mike said, smiling a little as he remembered how much he’d agonized over the decision. “It was reckless, but I figured there wasn’t much chance of Roman or anyone from that world running into her. I don’t know how else to say it, but it felt wrong to lie to her.”
He locked eyes with Carter, hoping his pack mate wouldn’t say anything about the whole soul mate thing.
That wasn’t something Mike wanted to talk about right now.
Mostly because he had no idea how he felt about the possibility.
Even if it were true, and Lark was his soul mate, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t deny the connection.
Now that he was a werewolf, it’d rip his heart and soul out even more than when she’d left him the first time.
“So, what went wrong?” Trey asked. “I mean, you must have been able to keep your relationship with Lark secret long enough to feel safe about having a kid. Did Roman come after them because he figured out you were a cop?”