Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (15 page)

And then the grandson died as well
.

The words hung unspoken between them, but they both knew they were there.

Grace swallowed around a suspicious thickness in her throat.

“Is that all you need to know?” he asked softly. “To prepare to meet the wolves?”

He thought she was asking for the same reason she’d asked him about his captivity the day before. For the mission. She wasn’t sure if it would make things better or worse if she admitted that for a moment there she had completely forgotten about their purpose. She only wanted to know him.

She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we’re ready.”

“Good,” Dominec murmured. “Because I can smell them.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Grace instantly stiffened at his words, her eyes going alert. “We’re still outside their territory,” she whispered, though there wasn’t a shred of disbelief in her expression as she scanned the brush around them.

“I don’t think they care about our maps.” He’d bet the wolves had a pretty fucking solid idea of what was and was not their territory, and from the scents he’d been picking up for the last few minutes, they patrolled this area regularly.

Grace cursed softly and murmured, “Come on.” She picked up her pace to catch up with the rest of their group, who were discussing sibling politics at what was doubtless a normal volume but sounded like shouts now that they knew they were already on wolf turf.

Grace was ahead of him so Dominec didn’t quite catch her low murmur, but the laughing conversation trailed off as defensive readiness rippled through the group. As Dominec joined them, Zoe murmured, “Time to run up the white flag?”

“How can you be sure we’ve crossed into their territory?” Kelly asked—in a far less confrontational tone than Dominec would have been able to manage with the same words.

“Can’t you smell it?” he asked. “This place is saturated in their scent.”

Kelly’s nose twitched, but if he did scent the wolves he didn’t say. Dominec had always had keen senses, but everything had been amplified thanks to whatever the Organization had done to him to turn him into their pet super soldier. It was possible the lions couldn’t smell the canine scent clinging to every freaking branch.

“Has anyone seen or heard anything?” Grace asked, so low Kelly leaned in to hear the words. Dominec barely bit back his growl. “Just because they’ve passed by here often doesn’t mean they’re here now.”

“Just the scent,” Dominec said.

There was a moment as the others scanned the surrounding area, straining their ears for any telltale sign and Dominec rolled his eyes. If the wolves
were
close, they would have gone silent and still as soon as Grace put the others on their guard. Such a distinct change in behavior wouldn’t have been missed by their watchers.

Grace met his eyes and grimaced, clearly thinking along the same lines, as the others demonstrated their wariness for their potential viewing audience.

“What’s the plan, boss?” Zoe asked with only a tiny shred of sarcastic insubordination—which was an improvement.

“We keep walking,” Grace replied. “But be ready to make contact sooner than anticipated.”

Grace took over the lead, with Kelly directly behind and Tyler falling back beside Zoe, leaving Dominec to once again bring up the rear. He kept his senses wide open as they walked, alert for any rustling leaves or cracking twigs.

They had only been walking a few more minutes and his attention was on the trail behind them when a sudden stillness from the group in front brought his instincts screaming to life. Keeping most of his attention on guarding their backs, he spared a quick glance in front of where the others had stopped. They were in the middle of an almost perfectly circular clearing and directly in front of them, silent as a ghost, stood a wolf.

Alarm shot through Dominec, but he kept his claws from snapping out. How had the animal moved so silently? He hadn’t even heard the damn thing breathe.

It was white, with rusty markings around the muzzle, ears and tail. Slim and leggy, with its tail held low, it was small for a wolf, and far smaller than the smallest lion or tiger. It simply stood, staring back at them, silent and still.

Grace held up her hands to show she was not armed. “We come in peace,” she said—sounding like a bad alien movie.

Kelly shot her a look, clearly unimpressed by her diplomatic skills, and stepped forward, his voice low and undemanding, but sure and clear. “We need to speak with the Alpha of Black Lake on an urgent matter.”

The white wolf bared its teeth and dipped its head, a low growl beginning in its chest.

Kelly tried again. “We are delegates from the Three Rocks and Lone Pine Prides and we have business with the Alpha of Black Lake.”

More teeth appeared as the wolf’s lips drew back farther and the growl grew louder.

“Nice puppy,” Zoe mumbled under her breath.

“Our mission concerns all shifters,” Kelly insisted—and Dominec had to give him credit for his cool. He didn’t even sound aggravated. All calm and patience.

Then he heard it. A rustle of leaves. So soft he would have missed it if everyone in the clearing hadn’t been holding their breath.

Dominec’s attention snapped back to the forest behind them. A flash of black fur. Something tawny and brown moving through the brush. “
Grace
.”

The warning was soft. And too late.

The tranq dart hit him in the throat—one of the few bits of skin not covered by his bulky winter coat. At the same moment, an earth-shaking thud came from behind him as the massive bulk of Tyler Minor went down. Zoe moaned, “Not again,” and fell as well. Dominec grabbed the dart at his neck, yanking it out before it could deliver its full load and flicking it aside.

In some corner of his mind, he heard Grace cursing and moving—not down yet, then. Figures melted out of the trees—both in canine and human form—and another dart found the back of Dominec’s neck.

He felt it now, the blur of the drugs, but it was quickly subsumed in a tidal wave of adrenaline. And rage.

He’d been taken once before. Helpless as the Organization pumped him full of drugs, forcing him down, powerless as they killed Micah. Killed Ksenia. He would not lie helpless as another person he cared for was harmed. Never again.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Grace hit her hands and knees and everything fractured.

The shift ripped through his body fast and hard, shredding his clothes. He came to his tiger form roaring, already leaping into the trees to find the bastard with the fucking dart gun. He cleared Kelly’s sprawled form with a jump and the ground flew beneath his paws as he raced after the fleeing shooter. The man was wiry thin with orange-red hair and he spun firing three darts into Dominec’s chest as the tiger pounced on him.

Dominec barely felt the tiny stings as he rode the man’s body to the ground. He lunged for the exposed white of the man’s throat—but the bastard was faster than he’d given him credit for and got an arm up to block. Dominec’s jaws closed around coat and forearm, clamping down until he tasted blood and felt bone snap.

His only thought was to kill this one quickly so he could find and dispatch the others, defend Grace. He flung the man’s arm aside, rearing back to go for his belly, and five more darts thunked into his side. His head suddenly felt enormous, wobbling on the end of his neck. His paws seemed at once tiny and massive, awkward and unwieldy. He swayed, the world in a dizzying flat spin, and collapsed onto his side—only aware of the landing because he felt the dirt against his fur, though the ground seemed to be on the wrong side of him. Above, below, spinning, spinning.

He growled, making a half-hearted swipe with his paw, but the gunman rolled away from him, cradling his arm and a trio of thunderous footsteps seemed to crash through the woods to him.

From the clearing. From Grace.

Grace.
He couldn’t fail her now.

He gathered his legs and tried to shove to his feet.

A deep basso voice rumbled, “Damn,” and another dart snicked into his shoulder.

As he staggered, a giant dark shadow of a man moved toward the injured gunman, kneeling at his side.

Dominec had almost managed to get his belly off the ground. Something hard nudged him in the side and he went over like a ton of bricks, sprawling on his side, rolling his head to see what had hit him.

A slim girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen, pale as the big man was dark, stood over him, tranquilizer gun pointed steadily toward his heart.

He tried to keep fighting, ignoring the fact that there were two of her swimming before his eyes.

“What the fuck is this guy?” she asked, her voice musical and light, and seeming to come at him from both sides. “We must’ve hit him at least twelve times and he’s still conscious.”

“Stop playing with him,” the dark shadow commanded, rumbling deep. “We need to get Soren to the healer. Asshole hit an artery.”

Good
.
Got at least one of the bastards.

Dominec tried to turn his head, tried to look back toward the clearing and Grace, but his limbs were no longer obeying him. The girl nudged him with a foot again and then raised her right arm—both of them—and aimed the tranq gun back at his heart.

“Nice kitty.”

She squeezed the trigger, and kept squeezing until the lights went out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Generally Grace liked new experiences, but she could have done without this one. Waking up handcuffed to a chair in a dark room had never been on her bucket list.

Her shoulders were stiff and she’d lost sensation in her fingers, giving her a clue that she’d been trussed up like this for a while. Her hands were bound behind her back and an experimental tug revealed they were secured to some kind of steel bar. The chair itself also seemed to be made of some kind of reinforced metal. She threw her weight against it and it didn’t budge a centimeter. Bolted to the cement floor.

So this wasn’t the wolves’ first rodeo when it came to keeping prisoners. No rickety barns and makeshift prisons for them.

She rustled her cuffs again and a low feline snarl sounded over her left shoulder. Twisting, she saw that the room was much bigger than she’d originally thought. She was perhaps fifteen feet from the wall in front of her, but there was easily twice that behind her. And in that space was a cage. It was big enough for Dominec to prowl back and forth in his agitation, but just barely.

The sight of him, locked up like that, hit her like a blow to the chest. For years he’d been stuck in a box and now these assholes had penned him again. Even if she hadn’t already been halfway to hating them, that alone would have tipped her over into pure loathing.

Fear might have been a logical response—chained to a chair in a room with a feral tiger—but Grace had never been very good at doing what was expected of her. She didn’t get scared. She got angry.

She jerked at the chains harder, cursing. “Fuckers.” She looked over her shoulder at Dominec. “You okay?”

The tiger snarled something she decided to take as an affirmative.

A pronged metal training collar had been wrapped around his neck, connected to a chain that was secured to the low ceiling outside the cage. Grace had seen them before on dogs—designed for the metal spikes to dig in when the attached chain was pulled and be painless at all other times. She’d never seen a collar on a shifter.

Hugo had said the wolves were territorial, but this was more than that. This was the sort of bullshit she expected from the Organization. She would almost think it was them, but the scents were all canine and she distinctly remembered the wolf in the path. Could the wolves be working with the Organization?

The other lions weren’t anywhere in the room. There was a door in the wall to her right, but otherwise nothing much to look at. If you didn’t count the tiger in the cage.

Dominec didn’t look injured, but from the pacing and the flicking of his tail, he was beyond pissed—and he had every fucking right to be. Seeing him like that was so violently wrong she wanted to scream at their captors to let him go, let him out, but exposing how badly she needed that to happen would only reveal her weak point—and you never showed your adversary your Achilles heel.

She wanted to promise him they were getting out of this. She wanted to tear the wolves apart with her teeth and claws, but when the door on the opposite side of the room opened, she swallowed down the rage and twisted to face the newcomers. A pair of slim girls glided into the room, letting the door fall shut behind them.

They looked like teenagers—which should have put her at ease, but there was something so damn creepy about the pair of them that their youth had an opposite, unnerving effect.

They were perfect carbon copies of one another—so similar she almost suspected clones rather than twins. They wore identical faded jeans, pale blue fitted long-sleeved shirts and some sort of moccasin-type shoes. With skin as white as pearl, pale blue eyes and long white-blonde hair pulled into identical braids, they were so fair they could almost pass for albino. They moved in perfect unison, each step in time, every mannerism and facial expression matching.

They were graceful—eerily so. Wolves just didn’t move right, to her feline eye. Cats prowled. They put their paws down and could feel the connection all the way to the core of the earth, grounded in that power. Wolves
bounced
. They glided over the surface of the world, never quite putting their paws all the way down. Skimming the surface of the world. Never quite touching down. It was just
wrong
to someone accustomed to a liquid feline prowl.

The girls came to stand in front of her, side-by-side, a matching set of creepy expressionless faces and deadly eyes. Those eyes, more than their flawless faces, made Grace think they might be older than she’d originally pegged them.

She had the vaguest memory of the creeper twins dropping out of the trees on either side of the clearing immediately after Tyler had hit the ground with an ominous thud. The first tranq aimed at Grace had gotten caught in the fabric of her coat and she’d had time to see how Thing One and Thing Two moved—perfectly synchronized and as fluidly graceful as elves in a Tolkien movie—before they’d tagged her with tranqs on either side of her neck.

Grace rattled her cuffs. “Your hospitality sucks.”

They tilted their heads, at exactly the same moment, to exactly the same angle. Like children of the freaking corn.

“Jesus. Do you know how creepy that is?” she asked.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum smiled, slow and disturbing.

Okay, yes, apparently they know
.

“Do you speak? Or are you just going to stare at me until you’re ready to suck out my soul and give it to your alien overlords?”

The smiles faded and an identical expression of mild confusion fell on their faces, as if the creeper twins couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t shaking in her boots.

In the cage, Dominec snarled, rattling his chain.

The creeper twins looked at him and Grace felt herself stiffening, wanting their attention fucking
away
from the tiger. She yanked at her cuffs again, making them clank. “Is this really necessary?” she asked, letting the words drip boredom.
Not scared of you, creeper bitches.
“Where is your Alpha?”

They said nothing, but at least they were studying her and not Dominec.

“Where are the other lions?” she demanded.

The door opened again. The small white wolf who had originally stopped them in the woods trotted in, followed by a striking woman with thick auburn hair and a jet black wolf the size of a Great Dane.

The woman was petite, curvaceous and flat out stunningly gorgeous. Her skin was dark for a redhead—the caramel tones not quite Caucasian, though Grace couldn’t guess at her heritage. Indian perhaps? Pacific Islander? Wherever her genetic make-up had come from, those people should reproduce more. The woman exuded hotness.

Her long auburn hair fell in a thick red-gold wave down to the small of her back. Long amber earrings dangled toward her shoulders, matching the amber necklaces, bracelets and rings she also wore. Her extravagant curves were barely contained by a snug, creamy blouse that laced up her front and a sliver of light brown skin was exposed between the hem and the top of the brown linen harem pants that clung to her hips. Her feet were bare and glided over the floor in that annoying not-quite-touching way the wolves seemed to have.

Her eyes, Grace saw when she was close enough, were the exact color of all the amber she wore and were framed by thick, black lashes. Grace couldn’t decide if she looked more like a courtesan or one of those big-eyed baby-talk girls all men seemed to fall all over themselves to protect.

Maybe a little of both.

Red smiled. “You wanted to see me?”

Grace nearly swallowed her tongue. Holy shit. This was the Godfather.