Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (28 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

Wrapped in Dominec’s strong arms and a fog of post-coital bliss, Grace eyed the discarded tablet where it had landed on her desk. Her back was to his front as he spooned her on the narrow couch and she traced lazy patterns on the forearm secured across her stomach, holding her to him. But her thoughts were on those files.

“Why did you encrypt them?” she asked softly, trying to use a tone that wouldn’t shatter the lovely post-coital glow.

His muscles went rigid around her before slowly, deliberately unknotting again. His reply was a breath of sound against the back of her neck. “I didn’t want anyone seeing what was done to me. It’s mine.”

She understood that. Few things were more private than pain.

She linked their fingers together, settling herself more deeply into the warmth of his body. She wouldn’t look any more. She had seen Micah and Ksenia. More importantly, Dominec had seen them. Everything else in the file would remain his.

She had resolved not to ask. But then he began to speak.

“When the Organization captured me—though I didn’t know that’s what they called themselves at the time—after the initial battery of medical tests, I was earmarked for one of their special programs. Sigma Project. That was the name I overheard my handlers use. I was Sigma Two. Not because I was the second one to enter the program, but because they needed to replace the previous Sigma Two who had been killed during one of their tests shortly before I was acquired. We didn’t have names, just numbers. And my only interaction with the other shifters in the program—at least at first—was when they wanted us to fight one another.”

Grace held herself very still, listening. Not daring to interrupt the story.

“They wanted to turn us into their pet army. Shifter Super Soldiers. They ran experiments on us. Trying to make us stronger, faster, more agile. They pitted us against one another in an attempt to see which breeds were the most powerful fighters—and in an attempt to break down any loyalty we might feel toward other shifters. They wanted our absolute obedience. And eventually, they got it.”

He was squeezing her a little too tightly, but Grace didn’t protest. She didn’t even breathe.

“I became their creature. I told myself it was only to lull them into a false sense of security so I could kill them all and escape—and that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I was good at it. The killing. The fighting. I seemed to have a natural aptitude for the viciousness and violence. And after a while, I began to like it.”

She tightened her grip on his fingers where their hands were still interlaced. “You did what you had to. You survived.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “And part of me will always be ashamed of that.”

“No.” She twisted around in his arms until she could face him. Wrapping her arms around him so they were nose to nose, she said again, “No. You lived to fight another day. There’s no shame in that. And you didn’t stay their creature. No matter how much you liked it. You fought your way out.”

His black eyes were so distant she wondered if he even saw her. “Did I ever tell you how I got out?”

She swallowed around the thickness in her throat. “No.”

“There was another Sigma. Eight. But we called him Tavio. I’m still not sure if that was his real name. He was the strongest of us—some kind of cross-breed hybrid. He couldn’t fully shift, but even in a partial shift he was unstoppable. He could have been the best fighter, but he hated it. He had been in their custody for years, but he resisted the conditioning for longer than any of us. Months longer than I had. But everyone breaks.

“There was a girl. A little leopard shifter he’d met in the cells when he was first brought in. The Organization learned he cared for her and thought to use her as leverage against him, but I don’t think they expected the reaction they got when they told him she’d been killed.”

Grace sucked in a breath.

Dominec went on. “Tavio loved her. And he killed five of our handlers before they could even sound the alarm. Security was tight—but not as tight as it had been before they became convinced the rest of us were tamed. Tavio was the spark to the fuse. We all began to fight our way out. I don’t remember much after that. I probably killed my share. I didn’t stick around to see if the others had gotten out—but none of them would have gone back for me either. We were too used to being pitted against one another. The Organization had done their job too well. It was every shifter for himself. But I got out. I would have gone back to kill the rest of the handlers and guards, but my memory.” He tapped his head. “It isn’t what it used to be. I couldn’t find my way back. Even backtracking my own scent trail was out of the question because of all the rain.”

“It was raining?” she prompted softly when he stopped speaking.

His distant gaze focused on her. “Yeah. I’d forgotten that. Warm rain. Summer, maybe. Pouring down so hard you were drenched two seconds after stepping outside.”

Grace nodded, ready to listen if there was more, but his story seemed to be complete. She didn’t know what she was supposed to say—tact had never been her thing—so she didn’t even try to say the right thing. She just said what she needed to say. “You don’t have to regret any of it. You survived. You got out. And you’re going to take them all down. Nothing else matters.”

He frowned, the uneven sides of his face making the gesture even more querulous. “Why don’t you see a monster when you look at me, Grace? Even after all you know of me. How can you—”

He didn’t finish, but they both heard the unspoken question.
How can you love me?

“You are more than broken pieces, Dominec,” she whispered. “You are the strength of will that kept you fighting until you got here. You are the determination to avenge your family that never flagged. And you are the one who always has my back. Non-negotiably. Why would I see a monster in that?”

Chapter Forty-Seven

A summons to the Alpha’s mansion in the middle of the night could only be bad news.

Grace had left Dominec back at her place and climbed the hill, her thoughts racing ahead, wondering what could have happened now. Worst case scenarios shuffled through her mind. The Organization could have attacked Black Lake. One of the shifter groups could have jumped the gun and tipped their hand to the Organization. Some rogue shifter could have decided to stop dancing around and outed them all with twenty-seven million retweets. Fucking Twitter.

The soldier who was now stationed permanently at the Alpha’s door opened it for Grace, waving her up the stairs where Patch was waiting on the first landing. “What’s going on?” she asked as she mounted the steps in a rush.

The Alpha’s mate fell in beside her, looking as bright eyed and bushy tailed as if she hadn’t just been pulled out of her own bed—and perhaps she hadn’t. They were all keeping strange hours these days. “It’s Mateo,” she said, and Grace recalled vividly the squirrelly way the leopard had been acting earlier that night. “He’s either been really dumb or really, really brilliant.”

“With Mateo that usually means brilliance,” Grace said without an ounce of exaggeration.

Patch didn’t smile. “I should correct myself. Mateo has been epically stupid. But the result may have been accidentally brilliant.” She waved Grace toward the small conference room. “Go on in. I’ll be in as soon as Rachel gets here.”

The four shifters in the small conference room broke off their conversation when Grace entered, Kye sliding down to make room for her while Roman and Xander simply nodded their welcome.

Mateo shifted nervously in his chair, offering no greeting as his gaze skittered guiltily around the room. The boyishly good-looking leopard still wore two days’ scruff and one of his usual wrinkled T-shirts. This one featuring a stegosaurus and a T-Rex and reading
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

“Why don’t you start over for Grace?” Roman suggested when Grace and Kye had settled around the table. Grace tried to read the temperature of the room, glean something from Roman’s tone, but besides Mateo’s obvious nerves, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

The leopard swallowed, resting his white-knuckled linked hands on the table in front of him. “Off and on over the last few years, I’ve had contact with a shifter hacker who calls herself Misfit.”

“How do you know it’s a woman?” Xander challenged, his tone antagonistic.

“She told me she is.”

“And no one has ever lied about that on the Internet,” Xander snorted.

“Hackers tend to be misogynists. It’s not the kind of thing they would lie about and she isn’t a troll. She’s a friend,” Mateo argued, seeming more at ease when he was snapping at Xander—though Grace doubted the lion realized that was a side effect of his baiting. “And whether she’s female or not doesn’t matter.”

Xander didn’t relent. “It does if we’re going off on wild geese chases because you’re being led around by your dick by an imaginary Internet girlfriend.”

“She’s a colleague,” Mateo growled.

“Xander, shut up,” Roman intervened when Xander opened his mouth to retort. “Mateo, continue.”

“I hadn’t heard from her in a while—which isn’t unusual—and then right after we sent out the Black Friday message, I got an email from one of her aliases. The subject was ‘About Damn Time’ and the email just said, ‘When you’re ready, I can help.’”

“You sent her the Black Friday message?” Roman asked for clarification.

“No. She wasn’t on the approved list. But I’m not surprised she knew about it. She’s a shifter and even if she didn’t hear about it through her pack or pride, she’s that good.”

Roman nodded for him to continue.

“She vanished again after that—which she has a tendency to do, so I didn’t think anything of it, until tonight.”

The door the conference room opened, admitting Rachel, Adrian and Patch. They all shuffled and scooted their chairs together to make room around the small conference table and Mateo quickly recapped what he’d said so far for the benefit of the newcomers. Grace resisted the urge to fidget, wondering why the hell they were burying the lead, but she held her tongue, trusting in Roman’s tactics.

“Earlier tonight, Misfit contacted me on a secure server and told me she can crash every Organization security system in North America. I just have to tell her when.”

“Trap,” Xander snapped. “She’s fishing for clues about our attack. You’ve been catfished.”

Roman held up a hand to shut Xander up, but his own expression was dubious. “How could she do that? You told us all the systems were isolated, that a virus attacking one would have to be uploaded on site and would have no effect on any of the others.”

“That’s true,” Mateo admitted. He’d grown comfortable during the telling of his story, but now his nerves were beginning to show again. “But Misfit is offering to send out a command that will look like it’s coming from the Powers That Be that will instruct the guards themselves to enter a code sequence that will activate a self-destruct buried inside each independent computer system. The Organization operatives at each base would actually kill their own systems for us—and they wouldn’t even know what they’d done.”

“Even if such a command existed,” Adrian argued, “how could she know of it?”

Mateo swallowed, fighting to keep his gaze steady. “She wrote it. Apparently, she’s the one who designed all the Organization systems. She mentioned you, Rachel. Said she gave you the hard drives.”

All eyes turned to the doctor as her jaw dropped. “Fiona? You’re in contact with Fiona Talent?”

“I only know her as Misfit.”

“She isn’t a shifter,” Rachel protested. “She was part of my operation smuggling shifters out of Organization custody. She handled the tech side—until they started watching her too closely. Last I heard she was going to Costa Rica when my resistance cell broke up, but she’s human. She wears glasses, has tattoos—and she worked for the Organization for years. If she were a shifter, they would have known.”

“At least she’s really female,” Xander muttered, and Grace kicked him under the table, earning a grunt.

“So the self-destruct command could be real,” Kye murmured, bringing them back to the heart of the matter.

“If it’s really Fiona, it could be,” Rachel agreed. “I don’t know why she’s impersonating a shifter, but Fiona Talent is invaluable. Without her, my operation wouldn’t have lasted a month.”

“Even if she has the command, how is she in a position to send it?” Patch asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mateo admitted. “But I think she might have infiltrated the offices of one of the Dead Presidents.”

The Dead Presidents were what they had taken to calling the Organization Board since they had all chosen aliases like Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt.

“Jesus,” Rachel whispered. “If she’s back, she’s in danger.”

“We’re all in danger,” Roman murmured, and no one could argue with that.

“She implied she was being hunted by the Sigmas,” Mateo said softly.

Grace sucked in a breath.

“Sigmas?” Xander asked.

Mateo looked to Grace and it was she who answered, “Shifters trained to be pet soldiers for the Organization.”

“She’s risking her life to do this for us,” Mateo insisted. “She just needs to know when.”

“If she’s so brilliant, why doesn’t she already know?” Xander challenged.

“She’s embedded with the enemy, asshole,” Mateo snarled.

Roman held up a hand to silence them. “Rachel, would you be able to confirm this really is your Fiona if Mateo can get you in touch with her?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. We need this advantage.”

Dominec waited, but dawn was breaking before Grace returned to her bed. He’d almost given up on her return and slipped off to begin his own day—he’d gotten in the habit of hanging around the training grounds, giving pointers to any of the younger fighters with the balls to ask for them—when the door whispered open on nearly silent hinges and she crept into her own bungalow like a thief.

Until she saw him fully dressed and leaning against her kitchen counter.

“You shouldn’t have waited up,” she said.

He didn’t dignify that ridiculousness with a response. She would be called away on pride business in the middle of the night—she was the pride Second. He knew that. But he would never be the kind of man or animal who could just roll over and go back to sleep while she was off God knew where doing God knew what. Even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t sleep without her at his side. So he just nodded to the coffeemaker. “Coffee?”

Gratitude filled her face. “Please.”

Caffeine was one of Grace’s indulgences. She drank coffee like they were going to outlaw it tomorrow and she needed to get her fill today. He had her favorite blend ready to brew at the push of a button and he pressed it now, catching the blissful sigh she released as the aroma hit her senses as the single cup began to fill. That sigh was one of
his
indulgences.

Stress showed on her face—but no grief. Just the same tightness around her eyes that had been there since they first learned of the Organization. If anything, she looked…optimistic.

“Good news?”

She hesitated, and a door that had been cautiously opening snapped closed inside him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said before she could speak. “I know there will be things you can’t tell me.” She was Second, after all. “Just don’t lie.” She may not trust him, but he deserved that much.

“I wasn’t going to lie,” she protested. “I just didn’t want to get your hopes up unnecessarily.”

He frowned at her, taking the brewed coffee and passing the cup over to her. She accepted it with a small smile, lifting it to hide her lips. “I don’t have hopes,” he murmured, drawing her eyes back to him.

A few weeks ago, the words would have been the unvarnished truth. Now he didn’t know what they were. He’d never had hopes before. He’d had a mission. A vendetta. An icy purpose. Grace had warmed everything, giving it light. And maybe hope. Maybe that was what the new flickering candle in the depths of the darkness that filled his chest was called. He only knew it didn’t exist without her.

“Mateo has a contact who may be able to help us with the security systems. Give us an advantage,” Grace said over the rim of her coffee cup.

“Do you have time to vet the source?”

“Adrian, Rachel and Mateo are on it now,” she said. “I wanted to come back here and see…” She left the rest unsaid, but he heard the words as clearly as if they’d been spoken. She’d wanted to see him.

It should be a comfort that she was drawn to him as much as he was to her. At least the vulnerability went both ways.

She’d told him she loved him. The words had terrified him, even as they lit that fucking candle in his darkness. The one that reflected off all the fragmented shards of his psyche, lighting them as well. He should have said something back, but that word was both too horrible an admission of vulnerability and too ridiculously inadequate to describe what she did to him, so he’d held his tongue. If she needed pretty words and poetry, she should have stayed with Kelly.

An involuntary growl rose in his throat at the thought. Grace raised a single brow, a small smile curving her lips, but didn’t otherwise respond to his seemingly unprovoked rumblings. She wasn’t easily thrown when he got caught up in the ghosts and shadows in his head.

Perhaps they would be silent soon. It was almost over. Almost time. Perhaps the souls of his wife and son would rest on Christmas Day. But even then, he would never be whole. He wasn’t sure what he would be. He wouldn’t know himself when revenge was no longer the guiding force of his life.

His gaze locked on Grace. But perhaps there was a future for him after all.

Perhaps the stranger he would become would be hers.