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  “Save it,” she hissed low, which drew up one of Aubrey’s sandy brows into an arch of surprise and subtle confusion. Eric guessed Vanessa didn’t mouth off at her protective big brother very often, except maybe in just, and this wasn’t.

  Aubrey shook his head at his sister and then at Salo. “The photos hit on those two Fenris Wolf biker losers, not you and certainly not Vanessa. That was who the Agency men and the local police were looking for when they found you all in the driveway. They didn’t have pre-existing intel on Vanessa, and the blurry dash cam video they had of you didn’t lead back to your old file, Alexander Eric Salo. You have me to thank for that, me and my sister. I covered your ass so whatever this is between you two wouldn’t lead back to her.”

  Eric had a moment to process his calamitous series of faulty assumptions—that he and Vanessa had been in the news photographer’s crowd shot and with a clear enough view of their faces to warn the Agency of his presence in the city, that the police alert had been for them, that taking Vanessa to the Panthera had been a bitter necessity.

  That he was protecting her when he was really just tearing away all the safeguards that had kept her hidden.

  But it was only a moment, before Vanessa turned to face Aubrey and level a heated glare at her brother. “Whatever this is,” she told him, repeating verbatim his reference to Vanessa’s involvement with Eric, “is none of your business.”

  Aubrey didn’t actually retreat in the face of his sister’s flaring temper, but he did leaned back on his heels, shifting his weight. The lion crinkled his nose, perhaps at the scent of Salo all over the lioness. Eric liked that idea. “What are you doing, Vanessa? You don’t know this guy. You don’t know how dangerous it is to even be seen with a shifter who’s got an Agency file on him. And you don’t know how dangerous he is. I get that you’re lonely, but—.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Vanessa asked, and Eric felt the thousand cuts inflicted in the sharpness of her tone even without it being directed at him. “Why didn’t I know any of this, Aubrey? Is it because you’ve been lying to me for twenty years?”

  Of all the threats Salo could have leveled and all the injuries he could have done Aubrey Dreyer, it was the accusation couched in this question that dulled the lion’s shimmer. Little by little, the man’s canines retracted. Caught in the painful suspense of the exchange, Eric didn’t notice at first that he had let his own impending shift recede.

  “Vanessa.” The single word was a heavy breath that practically bled from her brother’s mouth. He stepped back, finally. More like staggered, really. “I was going to tell a four-year-old our parents were lion shifters? Or a ten or twelve-year-old that we had to watch and wait for when she had her first period to see if she was a latent or an active shifter? If I got through that, I faced the joy of explaining we were being hidden from the council of werecats called the Panthera so some self-styled lion king couldn’t dictate our dating and mating habits for the rest of our lives. Do you think you’d have believed me if I had told you any of that, Vanessa?”

  “I believed you when you told me I was crazy,” she said. A fragile, jarring, absolute silence fell over all three of the weres.

  Is that what Aubrey had done, Eric wanted to demand. The Odin’s Wolf felt his fists clench and his beast’s hackles rise. When Aubrey fell back from Vanessa another step, Salo wondered if the movement over all the splinters and broken glass really didn’t make a sound. Or was the noise just covered by the pounding of Eric’s incensed pulse beating in his ears?

  The lion shifter hesitated, shook his head slightly and tugged uncomfortably at the collar of the white tee he wore under his office-appropriate blue button-front, then shook his head again more vehemently. “I never told you that, Vanessa. I never said you were crazy.”

  Vanessa surged steadily forward, leonine strength in the set of her plump pink lips and the animalistic role of her hips and that gorgeous, self-possessed glow she suddenly had. These and the lingering smell of their sex were raising Eric’s cock again as sure as the scuffle had raised his wolf.

  “Did our parents die in a car accident?” she asked Aubrey with her face just a few inched from his. If she’d been taller, she’d have probably tried to go nose-to-nose with him.

  Her brother’s response rasped like he had to force it up past a rock in his throat. “No, they didn’t.”

  “Did I dream about the men in black suits who spoke to me in the yard that day? Did I dream they came back that night in combat gear?”

  Aubrey broke his gaze away from Vanessa’s. “No.”

  Vanessa’s shoulders were tightening up, inching higher and higher with each of Aubrey’s answers. “And when I told you I was dreaming about fantastical feats—hearing and smelling things from an inhuman distance, running as fast as a bird could fly, climbing like a little chubby girl shouldn’t be able to climb, and lifting weight like a carnival strongman—and then that I was doing those things when I was awake, what did you say to me, Aubrey?” The werelion hesitated, cowed the way only a female shifter could cow a male shifter. “What did you say?” she repeated, enunciating each word.

  “I said it was probably like your sleepwalking,” Aubrey admitted. “Waking dreams.”

  “Dreams and guilt and imagination. Distortions and delusions,” Vanessa said. Then she snorted quietly under her breath. “But you never said I was crazy.”

  “Vanessa—.”

  “Get out,” she told her brother. His brow and the curve of his mouth sank into an expression of profound guilt and sadness that even made Eric wince, if only inwardly. “Get out of my house,” she said when Aubrey didn’t move.

  “Vanessa, you don’t understand.”

  “I understand; I just don’t forgive you.” When Aubrey took a breath to argue, she said again, “Get out.” And this time she shoved him, not like she wanted to fight him or hurt him, but like she was done with him. Like she didn’t want him anywhere near her.

  The lion shifter let his sister push him back a couple of steps, but he was using his weight to resist, to absorb the momentum and slow her drive toward the door. “Vanessa—.”

  Eric’s own anger had faded from a ravenous blaze of rage demanding blood to a steady burn in his gut. The stone glowing at the center of it was pure, hard, solid guilt for a hell of a lot of bad decisions. “Do what she says and just go.”

  Then Vanessa turned her face toward Salo. There was still anger in her eyes. “You, too. Go.”

  His mouth dropped open, but he didn’t repeat Aubrey’s protests. Both men found themselves turned out, standing sheepishly avoiding one another’s gazes as they lingered shuffling their feet on the porch.

  Aubrey was the first to start down the steps. “Stay away from my sister, wolf,” he muttered as he went.

  As much as Eric wanted to tell the werelion to fuck off, this wasn’t his business, and that wasn’t going to happen, nothing would come out of Salo’s mouth. Regardless of the lion shifter’s wrongs against Vanessa, and even regardless of his choice to work covertly for the Agency, Aubrey was right to say exactly what he had to Eric.

  Back at his own house just outside of town, Eric sat with an untouched beer sweating on the small table beside his chair on the back patio. The man was staring at his view of the distant mountains of Kingswood National Park, his pack’s hunting ground and part of their protectorate as Odin’s Wolves, but he wasn’t really seeing it.

  On the tattered notepad on the shifter’s lap, he’s scrawled a list:

  Call Eli at the Central Coast Pack about the Fenris Wolf Bikers—Sons of Fenris MC?

  Past time for another training hunt for Holly—get done before Ron gets home.

  Review scout notes from Dustin.

  Check in on Sami and Martin—no word from either in more than a week.

  Avoid Soren.

  The last entry was an indication of how poorly Eric was distracting himself from the “Vanessa situation,” as he had begun calling it in his head. It wasn’t Soren�
��s fault Eric had flubbed... everything. Acting without all the necessary intel. That had always been Eric’s fault. He always let his gut instinct and his cock lead.

  When he was old enough and experienced enough now to know better. To know that Vanessa was a fantasy for him, not a realistic possibility. To know that pushing the Panthera like he was would have consequences for everyone in the pride and his own Madera Valley Pack and had to stop. To know that his first priority—his only priority—had to be his duty as an Odin’s Wolf. To know that a werecat could never be mated to a werewolf.

  “It’s better she kicked us out,” he murmured to himself, lips brushing the glass of his bottle right before he finally took a drink of the now lukewarm beer. Of course, Vanessa would eventually forgive her brother, even for everything he’d done, because it probably really was all about protecting her. But Eric.... Yeah, it would have been better if she let things go and didn’t call or contact Eric again. If he stopped having lunch at the same café and....

  But she wasn’t going to be at lunch anymore, was she? It startled Eric, almost making him drop the bottle from his hand, that it only occurred to him now, hours later. To some extent, how much he didn’t know, the Agency had a bead on both Vanessa and Eric. Only Aubrey was standing in the way of the extermination teams coming after all of them. Odds were that Dreyer was going to make his sister change jobs and move, maybe even out of town. And the smart money said Eric should have been prepping to do the same, to... to leave Ron and the Madera Valley pack, to transfer under another identity to another group, maybe even Eli’s on the coast.

  Fuck, Eric really had screwed everything up. With a bitter chuckle around another mouthful of bad beer, he wondered how an alpha as sharp as Ron could have been so wrong about him. Salo wasn’t alpha material himself. That should have been Dustin, who had proven already he could make sacrifices to protect his pack and his mate at the same time.

  Aubrey Dreyer certainly could’ve picked a better time and a better frame of mind for both men to be in when he stalked around the side of the house and into Eric’s view. There was something about the t-shirt under a button-front, matching leather belts and shoes type that irked Salo, possibly because it was a common look among the comic book hero/law enforcement cadre. It had Eric gritting his teeth before Aubrey even spoke.

  “Where is she?” the werelion demanded. “Don’t screw me around on this, wolf.”

  Fucking werecats. Everything was about them, and the only sense of territory that matter to them was theirs. Hence Dreyer’s nerve prowling onto Eric’s property and launching into a series of demands without explanation or context.

  “How many lives are you planning on losing today, Kitty?” Salo asked after a long draught of the beer and with another right afterward.

  “If she’s here, you need to tell me now, and to hell with the Romeo and Juliet shit. Because if she is not—.”

  “She? Vanessa?” It only took one close look at the tension in Aubrey’s face, at the absence of bravado, for Eric to realize this wasn’t the lion shifter just trying to be possessive over his sister. Salo came up from his chair. “Are you saying you can’t find Vanessa?”

  Aubrey shook his head no. “Not at her place and not at work, and her phone is turned off. Smart girl, I hope.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Eric asked, but he was afraid he knew. “The Agency? Is that what this is about? Did something come over the wire about her and—?”

  “Me,” Aubrey said flatly. “The alert was about me, just for questioning, but they know what they’re looking for, obviously. All it really took, in the end, was Vanessa mentioning the Panthera on that call.”

  “You’re bugged?”

  Aubrey snickered but only briefly, bitterly. “She was always complaining about the bad connection on my cell, the annoying clicking and buzzing in certain areas of town. Internal surveillance upgrades aren’t that high on the Agency’s priority list. Overconfidence, I guess. Hubris. Their current tech is glitchy with some smartphone operating systems. In the four years I’ve worked for them, this morning was first time anyone let anything slip on my private line. I figured chances were good they wouldn’t catch it. Maybe the equipment cut out. Maybe the audio scanningsoftware would miss the reference. One single freaking word. Panthera.

  “But?” Eric asked, motioning for Aubrey to follow him through the backdoor long enough for the Wolf shifter to grab his car keys and head out the front to the Mustang.

  “The bulletin to detain me just hit the wire they don’t know I can access. I stayed long enough to download your file, run your address, and purge the search—in case she was with you.” Aubrey sighed slowly, heavily. It sounded like it hurt, physically hurt. “In case I needed you to find Vanessa before they did. It goes without saying that if they want me, they want her. Her place is pristine—no search or struggle—but she’s in the wind. I’m hoping that means she saw them coming and took off. She is sharp enough to know they’ll try to track her with a cell phone signal. First thing I tried. I even tried sniffing around her neighborhood, but....” He shook his head again as they stood at Eric’s car door.

  “But the whole neighborhood smells like her,” Salo told her brother. “I know. It’s that sleepwalking she does. The neighbors all look out for her when she shows up in their yards and gardens.” The gleam of realization lit both men’s eyes at the same time. “Get in. If she’s in trouble, better both of us there to get her out.”

  Twenty minutes and much tense debate over Salo’s driving speed later, he and Dreyer were standing on the porch of a little storybook Victorian that smelled strongly of Vanessa in the yard despite being almost four blocks from her townhouse. A pleasant elderly woman who could’ve stepped straight out of My Three Sons answered the door—with a big smile for Dreyer.

  “Oh my, you’d be Aubrey, with you?” she asked, which made both men rear back and blink. A raspy male voice called out from behind the lady asking who was at the door. “It’s Vanessa’s brother, dear.” Then to Aubrey and Eric, she said, “I told my husband, Norman, you’d come looking for her after that messy business with the police.”

  “Don’t make them stand out there if you’re going to tell them all about it.” The statement preceded a withered male figure who was just then rounding the corner into the entryway. Squinting through glasses that would’ve put a magnifying glass to shame, he beckoned the shifters inside with the wave of his arm and a a rustle from his brown corduroy professor’s blazer, complete with elbow patches. “Norman and Gloria Yancy, boys. Pleased to meet you.” To Aubrey he said, “We hear all about you from Vanessa, and you have the same look about you.” Eric was amazed Norman’s vision bore up that well behind the telescope-grade lenses.

  “You....,” the older man said more hesitantly to Salo. “I don’t think I know—.”

  “That’s Eric,” Gloria hissed in a loud whisper everyone could hear, then smiled, then blushed. “Couldn’t mistake you from the description she gave.”

  Norman’s frail, narrow chest puffed up as all three men followed the lady into the living room with its gold jacquard upholstery and abundance of doilies. “What description? She never said anything to me about an Eric.” His voice faded off as he muttered about long hair on men these days. Salo glared at Dreyer for his smug expression.

  “Don’t say a thing, buzz cut. Not a word,” Eric warned under his breath at a volume that truly only another shifter could have heard.

  “It was girl talk” Gloria explained to her husband as she motioned toward the couch, but then nodded in understanding when neither of her guests took a seat.

  “Girl talk?” Norman asked. “Oh, you mean he’s her boyfriend.” He tilted his head back to eye Eric, and the Odin’s Wolf noted the magnification was stronger yet at the bottom of the elderly man’s glasses. “Huh,” was the only comment he got from the somewhat bewildered Mr. Yancy, as though to say the gentleman didn’t get what Vanessa saw in the muscular blond.

 
“Huh,” Aubrey repeated, though he had an entirely different timbre of ‘yeah I know’ in his voice.

  “The police, Mrs. Yancy?” Eric asked to move things along before he and Aubrey got all shimmery and toothy with one another again.

  Gloria nodded as she frowned and folded her arms. “It was that boss of hers, Dr. Koller. Vanessa said he showed up at her townhouse with the police demanding they do a welfare check on her because he hadn’t seen her since confronting her about....” The lady hesitated, then smiled gently at Eric, apologetically. “About her involvement with a questionable young man.” This got another round of huh’s from Norman and the werelion.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Aubrey interjected, “but how you know this?”

  “She was here,” Norman told them. “Vanessa saw them coming up the street with that doctor. Police always parked down the block, you know. It’s their job to be a little on the sneaky side, a little shifty.”

  Eric had his own huh for Aubrey then.

  Vanessa’s brother pretended not to notice, but his face flushed. Rather than going after Salo, he asked, “And you two took her in?”

  “Of course,” Gloria insisted with a nod so vehement that a silky curl looped down from her impeccably styled white updo. “That boss of hers has much too strong interest in Vanessa’s personal life. It’s creepy, if you ask me.”

  Norman nodded his concurrence. “It’s creepy if you ask Vanessa, too.”

  “She never told you about that, did she, buzz cut?” Eric subvocalized.

  “She tell you?”

  “I wasn’t the one pushing her into that office job.”

  “No, you were the one delivering her like a package to Pietr Achieli.”

  Flustered, both men realized the Yancy’s were watching them quizzically.

  “What’s going on?” Gloria asked. “Should we be worried about Vanessa? Obviously, she didn’t want us to be concerned, none of us. But should we?”