This book is the first in a new series and can be read as a standalone. No reason not to dive in!
***
Chapter 1
I’d taken a gig coaxing a pair of direwolves into breeding. My real role? To catalyze two kindergarten-aged werewolves through their first shift so I could steal them out from under their owner’s nose.
“The female is the problem,” that owner said, walking me through yet another card-swipe security door in the series of identical hallways we’d been winding through for several minutes now. “Four years old, fully mature, yet she yanks her tail down every time he so much as sniffs her butt.”
It took an effort to swallow the rebuttal that a female of any species had every right to make decisions about her own body. And that four and five years old didn’t make the pair I was going to meet adults on a shifter timeline.
But non-werewolves weren’t meant to know about our existence, let alone our biology. So I squashed my annoyance at Nivara mis-explaining wolves to a wolf, and I bantered instead:
“Perhaps direwolf females are the ones who make dating decisions?”
“Direwolves don’t date,” the dapper fifty-something corrected. Then he paused with his arm holding the door open in such a way that I’d have to fold down small to fit underneath it.
Obeying that sort of unspoken demand used to be a reflex, one I’d given up a lot to leave behind. Really, Viv? I thought to my handler. You owe me a bonus.
“Think of your runaways, Dee,” Viv murmured in my earpiece, likely responding to my body language as seen through the facility’s hacked cameras.
It was just the reminder I needed. I squinched my arms in close to my body and slid through the gap while widening my eyes soulfully and throwing Nivara a verbal bone. “You’re right, of course. And you were smart to bring me in.”
Just like when I’d been a child helping my father wiggle into a pack that didn’t really want us, Nivara’s scent bloomed into sickly-sweet pleasure at my submission. That would help in a moment when I forced a line he wouldn’t like.
For now, though, all I could do was stare through the window into a space that looked like natural forest while actually being a fully enclosed replica within the stadium-scale building. The ceiling had to be sixty feet up, lit to approximate noon even though it was closer to midnight outside. Meanwhile, from lower down came the distinct sensation of being watched.
I frowned, having already clocked the glint of one-way glass in front of me. Still, the pair of direwolves stood facing in our direction, so intent upon their perusal that it felt as if no barrier divided us at all.
They were huge. Larger than my own wolf form. Larger than any dominant I’d ever seen in fur. I half expected the force of their eyes alone to make me do their bidding.
But that was a danger from my past, not my present. And these wolves weren’t demanding anything of me at all.
Instead, the four-year-old female had stuffed her body between branches of a bush that wasn’t thick enough to hide her. She looked terrified.
The five-year-old male was anything but scared.
His fur was blindingly white, which might explain why he didn’t try to disappear into the undergrowth. Instead, his amber gaze left me oddly breathless even after he looked away and began scuffling with a pile of fallen leaves.
Leap. Pounce. Head-shake that would have broken a rabbit’s spine.
The motions appeared playful at first glance. But their terseness and the way he angled his body relative to the female’s told a different story.
He was trying to pull our attention away from her.
“We can accommodate your request for privacy in most regards,” Nivara said behind me. “I do want to be present for—”
“A later session.” I didn’t turn around. “Full write-up within twenty-four hours. This is the part where you trust your investment, Director.”
I tensed, even after a decade still uncertain what my body would do if someone gave me a direct order that went against my wishes. Finally, I heard the door open and close behind me and my breath gusted out.
Only then did I go through the other door, the one leading into the enclosure housing the first direwolves to walk this earth in over ten thousand years.
***
Both the male and female went still the moment I entered their enclosure, but I didn’t acknowledge them. Just strode deeper into the artificial undergrowth, taking note of the way the false-noon light warmed my shoulders while the ground gave slightly underfoot just like real soil.
I was intrigued by the amount of effort that had gone into this forest replica, but Nivara was the type unwilling to relinquish control and quite willing to go back on his word. So I didn’t waste time investigating. Just counted on curiosity to draw the pair after me as I worked my way out of sight of the viewing room.
“Viv?” I murmured once I was sure Nivara couldn’t hear me. Behind my back, the wolves were so silent I might have thought they weren’t following if not for the hairs lifting along the nape of my neck.
“Dee.” My handler’s voice in my ear was crisp. “Feed’s live. I’m watching you through their system.”
“Good picture?”
“You know you’re beautiful. Stop fishing for compliments.”
“You just like Disney princess eyes.”
Viv chuckled at the same time air wafted across my right arm that couldn’t be explained by natural currents. The wolves were very close, and we were still within camera range.
So I walked a little further then asked, “Now?”
“You’re still lovely, but I can’t see you. Ready to swap on your go.”
I had the oddest feeling that I was missing something important, so I fished a little instead of telling Viv to change over the footage immediately. “Anything new to add to the briefing?”
Her pause was a half-beat longer than it should have been. “The direwolves won’t read like ordinary werewolves,” she said finally. “Just get them outside, hand them off to my driver, and everything after that is my problem instead of yours.”
So the shifters I was breaking out were feral. I’d already guessed that after hearing they’d spent their entire childhoods in a cage with nobody to teach them manners. That was why I’d brought the zip ties after all.
As I fingered the strips of plastic in my pocket, though, my inner wolf sidled uneasily inside me. Lupine instinct noted that Viv hadn’t actually given me any new information that wasn’t already covered by this job’s unusually slim dossier. It was almost as if she was sidestepping the question I’d just asked.
Still, there wasn’t time to interrogate my handler further. Nivara’s patience was limited, and the AI-generated loop Viv was about to splice into the facility’s security feed wouldn’t stand up to intense scrutiny. Speed was of the essence. So—
“Swap it,” I said. Then I turned around.
The male was close enough to bite me without straining a muscle, and he wasn’t acting like a five-year-old either. Instead, he oozed something bigger and wilder than run-of-the-mill alpha dominance. It felt like standing too close to a cliff edge during a storm while wrapped up in the arms of someone so strong I knew I’d never fall.
Lupine instinct wanted to bask in that combined exhilaration and comfort. But I couldn’t let myself believe what my wolf wanted to believe. Not when I’d spent over a decade clawing my way up a well-greased slope in order to reach my current solitary perch.
Plus, this was a kid. Whatever my instincts thought they were reading, he wasn’t promising to support me. He was the one who needed reassurance, reassurance I now proceeded to offer.
“I know this is confusing,” I murmured. “But I’m here to help.”
The male direwolf’s only reaction was flaring nostrils. He was tasting my scent. Good thing I was telling the truth.
The fact that my version of help involved catalyzing a direwolf’s first shift into a form he’d never worn then hauling him through a high-security facility in a borrowed jacket was, I decided, a detail that wasn’t yet need-to-know.
Behind the male, a twitch of movement materialized into the female. But I couldn’t afford to look away from the closer direwolf. Not when I was already fumbling a blowpipe out of my pocket and needed his full attention locked on my face rather than my hands.
So I kept on talking.
“Do you know what’s neat? It seems like day in here, but it’s actually night outside.”
I wasn’t sure how much English these direwolves had managed to pick up during their strange, caged childhood. Hopefully enough to make them curious, to keep them wondering for another moment.
I only needed a few more seconds because my dart was ready, the compound inside designed to nudge a young werewolf through a first shift. It was practical, I reminded the qualm in my belly. I could heft one frightened kid onto each hip and zip-tie their hands together if they fought me. Distasteful, but I’d done harder things.
Short-term pain. Long-term gain. The story of my life.
I raised the blowpipe.
The male tensed, but he didn’t run or attack. Just watched me for one long moment. Then he tilted his head to expose his neck.
Which definitely wasn’t what I’d expected from a captive animal facing a weapon-bearing stranger. Of course, he probably didn’t have enough experience with the world to know what I held was a weapon. And it made sense for a five-year-old to submit to someone older, despite that earlier oddity in his scent.
Still, as I hesitated with the pipe barely touching my lips, the scents wafting through the air snagged in my nostrils. His aroma was as clean as high-altitude sky, as pure as cold spring water. He was neither afraid nor confused.
For one absurd second, my body once again reacted like I was standing alone with a fully grown dominant wolf. Only, this time the result was more intense than before.
I was interested in a way I hadn’t let myself be for a very long time. I wanted to reach out to him and…
My stomach turned over at my own reaction, hard enough that the blowpipe wavered. He was a child.
“Dee?” Viv’s voice crackled through my earpiece.
I blew.
The dart landed in the tip of the male’s nose. It would hurt less than a bee sting, one sharp burst of pain with no lingering aftereffects. No wonder the direwolf only shook his head once before going still.
I was already moving. Pulling zip ties from my pocket. Unknotting the spare jacket from around my waist while yanking off my hoodie to cover the second child. Running escape routes through my head—
His shift started.
I didn’t want to dart the female until I knew the government chemists had calibrated the dose correctly. If there was a medical emergency, better only one direwolf was affected. So I paused and I watched.
First shifts are always slow and messy. There’s usually distress involved. Resistance. A body forced through a transition it didn’t know was possible.
This was nothing like that.
Instead, the male direwolf shifted the same way he’d moved through the enclosure—fast, purposeful, entirely efficient. I stood with a zip tie dangling from one hand and watched the outline of a wolf expand in every direction until my brain gave up trying to force the shape into the expectations I’d built.
Because the human materializing in front of me wasn’t a child.
Fully mature. Nivara had told me plainly, yet I’d stuck to my assumption that a five-year-old shifter would be barely ready for kindergarten.
I’d been wrong. This was a man. And such a man.
He landed on his knees with his torso curled inward, enormous even folded up on himself. Broad shoulders. Long limbs. The danger of a predator emanating from every pore.
That zip tie wouldn’t have fit around one of his wrists, let alone both of them.
I stood there longer than I should have. Swallowed as I tried to remember what I was doing then tried to figure out how to manage something obviously unmanageable. A fact that became even clearer when he lifted his head.
Between a bushy beard and shoulder-length blond curls, I couldn’t make out much of his face. But I could see those amber eyes, somehow even more intense in a human face than they’d been when lupine. They pinned me and didn’t let me go.
This wasn’t the glance-then-release that humans typically engaged in. Nor was it an alpha’s overbearing glare, meant to slap an underling into their place. Instead, the man in front of me held my gaze intently yet gently, an unblinking focus that turned my pulse into a drumbeat in my throat, my ears, my chest.
His eyes skidded over every spot of my body as I felt it. “I have questions,” he rumbled, the words coming slowly as if his mouth was figuring out syllables for the first time.
“Yeah,” I agreed. At the moment, I had quite a few questions myself.
Chapter 2
“Is there a problem?” Viv demanded in my ear. She didn’t seem shaken the way I was. But she would only have heard the man’s voice, not seen the full force of him.
She wouldn’t have smelled his not-quite-dominance. Wouldn’t have been speared by those amber eyes. Wouldn’t have felt the way he seemed to fill the entire enclosure even while resting on his knees.
Then the man’s gaze flicked down to the zip tie in my hand. The one I hastened to shove back into my pocket even as I said “No” to Viv.
I covered up the fact I was holding two conversations at once by adding: “No time for questions. I’m going to help you both get out of this facility. But I need you to stay quiet and follow my lead—”
A sound from behind the man materialized into the female, her body shaking so hard it vibrated a twig. She was terrified, and I winced as my plan rearranged itself from morally white to morally gray.
When I’d gone into this facility, I assumed these two were like every other werewolf I’d met who happened to be born on paws. Thinking back to one fur-form shifter who’d been forced to transform to human skin for her own sake at four years old, I remembered her emerging as a cute little kid who was barely verbal.
That kind of shifter, I’d been willing to hand over to Viv, who’d have no use for a four-year-old or a five-year-old. She’d place a pair like that somewhere they could grow up among their own kind.
But this male, despite stumbling over his first words, had adult intelligence in his eyes. Which suggested direwolves might not mature on a human timeline. Instead, they appeared to be more like gray wolves who went from blind and helpless to hunting with the pack inside a single year.
If so, the female wouldn’t be a kid any more than the male was. So my job now involved handing over a terrified grown woman into a life she hadn’t chosen for herself.
I flexed my fingers to force the chill out of them. And as I did so, the man rose to his full height, at least a foot taller than my own five-three. He held my gaze for a long moment then turned to the female and murmured a single word, “June.”
It was hard to pay attention to what he was saying as every part of him came into view. He was naked, of course, the way all werewolves were after shifting. I was used to averting my eyes and ignoring the aftermath of a transformation.
This time, though, my cheeks heated before I could stop them. Human skin suited this man far too well.
My arm lashed out, the spare jacket in my fist. “Put this on,” I demanded.
And he obeyed me, in a manner of speaking. He wrapped the jacket’s sleeves around his waist just like they’d been wrapped around mine. Tried to make a knot, fumbled it, shrugged, then simply held the ends in place with one hand, covering up basically nothing.
All the while, he continued talking to the female. Not in words, just with head tilts seasoned by scents swirling through the air between them. There were also very quiet sounds, I thought, though I felt them in my sternum rather than hearing them with my ears.
Was this how direwolves talked, or was the language just something the two had dreamed up since they hadn’t been able to rely on audible speech in fur form? Whatever it was, their wordless conversation continued until the female padded over to stand by his leg, on the side furthest from me of course.
And that was a problem. Because, no matter what I decided in the long run, there was no way we were getting a direwolf out of here four-legged.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t dart June with a huge mountain of male direwolf in the way. So I told the still nearly naked man, “You have to put the jacket on.”
Miming sliding my arms into sleeves worked where just handing over the garment hadn’t. And as he fumbled through dressing for the first time in his life, I lifted another prepped blowpipe to my lips…
…then found my wrist clenched in an iron grip.
“No.”
His thumb settled over my pulse point, seizing information that should have been private. Scratch that—seizing was the wrong word. His touch was gentle.
Still, my entire arm lit into awareness at the contact. Heat climbed toward my shoulder as we both felt my heartbeat transition from a jog into a sprint.
All the while, those amber eyes peered steadily into mine. As if my heartbeat and his thumb were the opening gambit of a conversation that a stare could finish.
“You…” I started, meaning to tell him off for touching me and unable to find the words to do so. Especially when my open mouth let me taste the wildness of his scent.
For a moment, I was once again teetering on that mountaintop. No, not teetering. My back was to his front, his arms wrapping me up so I was warm despite wind whipping all around us.
The vision was so clear I had to blink hard to make sure he was just touching my wrist while we stood firmly rooted to the ground.
When it became obvious I wasn’t going to finish my sentence, he spoke using words that came out clearer than his first ones had. “June will shift. When she’s ready.” A pause. Then, a little deeper and more growly: “You don’t force a first time.”
It was my turn to respond. But his thumb still rested against my pulse point. My heart was still beating like hummingbird wings.
Which was when I belatedly realized that this man was forcing me into stillness, even if not in the manner I’d spent my whole life running away from. The fact obeying his will didn’t feel terrifying was terrifying.
I yanked my wrist away with a twist and a jolt. It was a strong self-defense move, but I had no illusions my success was due to anything other than his choice to let me go.
“Fine,” I managed at last. “No dart. But we need to move or this whole thing falls apart. So whatever you need to say to win her over, say it now.”
The man waited one beat too long before turning back to June. Then that subsonic rumble returned, threaded through with something that almost resolved into melody before dropping into silence.
For her part, the female wolf listened, ears flattening. Then she sniffed at the air in my direction and her ears perked back up.
“She’s ready,” the man told me. “But she wants to know where we’re going.”
“That’s complicated.” And, as yet, undecided.
Viv remained silent, the half-forgotten earpiece heavy against my skin. Was my handler giving me space because she didn’t want to force my decision? Regardless of her reasoning and of where the direwolves would go after we left this facility, there was only one escape route. A route that required two legs instead of four.
“We’re going to have to climb,” I warned both of them. “Up a tree, through a ceiling panel.”
“That’s not the sky?” The man stared up at what did look very much like sky from here. It was some sort of domed screen with clouds drifting across the surface, but there were seams if you looked closely enough. One of those seams led to safety.
“Outside,” I promised, “we’ll see the sky.”
I headed toward the tree that direwolves couldn’t climb but humans could. If June didn’t shift…
Turning back to face her, I found that she was already human. Even on her knees it was clear she was far taller than me, with cheekbones that belonged on a sculpture and a dancer’s unconscious poise. And while the one-year direwolf age difference made her appear closer to my own late twenties than the male’s early thirties, she certainly wasn’t a child.
They looked even less childlike together. He’d knelt again so he could zip the two halves of her hoodie together, managing what must have been his first try at the task like it was a complicated puzzle. Yet his protective body angle suggested he intended to protect June with far more than clothing, a task he wouldn’t fumble even with his new human hands.
No wonder her fear seemed to have been replaced by a borrowed confidence. She peered up at him with pure trust and love that made my stomach twist.
The man’s piercing eyes turned to me as if I’d spoken. He cocked his head, brows lowering in what I was starting to understand was a question.
But I had nothing to say. After all, why state the obvious?
Despite their refusal to breed for Nivara, the direwolves’ body language suggested these two had to be mates.
Chapter 3
I swallowed and forced myself to consider their mate bond the way Viv would have: as an asset rather than a detriment. “If you want to keep her safe,” I told the man, using my newfound understanding strategically, “then you’ll both climb.”
I expected direwolves who’d never used hands to have trouble wriggling up a tree trunk. But the man suffered only one false start before lifting June onto the lowest branch then swinging himself up after her.
For my part, I ignored his offered boost and found my own way aloft before sliding past the man on my way higher. Leaning outward to keep sufficient personal space between us, though, the events of the night caught up with me. I swayed, lost my balance, and…
His warm fingers clenched down around my calves. My body responded instinctively, steadying as if he’d handed equilibrium back to me. At the same time, awareness seared itself through my entire body, making me imagine…
…things I couldn’t afford to indulge in. I shook my head hard then bit out, “Humans don’t touch without asking permission.”
Only after I’d spoken did I realize I could have just said let go. Orders were clear boundaries. So why had I instead doled out information on how to move through the world?
“I beg your pardon,” the man rumbled, an odd turn of phrase that sounded like something out of an old movie. He didn’t remove his fingers, though, until I was entirely steady on my feet.
And my traitorous skin regretted the loss of heat as soon as his grip eased away from me. No wonder I pushed the ceiling panel out of the way more forcefully than I really needed to. No wonder I used a command this time when I demanded, “Up.”
The direwolves slipped through the hole in the ceiling the same way they’d ascended the tree. First he lifted her through into the darkness. Then, after a quick glance at me, he pulled himself up to join her.
Whether he intended to offer a hand to aid my own ascent was derailed by the sudden pulsing wail of an alarm.
“Viv,” I breathed, hauling myself through the gap into a space between roof and ceiling barely tall enough to stand up in. One quick glance showed air ducts and a branching pathway just like I’d expected. Then I pulled the panel back into place, dimming my view to twilight as I hissed to my handler: “Explain.”
“It wasn’t motion sensors. They’re still offline.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the man staring at my ear as if expecting someone to leap out of it. If he hadn’t heard Viv speaking before, he’d heard her now.
He didn’t remark upon that. Instead, he merely rumbled: “The noise means trouble?”
I nodded. There was no time to explain further so I started moving, hunching under low ductwork, counting panels…
And jolting to a halt as the man stepped into my path while stating his next question as fact. “The hunters already know where we are.”
Hunters wasn’t, perhaps, the right word. But he’d understood the situation better than I expected him to. “They might,” I admitted. “You could have been chipped. But we don’t have time for a full-body search—”
“Between my shoulder blades.” June’s first words came clearer than the male’s had. She stepped forward, reaching back to tap a spot she couldn’t possibly see while a shadow in her eyes promised a story we didn’t have time for.
I had a first-aid kit, but the man didn’t wait for me to offer. “Ready?” he asked, the word slightly muffled by fangs he’d managed to lengthen without shifting the rest of his body.
That shouldn’t have been possible for someone who’d just transformed for the first time today. And he shouldn’t have been able to move so fast I could barely make out what happened next.
Somehow, though, he wrenched up the back of June’s hoodie while her nod was still in motion. He bit hard then spat out a metallic pellet that spun away into the darkness. All in the space of a single breath.
“Mine is here,” he rumbled.
His back was to me now, fully bare with the jacket removed in the instant it had taken him to turn around. I was so lost in the view that it took me a moment to realize that his finger pointed at a spot that, when I pressed my own fingertip against it, did feel like a grain of rice beneath his skin.
“I have local anesthetic,” I offered, fumbling in my pocket for the supplies. “And a sterile blade—”
He shook his head. The alarm kept wailing. “Do it now.”
He’d already braced one hand against the ductwork. I settled my open palm against his skin, finding it warm even there in the cold darkness.
Emergency surgery, I reminded myself. Not foreplay.
I held onto that thought until my mouth made contact with his skin.
Ten years ago, the bite had been higher. On my neck, not on a man’s back. Ten years ago it hadn’t felt like this.
Not like fire flaring hot through the underbrush. Like sparks flickering upward, catching in the canopy, setting twigs and leaves alight.
Canopy fires wiped away entire forests. Canopy fires consumed everything.
So did mating bites.
This wasn’t a mating bite, though. It was only business.
I kept reminding myself of that fact as I found the tracker by feel, my teeth closing around the hard, foreign item. I could have been done then, but for a moment I stayed just like that. Breathing against his skin, my hand still braced flat against his hard muscles.
A sound from June matched the moment the steady billow of his lungs stuttered.
I gasped as I ripped the tracker free and spat it into the darkness. The tang of his blood in my mouth lingered far too sweet as I pressed my hand against his wound to stop the bleeding.
The alarm kept wailing, but I couldn’t even think about pulling away until a voice reverberated around us. Metallic, broadcast from a dozen points at once.
“You’re making a mistake,” Nivara said, his words ringing through the ventilation system with the clipped precision of a man accustomed to being heard even without amplification. “I’m aware the value of my specimens could prove tempting, especially if you’re in financial difficulties. But this isn’t the way to get what you want.”
Reality reasserted itself. That was the language of someone trying to delay us. Which meant we needed to move.
Loss of contact felt like having a tooth wrenched out. Ignoring the throbbing ache, I demanded, “Keep up.” Then I pushed past the male and returned to the path I’d memorized through the maze of access tunnels that filled the entire low attic of the facility.
“I want to be transparent with you,” Nivara continued, his words waxing and waning as we passed one speaker and headed toward another. “These animals are more valuable to me than they are to you. Removing them from this facility is a felony. A career-ending, life-changing felony. And I will track you down.”
Behind me, the male growled. I didn’t look back. Whatever hung between us, it wasn’t relevant to our escape. And escaping was all we could afford to think about right then.
The space we traveled through branched four times, but one of the benefits of working for the U.S. government was good intel. Viv’s agents had mapped the route for me and I took the turns without hesitation on the way to the exterior wall.
Viv’s breathing in my ear made me imagine her typing into her phone while managing the other end of my extraction. Being aware of my backup should have felt steadying, but instead I tripped over my own feet as I remembered the choice I would shortly need to make.
Should I give the direwolves to my handler or not?
The grille separating the attic from the outdoors was exactly where I thought it would be. I got my fingers into the slats and pulled.
It didn’t budge.
Then the man was there behind me. His entire body wrapped around mine just like in my daydream, his hands landing on either side of my hands. The heat of him against my back was an almost physical pressure, and I felt rather than heard the steadiness of his breath.
The memory of June’s post-shift posture flashed through my mind. I understood her rebounding confidence a little better now. The decision I needed to make wouldn’t be so hard after all. I’d just…
Shaking my head to clear it, I accidentally knocked my skull against his chin. He grunted but didn’t complain. And, without the need for words, we yanked together.
The grille gave. I pitched backward into him, and he absorbed my momentum without comment. His arms were fully around me for one glorious second before he set me back on my feet, both of our faces turned toward the hole we’d made.
Cold night air slapped me. It was time to face reality.
The building, for all its size and despite the interior looking like a forest, was in the middle of an industrial district. Which meant the SUV idling against the curb didn’t stand out as strange.
But that wasn’t what the male direwolf appeared to be reacting to as he took his first breaths of unfiltered air, inhaling the scent of the world outside his cage in short, sharp bursts. I inhaled also, taking in rust and garbage. I had a sudden urge to apologize for what I was bringing him into.
Instead, I stuck to business. “There’s a vehicle,” I said quietly, knowing the direwolves might not understand what I was talking about but hoping my tone would bolster confidence. “We’re getting into it.”
The male direwolf said nothing. But when I glanced back, his pale eyes had tracked from me to the silhouette of the driver with an attention that felt surgical.
“The voice in your ear,” he murmured. “The vehicle is hers?”
Viv wasn’t inside that SUV. But the answer was clearly: “Yes.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Looked at June then back at me again. I got the strangest sensation that he understood my muddled regrets far better than I did myself.
His words, though, were simple. “Your choice.”
He’d been captive his entire life, so he had every reason to claim this decision as his own. Instead he’d handed it back to me like doing so cost him nothing.
It cost me something. My throat tightened.
Then the male direwolf slid out through the gap he and I had created. Fell further than was really safe, not waiting for the rope I could have asked the driver to throw up to us.
He landed with the grace of a wild animal. No grunt, just bent knees that straightened as he leaned his head back and nodded.
June leapt into his waiting arms like it was perfectly natural to expect him to break her fall. Setting her aside, his next nod was clearly aimed at me.
This was absurd. But why waste time rigging a rope when he was right there below me?
I pushed off into emptiness. Fell.
Was caught. By hands that slid up my body as I was lowered down. By hands that weren’t clinical but weren’t invasive either. By hands so big and strong they made the ground feel far away and my descent to meet it far too short.
I stepped back the moment my feet found pavement, regretting how easily he let me go but also glad to be separated from the temptation of him. Then I returned to the decision that had been gnawing at me ever since June’s shift.
The man had no understanding of the human world and one ill-fitting jacket as his only clothing. June was sharp and learned fast, but that shadow in her eyes suggested she might be broken by the wrong set of hands.
Two people who had never lived outside this facility were putting their futures into my care, trusting me not to harm them. Unfortunately, there were many more lives depending upon me making the right choice tonight.
“Think of your runaways,” Viv had warned not so long ago.
Those runaways were the reason I turned toward the SUV even though doing so felt like leading the direwolves back into a cage.
Chapter 4
Viv’s agent opened the rear door of the SUV and June was already moving toward him. Above us, floodlights had just flared bright while I heard the clatter of a security door being released inside the building.
That meant Nivara knew we were out here. But my feet felt like they were planted on the spot.
“Dee.” Viv’s voice in my ear was quiet and even, the one she used when she needed me to focus while in immediate danger. “Get them in the car.”
Despite the urgency, I just stood there while my mind’s eye filled with visions of the halfway house I’d built using payments from jobs just like this.
Every one of those women had been so grateful for respite after fleeing from bad mates. One had arrived so tightly wound she’d hidden a scorched pot under her bed rather than admitting to such a simple blunder. Another’s youngest child had started calling me Auntie DeeDee, and when I warned that my time in their lives was temporary, the woman had shrugged and said that nothing good lasts.
The runaways were safe because Viv’s gigs paid far more than any other job I qualified for. Viv’s documents allowed those ready to move on to do so in anonymous safety.
Defy my handler now, and I was gambling away who knew how many women’s safe haven. And yet…June’s graceful dancer body moving toward that government-issued vehicle felt so very wrong.
“Dee.” Viv’s voice was sharper this time.
Meanwhile, the male direwolf hadn’t moved. He hadn’t looked at the agent or at June, who’d paused just far enough from the SUV so she could still retreat from it. Instead, he watched me with those amber eyes that took in everything. Flared his nostrils the way werewolves did when we wanted to gauge someone’s emotions.
He’d know with one sniff that I was handing him over to a fate I didn’t think would be good for him. And still he didn’t try to seize the decision out of my hands.
Floodlights hummed. I could hear approaching boots on concrete inside the facility now.
I couldn’t just stand there. I had to decide: two direwolves, or dozens of women?
The thing was, I’d already rationally thought through the pros and cons. I knew which was the smart choice.
Still, I found myself yanking Viv’s earpiece away from my skin. Then I blocked out regrets I knew were coming as I pushed myself into a shift without even bothering to shed my clothes first.
I wasn’t a dominant wolf, so my transformations tended toward the slow and laborious. Oddly, this one merited neither adjective.
No, that wasn’t odd at all. Because the male direwolf was shifting alongside me, yanking me into my fur as if I was being slotted into a place that had been prepared for me. A blur over his shoulder suggested June had been dragged into wolf form at the same time.
Assisted shifts were fast but painful, so I clenched my teeth and waited for the searing ache to surge out of my realigning bones. Instead, the only sensation thrumming between me and the male direwolf was warm ease, as if we were sliding together into a hot bubble bath.
We inhaled together, twisting our bodies. Exhaled, grew fur.
I’d never in my life experienced such synchronicity and I’d spent far more time than I cared to around alphas. But this wasn’t a mystical experience. It was a shortcut intended to aid our escape.
I was wriggling out of my clothes when Viv’s voice came from the earpiece on the pavement. “Dee, this is a bad decision.”
She wasn’t wrong. So I fully expected my paws to feel heavy as I turned away from the SUV and the nine years of my life it represented.
Instead, warmth pooled beneath my sternum, a banked coal that made it easy to run with the male direwolf at one shoulder and the female at the other. In lupine form, they were both larger than me and they sandwiched me between them as if I was the one who needed protection.
Relaxing into that illusion, for just one moment I went with the flow.
***
