Every Night Forever (9 page)

She snorted unhappily and stood up abruptly.  “If that was true, then I wouldn’t have been able to walk away from them as easily as I did.  No one cares that I’m gone, and no one would care if I disappeared entirely.”

In complete disbelief, he watched her walk out of the office with her head down, grab her things off the desk and leave.  He ran to the door, because he didn’t like her walking out to her car alone at night, but she was already peeling out of the parking lot, her metallic-blue Camaro’s taillights disappearing quickly.

If he thought she was stand-offish before their conversation Monday night, he hadn’t known the definition.  Perfectly professional, she graced them with the frozen smile she used to keep the clients at arm’s length as well.  Mason and Cairo were furious with him, but he couldn’t justify her reaction.  She was hurt and broken, but not in any mood to let any of them in.

At ten-thirty on Thursday night, he walked out into the empty gym and stopped in front of the front desk.  “Lock the door behind me; I’m going to run the deposit out, I’ll be gone about twenty minutes.”

“Sure.”

She followed him to the front door.  He turned, his hand on the push handle. “Alyssa, I’m sorry if I upset you by asking about your past.  You’re so closed off with us.  We just want to get to know you better.”

“Holy shit, you guys are persistent,” she groused.  Anger.  At least that was an emotion, not the blank nothingness they’d been faced with.

“Because we care.”

“Oh yeah, sure.”  She snorted derisively.

“Of course we care.  Why would you think otherwise?”

“I know exactly the kind of caring that you guys are interested in, and I don’t play like that anymore,” she snapped, fury in the depths of her pretty eyes.  He stepped back and his shoulder bumped against the glass.

“Wait, wait, what do you think we’re looking for?”

“I know just what you’re looking for.  Every time I’m around you guys I’m drowning in lust.  I can’t fucking handle this.  I left the pack to start my life over and you’re trying to trap me into the same thing again.  I won’t play party favor.  I’m not a toy.  Leave.  Me.  Alone.”  She shoved him out the door and snapped the bolt in place, stalking back to the desk with anger and hurt radiating off her in waves.  He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d sprouted wings and started whistling.

He stared at her as she sat down in the desk chair and buried her face in her hands.  He hadn’t meant to upset her; that was the exact opposite of what he wanted.  He walked to his car, realizing for the first time that because she was were, she would have the scenting abilities that human women didn’t.  Of course she’d be aware of how she affected them physically, the same way they were aware of it with her.  They’d not ever bothered to try to hold back their lustful thoughts of her, and he was just as guilty of that as his brothers.  He believed she was attracted to them, but she was holding back, and now she might try to quit because of it.  His brothers would never forgive him.  He had to fix this.

He idled the car in the parking lot for several minutes.  He knew he had to go back in and apologize.  And he needed to tell her everything.  If he waited any longer, they would all lose her, and the sudden thought of that filled him with so much dread that he was now more certain than he’d ever been before that she was meant to be theirs.  Not long ago he could have fought that truth, but the last few days that she’d spent withdrawing further left no doubt in his mind:  she was their bride.

His music had been blaring so loud over the engine that he suddenly felt deaf when he turned off the car and got out.  Until he heard a piercing scream from inside the gym.  Running full tilt to the front doors he sucked in a sharp breath to see two men in black ski masks with Alyssa.  One of them held her arms behind her back, while the other delivered a stunning slap to her face.

He didn’t give a second thought to the thick security glass of the front doors as he let his beast free, backed up a few steps and surged right through them with a roaring war cry.  He felt his clothes tear, his skin scratch and bleed, but he ignored all of it.

Tackling the one who had slapped her, he slammed his head into the floor.  The man went still under his hands, and he surged up to where the second man still held Alyssa.  A knife he hadn’t seen before was pointed into her neck, a trickle of blood dripping down her skin.  He could taste her fear, but underneath that, in the depths of her eyes, he could see that she trusted him to save her.  Or at least hoped he would.

“Let her go.”

“Yeah, right.  I have my instructions.”  He dug the knife tip further into her neck and she whimpered.

“If you hurt her again, it won’t matter what your instructions are.  Let my mate go and I’ll let you live.”

The man started to pull her with him towards the door.  “Grady says your brother takes a dive in the next fight.  That’s three weeks from now.  I’ll just keep her warm for you until then; make sure he does what he’s supposed to.”  There was nothing good about the look in his eyes through the holes in the face mask.  Dante’s beast roared at him to stop this thug from taking Alyssa, but the human part of him knew the blade was too much of a risk to her fragile neck.

And then he remembered that he was faster because the man was human.  He acted like he was giving up, tapping into his beast as he hung his head in pretended shame and raised his hands in defense.  It worked; the human relaxed somewhat and lifted the knife slightly away from her as he tried to maneuver the both of them over the threshold of the broken door.  Dante took the opportunity and shot forward while he was distracted, slamming the man’s arm into the door and jerking the knife free.  Alyssa fell to the floor, choking on a sob, before getting to her feet and moving away.

The man fought against him, but he was already gone to his beast, his eyes yellow and bright, his fangs aching to tear the intruder’s throat out.  “She.  Is.  Mine!”  he roared, wrapping his hand around the man’s neck and pulling him inside, lifting him off the ground.

Suddenly, the man that he’d thought was unconscious was on his back, digging the fallen knife into his shoulder.  A bolt of pain radiated through him, but he ignored it and did not loosen his hold on the man against the wall.  He was aware only of the sound of tearing fabric and then a snarling growl as the other man was ripped off his back.  A dark gray wolf rolled to the floor with his attacker, then leapt to her feet and stalked towards him.

Dante pulled the blade from his shoulder and jammed it into the other man’s palm, anchoring him to the wall as he shrieked and tried to pull the blade out.  Alyssa lunged at the thug on the floor before Dante could call to stop her, and the man caught her with his leg and threw her into the mirrored wall.  Something cracked, and she crumpled to the floor as a glittering rain of mirror shards poured down on her suddenly very still form.

Too far gone to stop himself, he stalked to the man struggling to get up from the floor and broke his neck with one swift tug.  He deserved to suffer, but there was no time.  He dialed Mason as he knelt next to her, grateful she was still breathing.

He barked two short sentences and hung up, carefully picking out the shards of mirror imbedded in her fur.  “Alyssa’s hurt.  Get here now.”

Time seemed to leak slowly by, but in half the time it should have taken at normal speed, he finally heard the roar of Cairo’s truck and the squeal of brakes.  “Tell me she’s alive, please,” Mason begged, kneeling next to them.

“Yeah, her chest is moving but she’s out cold.  I think something’s broken, too, I thought I heard a crack.  Maybe a rib, I don’t know.”

Cairo gestured to the man impaled on the wall.  “You want me to kill this one or what?”  He’d been begging to be let go, apologizing, whining.  Dante had tuned him out immediately.

“No.  We need to find out what’s really going on.  Mason, go grab some towels from the supply closet and help me get her to the back room onto the couch.”

Cairo found a tarp and began to wrap up the dead thug’s body.  After pulling off the knit cap, Cairo said that he recognized the man as one who hung around Grady during matches.

Alyssa had a few marks of dried blood on her fur, but otherwise appeared to be free of any serious injury.  Pressing gently against her sides, she made a small, pained noise, but he couldn’t feel a break in any of her ribs and hoped that meant one was just badly bruised.  She would heal faster in her shift, so letting her rest as long as possible in this form was what was needed.  And it wasn’t as if they could take her to the hospital in that form anyway.

Free of the broken mirror, he and Mason carried her, using one of the towels as a stretcher, and laid her down on the couch.  Mason looked up at him with grief in his eyes.  He might be goofy, but he was also very tenderhearted.

Dropping a hand to his shoulder, he said softly, “You stay here with her in case she wakes up.  I’m going to help Cairo with our guest and run out to that all-night supply store in Glasston to get wood to board up the doors.  It’s going to be a long night.”

Nodding, Mason knelt next to the she-wolf on the couch and rested his hand on one of her stark white paws.  Dante knew that he wouldn’t move an inch until she woke up.

Before he went to get wood to board up the doors, they gave a once over to the other goon from Grady’s posse.  He seemed to be under the delusion that they would let him live if he talked, and he blubbered like a baby while cradling a towel to his injured hand.  They had no intention of letting him live, but helpful captives were better than ones that needed torture, because torture was time-consuming.  They most definitely needed to be out of there with the bodies before dawn.

He looked at the man and then at Cairo.  “It just doesn’t make sense that he’d go to kidnap and rape to get you to throw a fight, after trying to make you lose twice before.”

Cairo knelt down next to the man and gave him a friendly smile that was only for show.  “What happened to that guy who slipped that poison in my water?  You know him?”

The guy laughed lightly.  “We took care of him.”

Dante cast a quick glance at Cairo and said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” the guy said, “that he screwed up, so Grady had him taken care of.  Killed.  See, the guy, his name was Tim, he got in over his head with some gambling debts to Grady.  He asked for an extension and promised to win big.  He drugged you without Grady knowing, see?  And then when you lost, he won big.  Grady told him to do it again, but he got caught because he was an idiot.”

Cairo hummed in his throat.  “And Grady probably lost big-time when I won.”

“Oh hell yeah.  And then Grady figures you’ll be too much on your guard to get drugged again, so he thought we could provide a little extra motivation by taking the girl with us.  If you hadn’t come back and interrupted us, you would have gotten a call from Grady later on tonight explaining how you’re going to tank the fight in three weeks.”

Dante shook his head in disgust.

Cairo’s smile shifted slightly.  “You like how our girl looks?”

He snorted.  “Yeah, Grady saw her at the fight, said she was a real piece of ass and that he’d let all the guys at the gym have her until your match, and then he’d give her back to you if you lost.  If she survived, anyway.”  He laughed in a loud and mocking way, completely forgetting that Dante had called her his mate, and Cairo had said she was their girl.  Humans were certainly stupid sometimes.

The laughter choked off suddenly as Cairo’s large hand squeezed his windpipe.  They hadn’t asked his name, because in the end it didn’t matter.  Cairo leaned into the man’s ear but Dante heard the harshly whispered words anyway.  “She belongs to us, you miserable fuck.  Did you really think we would let you live?”

The sound of his windpipe being crushed was followed by the thud of his body as it fell, lifeless, to the floor.  Wiping his hands off on his jeans, Cairo stood.  “You go get the wood for the doors; I’ll wrap him up and get him in the trunk.  We’ll burn them in our fire pit and close the gym for a few days to take care of Alyssa.”

“And if she protests?” he asked.

Cairo cracked his neck.  “I don’t give a fuck what she wants right now.  Until we figure out what’s going on with Grady, she’s under house arrest.  Our house.”

Nodding at his logic, and appreciating the ferocious protectiveness seeping from his brother, Dante took the keys to Cairo’s truck and headed out.  An hour later, armed with a Skilsaw, Liquid Nails, and sheets of thick plywood, he and Cairo secured the front doors.  While he was getting the supplies, Cairo had cleaned up the glass and mirror and poured bleach everywhere that blood lay, sopping the mess up with gym towels.