Jared (River Pack Wolves 3) - New Adult Paranormal Romance (9 page)

He gave her a very small smile—it wouldn’t have been a big deal on anyone else, except that she’d never seen a real smile on his face. It looked like it hurt him. “I’m your bodyguard.”

She snorted a laugh. “All right, Mr. Jared, the bodyguard with no last name. Make yourself useful and get me some coffee, will you?”

He gave her a small scowl, but it wasn’t too harsh. “You’re trying to get rid of me.”

She sighed. “Only for a minute. You can bring your badass self back here if you’ve got coffee.”

That small smile made an appearance again, then he strode toward the door. She stepped aside to let him pass, but when she closed the door again, she banged her head softly against it.

One week.
Six days now, actually.

She had to pull herself together enough to fix this mess.

Jared should have known—the rally at 2 o’clock was an anti-shifter one.

He stood to Grace’s right, while the ex-boyfriend speechwriter stood to her left, and the coordinator girl—he thought her name was Kylie—flitted around the stage and fussed with the Senator’s microphone.

Every muscle in Jared’s body clenched.

The restless crowd that had gathered in the rented hall quietly murmured amongst themselves, waiting to hear the main speaker—two others had already spouted more hate speech than Jared wanted to hear in a lifetime. They were ordinary folk, just as he always suspected—that neighbor down the street, the guy you buy your groceries from, the mid-level manager coming down from her office for a little bigotry with her lunch. Their hatred was a pheromone that floated in the air—the scent of their anger twisted his stomach. Evil was a common enough thing in the world, but he thought he’d left most of it overseas. To see so much of it on display in Seattle chilled him deep in his bones.

He kept quiet, not blowing his cover in front of the speechwriter, but that asshole sure was flapping in his mouth.

“Would you look at the size of this crowd?” Nolan held up both hands as if embracing the lot of them.

Grace bent her head to listen, and with her hair pulled back, Jared could see the tight press of her lips. He would give anything to know what she was thinking, but that would have to wait until later. Assuming this poison didn’t seep into her system and scare her off.

Nolan kept talking. “The poll numbers are off the charts. People don’t want to say it out loud, but they’re starting to. Look at this…” He gestured to the crowd again. “This is on a Tuesday afternoon. Think about what it’ll look like when we have an evening rally, or a weekend one.”

Grace just shook her head and didn’t answer.

The Senator tapped the microphone, and the crowd quieted down. He started in on his speech, which Jared had absolutely no interest in. He watched Grace instead. Her eyes were glued to her father’s tall, commanding form. He was almost big enough to be a shifter, and a nagging doubt tugged at Jared’s mind. Was it possible? He seriously doubted it. There were plenty of alpha males in the human population who weren’t alpha because of their wolf nature. Which Jared actually counted against them. Wolves were more pure in spirit than humans—at least, Jared’s wolf nature was the good side of him, as far as he could tell. It was his human hands who had done all the killing, and humans who had given him the orders to do it. Humans made war; not wolves. Packs only fought when a member was threatened. It wasn’t as if there weren’t dark wolves—there were—but usually it was the human side corrupting the wolf, not the other way around.

No, the Senator wasn’t good enough to be a shifter.

“They’re a hidden menace among us,” he was intoning, to murmurs of agreement in the crowd. “They’re overrepresented in our criminal elements, they hide in the shadows, and by their very nature, they’re dangerous. They don’t reason or think the way humans do—they make blood vows within their packs and revel in their aggressive, animal nature. It’s not entirely their fault, I understand that. They can’t help being born what they are. But that doesn’t erase the fact that they’re a danger to the law-abiding citizens of our country.”

The crowd cheered, and the Senator paused, obviously relishing their adulation. His words made Jared wish he had pulled the trigger. But the look on Grace’s face—a scowl that grew darker with each line of the speech—reminded him why he didn’t. If only he could convince her that she could stop all this. He’d seen enough of her already to know she was strong, and she had a purity of heart about her—her wolf was hard to contain, and that brought out her righteous side. The question was whether she would be strong enough to stand up to the alpha male in her life—her father. Jared could see the dynamic: the Senator dominated everyone around him, including his daughter.

The man was still droning on with his speech. “The time is coming, my friends, very soon. We need to do something about this, take action that will ensure the safety of the good people of Seattle and Washington. Your numbers here today are heartening to me. You’ve taken time from your day, your lives, your work in making this country strong, to show your support for keeping it that way. I want you to know that I am on your side. And in the days to come, I hope you’ll be on mine.”

The Senator was wrapping up—thank God—but the crowd seemed far from ready to be done.

Nolan was clapping along with everyone else. He leaned over to Grace. “Do you see this?”

She nodded. “Do they really believe all this stuff?”

Jared whipped his attention to her.

“Hell yeah, they do,” Nolan said. “I took half this speech straight from the online sites where they rant about this stuff all the time. It’s what the people believe, Grace, and remember… we represent the people.”

“What happened to doing what’s right?” She was scowling at the crowd, not even looking at Nolan.

“What’s right for who?” He pulled back and gave her a frown. “I’m all for protecting the people—if they’re innocent. Shifters aren’t innocent bystanders in this, Grace. They’re involved in the drug trade, weapons dealing, who knows what else. They’re legitimately dangerous. You wouldn’t let convicted criminals run around in the streets, would you?”

“I’m not saying that, and you know it, Nolan.” She turned her scowl on him.

Nolan’s determination faltered. He leaned toward her. “It’s what your father wants, Grace. And I want to keep my job.”

She gave him a pinched look, but Nolan dropped his gaze and moved across the stage toward the Senator. He was already walking down the three steps into the crowd to shake hands.

Grace stayed where she was.

“He’s kind of an asshole,” Jared said.

“He’s not. He’s a good man.”

“Doesn’t look that way from my angle.” Jared studied how Nolan moved through the crowd, following in the wake of the Senator, pressing flesh with people and chatting them up. “He looks pretty comfortable in the hate crowd.”

The sound of a hundred conversations was making it so that he had to speak up, but it also meant his voice wouldn’t carry. A few people trickled in and out of the two sets of doors—one in back and one off to the side—but for the most part, people were grabbing cups of coffee from the refreshment tables and hanging around for more hater chit-chat.

Jared couldn’t wait to leave, but he wasn’t budging from Grace’s side.

She turned to peer up at him with her bright blue eyes. “Nolan’s just doing his job.”

“I’ve used that excuse, too.”

She frowned. “What happened to you? When you were in the military, something happened.”

“This isn’t about me,” he said coolly. He already told her what he was—she didn’t need to know he had one of the highest kill counts in Afghanistan. “This is about you, and whether you’re going to do what’s right, or if you’re just going to do your job, like your ex-boyfriend.”

Grace’s eyes unfocused as she gazed out into the crowd, watching Nolan again.

Jared sensed an opportunity, a moment—she was faltering. He could feel it. “You’re not one of these people, Grace. They would string you up if they could. They’re already doing medical experiments on people like you and me.”

Her pretty face whipped back to his.
“What?”

He dropped his voice to just below the murmur of the crowd, so she had to lean in to hear him. “Civilian shifters. Military shifters. There are already people in the government who feel free to kidnap them and perform experiments. They’re
already
treating us like we’re subhuman—your father is just trying to make it legal.”

Her face twisted up, horrified. “How is that even possible?”

“I saw it with my own eyes. I was one of the ones taken, but I didn’t suffer anywhere near as much as some. There are a few who’ve died; several more on their way. Tortured, kept in cages.”

Her expression just got more and more disbelieving—no, she believed him. That was why she was so horrified. “Why don’t you tell someone? Why not go public with this?”

“We might. Probably will. But there are lots of people in high positions of power protecting this, orchestrating it. We have reason to believe your father is involved.”

“No.”
She actually took a step back this time, almost like she was losing her balance.

Jared instinctively reached for her, caught her by the elbow, and kept her upright.

She was shaking her head. “No. Stop it. Stop saying these things.” She jerked her elbow out of his grasp.

“I’m only saying what’s true, Grace.” He hated doing this to her. It was tearing him up inside to see that look on her face. His wolf surged up with the need to protect her, even if it was from the truth about her father. And herself.

She shook her head more violently, then turned away from him. Her heels clacked across the wood floor of the raised stage.

Shit.
He was driving her away—too much, too soon. And just like in the meadow, the image of her retreating back—her fleeing
away
from him—surged up the need to go after her. Knowing he was causing her this pain, while the same time knowing that it had to be done… it was opening the fissures inside him again.

She pounded down the stairs. He grimaced, hesitated, then went after her, cursing himself for handling the whole thing so badly.

She pushed her way through the crowd. The haters made space for the pretty Senator’s daughter, and she left mystified looks in her wake. Jared trudged after her, calculating where he could corner her and explain. Or maybe backpedal. Soften it somehow. This had to be hard for her, and he
had
to find a way to make it work. To bring her over to his side. Because the alternative was worse than anything she was feeling right now.

When she reached the side door, a man in a hoodie who was lounging against the wall suddenly grabbed her and wrapped his arm around her neck to hold her firm against his chest.

Shock rippled through Jared, and he nearly shifted… but he managed to keep it under control and sprinted toward the man instead. A scream went up near the main door, and movement burst through the hall—a whole group of these hooded men sprung to life and fanned out into the crowd. They were large and hulking—too oversized to be casual hatemongers. Were these
shifters?
What the hell were they doing? Jared growled, cursing whatever was about to go down, but his focus stayed on Grace and the man holding her. She was terrified, clawing her hands at the man’s arm around her throat. Jared had to push his way through the now-panicked crowd.

The hooded man wasn’t choking her, just holding her and forcing her to watch whatever was going down, but it made Jared want to rip off his face. He finally pushed past the last of the attendees and lunged up to them, plowing his fist to the guy’s nose. The shock of it, and the crunch of the man’s nose breaking under his knuckles, made Grace scream and the man’s grip on her slacken. He slumped to the ground. Jared gathered Grace into his arms, protectively, and her small body melted against his chest. He turned her away from the crowd and trapped her body against the wall, covering her with his bulk before finally twisting around to see what else was happening.

His heart thudded, as he quickly took in the scene—the hooded men were shouting, intimidating the crowd, and shoving people to the floor, but the only blood he saw was on the man’s face at his feet. The mayhem was distracting everyone from the one guy who was moving toward the front. He had something in his hands, and for a moment Jared thought it was a bomb—but then the man shook it and started spraying the wall behind the podium. It was a gang symbol—a shifter gang Jared recognized—and the words,
we’re watching you.

What the hell?

The man let out a whistle, and the rest scattered, making for the exits. One stopped to hoist up the bloodied man at Jared’s feet—he was dazed but not completely knocked out. Jared stared long and hard at their faces as they hurried out the doors and into the Seattle afternoon sun.

He had no idea who they were, but he was damn sure they weren’t shifters. And he wasn’t at all surprised when the Senator took the podium again.

“Everyone please remain calm and see if anyone around you is hurt. The shifter gang appears to have left, although their message is clear. But we will not be intimidated by lawlessness and violence! I promise you, we will find who is responsible for this.”