Tempted by the Jaguar #4: Infiltration (Riverford Shifters)
Read Tempted by the Jaguar #4: Infiltration (Riverford Shifters) Online
Authors: Cristina Rayne
TEMPTED BY THE JAGUAR #4: INFILTRATION
A Riverford Shifters
Serial
CRISTINA RAYNE
The characters and events
portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living
or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 Cristina
Rayne
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without express written permission of the author.
“Kylie, something terrible has happened to Molly!”
For a split-second, Kylie stood frozen next to the bed she and Hunter
had just made love on, unable to comprehend her friend, Tara’s, words as they
played over and over within her mind.
“What…?” she whispered almost too low to be heard into her phone.
“What’s worse is I haven’t been able to get a hold of Ty!” Tara
continued frantically as though Kylie hadn’t spoken. “We were all supposed to
go out for drinks tonight, remember? Molly said you looked like shit last
night, so I figured you weren’t coming, but when Molly didn’t show, either, and
didn’t call, I went over to her place. There were cops
everywhere
! They
told me they think someone broke into her apartment!”
Kylie felt all the blood drain from her face. It couldn’t be a
coincidence…could it?
“Is she hurt?” she demanded.
Somewhere in some vague corner of her mind, Kylie sensed Hunter
abruptly sitting up in the bed behind her.
“That’s just it, Kylie!” Tara all but shouted. “I only got a glimpse of
her living room because the cops pushed me away before I could get too near
Molly’s door, but the place was trashed. It looked like a tornado had hit it.
The cops wouldn’t tell me
anything
, but some of the neighbors were
gossiping about there being blood, that they can’t find Molly anywhere! I was
praying that she and Ty were over at your place! Then you weren’t answering
your phone and—
Christ
—I thought something had happened to you, too!”
“I haven’t seen or talked to Molly since last night when she brought me
some meds!” Kylie said, her voice strained with worry. “Where are you right
now? Are you alone?”
“I’m still at Molly’s apartment complex. The elderly couple that lives
next door to her saw me freaking out and invited me to sit down inside their place.”
“Good. I’m coming over there right now to pick you up.
Don’t
leave that apartment for
any
reason.”
“Huh? But the cops want me to go—”
“Especially don’t leave with the cops,” Kylie added urgently. “I’ll
explain when I get there.”
She tossed the phone on the bed behind her and scrambled after her
strewn clothes on the floor. Tara’s frantic voice echoed ominously within her
mind as Kylie struggled to pull on her jeans with hands that were shaking with
equal panic.
“You know you’re doing exactly what they want you to do, right?” Hunter
said quietly.
For the first time since she had answered the phone, Kylie glanced over
at him. He sat on the edge of the bed, still completely naked, and watched her
dress with an unreadable expression.
“I know,” Kylie said. She bent over and retrieved his t-shirt from the
floor and tossed it to him. “That’s why you’re going to drive me over there.”
He dropped the shirt onto his lap. “Kylie—you know I can’t let you step
even a foot outside this building right now. We have no idea how many from the
lion clan other than that assassin and a handful of Sniffers have managed to
infiltrate the city. We have several clansmen on the force. Your friend would
be safer leaving that complex in their custody. One phone call from me, and it’s
done. That’ll buy us some time to talk to Maxim. The wolves in his security
detail are the best in the city.”
Kylie narrowed her eyes angrily at him. “You don’t seriously expect me
to just hide out here while the lions are out there targeting,
hurting
,
my friends?”
Hunter met her gaze calmly. “Yes, I do. Even if I was one hundred
percent sure that the lion clans are responsible for what’s happened to your
friend—which we’re
not
—I still wouldn’t let you go. Maxim’s people have
been interrogating the lioness that attacked you and Jack for a few hours now.
At the very least we should check in on their progress before we even consider
doing anything else. In the meantime, I’ll make sure they’ll keep your friend
safe at the police station until we have a better understanding of the
situation, I promise.”
Some of the tension in her shoulders eased. “Fine. Hand me my phone,
and I’ll tell Tara there’s been a change of plans while you get dressed.”
Instead of reaching for the phone, Hunter stood and reached out both
hands to pull her firmly against him into a tight hug. Kylie felt a mild
irritation at herself when the subsequent affectionate touch of his lips on her
forehead caused a good majority of the rest of her tension to bleed away, and
she actually leaned into his embrace. She didn’t like to think that she was so
weak to crave comfort when so many others had it a thousand times worse right
now.
After her parents had disappeared, she had despised having to lean on
so many others, and now that she was as adult, it really pissed her off that
she found herself
still
needing so many people as much as she did.
“We’ll find them,” Hunter murmured into her hair, “and we’ll make those
lion bastards wish they had never stepped foot in our territory.”
***
“Hunter, who’s Jack?” Kylie asked once Hunter had finished talking to
Maxim on the phone.
She was seated on the bed again, trying not to pick a hole in the
sheets as she had listened to Hunter’s one-sided conversations with first, his
contacts within the Riverford PD, and then with Maxim. Hunter had mentioned the
name Jack several times during his conversation with his tiger friend.
“That’s right…” he replied, coming over to sit down next to her on the
bed. “We were interrupted before I could tell you much of anything. Jack’s our
bleeding wolf friend, a member of the Bray wolf pack and the Parker Grove wolf
clan. A lot of the wolves that Maxim employs are from that clan.”
“So he survived,” Kylie said with a nod of relief. “With those horrible
wounds, I really didn’t think he would. I couldn’t tell from your side of the
conversation, but was he one of Maxim’s employees?”
Hunter shook his head. “Neither one of us had ever met him, though
Maxim knows some of his Bray cousins that live here in this city. No, as I
started to tell you before, he knew my older brother, Ryder.”
He paused, then reached for one of her hands, taking it into both of
his and giving it a firm squeeze. His expression was pinched as though he was
trying to contain a surge of sudden emotions, but he couldn’t quite keep the brief
flash of pain from his eyes.
His smile was bitter. “We share a common wound. Ryder went missing
about a year ago.”
Kylie gasped sharply, a million questions instantly rising on her
tongue, but Hunter was still talking. They would have to wait.
“We were supposed to go for a run in his territory one morning, but
when I showed up, he was nowhere to be found. We had always met up in the
forest, but I tried his apartment anyway, thinking he might’ve just slept in.
When he didn’t answer, I tried calling him. Nothing. He had never blown me off
before, so I was worried when a day passed and still no word.”
Hunter blew out an angry breath. “It wasn’t until he had been missing a
month that the Elders took his disappearance a little more seriously. I know I
shouldn’t be angry about it. Jaguars are known to wander off alone all the
time. It’s just in our nature, but their utter lack of concern still really
pisses me off. However, even I never imagined the horrible truth of what had
happened to him.”
“The lions,” Kylie interjected flatly.
For a split-second, that same look of hatred she had seen in Hunter’s
eyes when she had confirmed her Polyshifter nature appeared, and her chest
tightened painfully with a bout of
déjà vu
. Then the look was gone, replaced
with a rage so absolute and searing that it had even her inner jaguar quaking,
and a strong urge to
run
washed through her.
“Jack says that they were abducted along with several others, mostly
female, and imprisoned in a secret underground facility near Amarillo.”
Kylie furrowed her brow. “To use as leverage?”
Hunter’s grip on her hand tightened. “No, as guinea pigs.”
Her eyes widened. “They were
experimenting
on them? Like—full-on
mad scientist experimenting?”
A low growl rose up from his throat as Hunter gave a sharp nod. “I
don’t know what game those bastards are playing, but from everything Jack told
me about the torture they all endured, it’s become painfully obvious that the
shifter clans opposed against the lion clans really don’t know jack shit about
the lions’ endgame in this silent war.”
“But, even taking into account being unexpectedly distracted by me,”
Kylie said, “the lions have to know that their assassin didn’t quite finish the
job. For all they know, Jack survived long enough to blab about what they are
doing, including their exact location.”
She flashed him a stricken look. “You should be concentrating on a
rescue rather than bothering with me and my problems! They could be moving all
their victims to some other dungeon of horrors!”
“Which is why Maxim and his people are handling all the reconnaissance
and preparation rather than me or even the Elders. He has connections all
across the state that none of us can ever hope to match. The only thing I can
do right now to help my brother is to stay out of Maxim’s way and try not to
lose myself to my jaguar half that, at the moment, wants to go on a rampage. I
need to be as clearheaded and in control as I ever have been in my life for the
moment when we can finally make our move.”
Hunter released her hand and cupped her face gently with hands that
were slightly shaking, betraying just how close to the surface his anger still
blazed. “Helping you and your father, helping your friends, is something I
can
do, so there’s no reason at all for you to feel guilty. Whether or not your
friend, Molly’s, disappearance has to do with your run-in with that lioness
remains to be seen, but all the same, between the shifters on the force and
Maxim’s people, if she’s still in this city, we’ll find her.”
Kylie closed her eyes. “I tried to call her boyfriend, Ty, again while
you were talking to your contact at the police station, but his phone kept going
straight to voicemail,” she said. “I’m worried that it isn’t just Molly who has
disappeared. Tara said that there had been blood found in her apartment. If Ty
was there when her apartment was broken into, I don’t doubt that he would’ve
tried to protect her with his fists. He’s done it before.”
“Even so, the blood may not be from any of your friends at all,” Hunter
pointed out. “Carl told me that the blood found on the scene was minimal. Since
this case involves not only a potential kidnapping but also quite possibly
those lion bastards, it’s been made a high priority among even the humans.
We’ll know more by the morning.”
“I better call Karen and tell her what’s what. She and Mitch are hiding
out at the house of one of her Elders for the night. If it turns out that Molly
was
targeted because of me, then they may need to keep out of sight for
longer than they anticipated.”
Hunter caught her wrist as she reached for her phone that was sitting
on the bed between them. “Can you please keep what I’ve told you about the
ranch and my brother to yourself for the time being? Right now, the less people
that know about it, the better.”
“You don’t trust them…” Kylie said slowly, her eyes daring him to deny
it.
Hunter shook his head. “It’s not so much Karen and Mitch but the people
around them. With all the excitement, I never did get around to telling you
this, but a few days ago, I found evidence that a Polyshifter may have entered
the city. Given that the most recent suspected Sniffers are cougars…”
Kylie felt her heart seize painfully. “It’s a wonder that you didn’t go
for my throat the second you realized what I was.”
“That’s why I said I was dangerous. I
should
have taken you down
instantly, but I
couldn’t
. Had you truly been a spy for the lions, I
could’ve jeopardized
everything
because I let my emotions drown out any
semblance of reason.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, hanging her head in guilt.
He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against hers. “You and I can
apologize to each other until we’re both blue in the face, but it won’t change
how fucked up things are right now. We both fucked up; let’s just leave it at
that. All we can do now is lie in the bed we’ve made and hope that everything
turns out okay in the end.”