Bear My Baby (Shifter Squad Six 1) (14 page)

Cassie stood at the window, hyperventilating. It came all the more clear when Connor disappeared from sight, into the darkness. She breathed in deeply, trying to control herself, trying to get everything under control. But she couldn't.

Why?!

It was the only real thought pounding in her head. Why did they take Monroe? Why did they fucking care? They could have taken her. That would have been fucking fine. But her baby? That was... she had no words for the cruelty.

Numbly she turned away from the window, walking on autopilot. She was passing by the table where the box was still sitting and more out of reaction than anything else, she stopped and grabbed it. Tearing the top she'd already pried loose, she fished out the stack of photographs in it. Picture after picture of her in her home, in her yard, out that night with Adelaide. On some of them, she was holding Monroe. On one of them, she'd been caught with Connor, walking down the street, laughing as they headed toward her house.

She wanted to scream again but nothing came out of her throat. The only thing that was common in all of those images was that it was
her
that they were after. Her that they had so painstakingly photographed and cataloged. And now her son was paying the price.

Her hand balled into a fist around the images and she stuffed them into her purse, taking them with her as she stepped through the empty, jagged hole that used to be her front door. Cassie made no move to correct the gaping hole. It didn't matter. Just like it didn't matter that there was a dead man lying on her floor.

The only things that mattered were that her baby was out there, screaming for his mama, and the man she was falling in love with was desperately trying to save him. And from what Cassie could tell, it was all her fault.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Cassie

“It can’t be that bad,” Adelaide said, nudging a cup of coffee in front of Cassie’s nose.

She couldn’t even smell it. She bet it would have been delicious if she could. Pushing it out of her way a little, Cassie checked her phone for the millionth time in the last hour, waiting for an update from Connor. But there was still nothing. She’d resent the address a few times just to make sure he got it, but now she could only wait. It had been a few hours and every second that ticked by saw her losing her mind more and more easily.

“Where’s Monroe, anyway? Don’t tell me he’s hanging out with that hunk of yours! You still haven’t really told me anything about him, you know,” Adelaide carried on, grinning cheerfully.

Cassie threw her a look she hoped would convey just how exhausted she was and how little she wanted to discuss anything. Adelaide’s hands immediately clamped around hers, warming them in her palms.

“Oh, come on, Ellie. Tell me what’s going on. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. And what’s that dark stuff on your shirt?” she asked, glancing at Cassie’s sleeves.

Cassie looked down and groaned, seeing thick splatter of blood running up one arm. She must have been too close when Connor thrust the blade into the guy’s chest.

Should I be calling the cops? But what the hell can they do… I can’t even tell them who took Monroe. I don’t even know!

There weren’t any tears this time. She felt angry and empty, but unlike last time, she didn’t feel fearful for her life. She only wanted her baby back. And Connor. When she was about to offer Adelaide some kind of an explanation to appease her, there was a heavy knock on the door. Cassie was up on her feet before Adelaide could react, running through the condo to the front door.

She peeked out through the peep hole for a moment, confirming that it was Connor. Pulling the door open, she said a little prayer under her breath, but when Connor stepped in without Monroe, Cassie crumpled to the floor.
There
was that fear she had been missing. The anguish and the gut wrenching pain. Tears didn’t come but her whole body felt like it had been sucked through a vortex, jumbling everything around.

“You didn’t find him,” she said softly, choking on the words.

“No,” he said, getting down on his haunches in front of Cassie. “I didn’t. But I will. Whoever those fuckers are, Cassie, I’ll get them. I’ll get our baby back.”

“
Your
baby? Ellie, what’s he talking about? And why is he calling you Cassie?” Adelaide asked, brows knitting in confusion.

Neither Cassie nor Connor paid her any attention.

“It’s all because of me,” Cassie said.

“Don’t start that. You couldn’t have known that those animals would come for you like that. Or that they’d come for Monroe. You were supposed to be safe,” Connor growled, scooping her up in his arms and pressing her against his chest.

He felt cool to the touch. His skin was almost icy. She had never known him to be anything else than scorching hot before when she’d laid her hands on him. She looked at his eyes and the faded blues she knew so well were replaced by dark orbs, almost completely brown. They flickered a little. It was the first time she’d seen his bear up close like that, skulking underneath his human side.

“No, it was because of me,” she said, reaching for her purse that was sitting on a table next to the door.

She pulled the pictures out, shoving them in his hands. He flipped through them, his expression betraying surprise with every single one he looked at. Connor stopped on the one where Cassie was opening the door and walking in with him.

“I think it was both of us,” he said. “Or at least I didn’t make things any better. They must have known who I was and that kicked their plans into higher gear. I don’t think they wanted Monroe on his own. I think they wanted leverage over you. So you would tell them whatever it is they think you know.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Cassie said, grabbing her head with both hands.

“Adelaide, can you give us a moment?”

“What?! No! You’re saying someone has Monroe?! We need to call the cops right now! Ellie, come on! Get up!” Adelaide gasped, the color draining from her face.

The last thing Cassie needed was to try and explain to someone why she couldn’t hold
their
hand while her life was falling apart. Thankfully, Connor was there to do it for her.

“Adelaide. Give us a moment. Get into the kitchen. Don’t come out unless we call for you. Now,” he barked, putting all that military authority into his voice that years of being a SEAL and a commander of troops had distilled into him.

If Cassie had been in Adelaide’s shoes, she would have jumped to comply. There wasn’t any kind of a threat in his voice, just a promise. A promise that if she didn’t do as she was told, she wouldn’t like the consequences.

“Ellie, are you okay?” Adelaide asked weakly.

“I’m fine. Leave us alone for a second, please.”

Adelaide shuffled into the kitchen after a moment of contemplation, closing the door behind her. Cassie hated behaving like that to her only remaining friend, but this wasn’t the time to play nice and care about anyone’s feelings. She was too busy going through all the events that had led up to that damn night at Jonah’s house, trying to figure out what she could possibly know that would make someone do something as horrible as kidnapping a baby.
Her
baby.

“I think you don’t know anything, but you probably do. Now, hear me out. I don’t think it’s something obvious. But it has to be something that people are willing to kill for. This isn’t the time or place to talk about it, though. I’ll make a few calls. We’ll go meet up with my squad and we’ll get the right people working on this.”

Cassie nodded blankly, rifling through her memories. She’d worked as a personal assistant to Jonah for years and it hadn’t been a particularly exciting job. He was a small-scale businessman from what she could tell, though he lived fairly lavishly and kept himself in impeccable shape despite his growing age. Cassie could remember countless days of running errands for him, like picking up groceries, replying to correspondence about several of his charities, and running the day-to-day business of his laundromats. Nothing that stuck out.

Cassie had always felt that there was more to Jonah than he let on, but she wasn’t the one to pry. He was a tall man, with striking eyes that really bored into her sometimes. She knew he had been a scientist when he was younger, a biochemist, but had mostly left that life behind as something that came with more heartache than joy for him.

Occasionally, he would have heated meetings with people Cassie didn’t know, but as easily as he’d gotten angry at them, he’d calmed down again. He never let on that any of those heated discussions meant any more to him than the weather that day or what he was having for lunch.

She could have gotten a better job, but she never did because she liked Jonah as a person and he kept increasing her pay. He gave her time to study and to focus on other things that kept her growing as a person, like her writing. The only things he’d ever asked for was loyalty, that she would tell him if anyone approached her with another job offer or anything, and that she would be vigilant about the kind of people she communicated with.

To her, it had seemed like a quirk—an odd, deepening sense of paranoia that she didn’t understand—but she excused in him. He was a man of eccentricities and that was just one of them. But nothing else stuck out to her. He’d never asked her to hide any files or keep anything safe. Never confided in her about his lost love, his wife Rachel, who had died a year before Cassie met him. Things friends talked about.

Sighing, she shook her head. She couldn’t think of a single thing that she hadn’t already told the people Connor worked for. And she’d gone over every inch of her memories a million times between that night and now, scouring them for clues and coming up empty-handed.

Cassie hadn’t realized that she must have been sitting on the ground, staring into nothingness for a while. She was deaf to Connor’s words and only when he pulled her up on her feet did her world try to focus again. Her chest felt so tight, like she was seconds from having a heart attack and her body was convulsing with heaves that could have been breaths, or just panic.

My baby’s out there, all alone… Monroe, what have I done!

“Honey, it’ll be okay. We’ll fix this,” Connor said, keeping his arm around her waist and ushering her out through the front door, grabbing the pictures and her purse along with him.

Adelaide was just going to have to deal.

***

The place Connor took her to was little more than a bunker. It was definitely underground, though Cassie wasn’t sure whether it was in San Francisco or out of it; she hadn’t been paying any attention during the drive there. A man with wide shoulders and a crooked, worried smile had driven up in front of Adelaide’s house when they’d exited and Connor had ushered her into the big Jeep, introducing the man as Grant. She might have said hello, she couldn’t have been sure.

Now, she was sitting on a chair in the back of the room, cradling a cup of hot chocolate that one of the guys had brought her. She hadn’t taken a sip. One by one, they’d filed in through the door, gathering within half an hour of Cassie’s, Connor’s, and Grant’s arrival. They were all decidedly big men, seeming to fill in the tight space with their egos as much as they did with their bodies. She could almost taste the testosterone in the room.

All five were looking at Connor expectantly, sometimes throwing compassionate glances at Cassie.

Word must travel fast,
she thought darkly.

“So, what’s this about, lieutenant?” Dutch asked, chewing on some tobacco with his arms across his chest.

She wondered how that camo shirt stayed on him with the way his muscles were bulging through it. The same question could really be asked about every single one of them. She’d somehow found herself in the company of six of the hottest men in California and she couldn’t even enjoy it.

“Like I said in the message, I have to ask you all for help. This is strictly voluntary. I know all of you are slated to go on a mission tomorrow. I bowed out of it a few hours ago. Here’s why,” he said, raising his hand and stopping Thatch from protesting.

“You all know Cassie. She was our mark more than a year ago in Chicago. We picked her trail up at Jonah Robertson’s house after he called in the cavalry. I don’t need to remind you what happened there, I assume.”

“No, but what’s going on now?” Tex asked, his brows knitting together in question.

“Cassie’s… the mother of my child,” Connor said, managing to keep his voice clear and his expression unchanging. “And the boy’s been kidnapped.”

The tension and silence in the room could have been cut with a knife. The men grew completely quiet and serious. Cassie had done her research on shifters. She knew very well how important the first-born son of any Alpha shifter was, and that every one of these men would understand the tragedy of the situation. But unlike with humans, there weren’t any of those awkward questions or judging glances.

Connor’s squad understood. A shifter and his mate were a sacred pairing and what fate threw in their path was unavoidable, or at least they were taught to believe. So while Cassie was struggling with keeping her emotions at bay, by the looks of the men in the room, the only thing they were focused on was the new mission being laid out before them.

“Do we know who did it?” Grant asked, always the one to cut to the chase.

Cassie figured Connor had already filled him in on her and Connor’s past as well, meaning he got over the shock faster.

“I think it’s the same fuckers who chased Cassie in Chicago. Can’t miss those crew cuts.”

“Wolves, always the biggest fuckwits,” TexGrim growled, low and menacing. “No offense,” he added off-handedly, glancing at Thatch and Tex.

“None taken,” Grim said, chuckling. “Any way to know where they took him? What’s the plan?”

“I don’t think they wanted my son, Monroe. I think they came for Cassie, but I got to her before they could snatch her. I was too late for the boy, though,” Connor said.