Cats Got Your Tongue (Shifter Squad Six) (8 page)

Her brows were furrowed, and though she tried to keep the mistrust off of her expression, it was easier said than done. This man, dressed in black and holding himself as if a nuclear strike at his feet would not faze him, raised her hackles and sent every alarm bell blaring in her head.

“Ah yes. Squad Six. Always the ones in trouble,” he mused softly, taking a seat across from her. “Tell me, Kelis... I can call you Kelis, yes?”

“I’d rather you—”

“Excellent. Do you have any idea why you were on that flight, Kelis?” he asked, tapping his fingertips on the table once, twice, catching her attention with the motion of his long digits.

She felt irritation bubbling inside; the man was being both insufferable and rude all at the same time. It was no minor feat, considering that Kelis thought herself a pretty laid-back, calm individual when it came to dealing with gigantic egos.

“I have no idea. I’ve told your investigators several times. The whole story went like this: I was supposed to get on my plane heading for San Francisco, but I was turned back at the gate and told to board the other one. The stewardess met me at the door, walked me on, and that’s all I know. I figured it was some sort of a system error, but since the plane was still going where I needed to be, I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Not even when you checked your surroundings and found yourself sharing a flight with only men, and football players at that?” he queried, a bemused smile on his face now.

“We both know they weren’t only jocks,” Kelis scoffed, leaning back in the chair a little.

It might have been a subconscious effort to put some distance between them. Every fiber in her being was telling her that though she’d been attacked on the plane before by a man certainly looking to kill her, she was only now face-to-face with someone truly dangerous.

“Regardless. You couldn’t have known that then, could you?”

“That’s true. I wanted to fall asleep and wake up in San Francisco. I honestly don’t know why things went as they did, but if you find out, I’d love to know.”

She gave him a stern look and when he arched a brow, a feeling struck Kelis. He knew more than he was letting on. Pressing her lush lips into a thin line, she gave him a once-over again. His muscles were relaxed and he was as at ease as a shark, without a care in the world. He didn’t look like a man who
needed
answers from her, but more like someone who had all of them already and was simply there to see if she could guess any of them.

“Would you say it was rather lucky you were there? And even more so that you seemed to be unaffected by the gas?” he queried, tapping his fingers again.

“I wouldn’t say it was lucky, no. Lucky would have been if the gas hadn’t gone off at all, or if the only pilot available knew how to really fly something as big as a 747. Ground control talked me through most of it to be honest. I think any of the Squad Six boys would have done a job just as good.”

“Unlikely,” the man said, firmly.

“But I was affected by the gas. Only reason I was okay was because I got a mask off of one of the attackers. The Arctics or whatever you called them. Pulled it off his face as he was brought down. I still got a lungful of it when another guy came at me, ripping it off.”

“You don’t say,” he answered, sounding thoroughly interested, though Kelis had no doubt he must have already known about that from her earlier reports. He didn’t look dumb, so she wondered why he was playing dumb. “And how did it feel, this gas?”

“Disorienting,” Kelis replied, brow furrowing. “Like I wanted to do something bad, but I was at the same time exhausted and angry and pumped up. I didn’t get too much of it and I held my breath, which is what I think helped, compared to the rest of the people on board. But it made me more… animated, I guess?”

“Mm-hmm. And did you enjoy your time with Squad Six?” he asked, suddenly changing the topic as if they’d been talking about the Blackhawks and he’d remembered he’d lost a bet or something.

“They’re good guys, yeah,” she said, considering him dubiously. “Why?”

“Oh, curious. Some of our former female
guests
have had a tendency of liking some of them a little bit too much. But I’m sure that’s not in your character, Kelis,” he spoke, with all the poise of a cobra trying to entice someone to come at him.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business. I don’t even know your name. Do you think it’s wise for you to start calling me a whore already?”

“Those are your words, not mine,” he said, grinning.

In hindsight, Kelis wasn’t entirely sure what made her do it. It might have been the last hints of the gas in her nervous system, it might have just been the fact that she had always hated people who chose to be assholes when plenty of other options were available to them, or it might have just been because his face was entirely punchable. In any case, she whipped up and out of her chair and her fist was flying at his nose before she knew better.

As fast as she’d been, he seemed three times as swift. The man was up, his strong hand clamped around her wrist like a vise, yanking her arm back as he grabbed her by the shoulder, slamming her face-first on the table while still standing across from her. Kelis gasped, her cheek against the cold surface, her body painfully restrained with her arm snagged up and behind her, straining against the socket.

“Fucking let
go
of me,” she hissed, trying to slither out of his grip, but the man gave her no room to struggle.

“Listen now, Kelis. That’s no way to treat your superior,” he spoke in his calm voice, not the least bit winded or worn.

“I don’t fucking work for you,” she growled, full of spite.

“Yes, you do. You just don’t know it yet,” he said softly, letting go of her arm and grabbing her by the scruff of her neck like she was some stray kitten.

He yanked her back, his hand twisting around until it was clutching her throat, pressing down just right so her air was cut off, squeezing despite her hands clawing for him.

“Now now, kitty cat. Stop with the claws. I could break your neck right now, but I’m not. No one lays a hand on me unless requested and I’ve killed better men for lesser slights. But I like you. I like your spirit. And whether you know this or not, you will be very valuable to me very soon.”

With that, he let her go, completely ignoring the deep gashes she’d left along his forearm and the bruise that was already forming on his bicep from a punch that would have rattled most men twice his size. She crumpled into her seat, wheezing, eyes wild as she looked at this despicable monster before her, clad in fucking Armani and looking like the world owed him too many favors to count.

“The fuck’s wrong with you,” she hacked, clutching her throat.

Another ten or so seconds and she would have passed out cold. She was entirely certain that this dangerous animal she’d been stuck in a small room with was very well aware of this.

“
Tsk, tsk
, Kelis. Let’s not dwell on the problem, but the solution, shall we? I have a solution for all your problems, the ones you have and the ones I can give you, and all you need to do is listen.”

He smirked, smoothing the sleeve of his shirt back over his mangled arm, blood slowly seeping into the fabric where she’d ripped at him.

“It’s not like I have a choice, do I?” she huffed back, her voice a hoarse whisper.

“There’s always a choice,” he said, lowering himself into the seat with the poise of a king. “You listen to me, or you die. Nothing more to it.”

She didn’t know it then, but the man across from her would easily become both her biggest nightmare and her staunchest supporter. Though his support often took the form of misery, and the nightmares he weaved twice as much.

His name was Spade. And like everyone else that had ever met him, she hated him on sight.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Grant

“I’m telling you, I’m fine,” Dutch groaned, flopping down on his stomach in the makeshift operating room, carved out of a corner of the base of operations The Firm had afforded Squad Six for this mission.

It was no less than nine months now since the mission in Boston and every time Grant looked over someone with a concussive injury, he still got flashbacks of the carnage on the airplane. Though no one other than Arctics agents had died that time, it had been a close call for a few of the football players. The team had needed to knock out every single one of them to quell their murderous rages, but a two hundred and fifty pound man could do a lot of damage in a few seconds, even if his adversary was the exact same size.

Several had ended up in intensive care after the adrenaline and the effects of the drug wore off, and after giving Kelis over to intel, Grant had joined The Firm doctors in order to patch them up.

I wonder where she disappeared to,
he pondered idly, the same question he’d asked himself far too many times since the night he, Grim, and Kelis had shared together.

“Doc, you going to do something or am I exposing my delicate flesh here for fucking nothing?” Dutch asked, hiking himself up on one elbow and giving Grant a look.

“Wise-ass. Shut up and pretend to have some sense. You’re a father of two now. You’d think you’d get over your sass,” Grant grumbled, peeling back the bandages he’d set the previous day over a knife wound that had penetrated Dutch’s lower back.

He’d gotten insanely lucky, as the slack-jawed idiot who’d come for him from behind had missed every possible thing he could hit that would have done serious damage. Not that it mattered, considering that the guy still ended up with eight broken fingers and the knife shoved into his thigh for good measure. The up- and downsides of missions in odd locations—no one was going to mind if you fucked up an Argentinian drug trafficker in the middle of nowhere, especially if he was asking for it.

“My
sass
? What am I, someone from an Oprah episode?” Dutch snorted, rolling back on his stomach without a little bit of grumbling. “Just hurry up. I need to clock out and go see how Ari’s doing with the kids. Rhalyn’s working on saying ‘daddy’ and I’d rather not miss it because I’m here, chatting with your highly amusing but entirely repetitive self.”

“Yeah yeah, I hear you,” Grant said with a sigh, putting on a fresh bandage already as the wound looked good and it was almost entirely healed because of his jaguar being fit and strong.

The moment he’d get to his family, Grant knew the healing would speed up even more. It always did when shifters were around their loved ones. It gave them strength. Twins had a bit of a cheat in that sense, because they could regenerate faster on account of being around their sibling, but it was still nothing compared to having a mate thrown in as well. Nothing quite as powerful as an Alpha triad.

Something you’ll probably never experience,
Grant mused glumly, giving Dutch a tap on the shoulder.

“You’re good to go, big guy. Are we meeting for drinks tomorrow night, usual place? Grim got a table at The Pool Room for us. We figured we could kick back a few shots, see where the night takes us,” Grant offered as Dutch rolled himself off the cot and stood up, stretching as if Grant had confined him for hours on end.

“I don’t know, man. We’ve been away for a while and I want to get in some time with Ari and the kids, you know?” Dutch said, shrugging apologetically and clapping Grant on the shoulder as he grabbed his leather jacket. “But tell you what, we’ll have another barbecue at our place on Saturday. Get everyone together, wives, kids, the whole shebang. Okay?”

“Sure,” Grant said, smiling mildly as Dutch beamed a smile at him.

The werejaguar had taken to smiling a hell of a lot more now that he had a mate and a family. It wasn’t a gradual change; it was more like it had happened overnight. Ever since he and Ari got together, Dutch had been a changed man. And that went for the other members of Squad Six as well, all settled down with their happy families. All except the Aldroch brothers, that was.

Grant watched Dutch stalk out of their temporary mission room, tucked in some random corridor in The Firm’s San Francisco offices. Instead of giving them a permanent space, something with an actual medical bay and storage and other reasonable things like that, The Firm kept jerking Squad Six around every time they returned from another mission. It was always a new cubbyhole, another random cot to sleep on.