Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (5 page)

“If you’re trying to scare me off, you’re going about it all wrong. Because in all your arguments, I’m hearing a lot of logistics, but I haven’t once heard that you don’t want me.”

Kelly’s mouth swooped down to kiss her and Dominec’s claws snicked out to dig gouges into the shingles. His tiger was a creature of more instinct than thought, and the sight screeched across his nerves like nails down a chalkboard, inexplicably wrong and violently shrill.

Grace shoved the lion away before Dominec could move. “I don’t want you,” she said, monotone flat.

Kelly laughed. “You’re going to have to be more convincing than that.”

She groaned—the sound all exasperation and no actual pain or the tiger would not have been able to stay put—and began striding up the path again. “You’re impossible.”

Kelly gave chase, and Dominec held himself tense and still on the roof long after they’d vanished from sight and beyond the range of his hearing. He breathed in the scents of the pride, his hackles slowly falling.

Until the wind shifted and another scent lifted to his nose.

The sterile, medicinal tang, mixed with human sweat.
Organization
.

The prisoners.

He leapt from the roof before the wind could change again, bounding after that elusive scent. The hunt was brief, ending at a barn that had seen better days just beyond the main pride compound. There were guards posted at the doors and even if the scent hadn’t been enough to give it away, the distinctive rustling and moaning of the humans inside would have.

So this was their prison. He was unimpressed.

He could easily dispatch the guards and probably take out all of the prisoners before anyone arrived to stop him—but that wasn’t going to incline Mateo to make time to give him that list and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get him back in Grace’s good graces.

He crouched in the shadows at the edge of the path. It would be easy. Temptingly easy. And he’d always thought it was better to apologize after the fact than ask permission beforehand—but that habit hadn’t done him any services at the last raid.

Be good or kill them all? He knew which one sounded more appealing, but he held himself still and silent. If only there was a way to ensure vengeance against those Organization sadists without incurring Grace’s wrath.

He shuddered, his fur shivering—with excitement not cold. There was a way. He wasn’t the only one the Organization had hurt. He wasn’t the only one who wanted vengeance. This spot was quiet, isolated. Many of the members of the pride at large wouldn’t know about today’s raid, or the prisoners here. They wouldn’t know that those who had made their lives hell were being protected only by thin walls.

Dominec could still be the good guy. But good guys didn’t have to keep secrets like those from their beloved pride mates. Didn’t they deserve to know about the monsters in their midst?

The tiger rose, padding into the night.

Chapter Five

A knock on the doorframe made Grace lift her head. Her office door was propped open and Kye stood on the threshold, one hand raised to rest on the frame. He was shorter than she was by a good two inches and possessed the sleek, compact grace of the smaller predatory cats rather than the bulk of the lions and tigers—which made sense since he shifted into a nimble snow leopard. His presence tended to be unobtrusive, fading easily into the background, with none of the authoritative power of the alpha cats who seemed to eat up all the oxygen in a room just by entering it. Kye was good at being invisible—which was part of what made him so dangerous. It wasn’t a coincidence that he had been chosen to lead the Task Force to bring down the Organization.

“Hey,” Grace said by way of welcome, flipping closed her laptop to give him her full attention. The updated guard rotations were almost done anyway.

Kye didn’t take the tacit invitation to come in and toss himself into one of the overstuffed couches crammed into her office. She’d made an effort to make her office as comfy and welcoming as possible when she became a lieutenant, so pride members would feel comfortable coming in and flopping down and unloading their problems.

“We’re expected up at the mansion,” the leopard said, nodding slightly in the direction of the Alpha’s residence. “The Hawk is bringing Dr. Russell in for debriefing.”

Following the raid the day before, the infamous Hawk—a former military sniper and bird shifter named Adrian Sokolov—had taken Dr. Rachel Russell to a cabin that was on pride lands but well beyond the main compound. Grace trusted Adrian—he was a good guy and he wouldn’t hurt Rachel, no matter how angry he was with her for the months he’d spent in captivity because of her—but she had still planned to make an unscheduled visit later today to make sure Adrian wasn’t doing anything to the good doctor he would later regret. Just another thing on her never-ending to-do list.

But it looked like that trip wouldn’t be necessary if Adrian was bringing Rachel to the main compound for debriefing. Grace could look the doc over and make sure she didn’t seem frightened or damaged in any way.

She shoved her chair back and rose. “Are any of the other prisoners talking?” she asked as she rounded the desk.

Kye somehow managed to make his shrug convey a negative as he fell into step beside her. “How did Dominec take the news that he’s banned from future strikes?”

Grace mimicked his shrug, hers not nearly as eloquent. “He didn’t attack me, so that’s a win.”

Kye remained silent—his usual tactic for getting more information—and Grace obligingly filled the silence with the details.

“He thinks we aren’t being aggressive enough. Not going after them hard enough or fast enough.” The pride pathways weren’t crowded at this hour of the morning, but neither were they abandoned. Grace lowered her voice, pitching it for Kye’s ears only as her long strides ate up the ground. “I’m not convinced he’s wrong,” she admitted. “If he wants to commit suicide by going after the Organization like a one-man wrecking ball, maybe we should point him in the right direction and stand back.”

Kye grunted softly.

“I’m not saying we should be reckless,” Grace argued. “I just wonder if we could be doing more.”

“With what army?” Kye asked softly.

Grace grimaced. It was entirely too good a point. The pride had swollen in recent weeks to nearly two hundred members—and she could count the number of shifters with actual military experience on one hand. The Hawk had been an army sniper, but his control was unusual. Most shifters would shift during times of intense stress—like, for example,
battle
—and couldn’t risk joining the human military and exposing the shifter secret.

Grace herself had always had uncanny control—but she was female and female cat shifters went into heat three times a year, becoming ravening sex monsters with claws for a week at a time. So enlisting was out of the question. She’d trained as an EMT, and taken courses in combat and as a field medic, but the courses had always had to be strategically timed to miss her breeding cycles. Most shifters only knew as much about warfare as they could pick up training at the pride—which left them largely untested.

The current incursion team consisted of eight shifters—now that they’d lost Dominec, and the Hawk had declared he wouldn’t be going on the next strike so he could guard Dr. Russell. They were training new recruits to guard the perimeter and bulk up the security forces, but they were too green to take against the Organization.

They might all be predators, but they weren’t an army by any stretch of the imagination.

“Have you and Mateo picked the next target yet?” she asked as they began the climb up the hill to the Alpha’s mansion.

“Not yet,” Kye murmured, and she heard the worry for their friend underneath the words.

“I don’t know what to say to him,” she said. Mateo had always been a sweet kid, quick to laugh, but driven by a single consuming desire to find his sister. Now that the Organization files had revealed he was too late to save her, he hadn’t shattered completely, but there were a thousand brittle cracks in him as if he could at any moment.

“Leave it,” Kye said softly. “He’s getting the job done. He was great on the mission.”

“He’s only great when he’s working.” Grace reached for the front door of the Alpha’s mansion, holding it open for Kye and following him inside. “He isn’t sleeping.”

Kye let his silence speak as they jogged up the sweeping staircase that dominated the entry to the large conference room above.

“I know no one else can do what he does, but just keep an eye on him, okay?” Grace asked. “If he collapses, we’re all screwed.”

Kye grunted an affirmative and got the door for the conference room. As soon as it cracked open, the hum of conversation greeted them. The Alpha and nearly a dozen other lieutenants and advisory council members for the pride were already crowded around the long conference table.

The lumbering bear shifter Hugo spoke quietly with Tarron, one of the older lions, both of them carried over from the previous regime. Xander was kissing up to the previous Alpha, Greg, and his mate Lucienne. They were only attending in an advisory capacity, but Xander couldn’t seem to stop sucking up to them, even though it was now Roman in charge.

Roman himself was bent over a tablet with two other lions, pointing to something on the screen. Mateo sat at one end of the table by himself, huddled over a tablet of his own, his fingers flicking rapidly over the surface.

Grace moved in and took an available chair, stretching her legs beneath the table and leaning back with her arms folded as she studied the boys’ club gathered around it, alert for any warning signs of disquiet.

They all had shifter hearing, but it was Kye who tilted his head to the side and murmured, “They’re here.” Conversations died away and everyone took their seats, leaving one empty beside Roman and two empty at the opposite end. Moments later the conference room door opened again and Patch preceded the Hawk and the good doctor into the room. She moved to take her place beside her mate, but Grace kept her eyes on Rachel Russell.

The woman really was a stunner. It was no wonder Adrian was so obsessed with her. She had the kind of beauty that made it her defining characteristic—even if she was also a brilliant reproductive specialist and anti-Organization shifter-smuggler.

The Hawk hovered over her as they made their way to the two remaining chairs. He was tall and angular, with a naturally stooped posture, seeming to curve over her protectively as they moved. The doctor displayed no fear—either in her expression or her scent—and Adrian looked like he would rake his talons across anyone who looked at her wrong. At least that was one less thing to worry about. The good doctor was in good hands.

Now to see what she had to share…

Chapter Six

The Lion’s Den was never completely empty, no matter the day or night. The pride’s only bar, it was the one place a shifter could go to let loose without worrying about whether the humans would discover their secrets. Those shifters newest to the pride were unused to the luxury of being able to get wasted somewhere it didn’t matter if they got furry—and those recently released from Organization captivity were the most likely to need to drown their sorrows. So even though it was only one in the afternoon, the Den was the perfect place to stir up the kind of trouble Dominec was looking for.

He paused in the doorway, taking in the scarred hardwood floors, battered and mismatched tables, and the tilted pool table. He wasn’t a regular here. After being drugged by the Organization for years, he’d lost his taste for losing control. He hadn’t touched alcohol in years and wasn’t the sociable kind to hang out in bars, but the Den was perfect for his purposes.

He scanned the dozen or so patrons huddled around tables and bellied up to the bar, looking for the perfect fuse to light.

There. Two men at the end of the bar. Emaciated. Huddled over their drinks like they may be snatched away at any moment. Jumping at every stray noise.

Perfect.

Dominec moved slowly, making sure they heard him as he approached so he didn’t startle them as he slid onto the barstool two stools down.

Whiskey, the tigress who ran the bar, looked up from the pint she was drawing and frowned at him. She knew he wasn’t a regular. Knew he had only been in here once in the last two years, but she didn’t question him, just turned to carry the pint across to a table in the center of the room.

Dominec waited until she returned, biding his time. It wouldn’t pay to rush.

He propped his arms on the bar as he waited, angling his head so the scars on his face caught the light—just in case the two refugees down the bar had missed them.

Whiskey returned from her drink delivery with a couple of empty pint glasses and set about rinsing them behind the bar. “Dominec,” she said, her tone far from welcoming. “You drinking?”

“Coke.”

She nodded and grabbed a fresh glass, filling it with ice and reaching for the soda gun. She set the drink in front of him and went back to work sliding used glasses into a dish rack, but he didn’t fool himself that she wasn’t listening. Whiskey was notoriously discreet, but she heard
everything
that happened in this pride.

And he’d seen her a time or two with Grace. He’d have to tread carefully.

Dominec sipped his drink, let the light play across his scars, and waited.

It didn’t take long.

The one sitting closest jerked his chin toward Dominec’s face. “Organization do that?”

Dominec nodded, making sure to keep his face angled so they got a good look.

“
Fuck
,” the one sitting farther down muttered.

He nodded again, taking another swallow of the soda. It was too syrupy sweet for his taste, but he needed a prop and he didn’t think water would cut it. He let the silence stretch, pretending to enjoy the Coke.

The one closest, a small, dark-haired man with the unmistakable scent of a badger, spoke again. “These lions. They get you out?”

Dominec shook his head. “Killed my way out.” He emphasized the first word slightly, letting the violence of the act resonate.

The one on the end—lynx, bobcat, something like that—murmured an awed curse. The badger lifted his beer, frowning into it. “Wish you’d killed ’em all.”

“Me too.” Dominec paused, fighting the urge to look toward Whiskey and see how she was reacting to the little bonding session occurring at her bar. He’d let his fellow drinkers bring up the Organization, but he needed to watch his words so his hands stayed clean of whatever was to come. After taking another slow swallow of Coke, he mused into his glass, “I can’t believe any shifter would actually consider letting them live.” He shook his head ruefully. “Taking hostages. What the fuck is that? It’s not like the Organization showed us any mercy.”

The men huddled over their beers visibly perked up. “Hostages?”

Dominec feigned surprise. “Didn’t you hear? This last raid. They took a ton of hostages. Put ’em in some barn. Of course, we can’t touch a hair on their fucking heads because they might be
valuable
. They might have
information
. So who cares what they did to us, right?”

The badger snarled. “Fifteen minutes alone. I’ll get that
information
out of them.”

The lynx/bobcat/whatever grinned—but it wasn’t pretty. “Hell yeah.”

Dominec tucked his chin down and lifted his soda in a salute to the idea, saying nothing more. Nothing else needed to be said. The idea had been planted.

Whiskey appeared in front of him, soda gun in hand to refill his drink. “What are you doing, Dominec?” she asked so softly the words were almost sub-vocal.

He shrugged and drank down the caffeinated sugar syrup. “Just talking to some of my pride mates.”

She frowned, whiskey-colored eyes studying him, but said nothing more, moving away down the bar to check on the rest of her clientele.

It was unlikely she’d say anything to Grace. Sure, they all knew he was dangerous—but it was crazy dangerous, like he was a grenade with the pin pulled and they never knew when he was going to go off. No one expected the crazy asshole to be clever and patient enough to make plans and manipulate others into getting into trouble for him.

A few feet down the bar, the badger and his feline friend were whispering to one another. Already making plans, discussing who to bring along when they went to the barn. Dominec wouldn’t have to say another word.

His probation wasn’t threatened and those Organization prisoners were about to have a shit ton of pissed off shifters to deal with.

Justice.

Dr. Rachel Russell was a gift from the gods.

The stolen hard drives were invaluable, but dossiers and schematics couldn’t teach them how the enemy thought. How they targeted isolated shifters. How they buried the locations of their cells beneath bullshit super-spy codes.

Rachel was the key. By the end of the first five minutes of her interview, they had already learned more about the Organization than they’d been able to piece together in all the previous years combined. They’d interrogated her for hours before the Hawk had finally decided that his precious had had enough and whisked her back to his cabin in the woods.

Grace rubbed at her gritty eyes and glowered across the table at Hugo as Roman, Patch and the remaining advisors lingered to argue.

“The longer we wait, the older the information on the hard drives gets and the more chance the Organization has to move their captives to locations we don’t know about,” she insisted.

“And going off half-cocked only puts everyone’s lives at risk,” the bear shifter rumbled back.

Grace appealed to the Alpha with a look, but all it took was a glance at Roman’s frown to know she wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter.

“You heard Dr. Russell,” Grace pressed anyway. “The so called
D-Blocks
are for shifter
disposal
. We can’t just sit around and wait for them to kill our people off.”

A muscle in Roman’s jaw jumped, but he said, deep and calm, “We’ll continue to carefully select future targets—keeping in mind what we’ve learned from Dr. Russell. Right now we just don’t have the manpower for more.”

Two hundred shifters and they lacked manpower. Grace hated the truth of that. Hated how slowly they were moving.

Hated the fact that crazy-ass Dominec might be
right
.

“Patch?” she appealed to the Alpha’s mate.

The petite cougar sighed. “I’m with you, Grace,” she said, though her tone implied the opposite. “I want to take them all down, but even training volunteers as fast as we can, we’re months away from having the resources to go after more than one target at a time. Mateo will find us the right one.”

Mateo, who was even now back at his bunker, using the information Dr. Russell had given them to find the juiciest target. Mateo, who had been given a new lease on life only hours earlier when Dr. Russell informed him that his sister Caridad had been among those shifters she’d managed to smuggle out and mark as deceased in the Organization records.

Cari was alive and Grace would have liked to think that her worrying over Mateo was over, but the leopard was even more likely to work himself to death now in his relentless need to find her and bring the Organization down.

“What if we appealed to the other prides and packs?”

The other lieutenants had been murmuring amongst themselves, but silence fell over the table with those words.

“We’ve been thinking of our own limitations, but this isn’t just Lone Pine’s fight,” she pressed. “It’s all of ours.”

“It would take forever to coordinate everyone,” Roman murmured, but he was obviously intrigued.

“Longer than us going after a hundred Organization cells individually?”

“How would you even find all the prides?” Patch asked. “The locations are mostly rumors. We’ve never exactly played well together, so no one shares information.”

Grace shrugged. “The Organization knows where we are. Might as well use that information against them.”

Hugo stirred himself. “There’s a wolf pack north of here. They, ah, they like to keep tabs on the shifter community. Even if the prides and packs aren’t on Organization lists, they’ll be on the Black Lake Wolves’ radar.”

“So we contact Black Lake,” Grace insisted. “The sooner the better.”

“We’ll have to do it carefully,” Hugo rumbled. “They don’t like visitors. If we even touch their territory, we might be inviting a war.”

“This is a war. Against the Organization. And the wolves need to pick a freaking side,” Grace snapped.

Roman held up a hand to quell the argument. “Draw up a plan,” he said to Grace. “We’ll consider it.”

She grimaced.
Draw up a plan
. Sure. In all her free time. But at least it was
something
. “Will do, boss.”

Mateo wasn’t the only one who was willing to work himself to the brink of insanity to end this threat.