Temptation Rising (13 page)

Silence meant they all agreed.

“You think it’s the three from the party? The ones that were gunning for Kalina? That was Kalina Harper, our new employee, correct?”

Nick was still working that stress ball, his brow furrowed, pupils now mere slits in the light of the room. Shifters had eyes that adapted to light and dark. In the alley where they’d relied on their night vision, their pupils were round and big, allowing them to see. In the light, smaller, dark slashes against the bright cornea showed. This was because the cat was still lurking, waiting. In the office or whenever they were completely human, with the cat resting inside, their eyes looked like any normal human’s.

“It was Kalina,” Rome said tightly. “They had her in their sights. I knew there were shifters in the building but didn’t get a look at them until I noticed she was there.” That knowledge was still scraping against his already raw nerves. Why were they aiming for her? Had they known she was going to be there?

“Who’s Kalina Harper?” X asked, moving with quiet agility to sit on the leather couch.

“She’s our new hot-ass accountant,” Nick said with a bleak smile that withered only slightly when he caught Rome’s glare.

It was bait, Rome knew, and he decided quickly to ignore it. “I don’t know what she was doing there tonight,” he said, still thinking of the way she looked caught in those Rogues’ glare. Nothing could have stopped him from going to her at that moment, from taking her with him, showing the Rogues that she was under his protection.

“Maybe she just bought a ticket like most of the other people there,” Nick offered.

“Maybe.” But Rome wasn’t convinced. There was still something about her that beckoned him. He remembered that night two years ago when he’d been heading home from a meeting. He never usually drove himself to meetings, especially not faction meetings. But he had that night. He’d been walking to the parking garage where he’d left his car when he took a detour. A scent he’d lifted had drawn him in the opposite direction. Toward that alley where the man was attacking her.

Tonight, he now realized, he’d been drawn to her again, this time before she’d been attacked.

As for what happened in the back of the truck, it was inevitable that it would continue. Rome was too strong-minded, too sure of himself to believe anything else.

“The bigger question is what we’re going to do about those Rogues. Do you think they acted alone?” X asked.

“No way,” Nick spoke up. “They weren’t trained fighters, or at least not trained well. It was a sloppy attack. I don’t even think they expected us to be there.”

X sat back on the couch. “Which means they were looking for the woman because you were just leaving her house, right, Rome?”

“Yes. I’d just come outside when I saw Nick. We picked up the scent at the same time.”

“There wasn’t time to do anything but react,” Nick said then tossed the ball across the room, where it bounced off a bookshelf. “The fuckers snuck up on us.”

“Retaliation,” X said. “Rome took away their prize. You know how they are about females.”

Rome nodded. “I know.” And that’s exactly why he’d been so intent on getting Kalina out of there. Now his concern was whether the Rogues were bold enough to go back to her apartment. “Put Ezra on her. I don’t want her alone at any time.”

Nick nodded. “The question’s still: Why? What’s her connection to them?”

“Rogues don’t need a connection. If they want her they’re going to keep going until they get her,” X surmised.

“That’s what they do in the Gungi. This is not the forest,” Rome stated, hearing the hollowness of his words.

Nick interjected, “And the Rogues are no longer in the forest, as we now know. Just because we’re acting civilized doesn’t mean they will.”

Rome reluctantly agreed. Tonight had proven that the rules had changed. The question was what they were going to do about it. “Get Baxter on the phone. I want a meeting first thing tomorrow morning,” he told Nick. “Everybody is to be here at seven.”

He was assembling his squad. Each Faction Leader had a core squad they worked with to enforce the laws of
Ètica
in their zones. If the Rogues were stepping up their game in Rome’s territory, he and his squad would be ready to do whatever was necessary to neutralize them.

Nick nodded. “Eli stays with you tonight. I’ll send Ezra back to Ms. Harper.”

“They weren’t after me,” Rome said.

X stood. “They are now. You’re the Faction Leader, they know that. And you took something they wanted. They’ll be after you just for the fun of it.”

Rome went back to the window, looked out into the night. “Hunting me won’t be fun for them. I can promise that.”

*   *   *

Vicious claws sank into flesh with a sickening sound that mixed with the howl of a wounded cat. Rage spewed through each strike, filling the room with the acidic stench of blood and evil simultaneously.

They were in an old warehouse off Interstate 95 just outside DC in the northern Virginia area. The building had been abandoned long before they arrived but they’d taken over earlier this year. Slowly but surely, as money poured in, they were making it a more livable space. Soon it would be the headquarters of their empire. Just as soon they would rule, as their kind was meant to do.

This was Sabar’s goal. He’d been born in the jungle, treated like an animal for the first years of his life, until he’d been taught differently. His eyes had been opened, his mind awakened to what was theirs for the taking. Now twenty years later he was here, in the United States, doing what was necessary for his species to survive. To rule.

His cat clawed at the surface, wanting to dominate the situation, to handle the reprobates itself. But that would end in death, and while he was no stranger to the act of killing, in this instance Sabar wasn’t quite ready for these shifters to meet that end.

Still, they had to be punished. If there was one thing Sabar could not stomach, it was failure. These three should know this by now—they’d been with him long enough. Well, two of them had. The other one had only been with his group a few years, but he’d come highly recommended. Now Sabar wondered if that was a mistake.

“Get up!” he yelled, following the order with a kick to the shifter’s stomach with the tip of his steel-toed boot. “Get your sniveling sissy ass up!”

He was a sissy because he wasn’t a jaguar. In the forest the tribes were separated according to the feline family each cat was born into. That was the way of the Elders and the Assembly. Sabar had long since cursed their doctrine and their ways. So he’d accepted any and all members from any and all tribes. It didn’t matter which tribe they were from, or even if their tribe didn’t live in the Gungi; they were all shifters, all powerful in ways humans could never fathom being. But this one, this sniveling cheetah who’d been brought to him by one of the female shifters one night, could very well have been the weakest link tonight. The one that caused them to lose a key component to Sabar’s success as a ruler.

“Tell me again why she’s not here right now?”

He could hear the other two behind him, smell the relief that he’d backed off them for the time being.

“Sh … she got away,” Chavez, the freckle-faced man, answered. With blood gushing from the wound at his neck where Sabar had first swiped at him, it was a bit hard to see the freckles that marred his face and neck. But Sabar didn’t give a rat’s ass about how he looked when this was over. He wanted answers.

“He came in and took her. We were going to get her but he took her,” Chavez managed without stuttering this time.

“Who took her, Darel? And why didn’t you stop them?”

From behind him Darel struggled to stand, then pushed out his chest, put his shoulders back, and spoke clearly. “Faction Leader Reynolds took her, sir. They disappeared in the crowd and probably left through some secret exit. We decided to go to her house hoping Reynolds would drop her off and we could get her when he left. But he didn’t. When we approached he wasn’t alone. They’d already shifted and were waiting for us. We were fighting them off when the cops arrived.”

Sabar growled, blood dripping from his fingers where his claws tore the skin. “Where are Reynolds and his flunkies now? More important, where’s the female?”

Sharpened teeth pricked at his lips. That’s all he could allow of the change right now. Taking cat form at this moment would only cause the others to shift as well, and that would definitely lead to bloodshed and death. Beasts did not rationalize who they fought and why, they just fought to survive. In this Sabar reluctantly embraced the human half of himself, worked with the intelligence bred into human brains and adjusted accordingly.

“We all left before the cops could get to the alley to see us,” Chi offered. He, too, was now standing at attention as Darel did.

Chavez was just pushing himself up, using the wall for leverage. “They ran first,” he stated, as if that made a difference.

“You should have run after them. Your kind’s supposed to be faster, right?” To his own ears Sabar sounded prejudiced—against his own kind, at that. The thought didn’t sit right in his mind, the human part. But the animal in him prowled close, ready to snap the other cat’s neck at a moment’s notice. He didn’t trust this one, had thought about killing him just days ago. But as an old saying went, it was best to keep your enemies close.

“I don’t care what you have to do, who you have to kill to get it done, but I want her and I want her now!” His words ended with a deafening roar that rattled the windows of the warehouse and shook each man/beast standing near him.

None of them spoke another word, but the trio filed out, walking along the cement floors to the back door they used to keep anyone riding on the highway from seeing them.

*   *   *

Rome ran as if his life depended on it. Through the forest that bordered a dense mountainous region in Virginia he ran and ran until his flanks were damp with sweat. Only then did he stop, realizing he was in a favored spot. Pacing around the two large trees, he padded along the softened foliage-covered ground. Lips drew back over large sharp teeth, and he panted air in and out. Through the slits of his gold-green eyes he saw the dark of the forest, loved the feel of the night air against his furred body. Leaping up he balanced on his hind legs, gripping the tree trunk with the paws of his front ones. With quick ragged strokes the cat scored the tree just as he had in the past.

This was his land—the human had purchased it and held the deed. But animal had marked it, claimed this territory so that any who dared walk on it knew. This tree in particular wore the claw marks of the cat that ran through this forest on a daily basis. Tonight’s run was fueled by so much—anger, anticipation, hunger, lust. All these things ran through the human, pushing at Rome until he wasn’t quite sure what needed to be done first. They clawed at the animal viciously, making him impatient and irritable.

Even in this form he couldn’t outrun his demons. The dark parts of his past continued to haunt him years later. He was thirty-five and he was a successful attorney. He should be thinking of finding a wife, settling down to start a family—that’s what his mother would have wanted him to do. His father, too, for that matter, was a man about family and heritage. Both his parents instilled a great love of their heritage in Rome so that now his loyalty to the shifters and their home in South America was as big a part of his life as his career. And with that came one of Rome’s biggest burdens: finding out who murdered his parents.

The night of their murder was still fresh in his mind even though he’d been so young. He’d stayed in that closet because Baxter told him to and he’d been taught to listen to his elders. But he’d known something was wrong. Deep in his chest he’d felt a rising heat, then he heard the screams, his mother’s screams. He’d stood then put his small palm on the knob of the door, ready to turn it.

“Sit tight, Mr. Roman. Do not move until I come back for you,” Baxter had said.

Rome had already disobeyed because he’d moved from the sitting position. What harm would it do if he left the closet? His mother needed him. But he didn’t leave and with each sob he inhaled the tangy scent of blood. It consumed him until he sat in the closet close to vomiting. Then it was quiet for what seemed like forever, and Baxter did not come. He had to go to the bathroom and his stomach growled from hunger. But he stayed where he was told. And his parents had died at the hands of another shifter.

Opening his mouth the cat growled in pain, for the loss, for the memory, for the time he could not shift and protect those he loved.

But now he could. Rome was as powerful as a cat as he was in the human world. When he found his parents’ killer he would most certainly make him pay.

And now there was another for him to protect. Kalina.

He hadn’t known who she was two years ago, and even now he didn’t know her all that well—or at least his human self didn’t. Yet his cat felt a connection, yearned to break free each time he was with her. Of course he fought it, even wondered why the animal wanted to be free with her. He’d never felt that urge with another woman before. The attraction was strong, so much so that just thinking of her made Rome hard and the cat hunger for more.

When he’d touched her tonight, felt the clench of her inner muscles around his fingers, the man wanted to roar with pleasure. In her eyes he saw a banked fire, hidden for whatever reason. Beneath his touch she melted, her response as eager as if she’d known what to expect. But she wouldn’t have, just as he hadn’t known. Until he touched her. And now he wanted more.