Wounded (Dogs of War MC Book One) (6 page)

Sidney’s head was going to explode. She was going to die and she hoped it would be soon. “Fran, could you please make that dog shut up? Like right this instant,” she called out from her office.

“What’s your issue?” Fran popped her head into the room.

“I just have a really really bad headache. Is there anything else that
has
to be done today or can it be pushed to tomorrow?”

“Well Mrs. Turner is coming to pick her cat up and you still need to sign his paperwork. But nothing else that I can think of… Oh and you have a delivery sitting on the front desk.” Her mouth turned down in distaste.

“Good, I’ll take care of that and then I’m out of here.” The whole day had been a pile of steaming shit and she couldn’t wait to get home and into bed.  She wanted to figure out what was happening to her but her brain physically hurt. It would be nice if she could just forget the last week had ever happened. No saving superwolves who turned into sexy ripped men in her kitchen, no phone call from David, and definitely no drinking wine until she passed out. She wasn’t sure if any of it had happened, it was entirely possible that she
was
having a break from reality. The stress of moving to a new place after having walked in on your fiancé banging another woman coupled with the loneliness she’d been feeling could lead to some sort of mental breakdown. Wolves that big don’t even exist, that should have been the tip-off that something wonky was going on with her brain. Nor do they understand and obey humans and then morph into naked men. It just didn’t happen.

She walked down the hall to the front desk and picked up Fluffy Turner’s paperwork. That done she saw her delivery, it was a huge basket with a bottle of wine, some gourmet cheese and crackers and an envelope. Her hands trembled as she reached for it, the last thing she needed was another apology from David, she had hoped he’d gotten the message on the phone the other night but obviously not.

The trembling intensified as she read the note:

I noticed you were a little low on wine when I left, try not to drink all of this in one sitting though. I’ll be by to pick you up on Friday at 8. Just taking you out for a bite to eat to say thanks for saving my life. Don’t wear nothing fancy, this town hasn’t got any fancy restaurants to take you to.

“Red”

She dropped the note on the ground. Could this be real? Really real like as in, reality? No, it couldn’t, she just couldn’t accept it.

“Hey, you dropped this,” Fran handed her the note.

“Read it.”

“What?”

“Read it and tell me what it says.”

Fran read the note back to her, the same words she had just read, so unless her hallucination was painfully complex, someone had really sent this to her. “Whose life did you save?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she turned around went back into her office, shutting the door with a loud click, she was going to need time to process this. Time and lots and lots of wine. 

The day just wouldn’t end fast enough. He’d had bitches yapping in his ear constantly since he’d walked into work that morning. So and so did this, so and so did that. If there was one piece of advice he’d pass onto his son, if he ever had one, it’d be this: Don’t go into the prostitution business. Everybody wanted a piece of him. The girls, the manager, the accountant, everybody wanted to talk to him about something and he just wanted to leave.

Since his father had started the business, running it had inevitably passed to him when his dad realized his mental capabilities were slipping. They had a storefront called Pawn & Poon that was a front for the real business, a popular whorehouse that employed over 20 girls of all races, ages, sizes, and specialty. And business was good. His father had told him once that the reason he’d gotten into that line of work was simple, “Only the worst business man in the world could fail at selling pussy. It’s in constant demand and short supply.” He’d been right, at least about that. Not only was the whorehouse doing well, since they had expanded the “poon” half of the shop to include adult toys and lingerie modeling it had been raking in the cash too. The Club took a large cut of the profits, but as ‘owner’ he got thirty five percent of everything. Money wasn’t an issue he had to worry about. Whores though, whores he had to worry about.

“Red! Red, stop,” He guessed that name was going to stick. Sindy, a tall leggy Asian and one of his most profitable girls, was running down the hall towards his office. He’d been trying to wrap everything up so he could leave, he had shit to do.

“Yeah, what is it Sindy?”

“Marisol didn’t want to come to you with this but I told her that you needed to know.”

“Ok.” He was impatient to leave and he didn’t want to spend time sorting out hooker squabbles.

“While you were gone Trainz came in and said he was going to help run the place until they figured out who was going to take over for you,” she paused, biting her lip.

“Yeah… and?”

“Well, we were trying to tell him a few things,” she meant they were yapping at him, “and he hit a few of the girls and told them not to back talk. Chastity still has a black eye.”

She paused again, sensing she had his full attention now, “Is there more?”

“Yeah,” she looked down.

“Jesus, spit it out, you know I’m not going to hit you.”

“He… he fucked Marisol, even after she said no, and he didn’t pay her for it.”

Cold fury spread through Red’s belly. “Raped, you mean her raped Marisol.”

“Yes, he raped her. Right there in front of all of us. She was crying and fighting and everything.”

“Where is she?”

“In her room, she’s not going to be able to work for a few days. She says she sore and pretty ripped up.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she nodded at him and started to leave, “and Sindy. Nobody touches you or any of the girls without your permission. Not one of the guys, not me, not a customer, not anybody. You did the right thing by telling me.”

He pulled his phone out of the pocket on his shirt and dialed, impatiently listening to the voicemail message, “Donny-O, I need to talk to you ASAP. We’ve got some shit to work out.”

The assault on Marisol was almost worse than the attack on him. He, at least, had a chance to defend himself. Marisol didn’t have that same opportunity, she was a tiny thing, compared to Trainz it was like a fly battling a grizzly bear. He was going to have to figure out this bullshit and figure it out fast before he did something stupid out of anger.

But it would have to wait, at least until tomorrow. Tonight he had plans

Red realized he had spent a lot of the time he should have been concentrating on work thinking about a certain woman and he was pretty sure he knew what it was drew him to her, other than the very obvious physical appeal. It was her courage. How many women alone would have attempted to save the life of a wolf that was more than twice as big as they were? None that he knew. Not one of these hard as nails women in the pack, who would take a man out at the knees with a baseball bat if the need arose, would have done something like that. She hadn’t had a clue that he was really a man and still she’d risked her life to save an injured creature. Ballsy as fuck, that one.

He had to admit he also loved her humor, her honest innocent self-deprecating humor. Sure all of his friends and family liked to laugh and have a good time, but this was different. It was her automatic response to find the hilarious in any situation. Even when that asshole had called her and she’d dissolved into broken tears, she’d managed to make him laugh. He also loved that she had talked to, poured herself completely out to, what she thought was a wolf.

Seeing her like that over some dude, some
other
dude, had really pissed him off. He knew what the guy had done and the thought finding out who he was and paying him a visit had been rolling around in brain ever since.

He adjusted his cut in the mirror, the plaid shirt underneath was the best one he owned, and he didn’t have anything other than blue jeans so that’s what he was wearing. He’d started to go buy new clothes to take her out in but had decided against it. He had been too busy with work and so he figured that if she was going to be his old lady she was going to have to get used to holey blue jeans and leather. And she would be his, body and soul, she just didn’t know it yet.

Sidney had managed to abstain from drinking all the wine in existence and had instead spent her free time on the internet searching for werewolf lore. She was, after all, a scientist at heart and she’d have to test the theory that she wasn’t crazy and someone had actually altered their entire physical DNA and had morphed from oversized canine to human form in her kitchen. She, of course, began her exploration into this conundrum with Google.

From posters of Jacob to people who held exotic rituals to connect to their inner spirit animal to some frankly disturbing Japanese cartoons she hadn’t found one shred of evidence that werewolves were anything other than a myth. No blurry pictures, no out of focus youtube videos with lots of accompanying capitalized text, nothing.

She did, however, find one forum on a conspiracy website where people claimed to have seen or been in the presence the creatures. One woman even went so far as to claim she was a werewolf brood mother and that she’d given birth to more than 50 pups in her lifetime. Sidney, had serious doubts about the woman’s integrity, twenty pups she would have believed but fifty? That was just ludicrous.

She jotted down notes as she browsed, hoping something, anything, would pop out at her. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to find, she was hoping something that would say with a large blinking red arrow would say, ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR’ and then proceed to answer all of her questions.

Like, ‘How is that physically possible?’ The sheer improbability of it was making her doubt herself all over again. She shut her laptop, she wasn’t getting anywhere anyway, just becoming more frustrated by the minute. The clock said 5:32. She still had to get home and take a shower on the off chance her hallucination did show up to take her out to eat. She’d stop and grab a burger just to be on the safe side.

“So Sidney… about that basket you got yesterday…”

“Yeah?” Fran rarely started conversations with her that didn’t pertain to one of their patients, but obviously Miss New In Town Social Pariah getting a gift was just too much for her to handle without an explanation.

“Who was it from?”

A hot guy named Red who is can turn into a wolf
, “Just a friend.”

“Oh, is it anyone I might know?”

So now that I don’t want to talk to you, you decide we’re going to be buds and talk about relationships,
“Uh, no I don’t think so.”

“Cause there are some guys around here you just don’t want to mess with.”

Well, how about wolves? Are there some werewolves around here you’d like to warn me about?
“Yeah, there are men like that everywhere.”

Fran wavered, she seemed like she wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure how to say it. “Ok. So… uh. Just be careful ok?”

Well, wasn’t that sweet of her? I’ll be sure to be very careful with the figment of my imagination that I’m going on a date with tonight,
“Thanks I will.”