Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 120031 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 600(@200wpm)___ 480(@250wpm)___ 400(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120031 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 600(@200wpm)___ 480(@250wpm)___ 400(@300wpm)
Cassidy’s head snapped up, and her eyes went wide with fear. “They could come back? We have to go.”
“Do you have a rear exit?” Nick asked the shopkeeper.
The human blinked. “Y-yes.”
“Good, we’ll need to use it,” said Nick. “I’ll call Derren and—” He broke off as his cell rang and then he pulled it out of his pocket. “Speak of the devil …” He answered, “Tell me you have him, Derren.”
The look that twisted Nick’s face was enough to tell Eli that the answer was no.
Deep inside him, Eli’s wolf howled his fury.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eli stood as a familiar car drove into the lot. Like last time, he’d sat on the porch step of the main lodge as he’d waited for Casey to arrive. He’d texted her the moment he crossed the border of his territory, asking her to come to him. Despite that Cassidy was tucked up in bed, completely fine, his stomach was still in knots, and the chill hadn’t yet fully left him.
His wolf hadn’t calmed either. He kept pacing, snarling, and raking at the ground with his claws.
She slipped out of the car and said goodbye to the baker who’d given her a ride. Eli gave a brief nod to the driver and then cut his gaze back to his mate, who was ascending the porch steps. “Over here, baby,” he said. “Need to hold you right now.”
He closed his arms around her and breathed her in, letting the feel and scent of her settle into his system and chase away the chill. Slowly, the knots in his gut fell away, and the fury lost its sharp grip on him. His wolf pushed up against his skin, wanting to be nearer to her.
“What happened?” she asked. “I’ve been imagining all kinds of messed up scenarios.”
Guilt twisted his gut. Pulling back only slightly, he told her of the shooting. With every word he spoke, she got stiffer and stiffer in his arms. By the time he was done, she looked ready to burn shit down.
“I’ll kill him,” she said softly, her voice vibrating with suppressed rage. Then she was gone from his arms and pacing up and down, her neck corded, her nostrils flaring. “We need to go pay that motherfucker a visit now.”
Yeah, he’d been right not to tell her over the phone. “We don’t know for sure that Ignacio is behind this,” said Eli, knowing it was who she meant.
“It has to be him. You must have been the real target.”
“From what Derren gathered, someone got themselves comfortable on the rooftop opposite the store we were at, and then they took their shot. But they didn’t take it until after the others filed out of the shop. That tells us there’s a strong possibility that Cassidy was deliberately targeted.”
Pausing in her pacing, Casey licked her lower lip. “Ignacio wouldn’t try striking out at me through the pups.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He played the innocent card when Nick called him. The bastard truly did sound pissed that Cassidy had been shot—apparently, he doesn’t like kids being hurt. Also, according to the contact that Nick’s friend has within the pride, Ignacio’s also maintaining that innocence to his pride. Maybe it’s an act, maybe it’s not. But if we follow the theory that Cassidy was in fact the real target, we can’t ignore the possibility that one of Nick’s enemies was striking out at him through her.”
“But you said the shooter kept on firing. Why would he do that if he’d hit his target?”
“Maybe he was also supposed to shoot Willow.” Crossing to Casey, Eli relaxed her fists and massaged her palms with his thumbs. “There are a lot of maybes. We have to be positive that Ignacio is responsible before we go invading his territory, Casey—you know that.”
She ground her teeth. “So how do we find out if it was him?”
“That I don’t know. We have no clue who the shooter was. Derren said he smelled fox on the rooftop—that’s all we’ve got. The scent led him to the mall’s parking lot, where it abruptly disappeared.” Eli slid his hands up her arms and then began to massage her shoulders. “It was probably a lone shifter acting as an assassin-for-hire.”
“I get that there are other suspects to consider, but it seems far too coincidental to me that this would happen now, while shit’s going down between us and Ignacio. Especially when I had a little altercation with his mate last night. Did he mention that to Nick on the phone?”
“Only to apologize on Dahlia’s behalf, calling her indirect challenge a ‘drunken mishap.’” Eli had growled at that. “Zander quite rightly pointed out that an enemy of Nick’s might have found out about that little scene between you and Dahlia and then decided to act on their own grudge now, assuming we’d blame Dahlia. That kind of thing happens.”