Lion's Share
Page 54
Even humans would start to believe in the “impossible” if we kept leaving it around for them to find.
When the convenience store was as quiet as it was going to get during business hours, I took the handles of the plastic bag in my mouth and pressed down on the door lever with one paw. The latch clicked, and the door swung open several inches. I froze, listening again, and when no one started screaming, I dared a peek through the crack.
A woman was getting gas at the pump closest to the road and farthest from the restroom, and I could hear an engine running from a parked car in front of the store. Other than that, the coast was clear.
I burst from the restroom in a flat-out sprint. The white plastic bag swung from my jaw like a pendulum, and the scent of Hargrove’s blood was thick in my nostrils as I ran. That scent reminded me of what was at stake. Of why I’d torpedoed my own career—and possibly Jace’s—and why this desperate effort had to make those sacrifices worth it.
“Holy shit!” A woman cried behind me, as my paws pounded from concrete onto bare earth. My heart pumped blood so quickly, my head began to feel light. “Did you see that? Was that a dog?”
I put another burst of energy into my sprint and shot forward into the field. Tall grass slapped my face, snagged in my fur, and caught on the plastic bag, but I kept running until I’d almost forgotten what I was running from.
The overgrown field ended in a steep ditch, then another road, and across that road was a strip mall that had been abandoned, except for a payday loan service. There were two cars in the lot, and not a person in sight.
I looked both ways, then sprinted across the street and through the parking lot into the deep shadows on one side of the building. There I dropped my bag on the ground and rested, shielded from the street by an industrial trash bin speckled with rust and peeling paint. I couldn’t stay put for long—when Lucas found me missing, he’d see the same potential escape route I had—but cats aren’t long-distance runners, and I needed to think.
Jace is going to kill me. Yet even knowing that, I wished he was right there with me. I could handle the yelling, if that meant I’d get to see him again, and…
But Jace wasn’t what I needed to be thinking about.
Which way is north? Thanks to the cloud cover, I couldn’t tell by the stars, but there was still a bit more light on one side of the sky than the other. That way must be west.
The first frigid drop of rain fell as I turned to the north, and within four steps, I was drenched and freezing. But minutes later, the sunlight had disappeared and the rain had driven people inside. As long as I stuck to alleyways and deep shadows, I realized, I could move through Lexington like a dark streak in the night. Unseen. Unheard. Unbothered. Which was good, because with a wild cat on the loose, if the police saw me, they’d probably shoot on sight.
I have no idea how long it took me to work my way across town, sticking to shadows and back roads, jumping backyard fences and skirting lighted parking lots. At first, nothing was familiar. I’d never really ventured far from school on my own, and I didn’t have a car.
I was starving by the time I got to campus, having shifted and walked several miles without stopping to hunt and eat. In fact, I hadn’t eaten since Patricia Malone had put a plate of bacon and biscuits in front of me at seven that morning. Back when I’d been her son’s girlfriend, and her daughter’s maid of honor, and the aunt of her forthcoming grandson. Back before I’d been a murderer and a dishonored enforcer, on the run from her Alpha and heading straight into danger.
You know better, Abby.
I also knew I had no choice.
I entered campus from the south side, avoiding the student center and the apartments, and any other building with lit windows. To my relief, the rest of campus seemed to be deserted, which was no surprise on the first Saturday night of the winter break. Anyone with family had gone home. Anyone who’d stayed at school was either working or partying.
Minutes after I stepped on campus, my dorm came into sight. All the rooms on the front side were dark, but I circled to the back, avoiding flood- and porch lights. From the edge of the parking lot, I counted up three floors and over four windows to find my room. My heart tried to claw its way up through my throat.
My bedside lamp was on, but the form silhouetted in the light did not belong to Robyn.
FIFTEEN
Jace
“These are some sick fuckers.” Mateo stepped from the bottom tread onto the basement floor, and his gaze immediately found Hargrove’s taxidermy table. He shrugged, and I knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth. “Can’t really blame Abby for reacting the way she did. Hargrove was part of the group that killed her friends, and she’d just seen her picture all over the second stalker board in two days.”
“She took the same oath you did.” I stared up at the photo-covered section of wall. We’d packed up everything but the table, the cage, the filing cabinet, and the pictures, but I hadn’t thought of a thing since Abby and Lucas left except how empty my bed was going to feel without her next to me. How empty my arms already felt.
Why had she worked so hard to make that happen?
“But the real mistake was mine,” I said. “She obviously isn’t ready to separate personal grudges from her duty as an enforcer. I should never have hired her.”
Not that she’d given me any choice in that, or in firing her either. Abby had an infuriating way of getting exactly what she wanted, consequences be damned, and in retrospect, it was clear that she’d been calling the shots the whole time.
Hell, maybe I should have promoted her. Maybe anyone who could manipulate an Alpha that well shouldn’t have been taking orders in the first place.
But that wasn’t how our system worked. We didn’t just hand out Alpha patches like badges for selling Girl Scout cookies. And we didn’t just kill people—even bad guys—against orders.
“Hargrove’s group killed one of our men too,” I said, thinking aloud. “And lots of Titus’s, from the looks of it. What Abby did was about more than those pictures. More than her dead friends.” We were missing something.
No, Abby was hiding something. She’d practically admitted that much.
Teo frowned. “What else could there be?”
“I don’t know. But she was desperate to get into this basement.” I ran one gloved hand over the edge of Hargrove’s work surface. “In fact, she was hell-bent on coming with us in the first place. I thought that was because she didn’t want to be left out, or…” Or because she didn’t want to be separated from me. In retrospect, I could see that my ego had gotten in the way of my duty. “…something. But what if it was more than that?”
When the convenience store was as quiet as it was going to get during business hours, I took the handles of the plastic bag in my mouth and pressed down on the door lever with one paw. The latch clicked, and the door swung open several inches. I froze, listening again, and when no one started screaming, I dared a peek through the crack.
A woman was getting gas at the pump closest to the road and farthest from the restroom, and I could hear an engine running from a parked car in front of the store. Other than that, the coast was clear.
I burst from the restroom in a flat-out sprint. The white plastic bag swung from my jaw like a pendulum, and the scent of Hargrove’s blood was thick in my nostrils as I ran. That scent reminded me of what was at stake. Of why I’d torpedoed my own career—and possibly Jace’s—and why this desperate effort had to make those sacrifices worth it.
“Holy shit!” A woman cried behind me, as my paws pounded from concrete onto bare earth. My heart pumped blood so quickly, my head began to feel light. “Did you see that? Was that a dog?”
I put another burst of energy into my sprint and shot forward into the field. Tall grass slapped my face, snagged in my fur, and caught on the plastic bag, but I kept running until I’d almost forgotten what I was running from.
The overgrown field ended in a steep ditch, then another road, and across that road was a strip mall that had been abandoned, except for a payday loan service. There were two cars in the lot, and not a person in sight.
I looked both ways, then sprinted across the street and through the parking lot into the deep shadows on one side of the building. There I dropped my bag on the ground and rested, shielded from the street by an industrial trash bin speckled with rust and peeling paint. I couldn’t stay put for long—when Lucas found me missing, he’d see the same potential escape route I had—but cats aren’t long-distance runners, and I needed to think.
Jace is going to kill me. Yet even knowing that, I wished he was right there with me. I could handle the yelling, if that meant I’d get to see him again, and…
But Jace wasn’t what I needed to be thinking about.
Which way is north? Thanks to the cloud cover, I couldn’t tell by the stars, but there was still a bit more light on one side of the sky than the other. That way must be west.
The first frigid drop of rain fell as I turned to the north, and within four steps, I was drenched and freezing. But minutes later, the sunlight had disappeared and the rain had driven people inside. As long as I stuck to alleyways and deep shadows, I realized, I could move through Lexington like a dark streak in the night. Unseen. Unheard. Unbothered. Which was good, because with a wild cat on the loose, if the police saw me, they’d probably shoot on sight.
I have no idea how long it took me to work my way across town, sticking to shadows and back roads, jumping backyard fences and skirting lighted parking lots. At first, nothing was familiar. I’d never really ventured far from school on my own, and I didn’t have a car.
I was starving by the time I got to campus, having shifted and walked several miles without stopping to hunt and eat. In fact, I hadn’t eaten since Patricia Malone had put a plate of bacon and biscuits in front of me at seven that morning. Back when I’d been her son’s girlfriend, and her daughter’s maid of honor, and the aunt of her forthcoming grandson. Back before I’d been a murderer and a dishonored enforcer, on the run from her Alpha and heading straight into danger.
You know better, Abby.
I also knew I had no choice.
I entered campus from the south side, avoiding the student center and the apartments, and any other building with lit windows. To my relief, the rest of campus seemed to be deserted, which was no surprise on the first Saturday night of the winter break. Anyone with family had gone home. Anyone who’d stayed at school was either working or partying.
Minutes after I stepped on campus, my dorm came into sight. All the rooms on the front side were dark, but I circled to the back, avoiding flood- and porch lights. From the edge of the parking lot, I counted up three floors and over four windows to find my room. My heart tried to claw its way up through my throat.
My bedside lamp was on, but the form silhouetted in the light did not belong to Robyn.
FIFTEEN
Jace
“These are some sick fuckers.” Mateo stepped from the bottom tread onto the basement floor, and his gaze immediately found Hargrove’s taxidermy table. He shrugged, and I knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth. “Can’t really blame Abby for reacting the way she did. Hargrove was part of the group that killed her friends, and she’d just seen her picture all over the second stalker board in two days.”
“She took the same oath you did.” I stared up at the photo-covered section of wall. We’d packed up everything but the table, the cage, the filing cabinet, and the pictures, but I hadn’t thought of a thing since Abby and Lucas left except how empty my bed was going to feel without her next to me. How empty my arms already felt.
Why had she worked so hard to make that happen?
“But the real mistake was mine,” I said. “She obviously isn’t ready to separate personal grudges from her duty as an enforcer. I should never have hired her.”
Not that she’d given me any choice in that, or in firing her either. Abby had an infuriating way of getting exactly what she wanted, consequences be damned, and in retrospect, it was clear that she’d been calling the shots the whole time.
Hell, maybe I should have promoted her. Maybe anyone who could manipulate an Alpha that well shouldn’t have been taking orders in the first place.
But that wasn’t how our system worked. We didn’t just hand out Alpha patches like badges for selling Girl Scout cookies. And we didn’t just kill people—even bad guys—against orders.
“Hargrove’s group killed one of our men too,” I said, thinking aloud. “And lots of Titus’s, from the looks of it. What Abby did was about more than those pictures. More than her dead friends.” We were missing something.
No, Abby was hiding something. She’d practically admitted that much.
Teo frowned. “What else could there be?”
“I don’t know. But she was desperate to get into this basement.” I ran one gloved hand over the edge of Hargrove’s work surface. “In fact, she was hell-bent on coming with us in the first place. I thought that was because she didn’t want to be left out, or…” Or because she didn’t want to be separated from me. In retrospect, I could see that my ego had gotten in the way of my duty. “…something. But what if it was more than that?”
