1

BYRON

"I'm sorry, Byron."

Ishaaq rises from where he's laid the limp corpse at my feet.

It means something that he brought her back.

We don't leave our kind to scavengers. We bring them home so they can go on to the Great Wolf Glory beneath the howls of their kin.

Bending, I run my hands through the fur, my palm zinging when it comes in contact with the lifeless flesh beneath, flesh I've nuzzled and licked. Flesh that stretched to hold my cubs. Flesh I've spent hours scenting.

Now, all I smell is the onset of decay. She hasn't been dead long, but it's already there, secreting from the breakdown of cells as this being who was my someone reverts to nothingness.

I inhale, wanting to remember this scent, to imprint it on my mind. I file it away with the thousands of scents I can recall, all of them distinct. And I know that even this, my mate's death, has a smell of its own.

No other death will smell like hers.

"Daddy?"

I cringe and stand, moving to the side to block my sons' views. They're too young. They won't understand.

Or worse, they will.

"I'll prepare her." Ishaaq grips my shoulder, and I angle my head to catch his gaze and nod.

"What's wrong with Mama?" My youngest tries to peek around me, and I move forward, shifting the boys to steer them toward our cabin.

When we reach the porch, I look back, but Ishaaq is already gone, and so is my mate's body.

I don't sleep much.

Time in the field whittled away at my need for deep sleep, so it's rare that I go all the way down.

Taking up the post as caretaker for my wolf clan's village during the hot months when everyone has returned to their mainstream lives has been a good way to keep busy since I'm up so much anyway. I work on my scents and hone my tracking skills. I can also assess our clan's safety and report any strange occurrences to the Consortium.

I almost forgot what it was like to surrender to a level of unconsciousness where only my wolf is aware. The kind of sleep where reality and the wanderings of my imagination conspire to recreate some of my few haunting memories.

Like the dream that was just playing out, a moment from my past that fills me with equal parts longing and sorrow.

The first time I scented my sons on my mate, she'd been standing in our kitchen cleaning, naked like she preferred to be when she wasn't in her wolf. I'd been overjoyed, lifting her from her feet and swinging her around our cabin, and she'd tried to be as happy as I was, but I knew, deep down, she wasn't ready.

She lived for fieldwork.

She was feral like that.

Sitting in a cozy cabin making stews and nursing two rowdy cubs wasn't her thing.

But she'd done it for me as long as she could until she couldn't stand being out of the game anymore, and then not even I could stop her from getting back in.

She'd lasted six months.

To make up for lost time, she'd taken the most dangerous missions, all of which she was skilled for but which had also increased the chances of something going wrong.

They had.

Six months after I waved her off at our cabin door, our sons standing at my knees waving back, she was a stiff, furry body in the snow.

"You might feel groggy when you wake up, but that's a normal side effect of the sedative. Try to ease out of it slowly if you can." A voice cuts through the haze, leaving a trail of something warm and stirring and resurrecting my last moment of consciousness.

I'd been thinking about how complicated wolf relationships have been within the clan recently as I returned to my truck after dropping off Samiah, the mate of two wolves in my clan.

I was fitting the key into the lock of my pickup, humming a made-up tune as the van door slid loudly open, and an arm appeared holding a tranquilizer gun.

I'd known what was happening the moment I saw that gun, and I braced automatically, preparing for a sedative.

They didn't disappoint.

My wolf didn't go all the way down, but he still feels a bit sluggish. He drags himself onto his paws and shakes his great, grey head to clear it.

I feel you, my man. I feel you .

Getting tranqued is no joke. No matter how often it happens, there's no getting used to it.

And it's happened quite a few times for me.

It was mostly as part of our Consortium training so we could practice keeping our wolf calm while coming out of it.

Putting aside the wake-up hangover, it's risky. Whoever is doing the tranquing could always do whatever they want while I'm out, but they usually want us alive.

In general, a dead shifter is useless.

My abduction at Cree's place was sudden, and it happened before I could leave any official trail, which is unfortunate because it means I'm alone here.

But I've trained for this, and I've faced worse odds.

I smack my lips, working the acrid aftertaste of whatever they darted me with from my tongue, just as the hard plastic of a straw bumps my bottom lip.

"Drink slowly. You'll be dehydrated for a while. We need to get your fluids up before anything else. Did they feed you before you got here?"

Again, that voice.

It's gentle but husky, the kind of voice that one imagines Jazz singers have. The sounds roll out on her breath, and my wolf ears catch every note.

"You're restrained, so don't try to move. It will just make you panic. Here. Drink more water."

I smile and take the liquid, sniffing discreetly to see if I detect anything mixed with it.

It's pure.

It's been thoroughly sterilized, so much so that it tastes synthetic. There is, however, the faint scent of camphor from a lip balm on the straw.

"Take your time." The voice is kind—reassuring.

One of the perks of being a wolf, particularly one that's been blessed with mutated sensory genes that make my already sharp wolf senses nearly one hundred times cleaner, is that I can catch the subtle shifts in tone, voice tremor, heart rate, skin surface temperature, and bodily secretions that signal things like lying and disingenuousness.

For all intents and purposes, it seems this woman is genuinely trying to make me feel at ease, and it's unexpected from my captors.

I've kept my eyes closed, taking in the room with my other senses—the harsh sting of sterilization, the muted smell of liquid compounds, the briny notes of various pharmaceuticals—sedatives, antibiotics, methamphetamines—and other things that affect the chemical composition of the body.

There's also the smell of botanicals—French peonies, Bulgarian roses, a dash of cedar wood.

Hanae Mori Butterfly.

It's one of the few human-made scents I enjoy.

It was what my wife was wearing when we first met, except she'd put so much on that I'd had a headache all night and could barely concentrate on our conversation. I'd had to run to the bathroom several times to vomit.

One of the first things I did when I had the fate dream shortly after that first meeting was to create a new scent for her. Something that considered her natural shifter and human smells and enhanced them so that she smelled as equally delightful to humans as she did to our kind.

That scent, Mesh, had been a hit back in the late 90s. It remains one of my best sellers in the shifter community, even though the name didn't age well.

My wife, who had never bothered to wear perfume before that first night we met and only did because her sister suggested it, never wore anything that wasn't made by me after that.

Still, I'd always been partial to Butterfly.

The amount this woman wears is minuscule, but I catch every note of it.

Wearing scents in the lab is usually a no-no; it messes with other smells, which can sometimes be dangerous.

However, this woman is wearing so little that I imagine her dabbing a bit between her cleavage as a secret, something to make her feel beautiful even when she's doing the disgraceful work of capturing and experimenting on wolf shifters.

It's hard to reconcile this smell with the evil I know is being perpetrated, the evil I plan to decimate at its heart as soon as I learn where that is.

My mind imagines someone lovely, someone laughing, a full, glossy mouth split in a wide grin, maybe a gap, some purposeful flaw that can only be sexy. The image is so persistent that I finally open my eyes to dispel the illusion, only to wish I had kept them closed.

This woman's long, regal neck is too beautiful to rip out, and yet I salivate, but not in bloodlust.

I want to lick up her pulse to feel her heartbeat.

She's turned so that her profile is my only view, but it's enough to tell me she's gorgeous, exceptionally so.

She's almond brown, her skin smooth and silken. Her lips are just as I imagined, creased in their plumpness. Her cheekbone is high so that the light catches it. The lashes covering an eye whose color is still a mystery don't curl. They fan flat over her cheek, thick and straight.

I roll my shoulders to dispel the trance this first glance has put me under.

A pretty face means nothing if she's the enemy.

In the fight to keep the shifter community free and out of cages and labs, to keep us as lore in humans' minds, our brute strength and keen instincts have kept us one step ahead, helped along by a global infrastructure funded by billions of dollars amassed over generations and carefully hidden in plain sight.

However, in recent years, the faulty, desperate science of man has closed the gap, and we've found ourselves with groups like this one nipping at our tails.

This woman, though, is not the evil scientist I imagined before I opened my eyes.

The people I imagined are all old and greedy. They're the kind whose ancestors brought mine over in chains, an effort only achievable by our strict code of secrecy and not at all due to some superiority of our assailants.

Of course, we could have shifted and torn those monsters to shreds. But that would have exposed us in ways we couldn't have predicted at the time.

I've often admired those shifters lying head to foot in the belly of a ship, having the discipline to keep their human form while knowing they were a claw away from freedom.

Those men and women had the power of one of the Savannah's most incredible predators—the hyaena, a beast that could have ripped apart every European with a whip. Europeans whose descendants are the men who have spent so many resources trying to capture us so they can use us to win senseless wars and for their vain ambitions for Western exceptionalism.

Mostly, they're just haters. Always have been.

But those men aren't this almond-colored woman with the long, smooth neck and eyes as dark as obsidian—eyes that are now on me.

She blinks, her thick dark lashes obscuring the deep void of her irises a split second before she fixes me with her gaze.

They're brown, her eyes, but not just any brown. They're tinged with red, so they appear maroon. My wolf eyes seek out the varying shades and tones, the lights and darks, the swirling molten of her stare.

"Oh, you're awake." Her mouth tilts tentatively, and I wonder if she's one of those psychopaths who does their dirty work with a smile, even though I'm smiling, too.

I'm doing it because it throws people off.

What she's doing isn't smiling business, and my being strapped to a chair is a testament to that.

Still, I'm intrigued by her presence and my reaction to her, and I haven't found anything intriguing in a long time.

"Do you have a headache from the sedative?"

"Venison stew."

"Excuse me?" Her black, glossy brows tilt together.

They're thick.

She gets them threaded, but not in a few weeks. I can see the short stubble of new growth beneath her perfect arches, which makes me wonder about the delay.

Putting in extra lab hours to prepare for whatever unfortunate shifter they caught?

Instead of violent anger, I'm filled with a sense of betrayal that doesn't make sense. Nothing should surprise me about the lengths people are willing to go to get to us, but I can't help the thought that it shouldn't be her.

"You asked if I had been fed before you all grabbed me. I didn't know there was a dinner option along with this kidnapping, but as it happens, I ate before I came. It was venison stew, my mother's recipe."

She frowns again, her mouth folding like I've disappointed her somehow.

Looking away, she focuses on the tablet in her hand."Right. Well, since we both know you haven't been kidnapped, I'm going to ask you a series of questions to establish a baseline for your participation. Please, if you can manage, answer as truthfully as possible."

"I'll do my best." This is a lot more formal than I thought it would be. It's almost like they think they're doing consensual work here and not preparing for torture. "Was that your water you gave me?"

My eyes dart around, landing on the stainless steel reusable cup sitting on the desk next to her. The tip is stained just the faintest rose color. When I lick my tongue across my bottom lip, I taste her.

Deep inside, my wolf shivers.

She follows my gaze. "Oh, yes. They didn't leave any here for you."

"Shocking."

She pauses at my dry retort. "Either way, I hadn't drunk from it yet." Another pause, and her eyes caste to the side like she's unsure if this is true.

I don't correct her.

She did drink from it, and her lips taste sweet .

Clearing her throat, she consults her tablet. "Is your name Noel McCanty?"

I snort.

What the hell is this amateur shit? Ask me a fake name so that I'll give up my real one?

Wow.

"Sure."

She looks up, her eyes narrowing. "Sure?"

I shrug as best I can with my arms pinned back. "If you say so."

She stares for a moment, but then her own shoulders hitch like she can't be bothered to argue.

"Are you thirty-five years old?" Her gaze dips to my chin, where my nearly white beard covers most of the lower part of my face. She looks back at her screen like she may have read that wrong.

She's a few years off, but it doesn't matter. I can play this game.

"I will take the compliment and say sure again."

"You're young. How long has it been like that?" She gestures to her chin to indicate mine.

"Since my wife died." I stop smiling.

Letting the mask slip gives something away, but I can't stop it. I'm still partly in that dream place where my wife's dead wolf eyes stare up at me.

Suddenly, the woman's expression softens, and the forced clinical professionalism disappears. "I'm sorry. Your file doesn't note that you were married." She clears her throat. "I'll just keep going. Uh," her mouth turns down.

"What does it say?"

"I'm not sure why this question is here." She starts tapping, and I crane my neck to get a better look.

"Ask it."

She blinks up. "No, it's a completely irrelevant question."

"Whoever designed them must not have thought so. Ask it."

She's still reluctant but throws her hands up. "Fine. It asks if you've ever killed someone."

"Is that really what it says?" I nod to the screen. Every other question has been a confirmation question.

"Yeah. That's weird, right?"

I snort. "You're asking me?"

"No, you're right. I'm sorry. It's just, I guess answer the question, so we can move past it."

She seems uncomfortable now, and that makes me curious. With every passing second, she becomes less what I expect.

"I'll answer if you tell me something."

She meets my gaze. "What?"

"I have a question, and I want you to answer it. What can it hurt? We both know you all don't mean for me to make it out of here."

She frowns again as she regards me, and I keep my face even, not letting on how badly I want this information.

"Uh, okay. What's your question?"

"What's your name?"

"Uh, Dr. Eberling."

I roll my eyes. "No, your first name. I think you owe me that much since I have a feeling we'll be spending a bit of time together."

She considers my ask.

I wait.

I'm nothing if not patient.

Ishaaq and I once staked out a group of poachers whose snares had trapped some cubs for three days without either of us speaking a word.

Her lips twist to the side, two slightly elongated front teeth clamping down on the full bottom one, and she glances around the empty lab like she's about to do something she's not supposed to

"Aida. My name's Aida." Her gaze holds mine, the deep brown appearing soft despite the color's opacity.

Once again, my brain can't reconcile this woman's beauty with what I know she will do to me. I'm so absorbed that I only faintly register the sound of a door whooshing open before a man's tacky, heavy steps break our stare-off.

"Doctor, can you come with me, please?"

Now this man looks like what I imagined of my captors—middle-aged, salted blonde hair, and cold blue eyes that gaze down on the woman with obvious irritation. There's a badge clipped to the front of his coat pocket, but it's turned around, so I can't see the identification.

Doesn't matter. There are other ways to identify him; I've already committed to memory around five.

Aida blinks at the man's instruction and looks away. My wolf chuffs. He wants her eyes back on us.

"Don't you want the answer to the question?"

She looks back at me, her gaze unsure.

"Doctor, that's enough. You've gathered enough information." The man's tone is sharp, and her gaze finally detaches from mine.

She swallows, the sound loud in my wolf ears, the movement of her long throat making my skin twitch.

My nostrils flare as I breathe her in again, a groan rumbling in my chest as my wolf prances forward for a closer look.

She stands, setting aside the tablet and brushing her palms down the front of her white lab coat. "That will be all for now."

"Yes."

Her eyes fix on me again, creasing in what I can tell is disappointment. Still, I continue, even as the man calls her name again, trying to rush her away.

She ignores him.

"Yes, I have killed before, and they all deserved it."

"They all?" There's no faking the shock on her face or in her tone, and I wonder what it means. What have they told her about me?

"Yes, Aida, or have they not told you I'm a bloodthirsty beast?"