Chapter 13

Ginny lifted a tarp by one corner and bent over, peering underneath. The storage barn was near the apartment complex, blocked by fencing to prevent park patrons from getting near it. As far as she could tell, no one had been inside except to drop off more junk. Everything was covered with a layer of dust, and her skin already felt grimy just from being in there for the last hour.

"Oh," she said, "is this a horse?"

She straightened and lifted the tarp higher. August put down whatever he'd been looking at and walked over. He took the tarp from her, tossing it back from the object.

"Yeah," he said, "it's one of the animals from the carousel."

"There's a carousel?" She'd been around the entire park and hadn't seen any kind of carousel.

"Not anymore. It's been gone for a long time. There used to be a kind of kiddie park, with a small carousel near the petting zoo and a playground. As the park got more popular and there were more people coming, it became too much to handle, so the play area and carousel were closed down."

"I like carousel horses," she said. She laid her hand on the neck of the black horse, head down and one leg up like he was prancing. "My mom had a small collection of them."

One more thing she'd lost when she fled. She didn't have anything belonging to anyone in her family, not even a photo.

"I always thought it was cool. Our group used to do the maintenance on it. It was really one of the only rides the park ever had."

"Do you think they'd ever put it up again?"

"I'm not sure. We could ask Atticus to bring it up to the alphas. The space where it used to be by the petting zoo is filled with picnic tables now. Let's see if we can find the rest of the animals."

"Are there just horses for the carousel or other animals?"

"Just horses, and a few benches for people who want to ride but not move around as much. " He looked around. "If I remember right, there were eight horses and four benches."

She looked around the barn. It was really big and stuffed full, but she couldn't imagine there being a whole carousel in it.

"Do you think it's gone?" she asked.

"Nah. They wouldn't have thrown it away entirely. There's another storage building. I think the horses might be in here, and the rest of the carousel and benches in the other building. It would take a lot to put it back together and get it operational."

"Maybe that could be my thing."

He gave her a curious look. "The carousel?"

"I'm sure the other horses need to be refinished like this guy, plus the carousel itself probably does too. It would be pretty neat to have a project to work on, even if it's one that takes a super long time. I don't know how to put it together, but maybe a sexy gorilla does?"

He growled softly and gave her a sweet smile. "I could definitely do that."

August gave her a quick kiss and then put his phone to his ear, stepping away to talk to Atticus, who was in charge of park maintenance.

She pulled the entire tarp off the black horse and folded it into as small a square as she could make it. Then she picked her way through the piles and boxes, peering under tarps, until she found three more horses: one champagne-colored, one chocolate, and one golden brown.

"I like the black one the best; he reminds me of the one from the book Black Beauty," she said when August helped her fold another tarp.

"I never read it."

"It was my grandma's favorite. She was the big reader in the family, always reading books and then passing them on to me. Her favorites were old classics like Black Beauty and Pride and Prejudice. I liked science fiction, so she would read Ray Bradbury with me."

"I wish I'd had a chance to meet her," he said.

"Me too. My parents would have loved you, and my brother too. They would have liked knowing I had a big, strong gorilla for a mate." She laid the tarp on top of the others. "What did Atticus say?"

"He's going to come check out the horses. He knows more about refinishing that kind of thing than I do, and he wants to look at the other storage building and see what state the main parts are in and how much it would take to get them up and operational. Then he'll talk to Joss, who runs the accounting department, and the other alphas about starting it up again."

"I think it would be really cool."

"Me too."

His phone buzzed, and he lifted it up to his ear. "Hey, Atticus." She watched as his brow furrowed and he frowned. "Seriously? Shit. Yeah, okay. We'll wait for security, thanks."

He put his phone in his pocket and looked at her.

Her heart jumped into her throat. "What happened?"

"Someone tampered with the food in the petting zoo."

She tilted her head in confusion. "What? Why?"

"They don't know. The security team checked the feed and found someone had covered up the cameras and got close enough to the building to take off the screen from a window, climb inside, pour ammonia all over the norms' food, and then take off without anyone noticing. It was only when Luna went to refill the food for the baby animals that she realized what had happened."

Ginny felt a little bit frozen. And entirely pissed too.

"It has to be someone working for my grandfather. But why the hell would anyone target the petting zoo?"

Someone knocked loudly on the door. She startled with a gasp.

August put his arm around her and drew her close. "It's the security team. They said they'd knock first and then unlock the door with the keypad so we'd know it was them. They're going to walk us to the employee cafeteria just as a precaution."

She looked up at him. "You don't think we're safe in here? It's locked."

"We're too far back in the park. If they got close enough to the petting zoo to get inside without anyone noticing, they could break in here and we'd be sitting ducks."

"Well, shit."

The keypad beeped and someone said loudly, "It's us, August. You ready to go?"

"Yeah," he called back. He cupped Ginny's face and said, "We'll be quick, okay?"

She nodded.

He took off his baseball cap and handed it to her. She tucked her long hair up on her head and put the cap on. Then they met two males at the doors, Jupiter and Justus.

"Let's get you two to the cafeteria," Justus said.

"Thanks, guys," August said.

"We know you can keep her safe, but it's better to have too many people around you than not enough," Jupiter said.

"Yeah, definitely," August said.

They hurried across the park. Ginny couldn't stop looking around, wondering if any of the people she saw had been sent by her grandfather. She thought she'd be able to pick out people from her pack, but they could change their appearance or her grandfather could have sent new people to get her.

She still didn't know why he would have tampered with the petting zoo. She wasn't there, so what was the point?

When they were inside the cafeteria, Jupiter's walkie squawked.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Alistair just tangled with some males trying to steal the park van," a male voice said.

"What?" Jupiter demanded.

"Yeah," the male said. "He was at the feed store with Alfie, Benjamin, and Silvanus and they went inside to grab the food for the petting zoo animals. He said he had a bad feeling something was wrong, so he rushed out of the store and saw a couple of males trying to hot-wire it. He and our guys fought with them, but they ran off. And I already checked—the feed store doesn't have outside security cameras."

"Shit," Jupiter said. "Have him bring the van back to the employee lot and we'll check it for trackers."

Ginny shook her head. "I don't think they'd bother with a tracker."

August looked at her. "What do you mean?"

She looked at the three males. "It just clicked with me."

"What did?" Justus asked.

"So if you wanted to infiltrate a secure place, and you already tried to sneak in before it opened and it didn't work? Then the next best thing would be to steal a vehicle and use it for cover. The van could probably pull right up to the security booth at the employee lot without anyone thinking it was suspicious."

"Shit," August said. "I think she's right."

Jupiter shook his head. "So they messed with the feed at the petting zoo because they knew it would make someone take a park vehicle and go to the nearest feed store, then they could steal it and use it to get into the park? Damn it, they're clever."

"If they were in the park, though, why lure someone out with a park vehicle just so they could get back in?" Justus asked.

"Good point," August said.

Jupiter pulled his phone out. "I've got a good idea about that, actually." He poked around on the screen and then showed them the recording of the security cameras being covered up. Then he showed them the path of the security team. "The team walking that side of the park was coming to the petting zoo when whoever it was broke into the building. They may have been looking for you there, Ginny, and when they realized you weren't there, they maybe had the feed tampering as a plan B."

"True," August said. "They could also have realized she wasn't in the main area of the park and that she was in a restricted section for employees only, which the employee lot has direct access to."

"So they're learning," she said. "They're coming into the park during operating hours when humans are around and they're messing with things to try to find me."

She shivered as a mixture of fear and anger surged through her. August put his arm around her again, and while she found it comforting to be held by her soulmate, she didn't really want to be comforted right now.

What she wanted was to be left alone.

Why couldn't her grandfather just forget she'd ever been born?

Josiah Baldrich, alpha of the Pinewood Pack, stared at the males who'd come to him with bad news. His gaze was so powerful and full of menace that even these males, who could easily dispatch anyone with their strength and cunning, kept their heads tilted and their necks exposed in his presence.

He'd been alpha for almost forty years, and he wasn't going to step down. The laws of the pack were few but unchangeable for the most part. When an alpha reached seventy, he or she had to step down and turn over leadership to the next in the family line.

Power was all he had since he'd lost his precious soulmate to illness. Where he'd once loved with every bone in his body, he now coveted power and would do anything, go to any lengths, to preserve it.

Even killing.

Once he'd crossed that line, once he'd taken out his eldest son and his mate, it had gotten easier. Blood madness, he'd heard his other son say before he'd killed him and his mate too.

Perhaps he was filled to the brim with blood madness, unable to discern right from wrong. But it mattered little now. The only thing that mattered was keeping the alpha position.

There were loose ends, however, and that meant his position was threatened. Once his family line was eradicated, he could change the law forcing alphas to step down. But as long as there were heirs, the laws were unchangeable.

Ginny.

Even thinking her name made him want to scream in rage.

She'd fled like a coward, and he'd finally tracked her to New Jersey.

He needed her.

She could run and hide, but he would find her. She was the lynchpin of his plans to change the laws and enter a new era of leadership. Alpha until death, and not a moment before.

"So you're telling me," he said, his voice gravely with his jackal's annoyance, "that you didn't find Ginny?"

His right-hand male, Diedrich, lifted his head from the submissive tilt. "We're locating all the employee-only areas within the park. We found her scent at the petting zoo on one pass, but when we returned to investigate, it was clear she wasn't there long."

They'd moved on to plan B, which was to damage something within the park that would cause the employees—shifters living in plain sight of humans!—to leave to replace it, giving his people ample opportunity to steal a park vehicle and use it to infiltrate the employee-only areas they'd yet to be able to get close to.

Josiah let out a low snarl. Diedrich's eyes flashed to the amber of his beast for a heartbeat, and then he lowered his head.

"The feed for the petting zoo was tampered with, and several males left in an unmarked park vehicle to replace it. We'd nearly hotwired it when they returned, and after a short battle, we fled to avoid getting caught," Diedrich said.

Which left them in the current state of not being any closer to locating Ginny.

"Fine," Josiah said, waving a hand dismissively. "We'll move on. One way or another, we'll drive Ginny into the open and take her."

He stared at the males, the most loyal of all in his pack.

He'd reward their loyalty, but not until his position as alpha was guaranteed and he had no more heirs.

He longed to return home, his position as alpha secure forever.

All he needed was to get to Ginny. And he would.

Soon.