Chapter 12

CHAPTER

TWELVE

JACK

The flight to Prague was fast. It barely felt like we’d taken off, and we were landing again, which was a welcome reprieve. I barely had time to hate being up in the air before we touched down again.

Cal slept during the short flight, and maybe it was weird, but I watched him sleep. I knew he was angry. I’d basically stonewalled him, refusing to give him any additional information, and he hadn’t spoken to me since we’d left the hospital in Venice.

Unlike in Venice, there was no one waiting for us at the private airstrip in Prague. Instead, Reuben’s pilot handed me a small padded envelope that contained keys to a car that was parked at the private airport and a set of keys to a town house with a note saying the fridge was stocked.

“Looks like we’re staying in town.” I palmed the keys, and Cal looked my way. He made no effort to grab the keys.

“Okay. Do you know how to get where we’re going?”

“No, but I have this.” I held up my phone, then punched in the address on the little slip of paper. “We’re twenty-five minutes out.”

The sun had already set, leaving behind a chill in the air and making me grateful Reuben had thought to order us sweaters. It took only a second to load into the car, and then we were off. Navigating the unfamiliar roads reminded me of too many jobs in too many places I’d only ever seen under the cover of darkness. Instead of unsettling me, it made me feel like I was back on solid ground. While Cal thought I liked sitting around in broad daylight watching a target, I was actually much more comfortable in the dark.

Like the flight, we made the trip to the town house Reuben had secured for us in silence, the tension between us growing with every moment that ticked by, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to tell Cal why I was there, why I’d agreed to work with him on this op, but the words wouldn’t come.

When I finally opened my mouth to speak, Cal beat me to it.

“Do you and Reuben have a plan for how we are going to approach Vlk Mazal? Is it more wait and see?”

I flexed my hand on the steering wheel, and the gold fake wedding ring caught the blue light from the dashboard, distracting me for just a second. “No, but let’s talk about it in more depth when we get to the town house. Reuben sent me some footage from the last week we need to review.”

“We?”

“Yes. He sent the file to my encrypted server while we were en route, and I figured it would be best to look at it together.”

“Why?”

“I want your insight. Reuben has been watching Mazal for a while now. He’s taken control of several train yards and has been running shipments in and out of Prague via Bratislava, but he’s recently increased security at one of the yards.”

“Because he’s moving priceless art or something else?”

“That’s the question.” The GPS told me to take the next right, and I signaled to make the turn, even though we were the only car on this stretch of road.

We fell silent again until we arrived at the town house that sat at the far edge of the city where the buildings were more spread out. There was an alley behind the row of town homes, and the note Reuben had left with the pilot said there were two parking spots behind the town house we could use. I found them and parked. Cal was out of the car before I’d unbuckled my seat belt, and I wondered if it was because the weird tension between us was getting to him too.

“This is really nice.”

I studied the rear of the yellow and red brick building. Judging by the number of windows, the town house was three stories tall but not very wide nor very deep.

“Let’s go inside and see.”

The back door led onto a small landing. There was a bench and coat hooks on the right before a small set of stairs that led up. To the left, another set of stairs led to a cellar. Soft light filtered down from the upper level, and I followed Cal up the short flight. The stairway opened into the kitchen, and down the hall, I could see the living room at the front of the house off the street.

A fruit bowl full of green apples sat on a butcher-block kitchen island, and stainless-steel appliances gleamed under the soft glow of the light that had been left on over the six-burner range. Cal grabbed an apple from the bowl, buffed it on his shirt, and took a bite, all without stopping his trek toward the living room. Off the hallway, there was a powder room with a toilet and a pedestal sink, and opposite the bathroom was a small study. At the front of the house, the living room stretched almost the full width, giving up only the necessary amount of space for a small entryway from the front door and the main staircase leading to the upper floors. The furnishings were vaguely reminiscent of Reuben’s, if slightly more ornate than the ultra-modern furnishings at his compound. The colors were muted and neutral with the art on the walls and a handful of throw pillows and accent rugs the only splashes of bright color.

“I assume this is Reuben’s?” Cal asked, plucking the thought right from my head.

“I guess so. If you really want to know, a quick internet search would probably turn up the answer.”

Cal shrugged and took another bite of his apple, talking around it. “Doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Me either.”

“Should we go upstairs, or did you want to look at the footage first?”

“I’m starving, so let’s put our stuff down and see what we can find in the kitchen.”

“Good plan.” Cal punctuated the statement with another big bite of apple.

This time, I led, and Cal followed me up the stairs. At the top, there was a door and a hallway off the landing. Cal turned the doorknob and revealed a bedroom with a queen-sized bed against the wall in the middle of the space. He raised an eyebrow in my direction.

“I’m guessing there’s another bedroom in the back.”

“Thank God.” His words were flippant, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and he didn’t make a move to make himself at home in the room. I wondered if not having to share a space was making him as uncomfortable as it was making me after we’d spent our time in Italy practically on top of each other.

“I want to see the other room before I commit to one.”

I nodded. It didn’t matter to me where I slept. It was going to kill me to not be sleeping next to Cal, even if there had been a pillow wall between us.

Except for last night.

Then I’d felt Cal’s body against mine, his heat seeping into me and filling all the empty spaces in my heart.

I’d stayed completely still while he cuddled up to me in sleep, his stubble-rough jaw against my chest.

I’d dreamed of the night we’d first met and how pliant and perfect he’d been under my hands before I’d had to betray him, despite it being for his own good.

And I’d woken up so hard, even though Cal had rolled away at some point, that I’d needed to jerk off twice before I could leave the hotel room to get breakfast and the pastries I wanted to take to Azzura Scivolo. Luckily, Cal had slept through it all.

Here, Cal would be on the other side of the house, and I hated it.

“Another bathroom.” Cal had opened one of the two doors off the hallway. He flipped the light on and looked around. “Oh, this one has a huge tub.”

Peeking my head around the door, I saw the tub he was talking about. It was the centerpiece of the room, a large soaking tub that looked vintage until I spotted the jets along the inside.

“Nice.”

Cal pushed past me and walked to the last door. Behind it was another large bedroom, this one with a king-sized bed in the middle. An open door off the main room showed an en suite bathroom, and in true Cal style, he went to investigate. “No tub here, but a very nice shower.”

He stood in the center of the bedroom and considered the space. “You can have the en suite. I want the tub.”

“Whatever. The sleeping arrangements don’t matter to me.” Unless you’re sleeping with me , but I left that unsaid.

Cal walked out of the room and down the hall, and I tossed my duffel on the bench at the foot of the bed. The silence was deafening, and the space felt cold and lonely without Cal. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it felt like my heart was calling out to him from the other side of the house.

“Get yourself together, Jack. Head in the game. Remember why you’re here.” The pep talk did little to change the way my heart and my body pined for Cal, but it was enough to remind me we had a date in the kitchen to go over the files Reuben had sent me.

I beat him downstairs and set my laptop on the counter before opening the fridge and rummaging around. Reuben had the kitchen stocked, and I found some fresh chicken on a shelf in the refrigerator. I wasn’t in the mood to make anything fancy, and a quick look in the pantry provided everything I needed to make some quick baked chicken and a simple pasta.

When Cal finally made it down to the kitchen, I had the chicken in the oven and the pasta water boiling.

“You can cook?” His face was twisted into a look that clearly conveyed his skepticism.

“Enough to get by. This isn’t anything fancy. Some chicken in the oven and pasta with olive oil and garlic.”

“Better than anything I can make.”

“Cooking isn’t that hard.”

Cal frowned. “It’s lots of tedious work and a bunch of steps, and I get bored.”

I wasn’t sure what it meant that the first thought that popped into my head wasn’t some snarky comment about how he had the attention span of a gnat or something similar, but over the last few days, it felt like things had mellowed between us. Even so, the words that came out of my mouth shocked us both. “Find simple things to cook like this. I can teach you.”

My words hung in the air like the scent of cooking garlic, and neither of us said anything. An offer like that meant that I thought there would be a reason for us to spend more time together, but the reality of the situation was after this op when Reuben and I had the answers we needed, I wouldn’t see Cal again. He’d quit working for Alex, which was a good thing, not only because I thought Alex was the textbook definition of a douche canoe but because there was a leak in his organization he didn’t seem interested in plugging, and sooner or later, it was going to get someone killed. Cal had already been close a couple of times. But now that Cal was working with his brothers and the new ORCA organization they were creating, he wouldn’t be at risk unless he put himself there, and the only way I would know about it would be if I continued to follow him around, watching from afar.

Which I couldn’t do.

When this was over, I needed to take jobs that actually paid me. Not that I needed the money. Reuben had seen to that, but still. I couldn’t sit at home all day twiddling my thumbs, and as good a hacker as I was, I barely touched Felix’s or even Cal’s brother Julius’s skills. Besides, I wouldn’t be happy stuck behind a computer screen.

Maybe I could talk to Nero. Maybe ORCA needed a great white shark shifter with a specific skill set. But that would mean working with Cal, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

“Jack.” Cal’s voice pulled me out of my spiral of what-ifs and whenevers, his tone making it clear he’d tried to get my attention a few times. “Is it supposed to be doing that?” He pointed at the pan where the slivers of garlic I’d been frying were jumping around in the pan, a few a little too brown around the edges.

“Shit.” I turned down the heat and stirred the garlic, then peeked in on the chicken.

“Do you want to eat before we look at surveillance footage, or do you want to do it now?”

“Food’s almost ready, so let’s wait.” Pulling open the box of pasta, I dropped the spaghetti into the water and set a timer on my watch. “Do you want a beer?”

“Hell yes. No offense to the Italians, but I’m over wine for a while.”

“You could have had beer in Italy.”

“So you could tell me I had no class. Yeah, right.”

“I don’t think that.”

His eyebrow rose. “Who are you, and what have you done with Jack Grayson?”

I flipped him off as I opened the fridge and pulled out two beers, passing one to Cal. The bottles had flip-top caps, and Cal cracked the seal and downed a healthy swig. My eyes were glued to the way his Adam’s apple bobbed along his throat, the cords of muscle in his neck standing out as he knocked back the drink. If someone would have asked me twenty minutes before if I found a guy’s neck attractive, I would have shrugged and said I’d never noticed, but I did notice the long lines of Cal’s neck, and my gaze fell to his saddle patch. My eyes raked over the darker skin, hungrily taking in every slight variation in shade and the way the edges blurred until they faded into the natural bronze of the rest of his skin. There was a swirl at the edge of the patch that held my attention, and my mouth watered wanting to taste the salt of Cal’s skin and trace the pattern on his skin with my tongue. I couldn’t look away. It was like there was something significant I was supposed to know about that patch of darker flesh, but the knowledge was just outside my reach. In the tank top he’d changed into, I could see almost the whole thing, and I wanted to bite it, to mark Cal as my own, my shark pushing forward so hard my teeth started to sharpen. Cal was mine.

Mine .

A possessive growl built in my chest as I stared at him, but through sheer force of will, I swallowed it down. I was going to have to deal with the irrepressible urge I had to claim Cal eventually, but I didn’t know how. We probably needed to have a conversation, but I couldn’t see him taking it too well if I just blurted out, “ Hey, Cal, uh, my heart, brain, and body seem to think you’re my mate, and I’d like to bite you now .” I could picture his reaction. Hell, he’d probably shoot me on the spot. I knew he had his favorite gun in a travel lockbox in his bag.

Cal wiped his hand across his mouth, and for a second, I thought I’d managed to look away without him catching me ogling his sexy neck, but when his eyes met mine, there was a question there I didn’t know how to answer.

So I opted for something I figured was mundane. “Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention when we fucked around in the past, but I don’t remember that swirl in your saddle patch.” I pointed to where the edge of his saddle patch was visible around the ribbed fabric of his shirt. “Has it always been there?”

In a split second, Cal’s expression shuttered, and I knew I’d said the absolute wrong thing. I just wasn’t sure why. His hand came up to cover the skin in question, and the single word he gave me in reply seemed to carry immeasurable weight. “No.”

The timer on my watch went off, giving me a much-needed escape from whatever the hell had just happened, and I put the finishing touches on dinner while Cal alternated between scowling at his beer bottle and drinking from it. When he finished the first, he tossed the bottle into the trash and went to the fridge.

“Want another one?” He held up the bottle.

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m good.” Setting plates I’d found in the cupboard on the counter next to the stove, I gestured at the food. “Help yourself.”

Cal set his beer down on the farmhouse-style table and walked around the island to fill his plate. When I’d gotten my own dinner, I joined him at the table, leaving my laptop on the island.

Once again, the silence that had fallen between us felt oppressive, and again it seemed like it was somehow my fault.

Downing a long swig of beer for a little liquid courage, I set my fork down on the edge of my plate. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

He looked up from his dinner but didn’t look directly at me. “You didn’t.”

Cal was lying, and I knew it. “Okay, then why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird. I just don’t want to talk about it right now. Drop it, Jack.”

It was less what he’d said and more how he’d said it that made me want to press him for more. Whatever can of worms I’d inadvertently opened asking about his saddle patch was weighing heavily on Cal, and I made a mental note to finally do more research about killer whale shifters. I’d avoided it before because I thought the less I knew about Cal, the better it would be for me, but now I needed to know what a change in a killer whale shifter’s saddle patch meant.

And it wasn’t just out of some sort of morbid curiosity that I wanted to know. If I didn’t know what was wrong, I couldn’t fix it, and I needed to help take the weight of whatever this meant off Cal’s shoulders. My fingers itched to grab my laptop so I could put the subject to bed right now, but I stayed in my seat, absently twirling pasta around my fork.

Cal pushed his plate away a few minutes later and stood. “Thank you for dinner. It was really good.” He held his hand out for my now-empty plate, and I passed it to him. “I’ll clean up while you pull up whatever Reuben sent over.”

“Deal.” I rose and grabbed my laptop while Cal washed the dishes and resettled at the table, logging into my secure server and decrypting the files Reuben had sent. The largest file was a folder full of surveillance videos. The high quality of the videos made me wonder how much Vlk Mazal was shelling out for his security system. Whatever he was moving through the train yards at the edge of the city was clearly worth protecting.

A few moments later, Cal rejoined me at the table, a fresh beer in hand. I still hadn’t finished my first, and I wondered if he was trying to escape whatever was bothering him. It didn’t really matter if he tried to drown his woes in beer. With our shifter metabolisms, it wouldn’t work unless he took down nearly a full keg, so I didn’t comment on the third beer.

“What are we looking at?”

I turned my laptop so he could see too. “According to the surveillance footage Reuben obtained and the report he sent with the file, Vlk Mazal and his sons have more or less taken control of all the commercial rail yards between Prague and Bratislava.”

“Why does that matter to us?”

“Because the next stop after Bratislava is Budapest.”

The second the last word left my lips, Cal’s gaze swung to meet mine. For a second, his eyes were their normal deep brown, but slowly, the black of his pupils started to edge out the brown, his mind obviously going to the time we’d been in Budapest together.

Cal cleared his throat and came back to the present. “And that means whatever he’s shipping is likely getting smuggled out of Budapest.”

“Exactly.”

“Which means we need to find out if he’s trafficking stolen art.”

“Yep. The funny thing about all this is that the Mazal family’s takeover of the rail lines coincides with when Reuben first started hearing rumors that The Evolution of Man was back in play.”

“That’s definitely suspicious.” Cal drained his third beer and set the bottle aside. “Let me see the video.”

I hit the Play button, and we watched as two men dressed in black who had the broad chests and leanly muscled limbs I associated with wolf shifters spoke to a third man dressed in stained gray coveralls. The video was clearly taken at night, and the lights in the train yard cast long shadows between the tracks. Coveralls passed one of the wolf shifters a fat envelope and walked out of the frame. The wolves went the opposite way, and the video ended. I clicked the next one, which picked up seconds later and showed a different angle where Coveralls was barely visible walking toward the front of the train. The wolves rolled back the doors on one of the train compartments, and the wolf who had taken the envelope tucked it away in the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a phone. He held it to his ear for no more than five seconds, then put it away again. The wolves entered the train car, and a few minutes later, a third wolf appeared, driving a forklift.

The wolves on the train situated several wooden shipping cartons at the mouth of the train car, and the wolf with the forklift loaded them up as the video ended. The third video clip showed the forklift wolf loading the shipping cartons into another train car on a different track.

“Whatever they’re doing, it’s definitely illegal.”

“No doubt.” I closed the video player and opened the shipping manifest for the train Coveralls had been on. “This says the items shipped were private.”

“That could be literally anything.”

“Which means we need to find out what is in those boxes.”

“When does the train carrying the boxes leave Prague?”

“It already has, but there is another shipment of private goods coming in tomorrow night.”

Cal grinned wide, the movement making the skin around his mouth crease, and my heart flipped over in my chest, and then the smile slid from his face, revealing a serious expression. “What’s your plan?”