Chapter 15
Alicia was already upset by all of the police detective questioning she’d had to endure, so Jake wondered why in the hell Darien had to bring up the motive for her mother’s murder on top of all that. Jake knew Darien had good reasons for anything he did, but the timing seemed piss-poor.
But Alicia didn’t seem upset by the query. Instead, her lips parted, and she seemed surprised.
She cleared her throat and held herself stiffly on the couch. “Mario had my mother murdered because she was seeing a man named Tony Thomas. Mario had him murdered as well. Why? I don’t know. I speculated it was because Tony was either copping a deal with the Feds, incriminating Mario in his sordid operations, or trying to go into business for himself.”
She sounded as if the notion didn’t make any difference. Only the end results mattered, maybe because that’s all she dealt with in her line of work. The reason why the perp didn’t show up for trial or see his or her parole officer wasn’t important. Nor was the reason he had committed the crime. All that mattered was that the person was returned to jail.
Suspecting he already knew the answer, Jake ran his hand over hers in an attempt to put her at ease. “Why would Mario want you dead, too?”
“I planned to put him behind bars. Then I turned him in to the cops.”
That was what he’d thought. “Since Danny came after you, the police must not have incarcerated Danny and possibly not Mario, either.” That thought gave Jake major heartburn. These men seemed intent on getting to Alicia, and she wouldn’t be safe until they were stopped.
Alicia dropped her gaze to their locked hands. “Maybe my mother knew something about Tony’s business or Mario’s. Maybe something was going on.” She didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then in a voice that was hollow with defeat, she said, “Then again, I hadn’t wanted to know. I reasoned that the less I knew, the better. But now…”
She took a deep, shaky breath and met his gaze, her eyes swimming in tears. “Maybe if I had known more of what was going on in my mother’s life, I could have put Mario and Danny in prison. Maybe I could have stopped Danny from murdering her.” She looked weary and overcome.
Darien wanted to drop the subject, to give her time to deal with the changes in her life, but they had to know if something her mother had in her possession might further incriminate Mario. If the man was only human, they could turn the evidence over to the police. If he was one of the wolf kind, that could be a different story. But Darien wanted to know if there was more of a connection between Alicia and Mario, and that’s why Mario continued to target her.
“What kind of relationship did you have with Tony? Your mother’s boyfriend who was murdered. How well did you know him?”
Alicia’s jaw tightened as she stared at the coffee table. Jake wondered if there was more to the story than she had let on.
“Sometimes… sometimes I thought he was trying to be the father I never had. I thought maybe he was planning on marrying my mother.” She shrugged. “I didn’t need a father. Hadn’t had one all those years. And at my age, why now? But at other times”—she looked up at Jake—“he would distance himself as if he was afraid to know me. Like he was afraid for me to know him. Which was probably because he was tied to the Mob.”
“Was Tony ever jealous of your relationship with your mother?” Jake thought that could very well be the case.
Alicia shook her head with conviction. “No. That was the oddest thing. He seemed to appreciate my close relationship with Mom. As if I was good for her. I often wondered why he wouldn’t resent that she and I were such good friends. Instead, he seemed to admire our relationship. I don’t know. Maybe he’d never had a mother or father who was there for him growing up. Or maybe he’d been close to his mom and understood.
“He wasn’t exactly like the other men she dated. They were… never intimate with her like Tony was. He tried to hide his affections for my mother when he was with her around me. But even so, I’d catch a shared kiss. Him holding her hand. A warm embrace. The other men were just… there. Accompanying her. I never saw any sign of affection or intimacy.”
That seemed strange to Jake. “Where are your mother’s things? Did you go through them?”
“In my apartment. She’d had a furnished apartment in Dillon. She didn’t have many personal effects. And mostly at the end, she’d been living with Tony in his condo. I gave away all her clothes to the women’s abuse center. There wasn’t much left. I didn’t really take time to look through her things. I never thought she might have anything incriminating against Mario. I… I haven’t returned to my place for the past month, afraid these men would know I’d lived there, and one of them would be waiting for me to show up. So I’ve just paid the bills and stayed clear of the place.”
That was why Jake dreamed that Alicia was in different beds when they made love in their dream states every night. He looked over at Darien to get his okay for what he was about to do next. Darien nodded, giving him his consent.
“I’ll take you back to your apartment,” Jake said. “We’ll see if we can find anything, evidence, something that will clue us in if there was more of a connection to you than you believe. I have a sneaking hunch that Mario coming after you has more to do with you than your attempt at putting him behind bars. And I halfway suspect when we arrive at your place, it’ll look like a tornado hit it.”
***
The drive to Alicia’s apartment seemed to take forever as Jake chauffeured her in his truck, while Peter and Tom rode in Peter’s Suburban as their backup guard. Pete wore his sheriff’s uniform, although he’d be out of his jurisdiction.
Their presence was more than comforting, especially since Alicia couldn’t take her gun with her since the police still had it. But she was armed with a can of pepper spray.
She’d been alone for so long that she enjoyed the sense of belonging that Jake’s pack members had offered her. She still hadn’t come to complete terms with being mated to Jake forever or all the strange things she was learning about her werewolfism and pack-member politics. She could only swallow the news in little bites.
But the worry of what she might find at her apartment was overshadowed by the concern she might be pregnant. She clenched and unclenched her hands, then finally said, “Can we stop at a drugstore? There’s one in the strip mall on the corner before we reach my apartment.”
She figured if she had to shop at a drugstore in Silver Town, the whole pack might know what she purchased. That was one bad thing about the closeness of a pack, she was learning. And Lelandi had said most of the businesses were werewolf run. Alicia imagined even Lisa, the manager of the lingerie shop, might have told everyone what Jake had bought for her there. Lelandi wouldn’t have, though. Alicia felt Lelandi was one person who wouldn’t give her secrets away. Unless keeping them might harm the pack.
Jake was silent for so long that Alicia thought she’d spoken so softly he hadn’t heard. But with their wolf hearing, she decided that wasn’t it. She assumed he was trying to figure out why she needed to stop at the drugstore.
He finally nodded and grabbed his phone off his belt and punched a button. “Tom? We’re making a stop at a corner drugstore.”
“They don’t need to come inside with us,” Alicia quickly said. She didn’t need the whole world to know what she was up to.
He glanced at her, then said to his brother, “You can wait outside for us. It’ll only take us a minute. Right.” Then he put his phone away. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but she could tell by his furrowed brow that he was bothered by her request. Then he said, “What is it that you need?”
She raised her brows at him. “Is nothing sacred?”
He gave her the wolfish grin that melted her insides to mush. “Not between us. Not now that we’re mates.”
“Ah, so if I wanted to probe into your deepest, most private fantasies or past history, you’d freely tell me about all of it?” she asked.
He reached over with his big hand and squeezed her thigh in a way that made her shiver with interest. “You only have to ask.”
“All right. Well, I want to get a pregnancy kit, and I don’t want anyone else in your pack…”
“Our pack.”
“Our pack knowing about it. They might get the wrong notion.” Like it was Jake’s child, if she were pregnant. She swallowed hard, hating that she’d have to admit if she was pregnant that it was Ferdinand Massaro’s child.
Jake ran his hand over her thigh in a tender caress meant to console. Then his mouth curved up and his hand slid to her belly. “When Mary called from the gallery with the news you were pregnant, I was angry. I thought you had another man in your life and hadn’t told me. But I couldn’t be more pleased if you’re having a baby.”
“Most men wouldn’t like it if it was some other man’s baby,” she said, trying not to sound so disconsolate.
He drove into the parking lot of the strip mall and parked, then rested his hand beneath her chin and lifted and turned her to face him, his eyes pinning hers with resolve. “I love you. And if you’re pregnant, the baby’s ours. I’ll raise her as my own.”
“Her?”
“Werewolves in our pack statistically have fewer females. So we’re always hopeful we’ll have a few more females—keeps the males from getting too rambunctious.”
She chuckled. “I never thought I’d hear a man say he’d rather have a little girl than a boy.”
“Having two brothers probably had something to do with it.” He cut the engine.
She knew he was teasing. By the way he spoke to his brothers, she could tell he was really close to them. She had barely opened the truck’s door when Jake hurried around the front of the vehicle to help her down.
“I’ll have to add running boards,” he said, as he held her hips and helped her hop down to the pavement. “If you are pregnant, you’ll never be able to climb up into the cab.”
“Not without a forklift,” she teased, trying to feel better about it.
He smiled down at her but then said, “Would you agree to see Doc Weber? He’d be discreet.”
“And what would people think who saw me join the pack, then immediately see the doctor?” She shook her head.
Peter drove up beside them and parked, and Alicia suddenly was aware that he and Tom were watching them both. She hoped the guys couldn’t read lips or hear their conversation through the Suburban windows.
“Be just a minute,” Jake said to Tom as he rolled the window down.
“Sure you don’t want us to watch your backs?” Tom asked, his expression concerned.
Alicia was touched by the way he genuinely seemed worried about her, but she quickly shook her head. “We’ll be right out.”
Tom gave Jake a look, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she was making the decisions without allowing Jake to have a say or because Tom suspected something else was going on. But it made her even more self-conscious, and she hurried Jake into the drugstore before her whole heated body gave her away.
***
Tom watched Jake and Alicia head into the drugstore as Peter leaned back against the driver’s seat of his Suburban and said, “Wonder what that’s all about that she didn’t want us to see what she had to purchase.”
Tom didn’t want to speculate, but he couldn’t help it. Alicia was definitely anxious about something. He’d never seen a more expressive woman, unable to hide her feelings like his kind normally could do. He supposed it was because they’d been born as wolves.
After seeing how much Alicia had gotten under Jake’s skin, how much he really cared for her, Tom was damned worried she was going to get herself killed over this situation with Constantino and his thugs, though.
He couldn’t help worrying about both Alicia and Jake, and how Jake would deal with losing her again, if it came to that. He’d been unable to focus on work or anything in the pack during the last several weeks after he’d lost Alicia. But Tom assumed Jake had continued to believe she was all right. Then there was that damnable business of chasing after her without any pack backup when she was in trouble in Crestview. Hell, Darien had curbed his anger, wanting everything to turn out for the best, but he’d been furious with Jake for not waiting for Tom and Peter to catch up to him. Jake wanted her to be safe, sure, but Darien didn’t want to lose his brother in the process.
If anything happened to her now, Jake would be devastated. And Tom couldn’t let him down.
“I’ve never seen Jake allow a woman to order him around,” Peter said, his tone solemn. “I’ve never seen him fall so hard for a woman. She’s something special.”
Those were Tom’s sentiments as well.
Peter glanced at him. “You seem awfully quiet, Tom. What are you thinking?”
That the woman had gotten under Tom’s skin, too. How could she not when Jake had fallen in love with her? Lelandi had found a new friend in her also. Alicia’s sadness concerned Tom, and he wondered whether she’d be happy with their pack. It didn’t even matter that Alicia was new to being a werewolf. They’d make sure she felt she’d been with them forever. But something was the matter, and he suspected there was more to the story than just the trouble with Mario and his gang.
Tom cleared his throat when he realized Peter was watching him, waiting for a response. “Maybe Jake felt we didn’t need to go in. He might have thought we’d be more protection if we watched the front door while they went inside.”
But Tom knew that wasn’t the case. Sure, Jake had to have felt it was safe enough for Alicia since he hadn’t insisted that Tom and Peter come inside even if she objected. But Tom couldn’t for the life of him think of what had her so bothered that she would be afraid for others in the pack to know. Maybe it was a female thing.
Peter rubbed his chin and stared at the door, then dropped his hand away and shook his head. “I heard her vehemently say we didn’t need to come inside. So that made me wonder what she didn’t want us to see that she was buying.”
“Probably a woman’s thing, Peter,” Tom said.
“Oh.”
But Tom still wondered what was going on with Alicia. He couldn’t help thinking about that morning and how red her eyes had been when she’d first come down for breakfast. Jake had been tense, ready to defend her, from the way he had hovered over her. Something was wrong. Not that Tom had thought it had anything to do with the trip to the drugstore. Then again, maybe it did.
A few minutes later when Alicia walked out with Jake, his arm around her waist and escorting her to his truck, Tom eyed the small package she carried. Her expression was glum. Jake’s wasn’t any more cheerful than hers. If it hadn’t been for the trip to the drugstore, Tom might have thought they were just concerned about what they might find at the apartment, and further, what they might discover among Alicia’s mother’s things. But the small package made him think something else was the matter.
“Condoms?” Peter asked, as he started the engine, then pulled in behind Jake as the truck headed back onto the street.
“We don’t wear condoms when we have a mate. Hell, we don’t ever wear condoms. No need.”
Peter didn’t say anything right away, but then he cast Tom a sly smile. “Maybe she’s afraid of having triplets since they run in your family.”
Poor Jake, if that was the case. No wonder he looked so glum.
Normally, Jake and Tom could talk about anything and often did, even about Darien when he had been in such a black mood before Lelandi came into his life. But Jake had refused to tell Tom what had been bothering him while he’d been frantically trying to locate Alicia. Tom and Darien had talked at length about what could have been upsetting Jake, assuming it had to do with the woman who’d been in the shower running in the background that Darien had heard over the phone.
Tom sighed. No matter what, when he found the right woman to mate, he wouldn’t be anything but bowled over with joy.
***
The most noticeable things about Alicia’s redbrick, two-story building were the gardens in front of each of the townhouses. Alicia’s was overflowing with vibrant red roses and golden sunflowers and yellow daisies.
Jake pulled a gun from his glove box, and Alicia’s eyes widened. He patted her leg. “I said I didn’t have a gun with me when I first saw you in Breckenridge. But it seems prudent that I take a gun with me anytime I go out with you now.” He pulled out a lock pick set and helped her out of the truck.
She frowned at him. “Lock picks? I’ve got my keys.” She patted her purse. “Why do you have lock picks?”
He was so accustomed to using lock picks to get into places that weren’t family owned that he hadn’t even thought about her keys. “Most of us carry these in case we have an urgent need to get inside a building and hide ourselves. If there’s a wolf on the premises, I’ll have to shift quickly and deal with it.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised.
Her response reminded him how newly turned she was and how difficult it had to be for her to think in terms of being a werewolf or that others might also be werewolves and had to be dealt with differently.
Peter and Tom joined them at Alicia’s apartment door and hovered close as Jake said quietly, “Tom, I want you to stay with Alicia until Peter and I make sure the place is all clear.”
Using her key, Jake unlocked the door, and with guns drawn, he and Peter stepped inside the house. The place was quiet, and Tom and Alicia remained in the entryway watching their progress.
Jake lifted his nose and took a good strong whiff, just like the others did. He smelled the telltale scents of several men who had been here recently. Pungent colognes, primarily. The odor of male testosterone and sweat. And the faint odor of wolf. Male wolf.
He and Peter quickly scanned the small living room, which was filled with a blue floral couch and two solid-blue love seats, a light-oak coffee table and a couple of end tables, leaving nowhere for anyone to hide. A cheerful yellow kitchen was just beyond the living area, and in an open dining room were a glass table and wrought-iron chairs but nothing else. The bar divided the kitchen from the living room, however, and anyone could be crouching behind it.
Jake motioned for Peter to follow him and they quietly strode to the kitchen, but he shook his head at Alicia and Tom when they found no one there.
A creaking noise in the bedroom floor upstairs caught everyone’s attention. No one said a word as Jake and Peter quietly stalked up the carpeted stairs, Jake leading the way. He wasn’t sure what he would face—a wolf or a man. But he smelled the scent of a wolf and a man on the way up the stairs. If the man was in his human form, he’d be armed and dangerous. If he was a wolf, Jake would take care of the problem once and for all.
When they reached the landing, a short wall half-protected a suited man with his gun aimed for a kill, but Jake saw the man before he could fire the shots. Jake ducked into a crouch behind the wall. Three pops rang in the air. Three bullets slammed into the wall behind Jake with a thunk, thunk, thunk.
Peter whipped around the low wall at a crouch and fired, hitting the man twice in the arm and making him drop his weapon. The man collapsed on the floor and passed out. Jake cursed under his breath and then rushed forward to feel the injured man’s pulse. His pulse was thready, but the man was alive.
“He’s alive,” Jake called out, loud enough for Alicia and Tom to know that everyone was all right.
The injured man wasn’t a wolf. Someone else had been here, though, who was a male werewolf.
Jake kicked the gun away from the gunman and then rummaged through his pockets, looking for any ID. None. Not that he’d expected to find any.
Peter stalked into the bathroom. “No one in the laundry room or bathroom,” he said.
“Call the local police, Peter. We’ll have him hauled off and then take care of our business here.”
Surprisingly, nothing seemed to be out of place. Jake assumed that was an attempt by Mario’s man to give the appearance that no one had been there. Then if Alicia had arrived, she would have felt safe as she entered her apartment. The man would have waited like a venomous snake until she reached the bedroom and then would have pounced on her.
The bedcovers were tousled where the gunman appeared to have been lying down, waiting for Alicia to show up. He must have heard them downstairs, thinking Alicia had come home. Jake wondered just how long the man had been here waiting for her. Maybe only since the night before because the men seemed to have been tailing her before they lost her at the Crestview Motel.
Mario might have thought she’d finally return here with no place else to go.
Jake headed back down the stairs as Peter watched the man while calling the shooting in to the police. “This is Sheriff Peter Jorgenson of Silver Town, calling about a shooting incident at 452 Sunnybrook Apartments.”
Jake caught Alicia’s pale features as he hurried to join her at the front door. “The man’s passed out but just wounded. He won’t be firing another gun for a good long while.” He took her in his arms and gave her a heartfelt embrace. “If you’re up to it, do you want to look at him and see if he’s anyone you recognize?”
“Yes, of… course.” Even though her speech was hesitant, she seemed resolute about getting this over and done with.
He rubbed her back. “The police will be here soon. They’ll have more questions to ask you, I’m afraid. But at least Peter shot the man, who had fired his weapon first. Although I am licensed to carry a gun. All of us are, just in case we need to be. He’s human, Alicia. But a wolf has been on the premises.”
“I smelled the wolf, but I wouldn’t know who he is.” She looked toward the stairs. “My mother’s things are upstairs in a linen closet.”
He took her cold hand and led her up the stairs. She took a steadying breath at the top of the stairs and moved closer to the man, who was stirring now as Peter stood over him. Peter shoved his cell phone into his pocket. “Police are on their way.”
The man’s eyes suddenly popped opened. He groaned and grabbed his bloodied arm. He saw Peter first, wearing the forest-green shirt and khaki trousers and the gold seven-point star badge identifying him as a sheriff. At that sight, the man grew very still, his dark eyes round.
“Why did Mario send you?” Jake asked, his voice low and cold, which had the man jerking his head around to see Jake standing with Alicia, his hand at her stiff spine.
His gaze quickly shot to Alicia’s. She said, “This man was a friend of the guy my mother was seeing. So much for being anyone’s friend in their organization.”
The man narrowed his eyes at Alicia. “Friends take care of friends. If they turn traitorous, you stick with the guy with the most firepower.”
“So why did Mario have your friend killed? Was Tony trying to take over the business?” Jake asked.
Sirens sounded in the distance, and when the man wouldn’t answer, Jake urged again, “What about Alicia? Why does Mario want her dead?”
The gunman’s gaze again swung to her. “He doesn’t want her dead.”
She was barely breathing now. Jake rubbed her back. “Then what?”
The guy gave a half shrug with his good arm and groaned again. “Hell, he wants her. I dunno why. But despite her killing one of our guys and shooting another, Mario wants her. Alive. Frankly, none of us gets it.” He cast an evil half smirk at Alicia, as if to say Mario would get his way, then she’d pay.
Tom shouted up the stairs, “Police and paramedics are here.”
The sirens cut out in the parking lot.
“Send them up, Tom.” Then Jake growled at the injured man, “If you see Mario, tell him Alicia’s off-limits.”
“And who should I say said so?” The guy gritted his teeth and squeezed his bloodied arm tighter as they heard the front door open and Tom telling them the man was upstairs, wounded but disarmed.
“Jake Silver,” Jake said. “Of Silver Town.”
Might as well give Mario an invitation to visit the pack. See if he had the fortitude to try and grab Alicia there. If he was a wolf, and Jake was beginning to think so, they’d have to take him down in their own territory where they could handle the matter much more discreetly.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “If I see him, I’ll pass along the word. He likes dealing with a guy with steel balls. More of a challenge that way.”
Men rushed up the stairs, four officers and two paramedics. The place was swarming with people, and with the crowd in her small bedroom, Alicia went back downstairs since she hadn’t witnessed the shooting. Jake and Peter stayed to explain what had happened. Jake only hoped she wouldn’t falter when the police interrogated her about the connection between this incident and the one the night before. He would have given anything to keep her from having to deal with this again.
As soon as he could return to her, he headed back downstairs to see her sitting on the blue floral couch, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap as Tom stood beside the couch in protective mode. This time, she was armed with a glass of water.
Jake joined her on the couch and held her hand to fortify her before two of the officers came downstairs to take her statement. He felt her tense, her heart beating rapidly, as she barely breathed. He squeezed her hand to reassure her, hoping to hell this would be the last case of anything like this happening.
Tom looked just as tense, and Jake knew his brother was in protective wolf mode in the event anything went wrong with the police questioning.
Alicia swallowed hard and tried to settle her raw nerves. She was afraid she’d be in for even more of the third degree, considering her connection with the incident the night before. What were her ties to a mobster? She couldn’t let them know about her mother’s possessions in case she and Jake could uncover anything about what was going on.
One of the police detectives, a redhead with bright-green eyes and a stern look, said, “I’m Detective Hanover, and this is my partner, Detective Brumley.” Then they both showed their badges. Detective Hanover sat down on her wide-winged armchair and opened a notebook. “Okay, first can I see some ID from everyone?”
Alicia dug around in her purse and swore she needed to clean it out as her fingers searched for her wallet and instead ran into a tube of lipstick, a package of tissues, a ton of receipts for motel bills, a brush, a comb, keys, and nail scissors that she managed to stab herself with in her frantic search. Finally, she grasped her leather wallet and pulled it out. Searching each of the pockets she found: credit card, library card, car insurance card, health insurance card, dental insurance card, store-points cards…
She frowned as she went through every pocket of the wallet. Where was her driver’s license? She looked up to see the detective handing driver’s licenses back to Jake, Tom, and Peter. Then the detective focused his attention on her.
“Miss Greiston, your driver’s license?”