Buried and Shadowed (Branded Packs #3)

That was the question, wasn’t it?

Over the past couple of months, he’d become increasingly…aware of Mira. The delicate scent of her skin. The rebellious corkscrew curls that she tried to keep tamed in a braid. The pale skin that he ached to lick from head to toe.

Still, he hadn’t realized just how deeply she’d managed to dig beneath his skin until his calls to her had gone unanswered.

Suddenly, she’d gone from a tool in his plot to save his people, to a vital part of his existence.

How or why, or what it truly meant, wasn’t something he was going to consider.

Not until he was sure she was safe.

“I was the reason she agreed to help us,” he said. “If she’s in trouble, it’s my fault.”

Of course, the damned jaguar wasn’t satisfied. A part of the reason he was second-in-command was the fact that he was capable of sensing hidden emotions.

Which was why he spent so much time alone with his computers.

“You’re a leader,” Rios said. “You can’t be responsible for the decisions made by all of your followers.”

A part of him understood the logic. He had a hundred shifters in his Pack, plus even more allies that were hidden amongst the humans to act as his spies.

Each of them accepted that being a part of the Unseen’s secret plot to destroy the SAU would put them in danger.

“Mira isn’t a follower.” He tried to explain the unexplainable. “She’s a human, not a member of our Pack. Hell, she’s not even a believer of our cause.”

Rios continued to study him with that assessing gaze. “I’m assuming you didn’t force her,” Rios drawled.

“Not technically.”

Rios lifted his brows. “Is there a non-technical way to force someone?”

Sinclair swallowed a growl. Why had he never noticed just how annoying his companion could be?

“I used her attraction to me to coerce her into using her position at the CDC to get the intel we needed,” he admitted.

“Hey, my motto is use it or lose it,” Rios said.

Sinclair rolled his eyes. The handsome jaguar didn’t have to worry about losing it. He’d been breaking female hearts for years.

“I took advantage of her,” Sinclair said in grim tones.

“And now you feel guilty?”

He felt a lot of stuff. Most of it a tangle of emotions he wasn’t prepared to share with anyone.

“Yeah, I feel guilty,” he said.

Rios’s teasing expression settled into somber lines as his hand tightened on Sinclair’s shoulder.

“I get that, amigo. But if something happened to you-”

“Then you would take my place,” Sinclair interrupted. “But nothing is going to happen. I’m going to find Mira and bring her here. End of story.”

With a curse, Rios accepted the inevitable. Taking a step back, he squared his shoulders. He might argue with Sinclair when he thought the older male was wrong, but he never forgot who was the Alpha.

Sinclair’s word was law.

“How can I help?” he asked.

“We’re on the clock,” Sinclair said. He, better than anyone, understood that they had limited time to turn public opinion in their direction before the SAU decided that genocide was the only way to control the animals they both feared and hated. “I want you to collect all the intel we have and streamline it into one cohesive document.”

Rios nodded, already distracted as he considered the vast amount of work waiting for him.

“Okay. Is that all?”

Sinclair braced himself. He knew his next request was going to ignite Rios’s very short fuse.

“Then I want you to work with Bree so she fully understands the timeline, as well as the evidence that we have to back up our claims.”

Golden eyes smoldered with the power of his cat as Rios’s breath hissed between his teeth—almost as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

“You can’t be serious.”

Sinclair shrugged. He’d never asked what’d happened between his top lieutenant and the female wolf who passed herself off as a human and worked as a newscaster at a Denver television station.

He just knew that when the two were in the same room, the air prickled with a heat that indicated a desire for naked, sweaty sex…or murder.

Unfortunately, Sinclair didn’t have a choice but to force the two to work together.

“She’s our PR point person, and the only one with access to the media,” he said, his voice warning that he wasn’t offering a suggestion. It was an order. Period. “Who else would we trust to do our…” He grimaced as he tried to remember Rios’s name for the upcoming battle. “Grand Reveal?”

“Fine,” the younger man said.

“This is important, Rios,” he warned. “She’s going to stand before millions of people and denounce the SAU. She has to be fully prepared to answer any question. Got it?”

Rios dipped his head, a bead of sweat trailing down his cheek as Sinclair’s power thundered through the air.

“Got it.”





Chapter 2