I spun around to look at my father again. There was something shiny in the corner of his least-injured eye. A tear. “You need to tell me what you owe to whom,” I said quietly, glancing around the room without moving my head to see what there was to defend myself with. The window was just open enough that I could probably wiggle through. There was nothing sharp or heavy immediately on hand other than the plastic food tray on the cart besides my dad’s bed. The cutlery was cheap plastic. Better than nothing, though. A plastic fork to the eye was still a fork in the eye.
Throwing the tray would be enough to shock one man enough to run if need be, but three? I was out of my league. The men who were supposed to protect me were right here in this room. One was incapacitated in bed, the other one acting as crooked as I’d suspected he might be. How did so many people like him? I wonder how many people were paid to look the other way.
Or threatened.
Sheriff Whitmore laughed. “Even if he could talk, of course he wouldn’t have the balls to tell you how much he gambled away last week. He hates disappointing his angelic, darling, perfect daughter. But I did your father a favor this morning. These guys were asking for a lot of money, and he came to me begging for help. He was willing to go to jail if it meant bringing down the other guys. Instead, I promised to be responsible for his debt. And now… you owe me.”
“Get rid of…necklace,” my father wheezed out.
What was that about my necklace? Frightened and confused, I reached up to touch the tiny links. My father reached up, too, but his hand shook in midair before dropping back down to his side.
The sheriff edged into my view, looking irritated. “You always wear that, Cara. It’s a very pretty necklace. Where is it from?”
I pulled the pendant out from under my shirt and rubbed the green stone for good luck, as I often did. I never, ever, took off, ever since I got it when I was a girl. “It’s my mother’s,” I said. It was the one thing I had from her, the woman who left so many years ago that I had no recollection of her other than vague impressions of loving arms and warm smells. I didn’t even have a picture, although when my dad was really drunk, told me I was the spitting image of her. Then again, he also couldn’t make up his mind about whether she died or left us, so who really knew?
And then, when it was really bad, he would tell me I was cursed.
“I can sell the necklace to help cover what he owes,” I offered, still pretending to not understand the undercurrents. Stall, stall, stall. “It’s got a gold chain and the pendant is made of malachite. Gotta be worth something.”
The sheriff laughed. It was surprisingly lighthearted. “I have a different idea on how you can settle the debt. I’ve already told the gamblers, who are friends of mine, that I’ll pay off your father’s debt if you hold up your end of the bargain. In exchange, I’m going to need something… worth my time. You’ve always been dismissive of me at the bar. Too dismissive.”
The way he looked me up and down told me everything that I needed to know.
Shit.
“And if I don’t?” I challenged him to keep him talking. Surely a nurse had to come make the rounds at some point. Was there an emergency button I could press, like the ones that went off when a patient flatlined? Should I scream that there was a fire?
The sheriff took a step forward. So did his goons. I moved back, trying to edge toward the window without anyone realizing it.
Crash.
With a strength that no one in the room saw coming, my father leaped out of the cot, grabbed the heavy cart that had his lunch remains on it and heaved it as hard as he could in the direction of the three men, who were all slammed into the wall by the impact.
“Run!” he shouted, voice shredded with pain. “Run and take off the necklace so they can find you!”
Part of me wanted to stay and fight, but a louder voice cried out that if I didn’t run right now, there would be no more opportunities later. The girl who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day, my father would tell me as we’d sneak out in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time with two suitcases apiece. With a choked sob, I ran for the window, avoiding the sheriff’s grasping hand. I swung one leg, then the other, through the narrow gap, and then half slid, half slammed my hips through. If they could fit, I was good to go. My muscles screamed, skin tore, and I could feel the deep ache of imminent bruises, but I made it.
A bellow of sheer rage echoed behind me, and just before I was fully clear of the window, a hand grabbed at my neck, breaking skin and catching in my necklace and hair. As someone who’d broken up bar fights before, I instinctively grabbed the base of my ponytail to absorb the worst of the pull and yanked. Sure enough, strands of hair snapped and my scalp stung, but I was free within seconds.
To my horror, he still had a grip on the necklace.
It tore. Snapped.
And slid off my neck, falling silently to the ground.
Chapter Three
Angel Falls, Idaho
Wyatt
Just what I needed, the captive getting killed. If I didn’t save her and get the information I needed, my cousin would be furious. And rightly so.
Beside me, Nyria growled low and deep in her throat.
“I don’t sense anything,” West whispered before changing back into a wolf. The bloody rag fell off his leg. The bleeding had slowed, although the scent of his blood was still as fresh as the stench of fear wafting up from below. I took advantage of his shift to pad quietly down into the darkness, Nyria right behind me.
The stairs led into a small, dark cellar edged in shelves filled with various human knick-knacks and machinery. Toward the back, haloed by a single, horror-movie looking lightbulb dangling from a chain attached to the ceiling, was a barefoot woman in a tank and a pencil skirt bound, blindfolded and gagged in a chair. The bright red hair glinting in the light told me this was our missing Brigit Rayna.
A visibly shaking, sweating young male holding a gun to the woman’s head. A ruse, perhaps, if the wizards needed her alive, but a lone survivor, and a human at that, might not care about long-term consequences if killing her might distract everyone enough to guarantee his short-term safety.
A loud snarl tore through the air, and behind me, West went wild. There was no other word for it. Ears against his skull, he tore down the stairs, claws scrabbling against the cement floor as he skidded to a halt when he registered just how close to death the human female was. We hurdled forward, Nyria throwing herself in between West and the hostage situation while I quickly changed into a human.
“Calm down,” I said coldly to West, who snarled at me and paced back and forth, eyes fixed on the hostage in a death stare. Shit. I’d never seen my brother like this. Could that woman be…?
No. Couldn’t be a mate. She smelled human. Human mates—or rather, part-human mates, as all mates were at least part shifter—were fragile. A weakness.
Yet West was behaving as though she was.
Just what I needed. Great. Nothing worse than a shifter with the scent of a mate in its nose. Especially when they were in the middle of a dangerous situation. Although all things given, the fact that West hadn’t just flung himself in a boiling rage at the human male was nothing short of miraculous.
“Tell that shifter to stand down or I’ll—” The gun jabbed hard against the woman’s head, and at her muffled cry, West became even more agitated.
I slashed my arm through the air in West’s direction, warning him to back off. Clearly alarmed by the threat to another female’s life, Nyria sank her teeth into his side as an additional warning. West turned on Nyria and for a heart-stopping second, I feared he would attack anything and anyone who stood between him and the human. But after a second, he quieted, the look in his flat, golden eyes even more terrifying in the deafening silence.
Guess I get the play good cop this time around.
“If you want the girl alive, I want out. I want out of all of this.”
“You already called for backup,” I pointed out, my voice as calm and soothing as possible. “How long before they show up? Half an hour? You know you’ll end up like your friends up there if there’s another battle. Hell, they might even do it themselves to tie up any loose ends.”