Page 29 of Bound

“The other fang-head?” I said just as the server arrived with our food. River smoothly pocketed his phone.

It made sense, of course. I thought of the vampires I felt circling just outside our territory every night, waiting for the opportunity to strike. So far, they’d stayed too far out of range to positively identify any of them, careful not to trip our sensors. Which was why everyone at the table other than Caldwell was convinced I was losing my mind.

“John Doe was paid a thousand dollars to slip the envelope with the photographs of Kieran under your door. When he got cold feet at the last second, someone showed up out of nowhere, grabbed the envelope, and did the drop for him.” River dug into his French toast like he hadn’t eaten in a week.

“I take it this fang-head and the one from two nights ago at the apartment weren’t working together,” West said, fingers inching surreptitiously towards my bacon. Rolling my eyes, I shoved the plate at him.

“Bingo. When Cristof figured out John Doe didn’t know anything, he bashed his head into a wall and took off.”

“Ouch.”

“You get all that off the guy even with a concussion?” Brody stabbed at a forkful of eggs.

“Humans are easy. No mental blocks in place. I’ve never,” he hesitated, “almost never encountered anyone I couldn’t instantly read like a book. Vampires, on the other hand, are all naturally resistant to what I do.”

“You can’t read one of them?” I flicked a sideways glance at West, who having finished polishing off my bacon, was frowning at something on his phone.

“Sure. But just like with one of us, there’s a difference between passive listening and active stripping of memories someone doesn’t want you to access. The first you can do without much effort. The latter tends to cause damage, so you have to be careful.”

“So we’re looking at two different covens.”

“The Vampire Nation has been locked in a bitter civil war since its inception,” Brody said, eyes flicking to the door as a group of teenagers came in, laughing at something on their phones. “They have everything to fear from someone like you working for the Tracers, or the feds.”

“I’d never help the feds.” But even as I said it, something uneasy twisted in my gut. My brother was a hostage. What wouldn’t I do if someone was holding a gun to his head? Even by agreeing to the meet, we’d let the people holding him know we were willing to deal.

“It’s how they got to the shifters who’ve been implicated in giving up intelligence on pack security measures.” River’s phone buzzed. He frowned distractedly at the screen.

“You’re talking about Athena,” I said, thinking of the shifter who was coerced into taping a terrorist message confessing responsibility for a bombing orchestrated by the Vampire Nation back at Thanksgiving. The message had been broadcast worldwide. Athena was now wanted by the human government, the Vampire Nation, plus factions among the werewolves, and was being protected by the Tracers.

“Yeah. The undeads had a knife to her son’s throat.”

West cursed. “The kid you guys recovered in the raid last fall was hers?”

River stared out the window at a group of tourists crowding into Blair’s Bakery, seeming to consider his answer. “He’s two years old. Born in captivity. This is what the Vampire Nation does. They get to family members. Find out where you’re vulnerable. Use that information to get what they want from you. Hudson Smith, that guy who went missing in Austin on Wednesday, had a sister. Turns out no one has seen her in close to a year.”

“How did that not get reported in?” Brody asked, stirring cream into his coffee.

“According to her friends, she left home after a fight with her parents. They showed us text messages sent from her phone, but no one has actually seen or spoken to her since around Christmas.”

“So there’s a good bet the vamps have her, too.”

“Yes.”

My hands began to shake, my vision blurring. Dark. Cold. Teeth at my throat. Hands I couldn’t push away—

“That’s enough,” West growled from beside me.

Beneath the table, his thigh slid fractionally over so it rested against mine. His quiet anger, the fierce protectiveness that was so inherently him was a barely contained storm, cracking fissures in his carefully constructed wall of self-restraint. I remembered the feel of his hands mapping my bare skin as we tangled together in my bed, hot, hungry and wanting, and my chest began to ache. West Caldwell burned in my blood, a thirst I couldn’t slake. He was two sides of a coin, the West who didn’t hold back and the one whose self-loathing was so stark I felt it like a pit within my own body when he exhaled, guilt he carefully walled off from the rest of the world. I wanted to feather kisses over every inch of his body until he was breathless with longing, creating a stolen space out of time where there were no monsters and no memories. Where it was just us.

Beside me, West inhaled sharply, fumbling for his water glass.

River smirked. “You two need a minute?”

“Bite me.” He began typing out a text, thumbs flying over the screen. A second later, my phone buzzed.

West: Are you trying to kill me? I’m ten seconds away from dragging you out back into the alley and doing something very ungentlemanly that will probably get us both banned from here for life.

Topher: Channel it into your next dragon-shifter fic. We both know you’ll sink into a spiral of depression and emo rage-texting without access to onion rings.