Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 Page 6

  He listened to the night, his agitated thoughts finally giving in to the weight of physical exhaustion.

  He would live a little longer for vengeance. And then, when Micah’s spirit could finally rest, so would he.

  Chapter Eight

  Dominec’s impatience was contagious.

  Grace sat in the infirmary storeroom, inventorying the latest shipment of medical supplies, even though Dr. Brandt or Moira could easily have done the task. Moira, the pride’s bear shifter midwife, had already bustled past the open door once telling Grace to just leave it and she would get to it tomorrow afternoon. But Grace needed something to occupy her hands, while her mind traveled slowly toward crazytown.

  After nearly a week of interrogation, they’d finally finished debriefing Dr. Russell. Mateo had identified a captive-rich target for Kye to strike next, but the prison was larger, with more security counter-measures and Roman was balking at sending such a small team to such a massive Organization base. So far in their strikes they’d been cautious—and lucky—and hadn’t lost a single shifter to either capture or death, but if they went after riskier targets, it was only a matter of time before things went wrong.

  Grace understood that—which was why she’d drawn up a plan to enlist other packs and prides the same day Roman had asked her to. She’d volunteered to be the one to go to the Canadian wolves and had expected to be gone days ago, but Roman was dragging his feet. Roman—who had been seriously gung-ho about being aggressive against the Organization when he was the Alpha’s heir—seemed to have developed a massive case of over-caution now that he was officially responsible for nearly two hundred lives. He didn’t want to start a war with the wolves when they were already fighting the Organization.

  Which she supposed was understandable, but it still chafed. She wanted to go. To do. To act, damn it.

  She was doing what she could here, but there was only so much she could do. She’d spoken to the Hawk, tried to nudge him subtly toward taking an active interest in training shifter soldiers—since he had by far the most military and tactical experience of any shifter she’d ever met—but right now he was reluctant to take any time away from Rachel—convinced that she would be in danger as a former Organization doctor if left unprotected on pride lands.

  And unfortunately, Grace couldn’t argue with that. Some shifters, like Mateo, saw Rachel as a downright Christ-like figure for all the work she’d done smuggling shifters out of the Organization facilities. But not everyone saw her that way. There were those who didn’t draw a distinction between her and the prisoners in the barn.

  The riots at the prisoner barn had been getting worse. Grace had doubled the guards at Xander’s request—since the prisoners were officially his assignment. She’d tried to make sure the guards were loyal enough to do the job and keep the rioters out of the barn, but it wasn’t an easy thing they were being asked to do. To deny the Organization’s victims the justice they deserved.

  The barn had been a temporary measure. They’d needed a better prison—and a more considered approach to the prisoners. Xander and Hugo had been interrogating them, but beyond learning what their individual jobs had been at the Organization, they hadn’t gotten much from them. They were all terrified. And with the constant roaring outside the barn, who could blame them?

  Rachel Russell had volunteered to tell them which among the prisoners were the ringleaders versus which had been coerced into working for the Organization, but the Hawk had flat out refused to allow it, and Roman had also been reluctant to extend his trust of Dr. Russell that far.

  Which left them with a barn full of unknowns surrounded by a mob of angry shifters. That couldn’t possibly end well.

  Grace was surprised she’d never seen or heard of Dominec being among the rioters. She’d thought when she first learned about the disturbances that he had to have played a part in them, but she hadn’t been able to find any proof of that. Perhaps he really was taking his probation seriously.

  Or he’d just gotten craftier about hiding his actions.

  She had a feeling it was the latter.

  The scarred tiger had always been trouble—but he’d been good about keeping his crazy on a leash for the last few years. He’d been an ass, absolutely, but never a violent one. And now he was…unpredictable.

  She wasn’t sure what sort of message she was supposed to take from the fact that he’d left his clothing strewn around her office the other night. She hadn’t expected him to actually shut off the lights and shut the door, but the clothes had raised her eyebrows. If he’d shifted in her office with plans to tear it apart because she’d denied him, she would have understood that, but there hadn’t been a single claw mark.

  He was an enigma, that one. And a pain in the ass.

  But she’d rather be dealing with him at the moment than with Kelly.

  Stupid Cowboy Casanova. He just had to go and ruin everything.

  They’d had a good thing going. She liked him. He was pleasant and easygoing and very easy on the eyes. The perfect stress-release valve when she needed to unwind. But now he wanted a relationship and for her to invest her feelings and she suddenly felt guilty for the fact that all she wanted to do was use him for sex. She couldn’t sleep with him anymore with that lovely no-strings-just-fun feeling. It felt wrong and she was pissed at him for making it feel wrong. She needed a freaking release valve and he’d taken that from her, the bastard.

  Which was why she was doing medical inventory to try to calm her agitation when she could be having a wall-banging, mind-numbing, meaningless sex-a-thon with a willing lion.

  No more fucking Kelly. How dare the selfish bastard make her feel like a selfish bastard for not taking his feelings into account? He was a fuck buddy. He wasn’t supposed to have feelings. That was the freaking point.

  Grace partially shifted one hand and slashed open a shipping box with one claw. Assholes. All of them.

  “Hello? Dr. Brandt?”

  The infirmary was deserted in the early evening. Brandt and Moira had headed out a few minutes ago to grab some dinner at the dining hall, but whoever was calling from the front of the infirmary evidently didn’t know that.

  Grace dropped the inventory sheet on top of the open box of gauze to mark her place and headed toward the front as the woman called again. “Dr. Brandt? Are you here?”

  “Hey, Kathy Cat,” Grace said as she stepped out of the back hallway into the large front room of the infirmary. Kathy was a lynx shifter. Older than Grace, but newer to the pride. She was one of the shifters that Rachel Russell had personally smuggled out of the Organization labs—and consequently one of the good doctor’s staunchest and most vocal supporters here at the pride.

  “Grace, hi,” she said now with a tentative smile. “Is Dr. Brandt here?”

  “Out getting dinner. Can I help you?”

  “No. I just…” She bounced on the balls of her feet, another smile trying to curve her lips and Grace realized she wasn’t tentative—she was trying to contain herself. Something had made Kathy very, very happy.

  “Kathy?” Grace prompted.

  “Dr. Russell is going to help me get pregnant,” she burst out, as if the words couldn’t stay inside her any longer.

  “Oh. Wow.” Kathy was pushing forty and mated to a bobcat. Cross-breed pairings were always tricky when it came to having kids, but Dr. Russell’s specialty at the Organization had been shifter reproduction, so if she said she could get Kathy preggers, she probably could. “Good for you, hon. But what did you need from Dr. Brandt?”

  “He has records of all the stuff we’ve tried so far. I thought if we sent them out to Rachel at the cabin, she could look over my records and see what the next step is. And I just couldn’t wait to get started. As soon as she agreed to help, I came straight here—”

  Grace’s hip buzzed and she reached automatically for her cell phone. “Sure, hon. I u
nderstand. Brandt should be back soon, if you want to…”

  She trailed off as her brain registered the words on the text.

  Overheard some guards talking. You should get to the barn.

  It was from Parker. One of the newest, youngest and most eager new soldier recruits. He was a total apple-polisher, but he wasn’t inclined to make things up. If he’d heard something…

  “Shit.”

  Kathy’s eyes went round.

  “Kathy, I have to go. Go to the dining hall. Find Dr. Brandt and tell him to be ready. He might have some patients soon.”

  She didn’t wait to see if Kathy obeyed. Grace ran full out, cutting between buildings and forgoing the winding paths of the pride compound in favor of the most direct route to the prisoner barn. The roaring of the mob that had taken to aurally tormenting the prisoners grew louder as she approached.

  Then the tenor of the roars changed abruptly, surging with the distinctive tone of triumph.

  They were in.

  “Fuck.”

  Grace ran harder, punching an emergency code into her phone. It would call the rest of the security personnel, but most of them would be on the perimeter. Too far to help. She loosed the tranq gun from its holster at her hip and partially shifted, pouring on another surge of speed.

  The shit was officially hitting the fan.

  Chapter Nine

  The mob had less than a minute’s head start before she got there, but death didn’t take long. Several of the prisoners were already motionless on the dirt floor of the barn in pools of blood, entrails exposed, when Grace burst into the barn. The surviving prisoners screamed shrilly, barricaded in a stall in the back of the barn, surrounded by shifters in various stages of a shift.

  “Anyone who touches them answers to me,” Grace roared, her voice thundering up to the rafters in an attempt to shock the rioters out of their frenzy. One or two stumbled back, turning toward her in instinctive submission to the dominance in her voice, but most of them were too far gone to bloodlust.

  Focusing on the most feral, she emptied her tranq gun into the crowd, then tossed it aside and dove into the fray to knock heads, dimly aware of reinforcements charging into the barn behind her. She only hoped they were her reinforcements and not more rioters.

  The next few minutes were all reaction, her mind going quiet as countless hours of training took over and controlled her limbs. Bodies flew until the last of the rioters finally hit the ground and stayed down. Plaster dust floated in the air where one shifter had gone through a wall—with Grace’s help. Around the room, shifters groaned and Grace took in the carnage.

  It couldn’t have been more than five minutes—battles never lasted as long as it felt like they lasted.

  She panted, breathing through the adrenaline that made her heart race and her muscles feel supercharged. It was a crazy high, but she couldn’t enjoy it with the stench of blood and feces thick in the air. The remains of at least half a dozen of the prisoners had been flung around the barn—body parts separated in a way that made it hard to figure out exactly how many they’d lost.

  And it was a loss. A loss of information, even if they were all sadistic bastards who deserved what they got. At this point, Lone Pine needed all the advantages they could get against the Organization and the wanton slaughter of their prisoners didn’t help with that.

  “Fucking mess,” she growled, pushing the words around the fangs that still filled her mouth. No sense crying over spilled blood. There was work to do. “Kye,” she snapped, looking to the other security staff who had come to her aid, Kye and Adrian among them. “Get Brandt and Roman down here. Gather up the uninjured idiots and put them somewhere—I don’t care where as long as it’s far away from here.”

  Her gaze raked over the groaning rioters—the walking wounded. She pitched her voice to carry so the power in it echoed off the walls. “If you don’t require immediate medical assistance, go with Kye and be good little shifters. Don’t try to sneak off. We have surveillance, you dumbasses, and I have personally memorized each and every one of your stupid faces. Anyone tries to sneak off gets punished twice. Once by the Alpha—because you all fucking deserve it—and once by me, because I’m pissed. And anyone who even looks at the prisoners on their way out gets an express pass to the infirmary, courtesy of yours truly. Got it?”

  The rumblings were vaguely affirmative. She’d take it. She flicked a claw at Adrian. “Come here. Help me triage this shit. You have any medical training?”

  He moved toward her, stepping carefully around the places slick with blood. “Battlefield minimum.”

  It would have to do. “Look for anyone who’s bleeding to death. Try to stop the bleeding. Brandt’ll be here soon. Then just do whatever the hell he tells you.”

  Then her brain went quiet again, a different kind of training taking over as she began to triage the same dipshits she’d just given their injuries. A lieutenant’s work was never done.

  They moved those who were just unconscious—due to tranquilizers or knock-outs—out on stretchers and bandaged up claw and fang gashes that the shifters would heal within a matter of days. None of the rioters were injured beyond recovery.

  The prisoners weren’t in such good shape. The thirteen who had barricaded themselves in the back stall—which had to be their latrine by the smell of it—had survived with only a few scratches. The nine who hadn’t made it into the stall decorated the walls like disturbing expressionist art.

  She spoke to Parker—who had fought through the worst of it, the brave, dumb kid—and a few of the other guards, getting the full story. Apparently one of the prisoners had snapped and started screaming insults through the walls of the barn. The guards had already been planning to take a “smoke break” and decided that was a convenient time to abandon their posts.

  Since no shifter Grace had ever met could stand the taste and smell of cigarettes, the smoke break excuse wasn’t even trying to be believable. The delinquent guards would be disciplined by Roman himself—but that didn’t solve the root problem. No one wanted to be assigned to protect the bastards who had kidnapped, experimented on and killed so many of their own.

  Grace understood that. She’d love to be able to kill them all too. But Rachel had proved that not all of the Organization people were there voluntarily and they still needed them. At least until they could slay the giant.

  She finished cleaning up the fucking mess, Xander arriving with a few of the senior security members to take charge of the prisoners. Thank God. She had other shit on her plate at the moment.

  Once she had dropped the last stretcher full of unconscious dipshit at the Pride Hall, where Dr. Brandt and Moira were tending the wounded and stupid, she fell into step beside the Hawk, heading out into the night where snow had begun to drift lazily down from the sky.

  It was entirely too lovely a night for a massacre.

  “We’ll have to screen the guards more carefully,” she muttered, more thinking aloud than talking to Adrian, but he was a good listener and knew more than most about security. “And find someplace else to keep the survivors. The barn was never supposed to be a long-term solution anyway. Just the only place we could think of on short notice that would fit them all that didn’t have windows the bastards could crawl out of. What a fucking mess.”

  “What’ll happen to that lot?” he asked, indicating the group at the Pride Hall with a jerk of his head.

  “Roman’ll come up with a fitting punishment. The hell of it is, I don’t even blame them.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, moving faster, driven by irritation. “I wish I could, but most of the rioters are from the most recent batch of shifters released in our Organization raids. They’re the ones who still wake up screaming every night. Who are we to tell them they can’t kill their persecutors? Even if they weren’t persecuted by these particular Organization doctors. All the same breed, right?” Grace r
emembered who she was talking to and quickly retracted. “Except yours. She’s a different kind entirely, isn’t she?”

  Adrian said nothing and Grace tipped her face to the breeze, inhaling deeply of air that wasn’t tainted by death—and catching a nose full of Dominec’s scent. She slammed to a halt, head turning sharply toward the shadows along the side of the path. Nothing. Where the hell was he? She could smell him. He was close.

  Probably watching his handiwork. She didn’t doubt he’d had a hand in what happened today. Somehow.

  “Fucking Dominec.”

  She forced her body to relax. Her nose must be playing tricks on her.

  Adrian frowned, searching the shadows as well. “I’m surprised he wasn’t right in the thick of it, goading the shifters on.”

  You and me both. “If he had been, I would have taken great pleasure in kicking his ass into next week. That’s a lesson long overdue.”

  And one he might be getting tonight if she found out he had anything to do with the riots.

  She forced herself to keep walking, to keep chatting with Adrian about his doctor and the pride as if she wasn’t mentally planning how she would take Dominec down. When the Hawk realized that the insane tiger hadn’t been at the riots and raced off to check to make sure Rachel was all right, Grace turned back toward where she’d scented Dominec.

  It was time for a reckoning.

  Chapter Ten

  Dominec rubbed the fur of his chin against the shingles at the edge of the roof, watching as Grace and Adrian continued down the path. They hadn’t looked up. Even the hawk-man, who should know that danger could come from above, had scanned the shadows down low and completely failed to lift his gaze.

  Idiots.

  She thought she would teach him a lesson, did she?