ALSO BY SUZANNE WRIGHT
From Rags
THE DARK IN YOU SERIES
Burn
Blaze
THE DEEP IN YOUR VEINS SERIES
Here Be Sexist Vampires
The Bite That Binds
Taste of Torment
Consumed
Fractured
THE PHOENIX PACK SERIES
Feral Sins
Wicked Cravings
Carnal Secrets
Dark Instincts
Savage Urges
Fierce Obsessions
THE MERCURY PACK SERIES
Spiral of Need
Force of Temptation
Lure of Oblivion
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2018 by Suzanne Wright
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503902169
ISBN-10: 1503902161
Cover design by Erin Dameron Hill
For Quentin Tarantino—
thank you for creating the masterpiece
that is Pulp Fiction
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
It was really a good thing that Frankie Newman had never needed a knight in shining armor, because she’d only ever come across complete idiots wrapped in tinfoil. The guy in front of her was no exception.
Vance studied her appearance, taking in her protective clothes and the goggles she’d pushed onto her forehead. “I, um, guess you were busy.”
“Good guess.” But he hadn’t had to guess. The sound of rock music blasting would have told him she was working. But then, Vance didn’t see her job as “work.” He saw it as more of a cute hobby that she should have grown out of by now. It didn’t matter that her sculptures were displayed in galleries or that she had an established reputation. Much like her grandparents, he didn’t take her profession seriously.
Ordinarily she’d have ignored the incessant knocking, but she’d thought he was her agent, who was due to arrive any moment now.
He patted the cardboard box he was holding. “I found some of your stuff lying around. I thought you might want it back.”
“Thanks,” she said, tone flat. He stepped forward, clearly expecting her to move aside and let him pass. Not gonna happen. She grabbed the box and set it beside her on the hardwood floor.
He cleared his throat. “How are you?”
“Fine.” She’d be a hell of a lot better when he left. The wolf within her stirred, raring to swipe her claws at the human to warn him away. She wasn’t a forgiving animal.
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Shit, Frankie, I . . .” He sighed. “You have every right to be mad at me for getting back together with Layla, and I don’t—”
“I’m not mad that you went back to her.” She’d liked Vance’s company, and he was certainly good in bed, but Frankie didn’t love him. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t guessed that he still cared for Layla—a guy didn’t constantly trash-talk his ex unless she was on his mind a little too much. But Frankie hadn’t been mad about it back then; she knew that getting over someone wasn’t a simple thing and that feelings couldn’t be switched on and off.
While Layla had messed with his head by sending bitchy texts, posting pics of herself on Facebook kissing other guys, and even sleeping with one of his friends, Frankie had been there for him. The moment he’d “healed,” he’d gone right on back to Layla. It seemed that they both got off on the drama or something.
His brow creased a little. “You’re not?”
“No. But I am pissed that you led me to believe that you wouldn’t go back to her. I’m pissed that I spent time out of my life being there for you, worrying about you, supporting you while she hurt you, when you ultimately planned to go back to her.”
He held up a hand. “I swear, Frankie, I didn’t plan it. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I hate that I did.”
“If you want to prove it, tell her to stop stalking me online. Tell her to stop leaving stupid comments on my Facebook fan page. Every time I block her, she creates another profile and does it again.”
He winced. “I know. I told her to stop. She . . . obsesses about you. She refuses to believe that I’m over you. The more I deny it, the more she seems to believe that she’s right. I can’t win here.”
“Well, maybe if you stopped texting and calling me when you’re hammered and explained to Layla that you and I aren’t all that well suited, she’d simmer down.”
He bristled. “We suited each other just fine.” The sexual implication in his voice was clear.
“In bed, sure. Out of it? Not so much.” Which had disappointed her grandparents, because they’d loved the idea of her and the attorney—particularly her grandmother, who was close friends with his mother. “But that doesn’t matter now. Really, Vance, you should just go. I hope things work out for you and Layla, and I hope you’ll make her see reason and stop bothering me.” She tried to close the door, but his hand shot out to hold it open.
“I was hoping we could go back to being friends again. We were friends before we started dating, remember.”
Frankie wouldn’t have described them as “friends.” Acquaintances who’d met through her grandparents? Yes. Actual friends? Nah. “Look, I have no intention of bad-mouthing you to my grandmother, if that’s your worry, so the full story isn’t going to reach your mother unless you tell her.”
“I already told her, and she’s pissed at me. Not that she said as much. My mother’s a big believer of ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’ ‘Silence is golden’ is one of her favorite phrases.”
The unnecessary use of a proverb made Frankie’s frown deepen. She just didn’t get the need for proverbs. Like “All good things come to those who wait.” Really? Weird, because she hadn’t won the lottery yet. Like “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Well, why not? She wasn’t going to buy a cake for no good reason; it was stupid to think differently. Like “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Um, no it wasn’t—and never had—rained cats and dogs.
Why use a proverb when you could just use a phrase that made sense?
Well, Frankie had news for Vance’s mother: silence was silence. It was nothing—couldn’t be heard, seen, or touched. It therefore did not physically exist, and couldn’t be any color whatsoever, let alone golden.
But she didn’t want to prolong her conversation with Vance, so she simply said, “I have to go. I hope things work out for you and Layla this time around.” Just then a familiar Mercedes convertible parked behind Vance’s car. Frankie smiled as a middle-aged re
dhead dressed in a tailored blouse and skirt hopped out of the car.
“Who’s that?” asked Vance.
“My agent.”
His brow creased. “You have an agent?”
“You don’t need to sound so surprised. You may not approve of my job, but others do.”
“It’s not that I don’t approve. It’s that you could be so much more.”
Like sculpting was easy and something to sniff haughtily at. “You take care now, Vance.” The dismissal clearly rankled, and his jaw hardened. Yeah, well, his dismissal of her career rankled too.
Striding up the path, Abigail took in Frankie’s appearance and said, “You’ve been working. Good.”
Frankie smiled. “Well, hello to you too.” She counted Abigail as a friend, which Frankie didn’t have many of. She’d never been a particularly social person and often buried herself in her work.
“You know I’m not one for pleasantries.” Abigail eyed Vance curiously. “And who might you be?”
“Vance Browne.”
“Oh, the attorney who crawled back to his ex.” Yeah, that was Abigail—she didn’t spare anyone’s feelings.
His eyes hardened. “I didn’t crawl anywhere.”
“He has fabulous cheekbones, Frankie. You should sculpt his face. Then we can shatter the nose, break the jaw. Maybe even scalp it.”
Frankie saw some appeal in the idea, but . . . “It would be a waste of clay.”
“True.”
Frankie stepped aside to let Abigail pass. “See you around, Vance. Give Layla my best.” She closed the door, headed down the hallway, turned right, and walked into the studio attached to the house. She’d had it built a few years ago to her specifications. The high ceiling, spotlights, large windows, and good ventilation system made it a perfect work space.
Sunlight streamed through the open roll-up door, outside which she’d sectioned off a part of her backyard to use for bigger, more challenging sculptures. Tools, materials, and other equipment lined the walls; some sat on benches or shelves, others on metal racks or the floor, ensuring she had plenty of space to work.
Abigail’s high heel clicked on the cold concrete floor as she stood near the locked door of the display room, tapping her foot impatiently. Frankie kept all her finished sculptures inside, and she’d recently completed a commissioned piece for the owner of a New York art gallery. She fished the keys out of the pocket of her coveralls and unlocked the door.
Eyes alight with eagerness, Abigail walked inside and pointed to a veiled sculpture. “This it?”
“It is.” Frankie gently removed the cover, and there it was. A life-size child sat on a rickety chair, her head drooping forward so that her long black hair covered her face. Her gray nightie was dirty and ragged and stopped just below the knees. Deep scratches covered her legs and arms.
“Jesus, Frankie, she almost looks alive. This is terrifying. Honestly, my nape’s prickling—like someone’s watching me. This sets off that same feeling of danger. You’ve never used synthetic hair in a sculpture before, have you?”
“No.” Frankie made mixed-media sculptures, liking to combine different materials in her projects.
“She looks spooky, and it makes me wonder if she’s a victim or a creepy evil kid. Makes me want to part her hair to see what her face looks like. At the same time, I don’t want to know.”
“That’s the point. Pierre wanted something that reflects how often we’re too scared to look close enough to see what could be a dark truth, how often we see what we want to see.”
“He’s going to love it.”
Frankie had gained quite a rep for creating dark sculptures. She rarely set out to make something dark, but often the finished result looked like something she’d plucked right out of a hellish nightmare.
“What are you going to call it?”
“Child’s Play.”
“Shit, even that’s spooky.” Abigail shivered. “You must have extremely bleak dreams.”
She’d had nightmares as a child, but she could only recall flashes of them now. Remembered the snarling. The crying. The scary shadows. The sheer terror that had seized her. But the images had never made sense, had never come together to create a clear picture.
“Really, Frankie, I wouldn’t have thought I’d like this kind of work. Wouldn’t have thought I could truly admire it, let alone properly represent someone who created it. But every piece is so powerful that it touches me on some level—and sometimes it’s a level that I don’t like.”
Frankie’s mouth curved. “Good. If they don’t touch people—” She cut herself off as her phone beeped. “Hang on just a sec.” She dug her phone out of her pocket and opened the e-mail she’d received. She read it. Then she read it again. Then she read it again. The words began to blur, and she realized her hand was shaking.
“Is everything all right?”
Unable to properly process what she’d read, Frankie burst out, “What the fuck is this?”
Lounging in an armchair, Trick Hardy twisted the small object in his hand this way and that, studying it from every angle . . . as if it could somehow answer the many questions he had. His pack mates were spread across the room—perched on the sofa, sprawled in the armchairs, and sitting on the floor. They’d waited until the children were in bed before meeting to discuss the issue.
Taryn, the Alpha female, gaped at Trick. “You’re seriously telling me that four of the pack’s vehicles had been tagged with GPS trackers like that one? Jesus.”
“Someone obviously wants to monitor our movements,” said her mate, Trey, his large form pacing in front of the sofa. “Why?”
Dominic, an enforcer, tapped his fingers on the arm of a plush chair. “Packs always have reasons to want to keep a close eye on others.”
Makenna frowned. “Yeah, but using trackers isn’t exactly normal, is it? It seems extreme.” Her mate, Ryan, grunted in agreement. The gruff enforcer didn’t talk much. Luckily—and weirdly—Makenna seemed to be able to translate his grunts.
“Could be that someone’s trying to learn our patterns,” mused Trick. “Or maybe they’re waiting until the tagged vehicles are all gone at once.”
Trey’s arctic-blue gaze narrowed. “Waiting for a time when the pack might be vulnerable, you mean.”
Trick shrugged. “It’s a theory.”
“By monitoring our movements, they’re monitoring the kids’ movements,” said Tao, the Head Enforcer, golden-brown eyes flashing. Sitting on the floor with his mate between his legs, he lightly massaged her stiff shoulders. Riley, a raven shifter, was the pack’s Guardian and watched over the five children.
“It would be a good idea to keep them on our territory as much as possible,” said Ryan. He cast his mate a pointed look, since Makenna liked taking their baby girl to the homeless shelter for lone shifters where she worked.
Sniffing, Makenna flicked her long, multicolored, beach-layered waves over her shoulder.
“There’s no way to tell how long the trackers have been here,” said Riley. “That bugs me—no pun intended—because it means we have no idea just how much of our movements have been recorded.”
“Whoever planted the trackers will know we found them—they switched off the moment they were removed,” said Marcus, another enforcer. “They didn’t look particularly high tech to me.”
Rhett, their IT expert and hacker, said, “They weren’t. You could easily buy a batch of them online.”
Taryn eyed the one that Trick was fiddling with as she said, “Thank God the mechanic spotted it when he gave the SUV a tune-up, or we might never have known about them.”
Dante, the Beta male, stretched out his long legs. “I doubt whoever did it will risk planting any more, but we should still be careful. If we leave our territory, we should check the vehicles afterward—it wouldn’t be hard to plant a tracker while we’re out and about.”
Perched on Marcus’s lap, Roni—his mate and another enforcer—took her strawberry-flavored lollipop out of her
mouth and said, “We should also be on the lookout for people tailing us. If someone really wants to keep track of our movements, they’ll find another way.”
Trick pursed his lips. “Do you think Morelli might have something to do with it, Trey?” Nash Morelli had become a pain in their asses. The wolf had built his pack by recruiting lone shifters, many of whom were assassins. He called it the Mortelle Pack, the word being French for “deadly.” Trick found the idea a little pathetic. The pack had grown over time as Morelli had targeted small packs, challenging and killing their Alphas before then giving the rest of the pack members the choice to join him or die. As such, Trick doubted the Mortelle wolves would be particularly loyal to their Alpha. The way Morelli formed a pack didn’t really say “Alpha material.” He was quite simply an asshole.
Morelli had recently called Trey to request a meeting, which would take place in a few days’ time, and no one was looking forward to it. Trick didn’t think Morelli would be dumb enough to fuck with Trey—not given the Phoenix Alpha’s dark reputation—but some people were simply . . . well . . . stupid.
“It’s possible.” Trey rolled back his wide shoulders and turned to Rhett. “Have you found anything on him yet?”
Rhett blew out a breath. “If Nash Morelli truly exists, his history has been wiped. I’m more inclined to think that the guy changed his name.”
Jaime, the Beta female, tilted her head, making her long sable hair brush her mate’s jean-clad thigh; Dante immediately began playing with it. “Should we really assume this was Morelli’s work? We’re in contact with a few packs and prides. Sure, they’re all allies, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have some reason to record our movements.”
“Jaime’s right,” said Roni. “But since we have no way to find out who it was, the only thing we can do at this point is wait and see what happens next.” She sighed, her green eyes glittering with frustration.
Greta, Trey’s antisocial grandmother, patted Roni’s shoulder soothingly. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, my boys will find out one way or another.” By “boys” she meant Trey, Dante, Tao, and the male enforcers. The old woman seemed to pretty much despise Taryn, Jaime, Makenna, and Riley purely because they were mated to “her boys.” Roni had somehow tricked Greta into liking her.