“We’ve looked at all of this a thousand times,” he growls, throwing yet another folder on my desk. “What the hell are we missing?” he pounds his fist on the arm of his chair in frustration. I share the sentiment.
“Keep…” I begin only to stop suddenly and stare at the paper in my hand. That name. How did I not make this connection before?
“What?” he asks, leaning over to see what has silenced me.
“Sonofabitch,” I hand it to him and point to the name before digging through more file folders for a specific one.
“Burson Industries and Development. What’s the big deal about this company?”
Opening the new folder I take out the sheet containing the information I’m looking for and hand it to him to compare.
“Holy shit,” he murmurs. “Henri’s invested in Dick’s company.” His animal joins mine as they growl in anger.
“I knew that fuckin’ company sounded familiar,” I grab the rest of Henri Dupree’s file and look for anything that could give us my woman’s location. “You look through Dick’s again. They have to have something else in common or some kind of property.”
That motherfucker’s going to die. They both are.
Once I gave this new information to Roark, I hoped that things would start to move faster. They didn’t. We hit brick wall after brick wall after brick wall.
“We’ve got nothing,” Trick declares as he and X stand in my office doorway. “No traces of her anywhere. No scent, no clues, nothing,” he shakes his head. I give the man credit, he was doing his damndest to make his failing to keep her safe up to me. He was out all night last night trying to pick up her trail. It hasn’t changed my feelings about his role in her disappearance much. She was taken on his watch. I won't soon forget that.
Eliot and I have found no connections between the properties Henri and Dick own, leaving us back where we started. Nowhere.
“It’s as if she fuckin’ disappeared,” X growls in frustration.
It’s been a whole day since Larken’s gone missing and I’m barely keeping it together. I tune them out when my phone buzzes. Hoping it’s information on Lark, I pull it from my pocket. What I find when I open the text has my beast pushing to get through and my brothers move away from me immediately, except for X.
I can feel my leopard clawing to be free as my nails begin to elongate and my skin tingles. “Kill everything.” My vision begins to blur when my head is jerked to the side.
“Focus, brother,” X’s voice filters through my brain. “Take a deep breath and look at me,” he says the last three words slowly, with a caution that lets me know the shift is beginning. “Fight for control,” he continues. I focus on his words, fighting the beast within to regain control. When my vision starts to normalize, I can see the wary look on my brother’s face. “There ya go, man. Focus.”
I let out a pained mewling noise and fall into my chair. At some point during all of this, Roark has returned, with Ry and a few other brothers and is looking over the pictures on my phone.
“Mother fucker,” he growls while thumbing through them all.
“Shit.”
“Fuck.”
“Sonofabitch.”
Every one of my brothers gets a good glimpse at the pictures of my little bird before I rip the phone from his hands and shove it back into my pocket. No one needs to see any more than they have. Not even me, but they are burned into my brain.
Henri is standing beside a bed my Lark is lying on, tied up and gagged, her clothing torn, a vicious looking collar around her throat to keep her from shifting. Her face, arms, and legs are bruised, and there are streaks of dried blood scattered across her tiny frame. In spite of my anger, a surge of pride runs through me. They may have her, but some of those wounds tell me she put up one hell of a fight at some point.
“He’s mine,” I say to Roark.
“That goes without saying, brother,” X clasps me on the shoulder and squeezes hard.
“I told you, when the time comes, you can be there,” Roark says.
“Then you lift your order?” I push.
“You are free to go,” he concedes.
“You can tell the Howlerz I’m headed that way. I don’t care whose territory it is, I’m going to get my woman.” Thankfully, we are at peace with them and share resources when needed. I look at Roark who nods silently while X and Trick share a nod.
“We’re coming with you,” X says.
“Not,” Roark says, stopping us in our tracks, “until we have her location. I promised them I wouldn’t allow you to run amok in their lands unless you had a specific target. I’ll put you under an Order again if I have to, or you can give me your word to wait until I authorize you to go.”
“She’s there on Howlerz land, Boss. I know it.”
“Then give us time to find her.”
Unwillingly, I agree, but I won’t be able to wait for long. I’ll go after her and bring her home. When I do, that Dupree prick had better have an army with him because nothing will ever keep me from my mate.
358
Larken
“Wake up, bitch!”
My head pounds with every word the strange voice speaks, each syllable ringing in my ears as if I were standing in a belfry on Sunday morning. Where am I? The last thing I remember is coming out of the restroom at the bank and then everything went black.
“I hit her pretty good so she’s gonna be out for a while,” another unfamiliar man says with irritation.
They must be talking about me because my whole body aches. What the hell is going on?
“She won’t be out for long,” the now more familiar first voice disagrees before slapping me. “I said wake up!”
Wake up! Fight!
What is She
