Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) by J.R. Ward

Like she’d had a houseguest she’d somehow missed.

Nothing.

She checked the hall closet that was cedar lined and where she kept the extra sheets and her sweaters in the summer. Nothing out of place, but like anybody was going to take a Martha Stewart queen-sized anything?

Swallowing dread, she turned to her own bedroom doorway. There was no way someone had come into her room. NFW.

Over at her bed, she smoothed the comforter, which she’d put back to rights as soon as she’d gotten up. She checked under both her pillows. On her little side table, she checked that her old alarm clock, the radio one she’d had in college and still used, remained at a perfect right angle to the corner.

Nothing out of place.

She checked the drawers of her bureau and the shallow closet with her one-note wardrobe of practical, casual clothes. She even looked under the bed.

Just before she walked out, she glanced over her shoulder.

Across the way, there was a window seat full of throw pillows where, in theory, you could sit bathed in the morning light on a Sunday, and get cozy with the paper or a book, and sip chamomile tea in your robe and fuzzy socks. Maybe a fluffy gray cat with green eyes would curl up at your feet, and if you got a draft, you could pull a handmade quilt over your legs.

She had seen the vision clear as day the second she’d walked into the room. It was the reason she’d picked the house.

Of course, none of that Instagram-delusion had happened: She didn’t relax. She rarely read. She hated tea and didn’t have a cat. But the fantasy persisted anyway.

Out in the hall, she rubbed her face and did some mental math. Nothing breached and nothing stolen. So there had been another purpose to those obvious tracks—like a message to her that she was being watched. And she knew why it had been sent.

On Friday night, she’d spent two hours on the phone talking to the television producer at WNDK, and then she’d sent him photographs of the bait trap, the meat, and the printouts from when Rick had tested what poison had been used. She’d debated sharing a picture of the wolf—and in the end, she had forwarded the man one image and told him that they could use it, but under no circumstances take footage of the animal or disturb him in any way themselves.

A team was going to come and interview her in the office.

The hotel construction site was operational on weekends. She was willing to bet the producer went there. And the station had certainly called the corporate headquarters for a statement.

Lydia was aware that she had flimsy evidence to go on, nothing but the timeline of the work beginning on the site, and the traps being put out, and the three wolves getting poisoned. So there was a possibility that the hotel chain’s lawyers were going to get on the story and kill the whole thing under the libel laws.

They were good at killing things.

Did she call Eastwind? she wondered as she went downstairs.

Peering out through the panel of glass next to the front door, she looked over her driveway. She could just barely see the county road out in the distance.

The house was in what the locals considered the “busy part” of town. Which was to say the traffic in and out of Walters’s center, such as it was, passed by—but there were no streetlights up at the asphalt. No lights down the gravel drive. Just one front bulb fixture and one at the back door, neither of which were motion-activated, neither of which were turned on regularly.

Although that was changing, effective immediately.

Given how dark it got? Anyone could have parked just off the county road on her driveway and walked down and around her house—

Her car. Damn it, her car was parked in the open air because there was no garage, and she hadn’t locked it. She never did.

“That’s another thing that’s changing tonight,” she muttered as she went out and walked across the grass.

Looking in through the driver’s side, she expected to see the seats stabbed and the glove compartment open like a wound.

Nope.

Reaching for the handle, she snatched her hand back and pulled her sleeve over her fingers and palm. When she went to open things, she had a thought a bomb was going to explode. Which was nuts—

The handle made a little noise as she lifted it and she jumped.

“Relax,” she muttered as she pulled the door wide.

No boom! Nothing out of place, even as she looked in the backseat. And when she went into the glove box, she checked the paperwork. Everything was as she’d left it.

She went around and checked the trunk.

No ticking box. No random human head. No threatening note made out of mismatched letters cut from the pages of a magazine.

Closing her car up, she leaned back against the quarter panel and crossed her arms over her chest. As she stared at her house, she was glad she’d gone to BU and gotten into the habit of always locking her doors. Boston was a big city and crime happened anywhere there were lots of people.

Crime also crept into isolated places.

Her eyes returned to the footprints beneath the windows of her living room. Good thing she always had a deadly weapon with her—

As her phone went off in her pocket, she jumped with a shout. Then she took the thing out. It was a 518 area code, and she had a thought that it was Daniel.

“Hello?” She waited for a response, expecting it to be him. Wanting it to be him. “Hello … ?”

When he didn’t return the greeting, and a telemarketer didn’t click in and tell her that she was due a refund from Amazon or had a repayment option on her college loans, she hung up. Memorizing the number, she went onto the web and typed it into a reverse search—