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

She would not give him any more weakness. She’d already let him have way too much of that.

“I am a fool,” she mumbled.

“No.” The sheriff sat down next to her. “You are not that.”

Well, there was no reason to debate the point. Besides, she didn’t really care about the why’s of it all—

No, that wasn’t right. There was one “why” she was very interested in, but she wasn’t going to go into it with Eastwind.

“Ah …” She cleared her throat. “Have you found Peter? And please, let’s not have the whole ongoing-investigation thing, okay? I don’t have the energy for that right now.”

Eastwind shook his head, and, thank God, didn’t beat around the bush. “We haven’t found him, no. We’ve reached out to his known relatives. They haven’t heard from him in months. There’s nothing on social media—and his cell phone was in the house. The last time he used it was the night before you called me, when you were stalked to that deer stand. After that … nothing.”

She stared across the room without seeing a damn thing. “I don’t know if the Wolf Study Project is going to survive this.”

“It will. And you’re going to keep working there.”

She looked him square in the eye. “At this point, fifty percent of us are dead.”

“You’re here for a reason.” He slapped his thighs and stood up. “And anyway, I’m not going to let anything happen to you—even though you doctored that camera feed you gave me.”

Lydia blinked in honest confusion. “What are you talking about.”

“I know you altered the footage of the hiker attack on North Granite Ridge. I’m not going to take this any further than this conversation, but don’t ever pull a stunt like that again, okay?”

The sheriff nodded to her and put his hat back on.

As he approached the open front door, she said, “How did you know.”

The man cranked his head around, and as she looked into his face, a warning shiver went down her spine.

In a low voice, he replied, “This is my land. I know everything that takes place on it.”

She got to her feet. “It was the bite marks on the hiker. Of course the coroner would recognize them as an animal’s. So you’re just testing me to see what I say.”

Eastwind slowly shook his head. “No. It’s because I was up on the mountain, and I saw it happen.”

Lydia grew utterly still.

“I took a sacred oath to protect the things on my mountain, Lydia Susi, and I have been doing it for a very long time.” He touched the brim of his hat and inclined his head. “You have a good day there, and be safe.”

As he walked out over to his SUV and got in behind the wheel, she watched until he, too, was gone. Then she went across, shut the door, and stared into her house.

In a fit of paranoia—which maybe wasn’t so paranoid—she stalked down to the kitchen. When she and Daniel had gotten back the night before, he’d hung out on the front porch and had a smoke—and she’d used that time to stash the floppy disks she’d been carrying around in her purse.

Jesus, to think she’d felt guilty about deceiving him.

On the counter by her refrigerator, there was a lineup of metal canisters reading Flour, Sugar, Rice, and Salt, and she went to the first in the row, the biggest one. Whipping off the lid, she yanked up the Gold Medal bag she’d encased in a Ziploc—

They were all there.

But she counted them. Twice.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s … all right.”

The hell it was, but under the fake-it-til-you-make-it theory, maybe if she kept trying to sell the optimistic bullcrap to the universe, the tide would turn.

Taking the disks, she put them back in her bag—and realized that not only didn’t she have a car, she didn’t really have the need to go into work.

One step at a time, her grandfather had always said. That was all she needed to do.

The trouble was, she didn’t have a clue what direction to go in. Oh, and then there was the pesky detail that her heart had broken into a million pieces.

For godsakes, she was still sore in intimate places from having slept with that liar.



Lydia was still in the kitchen, and back-and-forthing about what to do with what little she had to go on, when her cell phone rang.

As she jerked to attention, she looked at the clock on the stove—

Forty-five minutes had passed. Jesus, she needed to pull herself together.

Taking her phone out of her bag, she looked at the screen. It was a local number, but not something in her contacts list.

As she accepted the call, her heart started pounding. “Hello?”

“Hey, so I’m finished.”

“I’m sorry, what—wait, Paul?”

“Yeah,” came the gruff response from the owner of Paul’s Garage. “I’m done, so you can pick her up whenever you want.”

Lydia sagged. “Oh, thank God.”

“I told ya it’d be ready. You think I’d lie?”

It’s not about the car, she thought.

“Thank you so much. I’ll walk down to you now.”

“Suit yourself.”

As Paul ended the call by slamming down the receiver, she thought it was a good thing he was a terrific mechanic with no competition for his business—