Masked By Danger by Christa Wick

Chapter Twenty-Three

Two hours later,freshly showered with a towel wrapped around her ample flesh, Iris opened the door of the master bathroom just a crack to find Lana standing at the foot of the bed, a friendly smirk lighting the woman's face.

"I'm glad that's settled," she teased.

Blushing, Iris walked to the dresser where someone had placed a large, unopened box with an all too familiar, smiling logo on it next to a second, used box, its top folded instead of taped.

"We ordered you some undergarments as soon as you arrived, but there's no same or next day delivery out here." Pointing at the used box, she continued. "We also have some first-class seamstresses. They took your measurements from the clothes you were wearing when you came in. When you have a little free time, I can take you to them and you can put an order in."

Iris opened her mouth, couldn't find the words for the gratitude she wanted to express.

"There's no money out here," pausing, Lana snorted. "Well, of course there is but it's mostly all about bartering. Some people sew, some heal and cast, some protect, some hunt and farm…plus, everyone wants Cade a little more mellow. That doesn't happen when you're wearing borrowed panties."

Winking, she stood and walked to the door.

"I'll wait for you in the living room," she said. "When you're finished, I'll escort you to the healing suite where Cade and Esme are waiting."

"I'll just be a few seconds," Iris nodded. With the latent out of the room, she quickly dressed. The need to add new wards to her flesh itched just below the surface, begging her to start with just a scratch or two.

She shook off the urge, the promise she had made to herself and Cade before he left her to shower repeating in her mind.

No more hiding—not from her mate and not from her past.

Hair still damp, Iris joined Lana. The latent looped her arm through Iris's, her touch warm with a calming magic.

"Let's put an end to this mystery," she said, her gentle manner coaxing Iris out of the apartment.

* * *

The healing suiteLana delivered Iris to was like a pill-shaped cocoon with crystals and silver embedded in its walls.

A chaise covered in freshly laundered blankets centered the room. Around the chaise were three stools, one on each long side and one behind the slightly raised back.

Cade waited at the suite's door, opening it for them as they approached. Lana led the way inside, lightly tugging Iris with her as Cade placed a warm hand against the she-wolf's back to ease her forward.

Didn't they understand how heavy her feet had become or how thick and impossible the air had turned?

"I'm with you, baby," Cade whispered to Iris. "Nothing will ever change that."

Her head dipped in acknowledgment, but she only half believed him. She could have done something in those missing weeks that would turn him away, or have had something done to her that would equally repel him.

Twelve years had passed to weaken the bond between them.

For all she knew, the remaining link was made of little more than air and memories that needed only the slightest bit of added pressure before snapping.

Approaching the chaise, Cade stopped. He glanced from Lana to Esme then gestured faintly at the door.

"Give us a minute, ladies." However nicely phrased, his raw expression told the two women that he wasn't requesting their departure but demanding it.

They left quietly, their fingers whispering against Iris's arm as they passed. She felt their magic infuse her, little electric charges working to relax her muscles enough that Cade could steer her onto the chaise and wrap her in the blankets as if she were a doll he had to dress or an invalid who couldn't complete the task on her own.

He didn't speak, just leaned into her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Cade nuzzled her cheek and stroked her hair until she turned into him and hid against his chest, finally relaxed by the knowledge that her mate's presence would shield her from the worst of her memories.

A few more seconds passed, her energy growing calmer, and then the women re-entered. Lana took the position behind the chaise. The fine hair along the nape of Iris's neck rose with the uncomfortable memory of the metal gurney Oscar had been placed on and the Hunter who had held his head immobile while Quentin probed the cub's spine.

But Lana didn't touch her. The latent placed her hand on top of Cade's, her energy passing through Cade to Iris to be almost imperceptibly altered by his wolf and the alpha power he possessed.

"Thank you," Iris whispered to the latent, uncertain how Lana knew that touching her would have made things worse instead of better.

Gently capturing Iris's hand, Esme pushed more magic into the she-wolf. It layered on top of Iris's energy, sank into her bones and into her blood, where her heart circulated it through the rest of her body. She relaxed further, her mind sensing Esme's commands more than she heard them.

Slowly they worked through the final days that Iris could remember. Camille's visit, Hank's growing animosity after the witch's departure, the old man finding her tucked under a tree, her nose in a book.

A new detail emerged from those that had always chased Iris through her nightmares. Blood had stained Hank's shirt as he approached.

He spoke, the words unintelligible but something about Cade. He kept pulling at his crimson splattered shirt, his gaze wide with panic until she finally realized that Cade was hurt and Hank wanted her to go with him.

Her mind only half in the healing suite with Cade and the women, Iris told them what she saw, her voice as dull and lifeless as Hank's had been erratic and distressed.

Hank's behavior was a ruse, of course, but she sensed his trickery too late. Another wolf waited by his truck, someone she didn't know, so an outsider to the clan. She caught the flash at his open collar of a small pendant on a chain, both pieces made of silver.

"He reeks, like bad magic," she said. "And he's wearing silver jewelry."

She pawed the air, describing the pendant to Cade and the women. A claw mark, a wolf's scratch. The stranger's arm flashed in front of her, a fat streak of silver as he hit her hard in the temple with a heavy baton. She fell silent, unconscious in her memory.

And then she screamed, vibrations running through the carved walls of the healing suite as Iris found herself reliving the nightmare that had jolted her awake the morning of Oscar's interview.

There was a second wolf she didn't know. He had the same kind of necklace and pendant as the other man wore hanging from his neck. His stink clogged her nose just as badly. Hank forced one knee against her back to keep her pinned stomach first to the ground.

The first of the previously suppressed memories appeared. As Hank pinned Iris and clawed at her clothes, his pants were undone.

She tensed against Cade, her soft whimpers dotting the air while he wrapped his wolf protectively around her and Lana pushed more calming magic through him.

"You're doing great, baby," he whispered into her ear.

Iris felt love pouring from him, into her. Love, not disgust. His shirt grew wet beneath her tears, but he kept holding her, whispering encouragement as she pushed past Hank stabbing her in the chest, whatever plan he had in his half-dressed state unfulfilled.

Cade's wolf ran alongside Iris as she remembered her escape, her body shifting to her wolf form for the first time as she breached the clearing and heard the explosion. Somewhere behind her, Hank howled in pain and rage.

She kept running, her legs twitching along the ottoman in memory like a fox chasing a rabbit in its dreams. She followed Hank's scent and the reeking trail of the other men to a turnout on the side of the road. She knew the location from her few trips off clan lands.

A plain black sedan waited parked next to Hank's familiar truck.

The windows were down on Hank's old Ford, but Iris couldn't bring herself to approach it. She smashed one of the sedan's back passenger windows and rummaged for the key. She found it in the jacket shoved down on the floor.

Keeping one eye on the woods, she started the car and rolled down all the windows to hide the fact that one was smashed out. Hearing the infuriated snarl of a shifter, his feet pounding the forest floor as his arms broke low-hanging branches to clear his path, Iris peeled out of the turnout.

The back end of the car fishtailed from the sudden acceleration and loose gravel. The vehicle bounced over the low concrete divider that separated the parking area from the road.

Her head slammed against the driver’s side window, the pain clamoring against the other agonies that tortured her healing flesh.

Pure instinct pushed her in the direction opposite the clan's lands. Only Cade and her grandmother would believe Iris. She had a long history of being something of an outcast among the wolves, her magic hidden so that she had less utility to the clan than the witches and healers who served them.

And Hank would make good on his threat, at least with her grandmother. Even though he bore the same external good looks as his son, the man was pure ugly on the inside.

Better to let him think he had scared her away, or that she'd died from her injuries. Surely, she had left enough of her blood on the ground to make him doubt her survival. A few months and she could sneak back, find Cade and get her grandmother out.

A car passed on the road, the driver's shocked expression and the surprised jerk of his vehicle reminding Iris that her clothes were tattered and stained red.

Her attention divided between the rode ahead of her and the rearview mirror, she reached into the back of the vehicle and retrieved the jacket. Clumsily, she put it on, her mind turning over her future plans.

Could she really ask her grandmother and Cade to give up their entire lives for her? Her grandmother, maybe. She had been old when she birthed Iris's mother and Iris had been the only successful pregnancy in a long line of her mother's miscarriages.

Andra North had maybe a decade of life left and defending her strange granddaughter had made her almost as much of an outcast among the wolves as Iris was.

But Cade would be risking his life and giving up his other family and friends. She couldn't begin to understand his den instinct and what a hardship it would be for him to live away from the clan.

She wasn't a wolf, how could she?

Still dreaming the past, Iris felt Cade's arms tighten around her in the healing suite. His voice rumbled in his throat, no words necessary to remind Iris that she was a wolf, had shifted in front of him the day before and during her escape from Hank. His fear reached into her memory, begging her not to forget her true form as she had once before.

You are a wolf, love. My mate, baby. Come back to me.

Iris squirmed in Cade's arms as she fought the urge to follow his energy back to the present. She had scratched just the surface of the lost time and needed to remember so much more, something that would help her, help the cubs and the two women guiding her over the rough terrain of a nightmarish past.

"I will," she promised in a whisper against his chest.

Her old self forgot about the shift, forgot about most of the attack, the other men, the way they reeked and the silver blade that had pierced her chest. She remembered only the threat of death if she returned—hers, Cade's, her grandmother's.

For two weeks, Iris moved farther from the clan, pawning everything of value that had been in the vehicle, stripping out the radio, and salvaging the tires and rims to sell them before she set the sedan on fire.

Hitching a ride with a trucker and going as far as a small town on the outskirts of Scranton, Iris kept only a small bag of the larger man's clothes and a lockbox.

It took another week before she opened the lockbox. She could have smashed it open before that, but the box carried the same smell of decay and rot as the two men who had helped Hank kidnap and almost kill her. Only desperation for more items to pawn had forced Iris to look inside.

She found more silver that she quickly sold, crystals and dowels that turned her stomach queasy but were worth a few bucks regardless, and a pile of papers with vivid pictures and writing in a language she couldn't read.

Some of the images were the wards she would later carve into her flesh, her mind subconsciously recognizing their purpose but the knowledge remaining buried until she had absently scratched one into her arm and the wound took a week to heal.

"What happened to the papers?" Esme asked, the question almost lost as it bounced and echoed from present to past.

"I had to leave them behind," Iris answered, the hidden thoughts and memories in her mind slowly resurfacing. "But I hid them."

Lana, the only one in the room who had experienced none of Iris's memories during the regression, shook her head in confusion. "But why leave them?"

"Simple." Iris pressed closer to Cade as she answered. Relief eased the burn in her tense muscles when he tightened his hold and kissed the corner of her jaw.

"Hunters found me," she whispered. "I just didn't know that's what they were."