A Lion’s Mate by Eve Langlais
Chapter Seventeen
By the time Zach whirled to say he’d changed his mind and ask her to stay, the door slammed shut.
He sagged onto the bed. Spent. Not just his balls but also his emotions.
His lion was pissed.
The man was sad.
So, when his door got kicked open again, someone almost got their face eaten until he recognized the three biatches looming.
“Lacey, Lenora, and Lana?” Elite Pride Operatives. And he only knew them by name because he’d actually done a few missions with them. It left its mark. They were terrifying. He felt especially bad for their nephew, Lawrence.
“Where’s the yeti?” Lana demanded.
“Gone. She left just minutes ago with her family.”
“Fuck,” Lana, the potty mouth of the group, declared.
Lenora waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Probably better this way.”
“Better how?” Because it sure didn’t feel better to Zach.
“Because now your mission can shift focus from babysitting to retrieval of the box.”
“I was already look—”
Lana sliced a hand through the air. “We don’t have time for you to pretend you actually have a voice. We’re here. We’re in charge. What we do know? The artifact is somewhere in these mountains. Svetlana and her grandmother were last spotted in Jasper, Canada.”
“It’s here?” He arched a brow. Maybe Arleen really could sense the box. He’d begun to wonder once he realized she had roots in the area.
“It is, and we can’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”
“Isn’t it already?” From what he knew, Svetlana and her grandmother didn’t seem like the most trustworthy custodians.
“Are you being smart?” Lana lasered him with a glare.
“No, ma’am. What do you need me to do?”
“Follow your girlfriend.”
“What? I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Lenore snorted. “Oh, please. Her scent is all over you. Can’t believe you let her leave.”
“I had no choice. Her family made it pretty difficult.” Beyond difficult. He’d thought his dad a master manipulator of emotions, but Francine was a level more diabolical.
“Surprised you let her go, given she’s still being hunted.”
“Are you sure? How?”
“It doesn’t matter how. Lucky for you, we took out a team preparing to capture you both. But they’ll send more.”
The threat to Arleen and her family was how and why he found himself surveilling the Smith compound, a sprawling multi-hundred-acre property surrounded by protected federal land. Awesome, and at the same time, impossible to protect. It was just too vast.
But he and the Elite Pride Operatives—code name The Aunts—took out the small teams of humans that kept coming, trying to capture a live one. Never more than five. Every single one died, but they did have one thing in common.
A tattoo on their bodies. The same thing. A key.
The Pride’s research team seemed convinced that they’d somehow stumbled across an order dedicated to the artifact’s recovery. Where had they come from? No one yet knew. It was as if they didn’t exist. No fingerprints. No facial match. No DNA. Nothing.
Nothing but an endless supply, none ever big enough to truly make a dent in the defense.
In the week he’d been watching, they’d taken out three attacks. But there was no sign of the missing tiger duo or the box. They had groups scattered throughout the Rockies, waiting for Svetlana to surface. A young woman travelling with an old, ornery Russian dame would stick out. Or so you’d think.
What no one could explain was why Svetlana had come to the Rockies. Where was she headed? Why?
He wanted to talk to Arleen about it, only to realize that he didn’t have her number. The closest he got to her was when she stepped outside during his watch. She didn’t tend to go far, just to the edge of the cultivated yard, leaning on a faded log fence rail. She’d stay there until someone emerged from the house, yelling her name.
Most likely her mum, given they sometimes fought before heading inside.
Every day, Arleen emerged more and more often, her misery plain to see. Why didn’t she leave? Did she need rescuing? Should he step in?
A few times, she turned from the north and stared right at him. Or so it seemed.
His lion urged him to go to her. To claim her.
What if she didn’t want to be claimed? She’d just gotten her life back. Not to mention, how would her family react? Because he already knew he couldn’t stay. He would take her away, and not just because he couldn’t live in the house with her family. He wanted to bring Arleen places that made her smile.
Talk to her?
Don’t talk to her?
Indecision plagued him until he got the call, and Lana said, “They’ve located the tigers.”
