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CHAPTER
ONE
NERO
“Stop! Bond enforcement!”My yell echoed down the docks, but spoiler alert, the asshole I was pursuing didn’t, in fact, stop. Shocking. He turned toward a boat I knew by looking wasn’t his, and I sighed as much as I could while running. “Trust me, buddy. You don’t want to get on that boat.”
But he did, and I rolled my eyes. For once, I really didn’t want to have to do this the hard way. But Lady Luck had apparently taken an extended vacation from looking over my shoulder, so hard way it was going to have to be. The guy—thin, wiry, and generally strung-out-looking—jumped from the dock onto the go-fast boat that was already idling, the rumble of the engine breaking the silence of the early morning.
“Goddamn idiot,” I muttered under my breath, stripping off my black leather jacket and tossing it over my arm. At this point, I didn’t need to run. Running on land had never been my best thing to begin with, but doing it at half past the ass crack of dawn with far too little sleep and no caffeine was a real fucking chore. And if I were being honest with myself, I was just plain getting too old for this bullshit. Give me a nice cushy office with a desk, a comfy chair, and a potted plant on the windowsill. That was the life right there. No freezing cold almost mornings. No moronswho thought they were smarter than the system. No stakeouts. No more fucking running.
At the edge of the dock, where the boat had peeled away, ignoring the No Wake signs and tearing out of the harbor, I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the four, only a little out of breath. I held the phone to my ear with my shoulder and toed out of my boots. A gruff voice answered on the fourth ring just as I popped the button on my pants.
“McMahon.”
“It’s Nero.”
“Shit. Not now. I only have ten minutes left of my shift.”
“You want this guy or not?”
McMahon sighed. “I haven’t seen my wife in three damn days.”
“So that’s a no, then?”
Another sigh. “Who is it?”
“Elias Valencia. Possible low-level cartel member. Arrested during a raid on the Sound. Drugs, firearms, women.”
“Yeah, I know who he is. How long?”
The boat’s wake had settled, and in the barely there predawn light, I couldn’t see the boat anymore. I opened my other senses, the ones that made me so good at this job, and pinpointed the location of the boat already five miles up the coast.
“Fifteen minutes. I’m going to try to nudge them toward the docks by the lighthouse.”
“That’s twenty minutes from here.”
“Better hit the lights and get your ass moving.”
Shuffling came over McMahon’s end of the line, then the slam of a car door. “Fuck you. See your ugly ass in fifteen.”
The laugh that slipped past my lips echoed off the containers stacked five high in the shipyard. “Hey, McMahon?”
“Yeah?”
“Bring me a towel.”
“Damn it,” he muttered before the line went dead.
Kicking my pants away, I took a deep breath, set my phone on my pile of clothes—I really didn’t want to replace another one—and reached deep within myself, pulling my other side forward. Then I jumped, hitting the water with a mighty splash as my body stretched and shifted into one of the ocean’s top predators.
Valencia wouldn’t know what hit him.
Literally.
I cut through the water effortlessly, gaining on my prey at a rate I couldn’t have achieved on land if I’d tried. In the water, I felt like the apex predator I was, and the feeling of chasing down the idiot in the stupid speedboat rushed through my veins. The hunt was on.
In moments, the roar of the boat’s engine echoed around me, and I course corrected so I’d come up alongside the boat from the Sound side, putting the boat between me and the shore.
