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Downing a long swig of beer for a little liquid courage, I set my fork down on the edge of my plate. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
He looked up from his dinner but didn’t look directly at me. “You didn’t.”
Cal was lying, and I knew it. “Okay, then why are you being weird?”
“I’m not being weird. I just don’t want to talk about it right now. Drop it, Jack.”
It was less what he’d said and more how he’d said it that made me want to press him for more. Whatever can of worms I’d inadvertently opened asking about his saddle patch was weighing heavily on Cal, and I made a mental note to finally do more research about killer whale shifters. I’d avoided it before because I thought the less I knew about Cal, the better it would be for me, but now I needed to know what a change in a killer whale shifter’s saddle patch meant.
And it wasn’t just out of some sort of morbid curiosity that I wanted to know. If I didn’t know what was wrong, I couldn’t fix it, and I needed to help take the weight of whatever this meant off Cal’s shoulders. My fingers itched to grab my laptop so I could put the subject to bed right now, but I stayed in my seat, absently twirling pasta around my fork.
Cal pushed his plate away a few minutes later and stood. “Thank you for dinner. It was really good.” He held his hand out for my now-empty plate, and I passed it to him. “I’ll clean up while you pull up whatever Reuben sent over.”
“Deal.” I rose and grabbed my laptop while Cal washed the dishes and resettled at the table, logging into my secure server and decrypting the files Reuben had sent. The largest file was a folder full of surveillance videos. The high quality of the videos made me wonder how much Vlk Mazal was shelling out forhis security system. Whatever he was moving through the train yards at the edge of the city was clearly worth protecting.
A few moments later, Cal rejoined me at the table, a fresh beer in hand. I still hadn’t finished my first, and I wondered if he was trying to escape whatever was bothering him. It didn’t really matter if he tried to drown his woes in beer. With our shifter metabolisms, it wouldn’t work unless he took down nearly a full keg, so I didn’t comment on the third beer.
“What are we looking at?”
I turned my laptop so he could see too. “According to the surveillance footage Reuben obtained and the report he sent with the file, Vlk Mazal and his sons have more or less taken control of all the commercial rail yards between Prague and Bratislava.”
“Why does that matter to us?”
“Because the next stop after Bratislava is Budapest.”
The second the last word left my lips, Cal’s gaze swung to meet mine. For a second, his eyes were their normal deep brown, but slowly, the black of his pupils started to edge out the brown, his mind obviously going to the time we’d been in Budapest together.
Cal cleared his throat and came back to the present. “And that means whatever he’s shipping is likely getting smuggled out of Budapest.”
“Exactly.”
“Which means we need to find out if he’s trafficking stolen art.”
“Yep. The funny thing about all this is that the Mazal family’s takeover of the rail lines coincides with when Reuben first started hearing rumors thatThe Evolution of Manwas back in play.”
“That’s definitely suspicious.” Cal drained his third beer and set the bottle aside. “Let me see the video.”
I hit the Play button, and we watched as two men dressed in black who had the broad chests and leanly muscled limbs I associated with wolf shifters spoke to a third man dressed in stained gray coveralls. The video was clearly taken at night, and the lights in the train yard cast long shadows between the tracks. Coveralls passed one of the wolf shifters a fat envelope and walked out of the frame. The wolves went the opposite way, and the video ended. I clicked the next one, which picked up seconds later and showed a different angle where Coveralls was barely visible walking toward the front of the train. The wolves rolled back the doors on one of the train compartments, and the wolf who had taken the envelope tucked it away in the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a phone. He held it to his ear for no more than five seconds, then put it away again. The wolves entered the train car, and a few minutes later, a third wolf appeared, driving a forklift.
The wolves on the train situated several wooden shipping cartons at the mouth of the train car, and the wolf with the forklift loaded them up as the video ended. The third video clip showed the forklift wolf loading the shipping cartons into another train car on a different track.
“Whatever they’re doing, it’s definitely illegal.”
“No doubt.” I closed the video player and opened the shipping manifest for the train Coveralls had been on. “This says the items shipped were private.”
“That could be literally anything.”
“Which means we need to find out what is in those boxes.”
“When does the train carrying the boxes leave Prague?”
“It already has, but there is another shipment of private goods coming in tomorrow night.”
Cal grinned wide, the movement making the skin around his mouth crease, and my heart flipped over in my chest, andthen the smile slid from his face, revealing a serious expression. “What’s your plan?”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
