Page 8 of License to Kill

“As I said, now you know why the illegal drug trade is never going away. How are you feeling?”

“Not bad.”

“Emotionally?”

“I would prefer to believe I am a being completely lacking in emotion at this period of time.” I remembered not to shrug. “Right now, I only care about revenge. After that, I’ll sort it out.”

“Whatever keeps you going, Karma. While you’ve been recovering, I have been doing some groundwork. At this point in time, you’re flagged as missing and either kidnapped or dead. The pack has been unable to confirm you are dead, but there is a notation that your mate has rejected or shown no interest in women and is not showing evidence of the grief expected from a lost mate, so they’re working the kidnapped angle. They’re assuming critical injuries, so they’re trying to push as hard as possible.”

“How nice of them.”

“I approve of your use of sarcasm.”

I almost smiled at that. “So, I’m kidnapped or presumed dead. What does that mean for me?”

“It means makeup, maybe some spray tan, a hair cut, and being very careful to mask your injuries when we move. Our next stop is South Carolina, where we’ll camp for a few weeks before moving on to Georgia. I have a lead or two in South Carolina I want to follow regarding this operation. You’re healing a lot slower than a Fenerec would, but given another week, you’ll be able to walk without much of a limp, although you’ll want to be careful about banging any of the gunshot wounds into something, as that would hurt a lot.”

“Understood. What can I do?”

“I picked up a laptop for you, so you can start with reviewing the information I’ve gathered and comparing it to what you know about any related cases. As expected, the bounty for your murder was removed from the system, and there’s no information on if it was paid out or not. The black market operators don’t really care about that, and the specific system the assholes used is less regulated than most. It’s a cesspool, frankly. The Fenerec network is buzzing over this, because wolves are a lot of things, and if one wolf’s mate is attacked or murdered, even with your current status as disputed, it means others may be attacked, too. Nobody is happy with that.”

“That I can believe. Other wolves seem to actually care for their mates.”

Or, at the very least, didn’t reek of other women when heading home after work. I’d seen enough of their culture to recognize they normally kept some distance to prevent that from happening.

One day, maybe I would understand where I’d gone so damned wrong.

Amelia sighed. “I can’t help you with that problem, but someone in that pack is concerned about you, and I’d bet on that being your mate. Really, he’s probably freaking out right now. And blaming himself for having driven you off, especially if you told him you were sick of smelling other women on him.”

“I did.”

“Well, let’s just say he’s an idiot and move on. Since the assholes who’d put out the hit on you used a pretty shitty network, I was able to bribe the operators to get some information, which is why we’ll be heading to South Carolina and Georgia. I have several addresses, the bank where the funds came from, and a few names. You’ll get to use the names to help track the assholes while I try to dig into the banking situation. The bank issue will be fairly easy. It’s a larger bank, and I have contacts who can be bribed to abuse their access to get more names and addresses. They made a stupid mistake. In that network, you pay off the operators if you want your work to stay secret, else someone—like me—can get intel.”

“Let’s say I wanted to be a dirty agent and make sure of that to get intel. Can it be done?”

“Sure, if you know the ropes and who to talk to and what to say. I can help you with that. It’s bad for business if all the assholes get busted, so if you want to do a hit on somebody who has used the system, you clear it with the ops first. If they don’t want to clear it, there’s usually a good reason for that. That reason may involve their profits, but there you have it. The longer you play by the rules, the more likely you get to catch some of the scum annoying you. I cleared taking out the assholes who wanted to murder you with the ops. I told them I didn’t like when bastards took hits out on women and wanted a piece of the action. It turns out the ops aren’t happy with that group because they’ve failed to pay the full amount of a few bills.”

“Seriously? We’re getting intel on these assholes because they didn’t pay some bills?”

“To the tune of a hundred thou. This group doesn’t sanction or approve bounties before they go live, and they’re one strike from having their access revoked. Basically, they’re revoking access. Permanently. And if I provide some proof I’ve thinned their numbers, I’ll get paid.”

Huh. I regarded the woman with interest. All in all, she seemed like the type of woman Jake would like, assertive enough to do well in law enforcement, pretty enough to warrant a second look at, and fit. Add in that she was the right species, and I lost.

I couldn’t even compare.

That could simplify things for me, too.

She could hold Jake’s attention just walking into the room, and she had ethics. Twisted ones, but they existed. While I finished getting out of my personal version of hell, she could distract Jake long enough to finish what I’d started.

A traitorous part of me wanted to go home, although not to Jake’s home. To mine, the home I’d sold to go to New York, where the only memories I had of Jake there were of annoyance that he kept coming into my space and relief he was there.

His home hadn’t been much of a home for me, although given time, it might’ve been. No, some parts of it had been a home to me, like our stupid master bathroom with the broken lock, as Jake had been an idiot, panicked when I’d slipped and had yelped, and forgot to use the knob before bursting inside to make sure I hadn’t died on him.

Only my pride had been injured, although we hadn’t fixed the door.

Little things like that would make the rest of my life hard.

I forced myself to take slow and steady breaths. “Helping me benefits you all around.”