Page 6 of Thrown into the Mob

“And who’s older?”

“Me.” That one word was delivered with more force than anything he’d ever said to me previously. “By four minutes.”

Ouch. Most people would have said me and left it at that, but he pointed out how much older he was. He counted not only those minutes but also the seconds, I’d bet. Did he lord it over his brother when they were kids? Oh yeah. And to his family, those four minutes were as wide and long as the universe.

Before we could discuss him or his brother further, my wolf sprang up and closed a hand around my ribcage. He picked up footsteps seconds before I did. I’d never heard Evander approaching; he'd always announced himself by knocking. This newcomer slowed at my door. My heart sped up, but whoever it was kept on going.

You know who it is.

The twin. Perhaps he’d been about to come in but scented his brother, who smelled almost the same as him. And they didn’t just share a similar scent, their DNA was identical.

But as the footsteps faded, I caught Evander staring at me. I tried to arrange my features into, what? Nonchalance, perhaps.

“I should go.”

“Thanks for lunch.”

He closed the door with barely a sound, and I moved to where he’d been standing at the window. Evander knocked and he’d chosen books for me. His scent was welcoming. Like me, he worked for a mafia organization and had probably killed people. We came from similar backgrounds, though he’d been raised in his and my folks had fled and lived a life away from La Luna Noir. I’d only come into the business in the last few years.

His brother, though, made my hands shake and I ground my teeth. If we had to battle one another, he could probably slit my throat before I blinked.

I grabbed the pirate book and read the same paragraph four times without remembering a single word. I was disappointed it hadn’t sparked any ideas on getting out of here.

Outside in the corridor, everything was quiet, but there was a noise in my head that I couldn’t turn off, and it wasn’t my wolf. He was asleep.

Until now, life hadn’t been complicated. Sure, I worked undercover for a mafia wolf pack, but I was good at it. I enjoyed being someone else and getting information from unsuspecting civilians. I went in, played a role and came home, leaving that persona dead and buried.

I thought of my own failures and being so careless that I was outsmarted by a bunch of dragon shifters. Evander was working me somehow, I just wasn’t sure how he was doing it and why.

I needed to up my game and not treat this as a vacation I’d won in a raffle.

What would Flint do? Or Ranger or Hunter or even Grandpa? Putting aside my unnerving reactions to twin dragons, I had to think like the wolf shifter I was.

But loud footsteps echoed in the corridor. These didn’t belong to either brother but to the guards, and it sounded like a posse.

“The patriarch wishes to see you.”

FOUR

MADD

Two guards I hadn't seen before escorted me out of the room while four others flanked us as we strode along a rabbit warren of corridors. These guys weren’t part of the regular rotation, and even the two who came into the room avoided looking directly at me.

“Why does he want to meet me?” I doubted they’d say but assumed I’d find out soon enough.

No one answered. I ran through various scenarios as we strode farther from my room. The patriarch had been leader of the flight for decades, so he was no fool and an accomplished interrogator. Killing me would serve one purpose and that was all-out war, so he had to be looking for information.

We were walking through an older part of the compound with high ceilings, and my beast was alert and my adrenaline spiked. Both of us memorized the route.

The first thing I noted about the room they brought me to was that it wasn't an interrogation room. There were no harsh lights or a metal chair bolted to the floor. I’d witnessed Flint’s interrogation tactics which often ended with a bullet, and I glanced around the room for two-way glass, though perhaps those were only present in detective shows.

This was a study, and perhaps that was the point, making me think I was going to have a friendly conversation. The room contained a huge wooden desk with dragons carved into the legs and back rail. If it was supposed to intimidate, it wasn’t working, though my palms were sweaty.

The walls were lined with books. I’d never taken the dragons as huge readers and wondered if they were supposed to impress visitors.

“Sit.” One of the guards had accompanied me into the room, and when I didn’t obey, he slammed my shoulder so I collapsed into a chair.

The door opened and an older man strode in. This was the patriarch, Aldric, because the researchers at La Luna Noir hadn’t messed up this time and I’d seen his photo before I took on my current undercover job.