Page 18 of Bound

“Or they were tracking us somehow, saw us turn back at the last second.”

“Unless they had a spotter somewhere, they couldn’t have seen us from the loft. Not from where we were. We should have August check, make sure they haven’t hacked into the town traffic cams.”

His phone buzzed.

Frowning, he checked the text. “The loft’s clear. Brody’s on his way over. Says there’s something we need to see.”

He hesitated, gaze falling to my lips, and I wondered if he was remembering our kiss back in the alley. But I couldn’t think about that right now. And apparently, neither could Caldwell because he moved away, scrolling through something on his phone.

Dark emptied out. Hayden let Brody in when he drove up, then relocked the door behind him.

“They were gone by the time we got there.” Brody nodded to me. “Obviously I’m going to want you to go back there and see what sort of impression you get, but this was all we found.”

He slid a legal-sized yellow envelope across the bar, the sort of thing you could pick up at any office supply store. Hands shaking, I folded the clasp open. Two 5x7 photographs slid out, along with a sheet of notepaper.

The figure in the photo was barely recognizable. Gaunt and seated in a straight-backed metal chair in a nondescript room with concrete walls, he held up a newspaper in battered hands. The light in the shot was poor, the man’s head tipped forward, making his features nearly impossible to discern. Beside me, Caldwell sucked in a sharp breath.

I blinked, realizing Brody had asked me a question. I forced myself to swallow.

“Yeah. It’s him. It’s Kieran.”

That was when I saw the note. Location. Time. And a message.

Meet us in two days. Come alone.

3

West

August: Please tell me you were ravaged just before coming here by a certain tall, dark and sullen someone, and that’s why you look like you recently dove headfirst through a wheat thresher.

West: Whatever. I’m totally killing this look. And I’ve told you before, THAT subject is off the table.

Topher and I had gathered along with Brody and August around the worn leather sectionals in my apartment. Brody’s phone lay untouched out on the glass coffee table as if a black hole had formed around it, which considering who was on the other end of the line and the current mood in the room, wasn’t far from the truth.

August: Which is why you two are trying so hard not to stare at each other the room is about to spontaneously catch fire?

West: Don’t you have some nice vampire databases to hack?

August: You need to tell the fam what’s going on, bro. You’re getting worse.

He didn’t know the half of it.

I closed my eyes, and instantly I was back in that alley, Topher’s gaze fixated on my mouth, his arousal slamming through my veins as a voice in the back of my mind screamed that we couldn’t, that this was wrong—

And then his lips caught mine in the barest of kisses, asking a question, allowing me the choice to back away. I’d spent a year trying not to imagine what Topher Greer’s lips would taste like, how his fingers would feel sliding through my hair as we lazily made out on my couch, or stole heated kisses in the secluded self-help section of Zombie Books. What it would be like to see the heat burning in those whiskey-amber eyes as he slowly lowered me onto his bed and kissed his way down my bare torso until I was aching and so hard for him I couldn’t see straight.

I was so screwed.

I’d stopped things. Clawed my mental shields back into place. But now it was taking everything I had to keep from shifting. My wolf strained within the cage of my bones, feral with moon madness in a way it hadn’t been since I was a teenager experiencing my first raw hormone-induced shifts, uncertain how to control my Omega magic and terrified I would hurt someone. My brothers were immune to my magic. I knew that much. Topher wasn’t. I had to get out of here, drive far out into the country and wait for the full moon to pass before I hurt him, or someone else.

“Okay. So obviously it’s a trap. Anyone think of an angle where we show up to this crazy meet-and-greet where it doesn’t turn into a complete fanged clusterfuck?” Typing while he spoke, August squinted down at his laptop screen. “End of the World. Isn’t that where Hayden’s band is playing on Saturday?”

“Because she couldn’t have booked a gig somewhere called Vamp Killer?” Vision blurring, I rubbed my temples. “Ethan’s gonna flip out when he hears this.”

“River or I can hack into their surveillance systems. Not an issue. But with the crowds and the lighting, it’s going to be messy.”

He rubbed his face, unable to hide the dark circles under his eyes. At twenty-three, August had just graduated from the University of Texas with an engineering degree and was working remotely for a major tech firm based in Austin, plus managing cybersecurity for the pack. My brother suffered from a rare autoimmune condition brought on by the lycan virus. Eighteen years and dozens of specialists since its onset, and we had more questions than answers. August’s episodes were cyclical, tied to the phases of the moon, when the same virus that turned humans into werewolves caused his body to attack itself, triggering nerve damage, seizures, disorientation, and a host of other symptoms. Like any other shapeshifter, he regenerated between episodes, but in nearly two decades of searching, no therapy had worked to reduce their frequency or intensity.