Page 14 of Damien’s Mate

Damien stood frozen in the chaos surrounding him, staring at the receding ambulance.

Lila was a shapeshifter. She’d almost turned into an animal, right there in the back of the ambulance.

Three months ago, he wouldn’t have known that, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have believed it. He would have told himself he didn’t see what he saw, that it was a hallucination or a trick of the light. But some pretty weird shit had gone down at his last job, ending with him getting caught in yet another fucking explosion.

That last time, he’d been rescued by shifters—a leopard with wings, a dragon, and some kind of bear-thing that looked like it was made out of living Jell-O.

He’d promised them he wouldn’t try to find out more about shifters, or tell anyone about them. As if people wouldn’t lock him in the loony bin if they heard his story.

He’d also promised the shifters he’d forget all about that night. Hell, he’d tried to forget about it.

But if this woman was a shifter and was too out of it to control herself, she was in danger. Not only that, but her being found out would put all those other people in danger too.

People who’d saved him from getting crushed in a collapsing building—and then saved him again by letting him go when they’d turned his murdering boss and the other surviving members of his security team over to the cops.

They’d covered his ass. And now Lila had saved Damien from taking a bullet.

Damien might not be loyal to Salzano, but he was loyal to people who put themselves on the line for him. It had gotten him in trouble more than once.

Apparently, it was about to get him in trouble again.

Injured knee burning, he ran for the nearest car that wasn’t boxed in. Yelling, “Security emergency,” Damien flashed his ID at the dumbfounded owner standing next to it, grabbed the keys out of the guy’s hand, and jumped in. He peeled out with a squeal of tires, the owner’s outraged shouts following him down the drive.

The ambulance was already halfway down the street, running lights and sirens. It was going to be hell keeping up with it, let alone heading it off.

Damien pulled up the car’s GPS and checked the route between here and St. Joseph’s. If he remembered right…

Hell, yeah. There was a little-known alleyway that he could use as a shortcut, and cut off the ambulance before it got to the hospital.

He raced down one street and then another, thankful for the sparse late-night traffic. He burned down the narrow alley, clipping a couple of garbage bins on the way. He hoped whoever he’d borrowed the car from had good insurance.

One eye on the GPS, he listened for the ambulance siren. He was ahead of it now. One more turn, one more block…

He pulled out half a block ahead of the ambulance and sent the car into a controlled skid, turning it so he blocked the entire street. He was already out of the car as the ambulance screamed to a stop, running over to the driver’s door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the driver yelled, rolling down the window. “Get out of the way!”

Damien said, “Sorry, ma’am.” He pulled the door open, dragged the driver out, and handcuffed her to the window frame. Then he ran around to the back of the ambulance and yanked open the door, pulling his gun on the startled paramedic in the back.

“Sorry,” he said again. “She’s coming with me. Pull out the IV.”

“She’s got internal injuries,” the paramedic said. “She needs—”

Damien cocked his weapon. “Pull it, and roll her out.”

The paramedic did as he was told. Damien let down the back wheels of the gurney, and rolled it out until he could gather Lila in one arm.

“Don’t follow.” The paramedic nodded, white-faced. “Good boy.”

Damien hiked Lila up and carried her to the car. Opening the back passenger door, he laid her inside as carefully as he could and jumped back into the driver’s seat.

As he drove away, he tossed the handcuff key into the road.

They’d need that ambulance back at the bomb scene.

Damien drove away from the ambulance as fast as he dared. He couldn’t afford to get stopped; the ambulance drivers would be reporting in any minute now.

The cops might treat this as a kidnapping—or they might think he was just a mobster escaping with his girl. How hard they tried to catch him would depend on which way their thinking went, and how busy they were with hurt civilians and bad guys higher on the food chain of crime than Damien.