Page 14 of Bound

“Which is total bullshit.”

West sighed. “I want to support you. I do. But we both know this has gotten out of hand. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Really. Were you ever going to let me in on your plans, hmmm, or just let me find out on my own when someone brought you home in a body bag?”

“I need you to cover for me. Just for a little while longer.”

“I don’t like this. It’s too much like before. You getting hurt. Taking risks. How do I know—”

Our server passed by. Caldwell swallowed and I could tell instantly something was off. Pale gold shards of moonlight played over his angular features through slats in the blinds. Something dark swirled between us, held just out of reach as he fought to block me.

“How much longer are you going to keep pretending you’re okay?”

Pain knifed through our connection, sharp and raw enough to make me lose my breath, and beneath it—

Heat swirled in Caldwell’s blood, twenty-five years of hard-earned control warring with the feral wolf urges we all fought at the full moon. West shuddered, and I realized I’d never felt him this close to losing control, had never felt his animal side so near to the surface. With a sharp intake of breath, he closed down our connection, once again a void, leaving my wolf arching in agony at his absence. Breathing hard, he rotated one of the sugar packets at the edge of the table. “Stay out of my head, Topher. You won’t like what you find there.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, suddenly unable to breathe.

“We need a new strategy,” he said quietly. “We’ve been at this for months. We’re no closer to finding Kieran or figuring out where the vamps are holding the shifters they’ve been taking.”

“Agreed.”

“You can sense the undeads when they materialize in, usually with a few seconds of warning.”

“Yes, and I swear at night I feel them outside in the dark, circling just out of range.”

Which was why I slept with a knife under my pillow. When I slept at all.

Caldwell’s voice was carefully neutral. “August has checked the sensors how many times now? He’s mounted dozens of extra cameras—”

“I’m telling you. They’re out there.”

Now he was onto stacking the sugar packets into a miniature card house. I bared my teeth.

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” he said diplomatically, in the sort of voice that implied precisely the opposite. “But we need evidence if we’re going to get Brody on board. Even if I cover for you, he’s not an idiot. He’s going to figure out we’re going around him. We need to start working together.”

“I’m done playing by Brody’s rules. That’s what I’ve been working on these past few weeks, trying to see if I can pick them up out in the field, looking for patterns—”

“You’ve been doing a grid search.”

“We know the bloodsuckers stay close to the urban centers, keep a network of safe houses within a certain distance in case they’re raided and need to bug out.”

“Sure. They can’t keep a human form and go out into sunlight. But we’ve seen them ghost out during daytime raids then turn up later, so theoretically they can dematerialize through sunlight, at least once or twice.” West leaned in. “Most vampires can only make a few jumps in a short period. They can’t go far. And good luck finding a basement in Austin with all that limestone bedrock. So if they got raided in the daylight, they would want multiple safe houses close together.”

“With so many vampires passing through the same space, there have to be residual traces.”

“You sure about that?”

No. No, I wasn’t.

He smirked. I dug my fingernails into my palms, trying not to think of all the ways I could wipe that smirk off his mouth.

“Which is why we need to start searching now, see if I can come up with any targets.”

“Okay, slow down. There’s a hit out on you, remember? Not to mention we have to clear this with Brody.”