Page 40 of Bad Blood Wolf

Flynn said, “I can fix that. Sloan, you’re with me. Get your weapon ready. Jasmin, Xander, go back and wait in the truck.”

Jasmin opened her mouth to protest being left behind, but Flynn shook his head. “You’ve been seen publicly with Brody. Best the dealer doesn’t get a look at you. Wait in the truck. That’s an order.”

She felt the press of his alpha presence and took the hint.

“Fine.” She walked off, growling in her throat, Xander a step behind her.

Ten minutes later Flynn and Sloan appeared out of the shadows and climbed into the truck. Flynn started the engine, and they rolled away.

“I hope you didn’t kill him,” Xander said. “Because I’ll be really pissed if you did it without me.”

Flynn shot him his crazy crooked grin. Adrenalin was humming off both him and Sloan, but there was only the faintest whiff of blood.

“Nah,” Sloan said. “We just had a little civilized conversation.”

“Sloan can be very persuasive,” Flynn added.

Wait. What the hell did that mean? Sloan was the quietest one among them, the submissive one. At least, he’d always seemed to be.

But she had other things to worry about besides Sloan.

“Awesome,” Jasmin said sarcastically. “Did you get any answers? About my so-called boyfriend, who all this is about, even though you did the same damn thing he did and told me to mind my own fucking business while you did men things?”

Sloan said, “It wasn’t like that.”

Flynn said, “Yes it was. I’m the alpha, and some shit gets done my way. Deal with it.”

Jasmin growled.

Flynn went on, “The dealer won’t connect us with Brody. We posed as normal drug dealers, wanting to make sure he’s not horning in on our territory. Turns out he’s a human who deals in esoteric shifter drugs. The kind the Professor was fucking around with.”

They all growled at that. The Professor was the one who’d experimented on them in Alexander Grant’s lab. Bad shit, bad memories.

“What does Brody want with shifter drugs?” Xander asked. “Was he working with Creston?”

Jasmin sucked in her breath.

Randall Creston was the Nashville pack psychiatrist who’d led the attack on their compound. The pack had been after Jesse Travis, but getting rid of Jesse was just Creston’s bribe to the pack for backing him up. Creston had been after one of the Bad Bloods, Tristan Barnes, and his sister Terin—who were rare white wolves—and a little boy named Brock Wells, whose father came from the same isolated Alaskan pack as Tristan’s family.

That pack was famous for having unusual mental powers. Whoever Creston had been working with had wanted them badly enough for him to be willing to take out the whole Bad Blood Crew in order to get to them.

If Brody had been working with him…

Fear and anger burned in her. Surely if he were that evil, she would have felt it. She wouldn’t have these feelings for him—whatever they were.

There had to be some other explanation.

Flynn glanced over at her. “I got the names of the drugs,” he said. “I’ll call Tristan and ask him to find out what they do, and why Brody might be taking them. One of the Silverlake pack—Kane’s mate, I think—knows about that shit.”

Jasmin nodded. She felt heartsick. Women are soft. Soft things get crushed.

They pulled back into the compound and Jasmin was the first one out of the truck. She handed her weapon off to Sloan and then pulled off her clothes with trembling fingers, desperate to let her jag take her.

Xander stood back, his assault rifle cradled in his hands, watching her with a troubled look on his face. Fuck. When even Xander felt sorry for you, you were in a bad place.

Her jag skin slid over her, but somehow that didn’t make things hurt less, the way it usually did.

She didn’t even want to bleed someone. She just wanted to run.