Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

Overhead, the sky was cloudy, and soon enough, rain started to fall, but it was the lazy kind, just drops floating down that he ignored even when they got in his eyes. He just really didn’t give a crap about anything.

Which made him a bad bet, didn’t it.

People with nothing to lose were very unreliable. Then again, he did have one thing to care about, didn’t he.

Sad as fuck that he’d already lost her.

As he continued along, the path he followed was a trail of deliberation that purposely made no sense, his forward progress full of double backs and random turns. With his thousand-pound boots, he was adhering to good tracking protocol for no other reason than habit—and as he took his own sweet time getting to his final destination, he really wasn’t in a hurry.

With “final” being the operant word.

He was going to take a page out of Rick’s book, just without the chain-link fence—or the interruptions.

And there was one, and only one, thing he could count on. Just like they would kill Lydia if he didn’t do this … if he followed through as he planned, she would, in fact, be safe. Fuck Blade’s honor bullshit. The more dead bodies, the more possibility for exposure, and with what Daniel was about to do, he was going to cast a whole lot of attention on exactly what they were trying to deal with discreetly. After his little boom-boom firework show here? There was going to be so much follow-up by the regular authorities that when it came to Lydia Susi, it was going to be in Blade’s best interest to leave her alone. Otherwise, the man would be risking too much scrutiny and a loss of anonymity and autonomy.

Lydia would be safe because actions had ramifications, even for those existing outside of the law.

God, he was ready for this to be over.

Pausing, he looked through the trees. He was halfway up the mountain, and if his memory was correct—and it never failed him—he didn’t have far to go.

Goddamn, he was so close.

As his legs started up again, his body went along for the ride and took his mind with it, the latter nestled in the stagecoach of his skull. And it wasn’t much farther until the line of “No Trespassing” signs made an appearance, everything exactly as he remembered—

There it was, up ahead. The hatch—although it was no longer flashing any of its metal. So Eastwind must have moved the pine needles back into place. The downed tree, however, had been left as is, and that was how Daniel knew he was in the right place.

Closing in on all the “No Trespassing” missives, he took a last look around, and then didn’t hesitate as he crossed over onto the property. As he kept hiking onward, he stayed aware of his surroundings. The worst-case scenario? He got plugged by someone on the final goal approach and Lydia died not because he was noncompliant, but because he was sloppy and exhausted and got shot because of it.

Destiny had a sick-ass sense of humor, though, didn’t it.

And then he was at the hatch.

His boots stopped and he glanced to the left. To the right. All was clear that he knew or could sense.

Bending down, he brushed the ground cover away, exposing the hatch’s face. There were supposed to be four of them in total; that was what the building plans for the underground facility had provided. But they only required one to get inside.

That stupid woman Phalen should have left the shit well enough alone.

But nooooooooo, she had to go get some bright ideas and try to resurrect the past. This was all her fucking fault, and if innocent people were collateral damage? It was on her.

Stripping off his pack, he opened the thing up. The acetylene torch with its tanks was heavy as fuck; the explosives had not been the weight issue.

Kicking more of the pine needles away, he knelt down, got out the red Bic that Susan had sold him along with his guilt-branded packs of cigarettes. With a crank of the gas and a flick of his thumb, he had himself a handy-dandy yellow flame.

He went to work on the seal of the hatch, the steel heating up to a glow, the going slow. But like he gave a fuck.

He was going to burn through this bitch, get down under, set the charges around the facility—and then have a last Marlboro before everything went Fourth of July.

The cleanup was going to be a bitch, and he wasn’t talking about the damage to the landscape. But the spin, at least as far as the outside world, was already in place.

Animal activists. Protesting that hotel for what they were supposedly doing to the wolves. The headlines wrote themselves, and he could just picture the social media hashtags. And that was another reason Lydia Susi was going to be okay. She had no history of activism, no arrests, no criminal record of any kind. People who blew shit up did it either as a pattern of behavior or in a moment of psychosis, and she fit neither of those descriptors.