Enticed (Two Marks 3)

But I was operating on very little information. One short conversation in the women’s restroom at the diner didn’t make me an expert. It made my plan thin at best.

What if I’d actually killed them? The men I loved. Had I just murdered the two best things that had ever happened to me?

Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. No, I couldn’t go there. I needed to keep it together until the guys healed and arrested these assholes. I had to believe that they wouldn’t die. That they would survive this, and finish their investigation. Hold me again. Tell me they wanted me forever.

Clinging to that thought, I squared my shoulders and marched over to Hollaroy. “Here’s their stuff.”

He stepped back, refusing to touch it. He even held his hands up to stop me. “You get rid of it. You did the crime.”

I sucked in a breath, ice cold rushing from my scalp to the soles of my feet. This guy was pure evil. I’d been shaking like a leaf since the minute he walked into our house, but now I could barely put one foot in front of the other. And he was right. I’d been the one to pull the trigger and shoot two law enforcement officers.

This was bad. This was really bad.

“Boss, what do you want to do with the bodies?” one of Hollaroy’s men asked.

“Leave them for the wolves,” I called out instead of Hollaroy.

“And their vehicle? They had to have gotten here somehow.”

“Find it, and make it disappear,” Hollaroy added.

“On it.”

I had no choice but to leave Theo and Holt. I had to follow through. The hard part was done, right? Pulling the trigger. Twice. Now I had to leave them, which, it turned out, was just as horrible. Were they dying right now, and I was just… leaving?

I climbed into Hollaroy’s truck. The engine revved and we drove off.

Things had gone horribly wrong, and I’d had only a few hours to figure out how to save all of us. But what if I hadn’t saved Theo and Holt? What if I’d just killed the two men I loved?

HOLT

What. In the fuck. Just happened?

“Our mate just shot us, that’s what happened,” Theo groaned, flopping over onto his back.

I must have spoken the question out loud. We were lying in the grass, the scent of blood overpowering my senses. It covered my chest, soaking my shirt.

“They left us for fucking dead,” I groaned, turning painfully to my side. “Fuck, that hurts.”

I set my fingers to the bullet hole, which still bled freely. We needed to shift to speed the healing, otherwise we might be here for days.

I closed my eyes and shuddered as my wolf wanted to push forth so I could shift and heal. Soon, but not yet.

The pain was excruciating, both in the wound in the center of my chest, and in my heart from the pain of Ali’s betrayal.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” I said, my breathing ragged. “We’re going to go fucking moon mad.”

“Yeah,” he groaned. “She knew what we were and, shit, had no interest in becoming our mate. She deceived us. Was all of it fake?”

“Can you walk?” I grunted, not able to process everything.

“Not yet.”

I looked at Theo. He’d taken a bullet in the center of his chest, just west of his heart. She’d shot to kill, for fucking sure.

“She played us,” he wheezed.

“I know,” I croaked. I could hardly believe it. Everything about the time we’d spent with Ali had seemed real to me, and yet it was all…a great big lie. “She purposefully seduced us. At the bar, then when we pushed her, she gave in. Fuck, it had been her plan all along. Playing coy, then becoming a fucking temptress. Led us around by our dicks.”

“Hell, she called us out here, leading us to our fucking deaths,” Theo added, stating the obvious since we were bleeding all over the grass. “She was playing the black widow.”

“We need to shift to heal. We can’t head back to your truck after. Based on what they said, it’ll be in pieces in Missoula by morning,” I wheezed. My breath was still short and labored as my body worked to recover from the blood loss and trauma.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “But that’s the least of our fucking problems.”

“Fine; we shift, we heal enough to get the fuck out of here. Then we go back to my place and call it in. Get cleaned up and lie low until the bleeding has stopped. When we show up to arrest them, we’ll say we were wearing Kevlar vests when she shot us,” he added.

She. Fuck.

“Attempted murder.” The words tasted like rotten meat in my mouth. Our mate would go to prison for life. Even if by some miracle we could find a way to forgive her, to work this out for the sake of our own lives, she’d be put away.