I took a couple dozen rounds from a semi-automatic and went down to play dead until I could shift and get the fuck out there.
The trouble was, the room didn’t clear. More and more assholes kept coming in. I was gonna get stuck in there and bleed out before my wolf could heal me. I shifted, startling the men long enough to get through the door, but took another dozen rounds to my back as I fled the scene.
Deke and Rafe came for me, and had no choice but to kill the men who had seen me. Not at all the stealthy, quiet affair this was supposed to be.
Now we’re racing away in the truck made too heavy by the gold bars I’m lying on, bleeding.
“For fuck’s sake, how many bullets did he take?” Channing also sounds panicked.
I must look really bad.
“Too many.” Again, it’s the agony in Rafe’s voice that opens my eyes.
“Not too many,” I wheeze. “Just give me a minute.”
“Why can’t you shift?” Rafe demands.
Can’t I? Why am I in human form? I don’t even remember changing back. We heal faster in wolf form.
I try to shift, but Rafe’s right. I can’t.
“Command it,” I mumble.
“You think I didn’t fucking try that? Shift.” Rafe uses Alpha Command, which should trigger a biological response in me to immediately obey.
I barely register the command in my cells. For that matter, I’m barely registering my body.
“Was he shot in the head?” Deke’s tinny voice comes from the comms. He must be driving the truck.
Someone moves my head around like he’s inspecting it. “Fuck.” It’s Channing.
“Was he?” Rafe chokes. The panic in his tone once more brings back our childhood trauma. The sound of our father’s voice when he commanded us to shift and run. To hide.
The sound in Rafe’s voice when we came back and found our parents’ dead bodies.
“Yeah.” Channing’s modulating his voice to make it sound more casual. “But the bullet’s already coming out, see?”
“Shift, motherfucker,” Rafe commands again.
This time, my body obeys. I change into wolf form. The scent of my blood-matted fur offends my sensitive nose. I pant, severely weakened, but coming back to my body. I feel the pain, and also the healing.
“How is he?” Deke barks.
“He shifted.” I hear the relief overlying in Rafe’s still-stressed voice.
“Good. Now, how the fuck are we going to get rid of this gold?”
Rafe is silent for a long moment, then he commands, “Drive straight to the airport. We’ll take a private plane.”
“We’re taking it with us?” Channing sounds surprised.
“I need to get Lance home to heal. You got any other ideas?”
“We could drive it out somewhere and bury it.”
“I don’t want to leave it anywhere where Sarcero can get his hands on it again. And I doubt he’ll stop looking for it.”
Dammit. That means Sarcero is still alive. I was hoping he’d been taken out in the melee.
“Maybe we can get U.S. Customs to seize it. Very publicly but without releasing our names. That way, he stops hunting. He may try to find us for revenge, but he won’t think we still have it.”
“Good idea, Channing, I like it,” Rafe says.
I don’t like any of it. Because I now have a female to consider when I think about some arms dealer using every resource he has to hunt down the men he believes are thieves. In fact, I wish to fuck we had just gone in to take Sarcero out. I doubt the CIA would have cared, either way. It was probably Rafe’s call to not get more blood on our hands than necessary.
I think he miscalculated.
Lance
Twenty hours later, we land in Taos. We stopped in Dallas to go through customs, where the gold was ‘seized’—all prearranged by the CIA, and publicly blamed on a drug cartel.
I stayed in wolf form through all of that, scaring the shit out of a couple customs and CIA agents surprised to find our team used a very large drug and cash-sniffing war dog for operations. At least the guys had hosed the blood off me before I got on the plane.
Now that we’re back, I shift into human form, in much better shape than I was a day ago.
Especially when I remember I have a date.
I pull on a pair of pants and t-shirt and reach for my phone to text Charlie. I’m back in the country. Dinner tonight?
Rafe narrows his eyes. “Who are you texting?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.” I’m a little short on my usual good humor due to the residual pain in almost every part of my body.
“You can’t see her,” he warns.
He’s my alpha, which means telling him to fuck off won’t go over well. Still, I want him to fuck all the way off.
“I’m fine.” It’s a lie. It must be from the bullet to the head, or maybe just the sheer number of bullets I took, but my recovery has been slower than I’d like. My breath still wheezes, and I’m weak and sore all over.