He threw a look over his shoulder—a real are you fucking serious right now? expression—before he headed into the club without even dignifying Wright’s question with a response.
“Hold up. I brought these for you just in case.”
Wright held something out to him. Colt took it, sneering when he caught sight of his reflection in the lens.
“Sunglasses?”
“I’m human. They won’t question me being here. My informant made it obvious that shifters don’t hang out around this joint. I thought… between the suit and the glasses, maybe you can pass for one of the vampires.”
Colt didn’t know if he should be insulted or worried that Wright was in way over his head. He signed up to be a partner on a task force team, not a babysitter.
Did he forget that Colt was a wolf shifter? Could he honestly believe that a pair of sunglasses would make him less wolfish? Or maybe Wright really was clueless when it came to certain Para’s skills, talents, and abilities.
Ah, well. If it made the human happy…
He slipped them on. His sight was so good, the dark lens barely dimmed his surroundings. Might as well leave them on.
While shifters relied on their heightened senses—vision, hearing, and a kick-ass olfactory system—Colt had always prided himself on his nose best. Even as the way-too-loud-for-a-shifter music slammed into him, making him wince and swallow roughly until he’d toned it down to a more tolerable level, he never lost his nose.
One deep breath and he could separate the thousands of scents that filled the room. Of them all, a single note stood out from among the rest. It was mild, muted, a woodsy scent that was a shot straight to his heart. His wolf perked its ears, throwing its head back, breathing in through its snout as if desperate to sample that one scent over every other it’s ever known.
He came to a sudden stop in the doorway.
He knew that scent. He always would.
Mate.
Shea was somewhere in this room.
Full of writhing bodies, blood exchanges, and a shit ton of Nightwalkers, his sweet almost-mate was inside of Bloodlust. His shoulders hunched. The material of his jacket gave a groan as it pulled at the seams.
She was supposed to be at her shop.
She was supposed to be safe.
No one knew she was his mate, or that he was buddying up to the Grayson PD. Now, with Wright standing behind him, he could sense the one woman meant for him in the middle of a Nightwalker nest—and that was right after the vamps targeted Evangeline for her relationship to a Grayson cop and the future Alpha.
What if they got their fangs in Shea?
A deep rumble started in his chest.
“Wolfe. You okay, pal?”
Over the ringing in his ears, he could just about make out the sudden worry in the cop’s tone. No surprise. He was on the edge of shifting three seconds after walking into Bloodlust.
He ignored it.
What the hell was Shea doing here?
And how was he going to get her out without compromising the reason why he was there himself?
11
“This was a bad idea,” muttered Shea.
“What’s that?”
The music inside of the Para club was a bass-heavy techno mix that thumped so loudly, Shea could’ve sworn her brain was banging against her skull in time to the beat. Strobe lights flashed and flared, breaking up the dark gloom by highlighting the blood-red walls and the glossy black floor.