Dark Instincts (The Phoenix Pack 4)

Nick stroked his mate’s red corkscrew curls. “You know why you can’t, baby.”

Shaya snorted at him. “And you know that you’d have tried to keep me home even if I weren’t pregnant.” Nick just shrugged—totally unrepentant about his overprotectiveness.

That got Roni thinking. She turned to the three men in her life. “I don’t want any of you trying to protect me tonight.” Marcus, Nick, and Eli frowned. “I mean it. I’ll be nothing but a distraction if all you’re thinking about is my safety. Besides, if you really want me safe, the way to do it is to rip apart any jackal you see—you concentrate on what’s in front of you. Got me?” Her brothers nodded with an unhappy sigh.

Marcus rubbed his nose against hers. “I got you, sweetheart. But that works both ways.” He almost smiled at her rebellious expression. He and his wolf liked that she was so protective. “Don’t worry about me. You just worry about this.” He lightly tapped her ass. “It’s mine, and I want it safe.”

“We good to go?” Derren asked Nick as he, Zander, and Bracken approached.

When Nick flicked a worried look at Shaya, clearly hating the idea of leaving her, Stone came to her side and vowed, “Nothing will happen to her while I’m here.”

Nick opened his mouth to speak, but then his cell started ringing. Digging it out of his pocket, he answered, “Hello. You’re kidding me. Are you sure? I’ll be right there.” Ending the call, he swallowed. “That was Kent. He and Caleb found a corpse dumped just over the border of our land, near the edge of the cliff.”

“Corpse?” Bracken gaped.

“They think it might be Eliza, but they’re not sure.”

Everyone glimpsed at Jesse to find that his expression was as blank as usual.

“It’s got to be the jackals paying us back for killing one of their own,” said Shaya, who had gone from being a bag of nerves to a fierce Alpha ready to burn shit down.

Zander nodded. “They must have thought Eliza was still Jesse’s girlfriend.”

Marcus spoke then. “We should check it out before we leave.”

“I’m coming,” announced Jesse.

Shaking his head, Nick told him, “I need you to stay with—”

“While you launch the attack on the jackals, I will remain here to guard Shaya. But I need to see for myself if this is Eliza. I might not have cared about her, and I know she was a pain in everybody’s ass, but . . .”

But it would feel disrespectful to not identify the body in case it was Eliza, Roni understood. “I’ll stay here so that Jesse can go with you,” she said to Nick.

Jesse nodded at her. “Thank you.”

“Let’s move.” Nick turned to leave. Obediently, the males of the pack followed.

Marcus kissed Roni gently. “I’ll be back soon.” He ran with the Mercury male wolves to the opposite side of their territory. Kent and Caleb waved them over before standing back to give them room. Staring down at the brutalized corpse, Marcus felt bile rise in his throat. He hadn’t liked Eliza in the slightest. The fact that she’d provoked Roni into a fight and actually injured her—shallow wounds or not—meant he’d had no respect for her. But surely no one deserved to die like that.

She’d been stabbed, beaten, burned, and quite possibly raped. On top of that, “SNM” had been carved into her stomach. Her bruised, swollen face had been mercilessly slashed until skin actually peeled away in some places. If he hadn’t recognized her scent, Marcus wouldn’t have been convinced it was her.

He slid his gaze to Jesse. There was no grief or devastation in his expression, but there was anger. As the guy had pointed out, Eliza had been a pain in everyone’s ass. But she hadn’t deserved that.

Zander was the first to speak. “It was ballsy of the jackals to come here.”

“But they weren’t that ballsy,” began Jesse, “or they would have picked a spot that wasn’t so secluded. They would have chanced getting nearer to the main lodge.”

“It just doesn’t fit that they would do this to get at you,” Marcus said to Nick. “I can understand them wanting to get even for what we did to their pack member. But as retaliations go, this isn’t exactly tit-for-tat, is it? I mean, Eliza might have been”—he struggled for a way to put it politely, not wanting to disrespect the dead—“an acquaintance . . . but she wasn’t a member of your pack.”

“But she was Brunt’s lawyer,” Derren pointed out.

Eli turned to the Beta. “You’re thinking they killed her because they were worried Brunt might have told her about the website.”

“It makes sense. Then they dumped the body here to taunt us.”

“And now we have to decide what to do with the body.” Nick sighed. “Her family deserves to know what happened to her, but we can’t trust the council with any of this. Not if one of them is involved.”

“Maybe we could leave her body in a place it will likely be found,” suggested Bracken.

Nick was quiet for a moment. “This isn’t something we can act on right now. We need to leave; we’ll discuss it when we get back. Kent, Caleb, transfer her body to one of the empty lodges so the wildlife won’t savage it any worse than it already is.”

“I’ll call Trey, tell him we’re on our . . .” Marcus trailed off as a sense of wrongness suddenly slithered over him.

Nick stiffened. “What is it?”

“Something’s not right.”

An abrupt yelp was quickly followed by a succession of shorter yelps that seemed to come from every direction.

Zander growled. “Jackals. The bastards have crossed the border.”

“They’ve surrounded us,” rumbled Marcus. They’d surrounded them in a loose circle, and then slowly closed in, little by little. He’d scented them, but as Eliza’s body reeked of them, it hadn’t raised any alarms. Marcus could now scent something else too. “And they’ve brought some friends.”

A siren-like howl was answered by a hollow cackle. Suddenly jackals and hyenas were charging at them from every angle. Without the slightest hesitation, Marcus shifted, along with the others. Seeing a black-backed jackal leaping at him, the wolf slammed into the animal and clamped his jaws around his throat.