The Wolf, page 23
Closing his eyes—because hey, you never knew, maybe he could sleep instead of be a dirtbag—he… went right back to the moment when she’d dropped her mouth to his.
His hand didn’t require any order from his brain to move a little and cover his—
Lucan hissed. The weight of his palm along the top of his thick shaft juiced him up to the point of not saying no. Kicking one leg out as far as it could go, which was not far at all, he thrust his pelvis like he was penetrating that woman’s hot, wet sex.
More with the hissing.
And then he didn’t give a shit who in the other cubicles heard him.
He was back on that bed with Rio, and he was kissing the ever-living shit out of her—and because this was a fantasy, he curated Kane out of the clinic’s picture and locked the door that had no lock.
Then Rio’s clothes disappeared without her or him removing them, her breasts exposed to his eyes, his hands, his mouth.
And then they were changing positions. She was…
“Fuuuuck,” he groaned as he yanked down his fly and sprang his cock.
In his daydream, Rio pushed him back and then got up on all fours.
Looking around her shoulder, her eyes shone with sexual heat. I ache, Luke. Can you help me?
Or something like that; her lips were moving, but he wasn’t really hearing her. Not that he needed her to tell him what to do.
The glistening stripe between her legs was all the conversation he needed.
Lucan mounted her in a surge, and his erection pierced into her sex—
The orgasm that exploded into his hand was translated into the fantasy: As his palm went up and down, yanking, pushing, pulling, and come jetted out onto the front of his pants and the hem of his sweatshirt… in his mind, he was pumping her full of his scent.
Marking her.
To the point where he bit her on the shoulder to hold her in place and reached around to the top of her sex—
She was not wolven.
That one god-awful realization cold-watered the whole goddamn thing. In an instant.
As his hand stopped and his fantasy derailed from its track and went free-falling off the bridge of his delusions, he banged his head back into the hard pallet. A couple of times.
She wasn’t even a vampire who could just look down on him for being a half-breed wolven—because females of worth did not fuck creatures like him.
Rio didn’t even know his kind existed.
Either of his kinds.
And if she found out, it was not going to be the sort of news that made things better for them. Easier for them.
Possible for them.
“Fuck,” he groaned as he looked down at himself.
In the glow from the lights out on the ceiling, he saw more than he needed to about his reality, and by extension, the two of them.
The fact that he’d ejaculated all over himself and now had a sticky, cooling mess to clean up seemed like a perfect commentary on everything.
Especially their future.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Rio had vastly underestimated the scale of the place—and the operation. The staircase she and Apex used wound its way around a landing, and when they got to the next floor up, he stopped and seemed to gather his thoughts as he sniffed the air like he was searching for evidence of a live fire.
While he did… whatever the hell he was doing… she looked through the chicken-wire glass in a heavy fire door. The corridor on the far side was easily sixty feet long and ten feet wide. A series of light bulbs dangling from raw wires illuminated its progression to a far-off end… and she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
The walls had cutouts in them, little curve-topped holes stacked three to a group and spaced far enough apart to accommodate ladders that led up to the middle and top levels. It was almost as though they were sleeping compartments of some kind—
“Come on,” Apex hissed. “We don’t want to be caught here.”
“Then why did you stop.” She glanced back at him. “What are all those spaces?”
“None of your business.”
As he pulled her away, she did some math in her head. Assuming they were a kind of bunk system, there had to be—Jesus, several hundred workers in the facility.
“How many people are here?” she said, even though she’d already done the estimate, and even if she hadn’t, he would certainly not help her. It was more like she couldn’t believe the total.
“We’re going all the way up to the main floor. It’s more dangerous in some ways and less so in others.”
“Well, I’ll put that in my Yelp! review of this place. Thanks.”
When they got to the next floor, he didn’t give her a chance to stop at the fire door. She caught only a glance through its window down another long corridor. Unlike the one under it, the level seemed to be far more brightly lit, and there were no sleeping pods. The walls were also finished, although only with raw Sheetrock from what she glimpsed.
At the next landing, Apex stopped at a steel door that had no window in it. Pressing his ear against the steel panel, he seemed to not even breathe as he listened.
Then he turned to her. “The lowest two floors are totally underground. The next one up is mostly so. This one is not at all, however, so I’m going to have to move fast. As soon as I open the way, we’re heading to the first door on the left that’s unlocked. It’s a break room. It will be empty and the windows are boarded up, so it’s safer. On three. One… two… three—”
Apex ripped open the metal panel, and then recoiled as if he had been hit with toxic gas. Lifting his arm to his face, he ducked down low—and jumped forward in a defensive crouch. Even though she didn’t smell anything dangerous, Rio echoed his protective stance, drafting behind his bulk, holding her breath as a vague impression of moldy carpeting, peeling walls, and a crumbling ceiling registered. Out in front of them, weak sunlight streamed across the corridor in sections, and he dodged around the stripes of faded gold.
Right ahead of her, Apex was breathing heavily, like he was struggling to stay conscious, and his speed was slowing. As they passed doors, she tried the knob of every one of them. All were locked—
“Oh, God,” she muttered as the man faltered and fell down.
When he tried—and failed—to get back on his feet, she stood over him and looked around. Had he been shot? She hadn’t heard anything.
Rio grabbed his flailing arm and dragged him off the carpet. “What’s wrong?”
“Help… me…”
There was nothing in the air that was bad, no one else was around, and he didn’t appear to be bleeding or wounded by a bullet. But now was not the time to ask questions.
Hauling him onto her, she threw his arm around her shoulders, braced his weight, and tightened a hold on his waist. Together, they limped forward, weaving a sloppy path down the corridor, her robe disguise tripping her up. She looked into every open door, noting the toppled office furniture, the graffiti, the occasional view out into a scruffy landscape of leafless trees. At each space, he told her to keep going.
“How much farther,” she grunted.
“There…”
Okay, that narrowed their end zone down to absolutely nothing in particular.
Just as she was about to drop him, his hand shot out and grabbed on to a knob. With a powerful crank, he released the mechanism and threw the door wide—and then he shoved himself off of her, falling forward like a drunk, landing facedown with a bump of useless limbs.
“Shut the door—shut the fucking door,” he groaned.
Rio shot inside, but didn’t slam things—because there were people under them. Maybe above them, too. And they’d made enough noise with their footfalls.
As she carefully closed them in, instantly, everything went pitch dark, and her only orientation as she floated in space was the sound of the man’s tortured breathing. Her eyes did adjust, however, shadowy outlines of a stretch of countertop, a sink, a table on its side, and one spindle chair in the corner pulling free of the void, thanks to a soft glow around the panels that had been nailed over what she assumed were window frames.
“Dumbwaiter,” Apex said on a wheeze.
“Excuse me?” Rio lowered herself to her knees. “And what the hell is going on? Are you hurt?”
“There—it’s a dumbwaiter. Your weight will lower it down. When you’re ready, I’ll pull you back up.”
“No offense, but breathing seems like a challenge for you right now. How ’bout we focus on that first?”
“Go—I’ll be all right. I just need a minute.”
Rio looked to where he was pointing. Across the way, there was a panel in the wall that was demarcated by molding. The inset square was maybe three by three feet and it had a handle down at the bottom.
The man coughed and made her think of the patient. “Once you get down, you’ll know what you see. Do what you have to and call up the shaft when you’re ready for me to pull you up.”
“I have my gun,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
Even though he was a disrespectful pain in the ass, she didn’t want to leave him. Still, they had a job to do, so she got up and moved across the room, chunks of plaster gritting under the soles of her feet. When she got to the dumbwaiter, she lifted the panel. It was so dark, she had to feel around to get a sense of the size.
“I need to take the robes off. I won’t fit otherwise.”
“Do what you have to.”
It was a relief to cast off the suffocating hood and take a deep, free breath. Then she put a foot into the space and grimaced as the inside of that thigh burned in protest.
“I should have gone to more yoga classes,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
Rio glanced back. Apex was still lying there like a dead fly on a windowsill, his arms and legs curled up like they hurt.
“Are you sure you’re going to be—”
“Go.”
Rio reached in and found a lip on something that she could get a pretty good hold on. Pulling herself into the three-by-three-foot cubicle, it was alarming the way the pulley-rigged box rocked in its intra-floor track. And goddamn, as she squeezed her head to the side so her shoulders fit, the tender spot on the back of her skull hollered like a banshee.
“Please don’t kill me,” she announced as her eyes bounced around the tight interior—and could tell her nothing about the chances of her plummeting to her death.
“As long as you don’t fuck around, I won’t.”
She glared out of the dumbwaiter. “I’m not talking to you. And you were wrong, my weight’s not doing anything to move this thing. I suppose I should take it as a compliment, but it’s a problem.”
There were a couple of quick-draw inhales, and then Apex grunted and got to his feet. Dragging himself over, he braced himself against the wall.
“I’ll close the door and lower you manually.”
“How—”
He opened a flush panel in the wall. “Hang on.”
Rio closed her eyes and pushed against the walls that crowded her, like they were people she could get to move away. “It’s not me who has to do the hanging. Is this thing rated for my kind of weight?”
“We’ll see, won’t we.”
He pulled the dumbwaiter’s door shut on her.
There was a bump. And another.
Her breath was loud. So was her heart—
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak…
The descent was slow—and agonizing because the human body was not meant to pretzel into a space barely big enough to fit a picnic cooler. With every bump in the track and halt as Apex switched his grip, she had to fight the terror that something was going to snap and she was going to straight-shot down God only knew how many floors to egg-shatter all over—
This time, the bump was different.
“Stop,” she said, projecting her voice up the shaft.
“Shh,” was the response. But hello, he stopped.
Muttering about bossy men, she felt around the panel in front of her and found a handle at the bottom—which kind of begged the question whether the makers had anticipated the thing being used as an emergency elevator during the infiltration of a drug den to save a patient a little pain on his way to his eternal reward.
Rio gripped—no, it wasn’t a handle, it was a bracket—and pulled. Pulled hard. Put her shoulder into—
Squeak!
Wincing, she froze. When nothing came at her, she forced the panel farther up. She was fighting against its function, some kind of resistance locked in to prevent exactly what she was doing.
Guess it was a no on the prognostication powers of its fabricators, at least when it came to someone like her being cargo. Either that or they’d been worried about bagels and cream cheese or maybe a fruit plate busting out and making a bid for freedom.
When she had the panel all the way up, she stuck her head into—
“Holy… shit.”
The well-lit area was the size of a large classroom, and as if it was used as one, there were a couple dozen tables set up in three rows. Each table had a pair of chairs set on one side, and a lineup of scales, bowls, and tools on its surface, including little hammers and straight-line pastry knives. Down on the floor, boxes were set at regular intervals, and there were rolling bins dotting around. At the far end of the workspace, there were two proper desks, a couple of stepladders, and—
She recognized the cellophane-wrapped bales in the far corner instantly—and was not surprised to find that the kilos of drugs were locked into a metal cage bin that was five to six feet high.
Extricating herself from the dumbwaiter, she moved silently between the tables, her brain snapshotting everything at the same time it did some math. Twenty-four tables, two people a table, that was forty-eight workers. And yet there appeared to be several hundred of those sleeping compartments.
So there had to be more workrooms.
The implications made her head spin. An organization of this size did not just appear out of nowhere. It was part of an evolved strategy for disseminating a huge amount of product. Clearly they had been selling a lot of drugs for a long time, and yet why had no drug market intel from the streets mentioned a big whale like this?
Then again, there were always cycles of preeminence, the eras coming and going as arrests were made or deaths occurred. Maybe this operation had come here from another part of the country, ready to make the most out of Caldwell’s close location to Manhattan and further accessibility to Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
As she passed by a table, she paused and opened one of the cardboard boxes on the floor. It was full of little baggies… and each had the stamp of the iron cross on it.
How far up did Luke go in the hierarchy? she wondered.
Probably pretty far. She needed to get him to talk on their way back to the city.
Continuing on, she went to the locked-up kilos and couldn’t even estimate the street value. Well, she could—and it was in the millions and millions. How much product was on hand in the whole operation? And how did they get it in here? There had to be things like loading docks and other storage facilities to handle the pre- and post-processed drugs. With what she was seeing here? They could take in and put out kilos and kilos and kilos of cocaine and heroin in this place—and they clearly had the contacts with the importers to keep a steady stream of it coming.
It boggled the mind—
The sound of a door handle catching snapped her head around—and just as the way in opened, she dropped down to the floor.
All the way across the room, a man in a black uniform entered and hit a light switch that made everything even brighter.
Heart pounding, Rio looked through the legs of the tables and around the cardboard boxes as his boots started walking… to where the hatch of the dumbwaiter was still shoved up.
Proof that someone had gotten into the room.
And was still inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
In the end, Lucan couldn’t stay put. After he came all over himself, and then buzzkilled that vibe with the hello-my-name-is-Wolfie-and-not-’cuz-I’m-related-to-Beethoven, he had to go see Rio.
He told himself it was to make sure she was safe. Also told himself that if anyone was following him after the showdown with the Executioner, they’d have gotten bored by now of waiting for him to do something.
And he might have further mentioned to his inner critic that the Rio-related wanderlust was not tied in any way to the kiss that had started the handshake deal with his dumb handle. Not at all. In the slightest.
Whatsoever.
But yeah, there was a lot of internal monologuing going on as he shifted out of his cubicle and walked off for the stairs. He knew the guard down at the other end wouldn’t question the departure—just like there had been no problems with his late arrival after check-in. They were used to him coming and going on his own, courtesy of his work with the Executioner.
Pulling open the fire door, he was quick-footed as he descended to the lowest level—
Lucan stopped. Sniffed the air.
Incense… and Kane?
Nadya, the nurse, must have come up here, he thought as he started again with the jogging.
Bottoming out at the base of the stairs, he glanced back at where he’d come from, peering through the latticework of the balustrade’s supports. When he didn’t see or hear anything, he strode off toward the clinic. The hall seemed like it went on forever, and as soon as he came up to the storage room’s door, he opened it wide and looked down the row to Rio’s bed—
It was empty, with the sheets, such as they were, messy… as if she’d gotten up in a hurry. As his heart slammed into his ribs, he leaned back and looked out into the hallway.
Of course. The bathroom.
Telling himself to get a grip, he went across to the closed door. The scent of the soap she’d used lingered in the air, but it was faded—and he was relieved he couldn’t catch any sniff of her. They’d managed to camouflage her successfully.
With an excitement that was totally inappropriate, he put his ear right to the panel. It was cold against his face.
