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I scanned the carnage. None of us knew what King looked like, exactly, other than he had a scorpion tattoo across his neck. There was nobody fitting that description, but he had to be somewhere.
A hard-looking brunette bobbed up from the behind the bar with a loaded shotgun. She raised it in our direction and I dived to the left just in time. Buckshot peppered the door behind me. Fuck this. I didn’t need any additional bullet holes.
Without thinking it through, I shifted into my wolf and crossed the bar in two strides. The brunette turned ashen and collapsed. I guessed she’d not seen a shifter shift before.
Tanner knocked his sparring partner to the floor and wiped his fist on his pants. Whereas his opponent looked like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, Tanner didn’t have a mark on him.
The sight of my wolf brought the bar fight to a premature halt. All the men stood silently, most of them pissing themselves.
All but one.
King stepped out from behind the bar from where he’d been hiding.
I spotted the scorpion tattoo on his neck and growled.
“Get out, all of you,” Silas barked from across the room. The people in the bar didn’t need telling twice. Now they knew what we were, they were terrified. There was a mass exodus and a few moments later, the rumble of trucks and cars high-tailing it away.
Only King and the brunette stayed. Since she had passed out on the sticky, glass-strewn floor, I wasn’t worried. Her chest rose and fell, so a heart attack hadn’t killed her. Not that I cared all that much. The bitch had tried to shoot me.
My wolf took a step closer to King, and his eyes widened.
“What…what do you want?” His fear was nauseating. Times like this, a sensitive wolf’s nose was a real hindrance. The stink of stale sweat and rancid fat made my stomach roll uncomfortably, but I pushed past the desire to hack up a hairball and showed King my teeth.
They were more than sharp enough to tear a few strips off his lanky frame.
“What we want are some answers,” Tanner said in a deceptively calm voice.
Tanner
Iwasn’t accustomed to being the rational one in a tricky situation. Cole shifting had taken me by surprise. Yeah, I got he was mad about being shot at… again. Despite that, of the three of us, he was typically the calm one who liked to do risk assessments before breaking a few bones.
Losing Eva had fucked him up. We were all on the edge. Knowing she was likely going through all kinds of hell did nothing to tamp down my need for bloodshed and violence.
The bar brawl had helped ease some of my tension, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted blood. Pain. To hear men scream as I disemboweled them for touching what didn’t belong to them.
“I hear you are looking for shifters.” I gestured at Cole’s wolf. “Congrats, you found one.”
“You must have got it wrong,” King blustered, having recovered some of his equilibrium. I guessed he preferred doing the beating. His hand slowly drifted down to the left, out of sight. Before he could grab the gun he likely had hidden behind the bar, Cole’s wolf lunged.
There was a satisfying crunch followed by a high-pitched scream. Blood spurted from King’s arm, creating a pleasing mess. The brunette stirred.
“I don’t think so. Start talking before you become Cole’s favorite new chew toy.”
Silas snorted from behind me. “He wouldn’t last long.”
“There’s an underground club where people bet on fights between shifters and humans.” Cole released King’s arm. Blood dripped down onto the stone floor, mixing with spilled booze, dirt, and all manner of unmentionable things.
King grabbed a filthy bar towel, wrapping it around the ragged wound. It was a staph infection waiting to happen.
“Some of the local cops run it,” he continued.
If there was a shifter-human fight club, I’d have happily gotten involved. Nothing pleased me more than beating on idiots with more ego than brains.
“If that’s so, then why is this the first time we’ve heard about it?” Silas asked. Like me, he was skeptical.
“It’s being kept on the down-low. They’re using shifter girls and then selling them on.”
My blood ran cold. “Just to be clear, your cop friends are kidnapping shifter females and forcing them to fight in the ring before selling them to sex traffickers?”
