“It’s possible the operation made Stella. Right now, you’re a fighter whose girlfriend disappeared. Holding your cover is the best option,” Siren said.
“I’m in the traffic camera now. Working on the timestamp,” Axel said.
The room went quiet. Ryder sat in the desk chair and stared at the carpet. Blaze sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his bruised hands.
“I have her.” Blaze closed his good eye. “I see her turn onto the sidewalk. A white van pulls up at the curb. Her hand comes up to swat his arm down. His hands go to her neck. She goes limp and they lift her in. Door slides shut. Van pulls away.”
Blaze didn’t speak. The wolf screamed at him to shift, but he held his form.
“Plates,” Siren said.
“No plates. They pulled them before the grab. They went east. I’m pulling the next camera now.”
The typing started again on Axel’s end. Blaze opened his good eye and stared at the wall above the dresser.
“Our cover is blown,” Blaze said. “Pierce is going to move. He has to. He doesn’t know what we know, but he knows we know something. He’ll cancel the sale. Or he’ll move it up. Or he’ll relocate the women and disappear. We have to assume everything we built is dust as of right now.”
“If they saw the contact, Nell’s a leak,” Siren said. “She’s in serious danger. Both of them are.”
Axel cut back in.
“I lost the van.”
Blaze didn’t speak.
“Two cameras east of the hotel and they turned south onto a stretch with no coverage.”
“Blaze, hold cover for the rest of the day. Act like a man whose girlfriend just disappeared. Get in the truck. Drive the streets. Talk to people. Look distraught. This is the best way to play dumb. Dom and Hunter will be in town in two hours. We’ll regroup when they arrive.”
The line went silent.
Blaze stood, crossed to the nightstand, and pulled the gun out of the drawer.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
The cold concretewas rough against Stella’s skin, and there was a metallic taste in her mouth. The light was bright and flat, and she spotted a drain on the floor a few feet away. Reaching for her inner bear, she could feel the shape of it inside her and the warm familiar weight that had been her company as long as she could remember. But the bear was muffled and wrapped in something thick. She pushed at the shift, but it didn’t come.
They’d drugged her. The memory came back in flashes. The sidewalk outside the hotel. The white van. The man with the syringe. She tried to look around. The room had concrete walls. A single fluorescent fixture overhead. No windows. A metal door at the far end with a small reinforced window in the upper third.
There were four women sitting against the far wall. One had her arms wrapped around another’s shoulders. She recognized them from the fight venue. Stella tried to push herself up onto one elbow and her arm gave out. Nell… She was there with the others. She lay there with her cheek back on the concrete.
“Stella!” Nell’s voice echoed in Stella’s brain.
The metal door opened.
Two guards in black polos came in with a camera. The first one crouched beside her and rolled her onto her back. His hands were on her shoulders and her hip, moving her the way orderlies moved patients.
“Get her photographed,” he said. “The buyers want to see her before we move them.”
The second guard held a tablet up to her face. The flash went off. White spots bloomed in her vision.
“Other side.”
The first guard turned her head. The flash hit her eyelids through her closed eyes and the bear inside her growled. The wrap around her bear cracked. The nails on three of her fingers started to lengthen.
The second guard’s hand stopped. “She’s shifting. This one’s a bear.”
