Page 7 of Wolf Revealed

“Did Roman say why he kidnapped Kal?” she asked, moving on from a subject that simply didn’t matter at the moment and looking at Mike again. “Or why he waited so long to approach you after abducting him?”

“I have no idea why he waited so long. As for why he took Kal, he said something about me stealing some kind of flash drive that belongs to him. Roman said he wants it back, or he’ll kill our son. Unfortunately, I don’t know what flash drive he’s talking about. I certainly never stole one from him.”

Panic gripped Lark. Knowing a man as dangerous as Roman had their son was bad enough, but hearing Mike didn’t know what the man wanted or even how to get it for him was heart-wrenching.

“What are we going to do?” she asked desperately. “How are we going to get Kal back if we don’t have what Roman wants? What happens if he calls to set up an exchange? What are we going to do?”

“First, we calm down,” Mike said firmly, stepping forward to take her hands in his. They were warm and reassuring. “There’s already a BOLO out on Roman. Now that we know he’s in town, it shouldn’t be that hard to find him. He’s not the kind of man who can keep a low profile. Someone will know where he’s hiding. At the same time, I’ll start working on what this whole flash drive thing is about. Hopefully, I’ll either find Roman, or the flash drive, before any kind of exchange can be arranged.”

“What happens if you can’t do either of those things in time?” she whispered, looking up at him, not sure she wanted to know the answer to that question.

“Then my pack and I will go into the exchange with a decoy flash drive and hope for the best. It’s not the best way to do it, but if that’s the only option we have, we’ll make it work.”

Lark nodded, trying not to think about all the things that could go wrong with that plan.

“If Roman calls you to make the exchange, I want to be involved,” she said firmly. “My pack mates and I can help.”

She held her breath, expecting Mike to say no, but he surprised her by nodding.

“You can also help by sending me a picture of our son, so I know what he looks like now, since the last time I saw Kal was when he was a baby.”

Lark fought back tears and nodded, feeling more horrible than ever as she reached for her cell phone to pull up the most recent photos she had of their son.

Chapter three

“We were wondering when you were going to get back,” Xander said as Mike walked into the SWAT compound training room an hour and a half later to find all sixteen werewolves in his pack waiting for him. “I would have interrupted your conversation with that woman at the crime scene to let you know we were leaving, but it looked pretty intense.”

Mike sighed. “That’s one way of putting it.”

Spotting the pizza boxes on the table in the front of the room, Mike followed his nose and headed that way. Grabbing a paper plate, he helped himself to two slices of pepperoni, then grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge before taking a seat at the table with everyone else.

“So, is she really your fiancée?” Xander asked. “Lark, right?”

“Yeah, Lark was my fiancée,” Mike said, picking up a slice of pizza and taking a bite. Man, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “She still is, I guess.”

At least, she was still wearing the engagement ring he’d given her when he asked her to marry him. That was part of the reason it’d taken him so long to get back to the compound. After talking to Lark, he’d spent a good fifteen minutes in his SUV processing that she and his son were alive.

Seeing her again had been like getting hit with a ton of bricks. All he’d been able to do was stare and wonder if she was really there or his mind was playing tricks on him. But when he’d gazed into her periwinkle blue eyes as her lavender scent wrapped around him, he’d finally figured out it wasn’t his imagination.

And all he’d wanted to do was take her in his arms and never let her go.

Instead, after they’d talked, he’d watched Lark walk back to her rental vehicle before climbing into his SUV, even as his inner wolf howled at him to go after her.

Then he’d sat in his truck flipping through the photos she’d texted him of Kal, in awe of how amazing he was. While most were recent photos of Kal, she’d also sent him a few of their son over the years. Seeing him go from a baby to a toddler to a ten-year-old boy in those pictures had made him realize how much he’d missed. It had been enough to bring tears to his eyes.

Opening the bottle of water, he took a long drink, aware of the surprised looks his pack mates were exchanging. Most of them didn’t even know he’d had a fiancée and child, much less what he’d thought happened to them.

Gage Dixon, the SWAT Team commander and alpha of their pack of alphas, was the only one who knew the whole story. And from where he was sitting at the far end of the table, he was clearly going to leave it up to Mike to decide how much he wanted to share.

Xander had joined the SWAT Team a little while after Mike, so he knew some of the story. Not the part about how badly Mike had lost his shit in the fallout of seeing his fiancée and child supposedly die, though.

Carter was the only other member of the Pack who knew about his previous life, and that was only because Carter had been having doubts about taking the leap with his own soul mate and had needed a push in the right direction. Mike cringed as he remembered admitting to him that he’d been convinced Lark had been The One for him, that unique person out there for every werewolf who loved them despite what they were, even though he hadn’t even been a werewolf back then.

That was a joke. What soul mate could walk away like Lark had from him?

Xander leaned back in his chair. “When Lark asked me to let you know she wanted to talk to you, I couldn’t miss the fact that she smelled...different, I guess you could say. Did you notice it, too?”

Was Xander talking about the intoxicating lavender scent that seemed to envelop her? When he and Lark had been in the pack-and-ship store, it had completely surrounded Mike, making his inner wolf definitely take notice for reasons he didn’t want to think about right now.