Page 1 of Bound

1

West

THE RUNDOWN APARTMENT COMPLEX ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Austin, Texas looked like all the others. Burned out security lights gaped like missing teeth over a line of faded maroon doors facing out towards the street. Despite it being past midnight, waves of muggy late August heat radiated up from the asphalt. On the next block over, a car alarm broadcasted the city’s rising property crime rate. As I watched, a plastic grocery bag tumbled lazily across the parking lot like something out of an old spaghetti western.

The moment I kicked the door to my Prius closed, something skulked towards me from the shadows. Scowling, I pocketed my phone. The shadow solidified into a werewolf, its rangy body corded with lean muscle. In the glow of the moth-infested streetlamps, the dark brindle streaks of its coat seemed to shimmer like crushed onyx. And between its teeth—

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Another dead body? Brody is going to kill you.”

Glaring at me through slitted pupils at the mention of our pack Alpha, the werewolf spat a severed arm onto the pavement. No scent. Which meant the arm was vampire, not human. Vampires absorbed the blood of whatever they last fed from—human, werewolf, bison (don’t ask) for up to three days after a meal. This little complication? Pretty much the last thing I needed right now.

“I’ll just pop that in the trunk. Unless you want a snack for the way home?”

The wolf flattened its ears.

“You do realize you can hardly pass for someone’s labradoodle out for a stroll at this time of night?”

And with one last scathing look, the bane of my existence shifted to his human form. Picture every bad boy fantasy you knew you shouldn’t have been attracted to, light them on fire, and you would have Topher Greer. In the year since he’d been assigned to the Blood Moon pack, his dark unruly hair had grown out. He wore it longer on top, shorter on the sides, his fuck-the-world attitude clearly extending towards combs. At just over six feet, he had a slight height advantage over me, enough that I noticed when we passed too close in the hallway of our apartment building when he was coming in from one of his overnight shifts as an EMT and I was running late to teach my zero hour. As I’d been assigned as his sire by the werewolf council, our current neighboring apartment situation was six degrees of non-negotiable. We’d worked out a snarky communication system in that time involving passive-aggressive texts, post-its, the occasional cage fight over whose turn it was to pick up Dr. Pepper and takeout for Netflix night (mine, guilty), and stacks of books left outside each other’s doors. Which would explain how I was somehow hate-reading Tolstoy for the second time. The only upside? It had kept us from killing each other.

Mostly.

“Can we not do this right now?” Topher muttered, purposefully knocking into my shoulder on his way past me towards the apartment building. Because, nice. Oh, and like there was any way I was going to miss the split lip. Or the black eye.

Or like it had been his first one this week.

Growling, I stalked after him. “I’m not even going to ask how you got down here—”

“Guy on my crew. And did Brody really not think I’d find the tracker he put on my car?”

“—or how you were planning on getting home—”

“August has connections.”

Because of course my little brother would be in on this, too.

“Okay, James Dean. But don’t think we’re not discussing this later.”

Nearly to the line of dumpsters behind the building, Topher spun on me and I realized I’d been following him so closely I could feel the heat coming off his Aerosmithtee, could smell the mix of leather, Irish Spring and sweat radiating off his skin. Quickly, I took a step back.

“You gonna put on your glasses and use that stern teacher voice? Not that I’m into that or anything, but—”

I growled. “This isn’t over. You think I don’t know where you’ve been going at night, or what you’ve been doing?”

Smirking, he tossed the severed arm into the dumpster and wiped his hands on his ripped skinny jeans. “You had me tailed?”

I scoffed. “Please. You’re not that hard to read. I get why you’re doing it, just… be careful.”

“Don’t look now, Caldwell, but it almost sounds like you care.” He frowned, giving my clothes a suspicious sniff. “Thought you were stopping at that food trailer on North Lamar, the one that makes their burgers on garlic toast with the top-secret sauce?”

There was no missing the accusation in his voice. Because his wolf could show up with a dismembered vampire arm hanging out of its mouth and it was no biggie, but god forbid I stopped at a drive-thru anywhere in the next four counties and didn’t remember to get him a double bacon burger, hold the mayo and onions.

“Do I look like your errand boy? And no, they were closed.”

He rolled his eyes. But now I was kind of kicking myself for not having found somewhere that was open. My love of cheeseburgers? Legendary. Shapeshifters had a metabolism that could burn through nearly ten thousand calories a day at the full moon, and on-again-off-again enemies of our pack or not, the werewolves down in North Austin liked to eat. My brother, Dallas, who owned the best barbecue restaurant south of the Red River, had said more than once he was pretty sure he could have this whole pesky shapeshifter-vampire war sorted out in an hour provided everyone sat their butts down in front of a plate of ribs.

“We got a name?”

I took out my phone, pulling up the last text. “Hudson Smith. Aged twenty-three. Turned two years ago.”