Page 49 of Brock’s Mate

Then something made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Danger. Outside.

Immediately he pulled away from Desi, his head going up, sniffing the air, trying to sense what lay behind the scent of her.

Enemies.

Shifter wolves. But they smelled wrong, like DiSantos. And there were more of them.

Brock came to a crouch, a snarl curling his lip. His wolf was still near the surface, taking over his mind and his senses. He grabbed a pair of jeans hanging from the coat rack by the door and shimmied into them, and then opened a drawer in the sideboard and pulled out a pair of handguns.

Teeth and claws, his wolf said. That’s all we need.

We might need more. Brock willed himself to focus. He checked the clip on the first gun, slammed it back in place, and handed it to Desi.

The other he kept for himself.

“Stay out of sight,” he growled, low and quiet. “And for fuck’s sake, watch your back.”

She glanced over her shoulder towards the kitchen, and the back door. She nodded. Then she grabbed Brock’s chin and pulled his face around. He gave another soft snarl, knowing his eyes were full gold. Desi said, “I’m watching both our backs.”

The front door was still half open, and Brock flattened himself against the wall next to it before pushing the screen door open. There were no lights on in the house to illuminate him, but that didn’t mean he had to make himself a target.

He edged slowly out onto the porch.

Five wolves materialized out of the darkness of the trees and walked into the small front yard, their eyes glowing red in the darkness. They stayed far enough apart that it would be impossible for him to shoot more than a couple of them before the others were on him.

Two of them melted into human form, dressed all in black. Brock hit a switch by the door and the outside spotlights went on. The men squinted in the sudden blinding light.

One was DiSantos. He didn’t recognize the other, but from Desi’s hiss of breath behind him, he could guess who it was. That fucker Jered.

“DiSantos,” he said, holding his gun at the ready and wishing he had something with more firepower. “Don’t tell me. I’m under arrest again.”

“Still,” DiSantos said. The other guy made a sharp gesture to silence him, which seemed to piss DiSantos off. Trouble in the ranks?

Brock turned to the other guy. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t need to know who I am. All you need to do is turn over my mate—who you abducted from DiSantos—and we’ll be gone.”

“What, that girl in the van? I cut her loose. She’s probably in Vegas by now. And even if she wasn’t, there’s no way I’m turning her over to mutant wolves for your weird mating experiments. Because you sure as fuck aren’t Enforcers.”

“This is a Council Special Project, Reilly,” DiSantos snarled. “Way above your pay grade. Or your uncle’s.”

Brock opened his mouth to answer, and got a familiar cold prickle down his spine. Magic. A dragon? A sorcerer? The mutant puppetmaster?

It felt like someone was calling him from far away. No. Not him. Desi. The fucker was trying to compel Desi to come to him.

He didn’t hear her move, though, so she must be resisting.

A second later he felt the echo of a sharp pain slice through him. Dammit. Now the sorcerer was trying to break her resistance by accessing her pain centers. “Desi?” he said.

Her answer was a soft murmur. “Still here. Pissed off now.”

He almost grinned. “That’s my girl.”

DiSantos was talking again. “You might as well give her up, Reilly. We’ll take her one way or another, but that way we won’t have to kill you to do it.”

“Yeah?” Brock said. “I was thinking more like you should get the fuck off my land. Although, if you want me to shoot you and dump your bodies on the other side of my property line, that works for me too. As long as you’re gone.”