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No answer.

“Just… I need Mr. Calvert’s login, so get it for me.”

“If you open that door, they’ll shoot you dead.”

“Maybe.”

“No. There’s no maybe about it. Jesus Christ, Deacon! Do you have any idea how––”

“Please, Avery,” I begged him. “Please.”

Moments later, I had the number, and I punched it in.

“Wyn, you son of a bitch!” a woman screamed. “Where the fuck have you been? What the hell is going on?”

Opening the door, I was faced with a wall of mobile aisle shelving on both sides, the kind you cranked to open, and together they created a steel corridor about thirty feet long, six feet high, with breaks between them every ten feet. At the other end of the room, that I could see from where I was, there were four long tables.

“Wynton!” the woman yelled again. “You promised me the emerald was mine as long as I kept quiet about all those omegas! I held up my end. Now where is it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I answered as I leaped straight up, landing softly on the top of the shelves before moving silently toward the sound of her voice.

“Deacon,” Sasha gasped, and I heard the heartache in his voice and instantly knew why he was terrified. “Vanessa said she had you and if I didn’t do exactly what she––”

“No,” I assured him, moving silently like the predator I was, from the top of one of the shelves to the next. “One of her men is dead, though, and I brought the police with me. Also, the vault is open now.”

“We’re not the only ones in here,” he blurted, “please be––”

“Shut up!” Her shriek was loud, and there was no more sound from him.

I heard several men moving, their boots pounding the concrete-slab flooring as they ran to reach Vanessa.

“There’s nothing,” a new voice reported to her. “And we have company. We need to get out of here now.”

“No.” I could hear the fury in her voice. “It’s mine, it belongs to me, and I want it!”

“Where do you want us to look? Everywhere you suggested is a dead end.”

“Where the fuck is Wynton?”

“In jail,” I said, and moved quickly after I spoke, so by the time they were on the aisle that they assumed I’d been on—in my experience, most people didn’t look up—I was gone.

“Nessa, he’s in jail?” someone asked her.

“Isn’t that what this guy told you originally?” Another voice. “Jesus, what’d you hit him with? He’s really bleeding.”

Bleeding?

“I might have clipped him too hard, Deacon,” she called out to me. “You better come save him before he bleeds to death.”

With that, I was done, because suddenly I could smell it. His blood. My mate’s blood. The only reason she’d been able to hurt him was because he’d believed her. She’d said her men had me, and even after all he knew of me, he thought, somehow, that could have happened. When we got out of this, we were going to have a long talk about my capabilities. Of course I knew why he’d underestimated me. He’d saved my life on the street, so he thought of me as somehow fragile. That was not the case.

After leaping to the floor, I stripped fast, ripping away clothes, and shifted into the enormous black wolf I was.

My mate was fast all the time, no shifting necessary. For me, the transformation was what made me big, fast, and in possession of long jaws full of sharp teeth specifically made for tearing. When I took a step forward, all there was, was my animal.

Running to the next aisle, I didn’t see men, I saw obstacles between me and my mate. As soon as I reached them, they died.

Amazingly, the overhead fluorescent strip lights went off then. There were yells of outrage from every corner of the large vault. That had to be either Avery or Wade’s doing, and if I got out of this, I would thank them. So much easier to move around unseen with only the emergency fixtures over the exits on.