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He growled and shook the one off of his back. The wolf fell with a yelp, and Mars lifted a giant claw. But before he could bring the claw down on the wolf, another one jumped and bit into his paw.
He roared with pain and anger but saw an advantage. The wolf still hung onto his arm, and he brought the creature closer to him.
He opened his mouth and took one huge bite out of the wolf’s shoulder.
Mars spat out flesh and fat as the wolf shrieked. The wolf was bleeding out quickly, so the pain wouldn’t last long.
He tossed the dying creature aside, but there was no reprieve because the other two came at him. They were snarling, and their anger was palpable.
They both pounced at the same time. He lifted a claw and caught one in the neck.
He throttled it, shaking the wolf’s large body as though it was simply an empty bag. Mars thrashed the wolf’s body until he heard its spine break. The remaining wolf snapped at his feet, and Mars gave a kick.
The wolf yapped, flying across the tiled floor, but it wasn’t dead. The shifter ran, whining as it did.
Mars immediately returned to the main aisle, where he shifted quickly, breathing heavily as he pulled his clothes back on.
At least he had done something to ensure that Rhi would remain safe. Any further threats to her would be met head-on.
But it was clear that the murdered woman hadn’t been a coincidence.
NINE
RHIANNON
Rhiannon did what she was accustomed to doing for the past ten years when her body was about to succumb to stress; she dove deep into her work.
It assured her of her strengths and abilities rather than retracted from them. Seeing a woman who looked like she could have been her long-lost sister was unnerving. It shook her to the core in ways she could not have imagined.
It wasn’t like having her life threatened was anything new. She worked with women who had been abused and was often responsible for direct removal from the environment that was slowly killing them. The men, the statistically likely abusers in these situations, weren’t nuts about their victims being taken away.
Because of her heroic convictions, Rhiannon had received phone calls, letters, hell, even once been screamed in a line at a coffee shop, which certainly had left her shaken. She was a realist, but she was also very bold and willing to take risks for the sake of her female clients.
Despite the attempted acts of intimidation, she had never been deterred. In fact, they’d had the opposite effect; they fueled the fire of her protective and proactive nature, making sure the women and children dried out the bastards’ bank accounts as much as legally possible.
But the sight of the dead woman’s face, alive, well, smiling, and likely oblivious to her fate, had clicked something inside of her. Her hands shook as she typed, a growing sense of doom rolling over her head like the phantom of death itself.
“Fuck,” she muttered to herself.
It was all ridiculous, really, when she let herself think about it. The mind could be poison, a rich playground of spun yarn done all for the sake of some broken alarm bell.
She was a woman, so of course, she had to be extra careful. But she wasn’t going to let that stop her. Not now, not ever.
So she worked into the night, feeling safe and secure within her locked office, security only a button tap away. The window to the vast city sat next to her like a blackened marble painting, starlight flicking every now and then to indicate the presence of life.
The work enveloped her in just the way she wanted. But beyond that, outside the bubble of her razor-sharp focus, something was pulsing, flashing in the distance like a dazzling siren at sea.
The thought that she may have been the real target of this murderous heathen kept cropping up like an infection that just wouldn’t heal. She pushed it away, but only for a few minutes at a time. It became an itch she could not scratch, a fear she could not rationalize.
Her wrists began to ache at nearly midnight, so she called it quits. Just as she closed her laptop, her phone, which she had placed aside for the time allotted for work, buzzed.
She wanted it to be Mars, and when she tapped the screen, the bright illumination lighting up her tired, gorgeous face, her heart began to tap-dance in her chest.
Hello, beautiful,it read.I hope you were able to get some work done tonight. Are you feeling peckish at all?
“How the hell did he know I was done?” she muttered to herself.
That didn’t matter. All she knew was that, yes, she was feeling ravenous, likely because she had skipped her usual meals due to the uncomfortable pit in her stomach. And most of all, which was something she couldn’t yet admit, she knew she would feel beyond safe with Mars nearby.
