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She cleared her throat. “Well, yeah, sure. Gunnison comes immediately to mind, obviously. Fucking shitshow that was. Central Rockies field office was consumed by it for months. You remember it?”
Dmitri nodded, grimacing. Three brothers of a single clan, wiped out in a night, executed and mutilated.
She crossed her arms over her breasts, shivering slightly. “The FMB never did find all the body parts. It was… absolutely horrific. But that wasn’t the only incident. There were several others as well, over the years, though not quitethatbad. Investigations never went anywhere though. We always assumed it was some sort of, you know, internal power struggle, internecine warfare among wolves. That kind of thing.”
“That’s not what it was at all. The wolves generally don’t resolve conflict in that way—we tend to negotiate it out. If we do resort to violence, it’s never something the humans would ever be privy to.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers laced together within the span of his legs. “Those cases werealwaysa wolf—or wolves—that had been killed by vampires.”
“How though?” She rubbed a palm against her temple. “I mean, the wolves… you’re all so goddamnedstrong.”
“There are some creatures in this world that make even us look like weaklings.” He gazed over her shoulder as he spoke. “A single vampire is far more powerful than any single wolf. Even a juvenile is quite capable of killing an adult wolf, though it would likely be a good fight.”
“H-how then?” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “If that’s so, why haven’t they wiped you all out? And us too, for that matter?”
Dmitri gave her a wink. “Two reasons. Math and teamwork.”
“I don’t follow…”
“Put simply, there are a helluva lot more of us than there are of them. But that isn’t our only advantage. The wolves are not only greater in number, but they tend to work together much better than the vampires do. So, we make up for our lack of individual power by working in groups. That’s something the vampires greatly fear, what we’re capable of in coordinated, planned action. In thousands of years, they’ve never come up with a workable strategy against it because the vampires are collectively so few in comparison to us.”
“How many are we talking?” she asked, her voice reed thin. “Vampires, I mean.”
“Well, we don’t really know—and the vampires aren’t exactly going to tell us either—but we think the total number worldwide has to be somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand.”
Her face went white as a ghost. “Twenty-fivethousand?” She shuddered, but kept her gaze locked with his. “And how many, um, wolves are there?”
“What did your vaunted Bureau tell you? I assume they keep meticulous statistics on us. Their biggest customers, so to speak.”
She paused for a heartbeat. “Let me think. I think it was… fifty thousand? I think that was right around what they told us.”
Dmitri chuckled, sitting back, laying an arm across the back of his chair. “Interesting.Veryinteresting. The exact number isn’t important, but we’re comfortably north of ten times that number.”
She made a tiny sound in her throat. “In the world?”
“Try North America.”
“Holyshit.” She sucked on her upper lip a moment, nostrils flaring. “You’re telling me there are a quarter of a million wolves in North Americaalone?”
Dmitri lifted a shoulder. “Give or take. More pups are born every day, you know.”
Stacy leaned all the way forward, putting her head between her knees as if she’d become light-headed. Then she sat up once more, staring at the floor. “They… we had no idea. The Bureau… they didn’t say jack shit about… any of this.” She punched the mattress next to her, grunting loudly, her breasts bouncing. “Why?Why did they… lie to us? From the very first day of the academy, it was always the same—‘The wolves and us. Remember that, agents.’ They drilled it into our brains. Never anything about… anyone else. Anythingelse. Fuck.”
“Like I told you, Stacy. You might not like it, but it’s the truth. Ugly though it may be. You needed to know.”
“Yeah, right. I feelsomuch better.” She put her face in her hands.
“Welcome to the real world, Agent Masterson. I’m glad you finally made it. Better late than never, right?”
CHAPTER19
Stacy
This is no time to freak out, Stace. Keep your shit together.
Willing her breathing to slow, she closed her eyes to focus on something,anythingthat might quell the rage burning hotter and hotter inside her.
It was worse than that though. Not only had the FMB been keeping them in the dark as agents, but she’d been personally sold down the river by her own boss.Allthe agents had been working under false assumptions. They’d all been given the same line of bullshit—at least the ones that she worked with—serially deceived about the full scale of what they were dealing with.
Looking at Dmitri wasn’t helping matters. Was that the outline of his huge cock there behind the stretch of denim at his crotch? He was so thick, so big, it made her heart trip even as she thought of it. She’d never imagined she’d like a cock that hurt, but his she more than liked.
