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Lauren showered, dressed, fixed her hair and make-up, loaded up with knives and her primary carry gun, packed four days of clothing and toiletries, and was out of her suite in just under forty minutes.
The chef put a plate of pancakes, eggs, and steak on her plate as she slid into the chair, and she thanked him before digging in. They had twenty minutes until they left for the airport.
Nick had packed while she showered, then he’d showered, dressed, and left the suite. He was almost finished with his meal, and was on the phone.
“The goal is to find the civet and rescue her. If you’re the best wolf to have at our backs, I can be professional. If I find out you’ve struck another woman in anger though, Iwillcome for you. Politics be damned.”
Lauren focused on her food. She remembered the incident that’d set Nick off — a wolf who’d interrupted a practice run-through to punch his wolf girlfriend hard enough to break her jaw when he saw her kissing someone on stage as part of the act.
When he hung up, Lauren pointed out, “His girlfriend forgave him. They were broken up a few weeks, but she took him back, and they’re still together.”
“And if she forgave him, I should too?” Nick’s jaw muscle rippled. He still wanted to tear the wolf apart. Not good.
“I didn’t say that. The scuttlebutt is that she hadn’t told him she was going to kiss someone as part of the role she’d accepted. If he’d known, if she’d been honest, he’d have been prepared for it. Shechangedto wolf and back twice, and was fine. It isn’t like she was in the hospital for a month recovering.”
“You’re defending him?”
“Absolutely not, but I’m pointing out that there are two sides to every story. In his place, you’d have probably punched the guy she was kissing, but he was human, and thatwouldhave meant a hospital visit and at least a month recuperating, even if you’d massively pulled your punch. If he had to punch someone? Better his misinforming wolf girlfriend than the unsuspecting human who’d done nothing wrong.”
Nick glared at her, but she was right and he knew it. He ate his last couple of bites and left.
Lauren made it downstairs with three minutes to spare. A limo was waiting, and she noted it only held seven people, plus her, when she entered.
“Where’s everyone else?” She asked Queenie.
“Gavin’s in a light-tight box. He left early so he could be loaded without slowing us down. The first limo is ten minutes ahead of us.”
“And there’s no ‘prey’ in my limo, so the odds we’ll be captured have gone down,” Lauren noted.
“But aren’t zero,” Ambrose said from in front of her. “The Lord of Lust won’t be involved in your kidnapping, but there’s nothing to say the others won’t do so and leave him out of the planning.”
Which was why she was sandwiched between Ellania and Ambrose. It hadn’t worked before, but she decided it was best not to point that out.
She closed her eyes and aimed her thoughts towards Gavin.Thank you for not making me have to fight for a spot on the plane.
I decided who my best warriors are and assigned them a seat.
Why is the wolf going? The ex-marine? I heard Nick on the phone with him.
The Alpha is going because one of his wolves is blood bound to the civet, so he considers the civet one of his. If this was a social trip to enforce political bonds, he’d be expected to have a girlfriend and two guards.
Queenie handed out little booklets, and told them, “You’ll be asked to return these before we land in Bullhead City. This is documentation of everything we know to this point. It’s possible we’ll land and take off again without deplaning. The general Vegas area is an educated guess on Gavin’s part. Read through your documentation and familiarize yourself with it. We’ll begin running tabletop scenarios once we reach cruising altitude.”
* * * *
Nick found a seat he knew Lauren would like and sat in the one beside it. She’d want a window seat with a view unobstructed by the wing. He finished reading through the dossier he’d been handed on the ride down the mountain, and then went back through it slower, to make sure he’d absorbed the important facts.
When Lauren entered, he stood and motioned her to the seat he’d saved for her, and she gave him a friendly smile.
“I need more time with this,” she told him, showing him her dossier copy. “I know most of it, from reading the Drake report, but this has a few details I don’t remember seeing in their information. A lot happened, while I was kidnapped.”
“I’m on my second read-through. You should have a water. Me too. Flying always makes me feel dehydrated.”
One of the Drake airplanes had a similar setup, so he knew where to go for water. He returned from the front of the plane with the two waters, and had to tell several others where to find them on his ten steps back to the seat. As planes went, Gavin’s was super-fancy, but not terribly big. As a result, the seats were lined up on the sides of the aisle as they would be in a commercial plane, though they were much larger, and farther apart.
The plane started moving, and Queenie stepped to the front of the plane and told them, “Everyone knows how seatbelts work, and where the emergency exits are. Nick told ya’ll where to find drinks and snacks, but if you missed it, the cabinet to my right has a refrigerator hidden in the left side, and snacks in the right side. Once we reach cruising altitude, we’ll begin running through possible scenarios. We’ll assign who will enter first in the event we locate the civet, who will communicate with law enforcement, and a number of other jobs. The Amakhosi, the Harlequin, and Mordecai will already be on the ground when we arrive.”
Nick pulled his tactical pen from the loop on his pants and made a note in the margins of his dossier to ask why Gavin had been able to find the Civet when Mordecai could not.
