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She was crazy if she thought that excuse would fly with anyone we met in the hall or elevator. The entire building was filled with as many security guards as it had leap executives like my parents and peon worker bees like me. Each guard was a cat shifter, maybe a quarter of them alphas too dense mentally to figure out a profit and loss statement but as expert with firearms as they were with tooth and claw.
Maybe on a good day she could fool them, but she was throwing off pheromones broadcasting to any shifter with a nose that something…well, somethingshifty…was going down.
“No one will question me,” she said with a foolish amount of confidence, handing me the backpack as we left our suite.
I wasn’t convinced.
“Do you seriously think that Henric accidentally left the thumb drive in with everything else I’d have to look at?” I asked in a hushed tone despite the impossibility of keeping a whisper quiet around shifters. For anyone the next hall over, maybe.
But the doors we were passing?
Not a chance. If anyone was there to hear, they would.
She didn’t miss a step as she considered my question. Her answer was wordless. First she pressed the car keys into my hand, then reached into her purse and pulled out what I knew to be a Hellcat Rapid Defense. The high-capacity, micro 9mm could fit down the front of an evening gown without giving itself away. I knew that particular fact because I’d seen Justine do just that when dressing for one of the “ambassador” events between shifter communities.
The memory was on of my earliest and most vivid, the black of her skin and gun against the saffron yellow satin of her dress. With the pack wars still fresh in everyone’s memory at the time, a gun was a necessary accoutrement for the mate of a leap’s leader and the daughter of its last leader who had died bringing peace to his claw.
“Safety’s on,” she whispered as she reached behind me and deftly lifted the back of my dress shirt, nestling the gun between the waistband of my pants and the small of my back.
She kept her hand just above the spot, her palm flat and propelling me toward the door that exited onto the parking lot we shared with the surrounding buildings.
“If you have to leave without me, abandon the car as soon as you have multiple public transportation options in the same area.”
A recent memory washed over me. It was a few months old. The two of us had gone to Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” starting where East Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue met, then down Michigan Avenue to the DuSable Bridge. My father had insisted on a driver taking us for our safety and comfort. Really, he just wanted frequent assurances that I hadn’t run off.
Well, that’s what I had thought at the time. Given today’s weirdness, maybe he had worried about my mother running off, too. We seldom left the safety of the leap together and never just the two of us. Maybe that was Henric’s demand and not her choice.
What had stuck with me most during the recent outing was the tactical appreciation she had exhibited for the area. It was a good place to get lost, she had mentioned almost every time the driver wasn’t so close he could hear every damn word despite the surrounding crowds and traffic. There was an entrance to the Metro station on Chicago and another on Grand. There were taxis everywhere, buses that connected all over the city, a ferry terminal, a train station on La Salle, and about a million parking garages to stash a vehicle if you didn’t want it found too quickly. With the hotels, you could pop into one and rent a car if you had a credit card.
“I can’t,” I said as we reached the building’s exit.
“Can’t what?” she asked, her voice distracted as her alpha senses seemed to pick up on something far beyond the more immediate periphery of what I could sense as a mere beta.
I wasn’t sure what it was I couldn’t do—go it alone or leave her behind?
They were two different things, but tightly intertwined.
Before I could reply, she put her lips against my ear and whispered as low as she could.
“Never get off a train at the station.”
Her advice was followed by half a dozen male shifters, all alpha, streaming into the hall behind us. She shoved me out the door, then blocked the exit with her body.
“Run!” she shouted.
I took off at a sprint, expecting to feel her energy nipping at my heels. I should have known better. My mother had an excellent chance of outrunning the guards. I had zero chance. So she stayed, holding the door open with one hand, glaring down the hallway at the frothing beasts pursuing us, and did something else I couldn’t.
She released an alpha’s roar.
She released it…in the open…with hundreds of windows from the surrounding buildings facing our lot.
Buildings filled with humans.
Reaching her reserved parking spot, I fumbled with the fob, my heart missing a few beats as I wondered if Henric had done something to disable the car. That would certainly track if he also intentionally left the thumb drive for me to find and for my mother to catch me watching.
Did the bastard know I wasn’t his daughter and that the video included a shot of my father?
Whatever Machiavellian scheme he was up to, it didn’t involve disabling the sedan’s locks or battery. The door opened. I slid behind the wheel, slamming one foot down on the brake pedal as I hit the ignition button. The whole time, I was looking over at the building’s exit. My mother stood her ground, but she was starting to shift. I could see the distortion in her face, and the hand not holding onto the door was locked in a shredding pose, all the sinewy muscle and claws of her alpha state on display as she maintained the partial transformation.
