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ChapterOne
Ashley Talbot surveyed the gate at LAX as she waited for her flight to Cleveland. It had already been delayed once due to crappy weather along the route but was supposed to leave soon.
Most of the people waiting for the flight were human, like her. You could tell by the way they carried themselves. Humans tended to be oblivious to everything around them, focused on their phones and not on dangers that might be lurking.
Unless they were like her and had reason to be on edge and suspicious. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d let her guard down—especially not in a public place like LAX.
A couple walked up to the gate attendant, arms around each other, moony-eyed and clearly in love. It took only one quick perusal for Ashley to see that the woman had scars on the side of her neck, a few punctures from a mating bite.
He didn’t have any marks on his neck. That told Ashley they were most likely wolves since only the woman wore marks. Honestly, she found it a little sexist, not to mention barbaric. If a woman had to have fangs rooting around in her flesh, why not the man too?
She was tempted to find out where they were going and give their information to her boss so he could add them to the list of shifters who needed to be taken out. But she nixed that idea. There were bigger fish to fry in the form of a tiger ambush that had gotten a little too big for its britches in Cleveland, Ohio.
She’d never killed anyone personally. She didn’t consider herself an assassin by any stretch of the word. But she was instrumental in ending the lives of shifters who were criminals, and so very many of them were. Hiding behind theirshifterlaws, as if being able to turn into an animal gave them the right to kill on a whim.
But maybe this couple were perfectly pleasant and law-abiding.
She bet the man at least had blood on his hands.
She’d never shed any tears for the lives that had been lost. Her boss, Brent, and the good people at Humans Against Shifters were doing their best to ensure that humans weren’t going the way of the dinosaurs and would instead remain the dominant species on the planet.
She hated shifters mainly because of what happened to her sister. The moment her sister’s face flashed in her mind, a well of sorrow threatened to bubble up inside her. She tamped it down immediately.
She had far too much to do to let herself get waylaid by thoughts of the past. She was not a mourn-in-public sort of person, although she did wonder if she’d ever get to the place where she didn’t miss her sister with an ache that went soul-deep. It was compounded by her parents forgiving the bastard who did what he did.
Ashley wasn’t forgiving anyone.
She was going to ensure that what happened to her sister didn’t happen to anyone else, starting with the tiger ambush.
She’d just opened the dossier on the tigers when her phone buzzed, a text from Brent flashing on the screen.
ETA
Not a man of many words, but that was okay with her.
Flight leaves in forty-five. Four-and-a-half-hour flight. I’ll text when I get the rental car.
Buck will pick you up.
She rolled her eyes. She didn’t particularly like Brent’s redneck right-hand man, and she didn’t want to be trapped in the car with him or trapped in Cleveland without a vehicle.
No thanks. I’ll text when I get the car.
There was a brief pause, then he wrote,Fine. Safe travels.
She closed the app, put the phone away, and then leaned back in the seat. The wolves had moved to a row of seats and were making out like teenagers in a dark movie theater.
Get a damn room, you freaking animals.
She turned her attention back to the dossier for the tigers. Soon enough she’d be speaking to her boss and finding out what exactly he wanted her to do about his big cat problem.
* * *
“You’re late,”Brent said when Ashley finally walked into his office at the Humans Against Shifters’ temporary headquarters.
“Sorry,” she said. She took off her leather jacket and hung it over a chair, then sat down.
He gave her an annoyed look, probably assuming she wasn’t really sorry, which she wasn’t. She hadn’t been able to leave LA right away when he’d called for her to join him in Cleveland. She’d been busy cleaning up the former headquarters of Humans Against Shifters at his request.
