“Time!” Mom shouted to me from the kitchen.

Ugh. I hit the pause button on the Super Nintendo controller in my hand. I’d just beaten Japanese Mask Robot and was pumped to face off against Dr. Wily next, the final boss in the new Mega Man 7 game. I eyed the clock and scribbled the time down on the notepad on the floor next to me. “Got it,” I called back before un-pausing the game.

Mom and I had been timing her contractions all day. I didn’t know what exactly it was about them that we were timing or how it all worked; I just wrote down the time on the notepad she’d given me when prompted.

While we’d been out running Mom’s “last-minute baby errands” that afternoon, the contractions had gotten so close together she’d said that she was certain today would be the day my sister Milena would be born. Mom was in such a great mood about it that she’d bought me the video game I’d been bugging her to get me for months. I was pretty sure she’d done it to keep me out of her hair.

She was busy in the kitchen now, making meat lasagnas and casseroles so I’d have something decent to eat while my Aunt Aracely was here to help with the baby. Mom’s twin sister, Cely, was arriving tomorrow to stay with us. Aunt Cely was pretty cool to have around—’cept for the fact she was a vegetarian who only prepared gross foods. I refused to eat that crap, and Mom knew it.

“Time.” Mom’s voice was notably weaker when she called out again. I paused my game and wrote down the time.

“Got it!”

I was in the middle of a boss rush in the game when I heard something clatter to the floor in the kitchen. Mom had gotten clumsier the bigger her belly had grown. It sounded like she’d dropped a dish or a cooking pan. Again.

Not wanting to pause the game, I hesitated before calling out, “You okay, Ma?”

She didn’t respond right away. Then she said, “Fine. A plate ... fell.” She sounded strange. Winded.

Something told me I should go check on her, but I was already fighting Spring Man, and I didn’t want to stop. I was dying to get to Dr. Wily. “Be there in a minute to help clean it up, ’kay?”

Kitsune’s yapping pulled my mind back to the present. Bethany’s rescue pup, a four-month-old Akita wolf, was running in circles around the redwood tree he’d pissed on. Dawn was over an hour away, the forest still dark beneath its canopy of giant redwoods. Poor little guy had probably never seen a real forest before.

I knelt down on my haunches and ordered, “Come.” He scampered over. “Good boy.” I patted his head and scratched behind his ears as I continued to praise him, welcoming the distraction from my own thoughts. My head was a fucking mess, and I needed to stay focused now more than ever.

I could tell Kitsune didn’t like me yet. Teleporting him from Bethany’s high-rise apartment to the redwood groves of Big Basin had unsettled him. He definitely didn’t trust me. But he knew enough to listen to me. If he hadn’t understood immediately that I was his new master, seeing me transform into an enormous wolf had cemented that fact.

Bethany had only had him a week, and it was clear she didn’t have a lot of experience with puppies in general, much less an Akita wolf-dog hybrid.

The little beast seemed to have been partially potty-trained before Bethany had gotten him at least. But she’d mistakenly assumed that he was fully trained and had been leaving her balcony door ajar for him to go out there and do his business whenever she left the apartment. I smiled to myself as I imagined her trying to explain to the stubborn little mutt that he should use the patio when he had to go. I knew Stephen and Tiago had stumbled upon and cleaned up several of Kitsune’s accidents earlier when they’d scouted out Bethany’s apartment for me.

I sensed Mike trying to tap my mind to reach me. I allowed the connection, checked to make sure he was alone, and opened a link to my location.

When Mike teleported in, Kitsune began barking like mad. When he didn’t obey my “quiet” command, I growled and flashed my wolf eyes at him before repeating it. He piped down. “Good boy.”

I stood as Mike approached. Mike was head of my security detail, one of the highest-ranking Betas within my pack, and one of the first and only true friends I’d made when I’d joined our Salvatella pack over a decade ago. Although Mike shared a blood relation to our former Alpha, Gabriel Salvatella—the sadistic tyrant who’d been the bane of my existence for the past ten years—Mike was nothing like his late second cousin Gabriel.

“So …” he dithered, biting his lip and cocking his head at me.

“So,” I replied, ignoring his prompt.

“Things got a lot crazy a little quickly last night, don’t you think?”

“I held my wolf back for ten years, Mike.”

His wince was sympathetic. “I know, man. It’s just—”

“I’ll handle it. I won’t let you and the others down.”

He nodded, his gaze lowering to the ball of fluffy russet and white fur at my feet. “Her rescue pup’s an Akita wolf,” he observed with a wry half-smile. “Fitting.”

I didn’t disagree. “Name’s Kitsune.”

He chuckled. “Even better.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “You know you marked her, right? In addition to infecting her with werewolf venom multiple times.” Mike always cut to the chase with me. It was one of his better qualities.

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Probably? Raul, this is going to complicate—”

“It was already complicated.”

“I know, but Alpha Milena—”

“I can handle my sister.”

He nodded and dropped it. That was one of Mike’s best qualities—knowing when to back off with me. “What about Bethany’s mind?” he broached. “Any luck getting around that emotional shield yet?”

I shook my head. “I’ll figure it out. If I can’t, Alcaeus should know how to get past it.” I hoped.

Mike gave me a questioning look, but then comprehension dawned on his features. “Right. We have a Reinoso insider now.” He paused to watch Kitsune pawing at the leaf litter beneath his feet. “Alcaeus isn’t going to be happy about this, though.”

“Nope.” Not happy was an understatement. He was going to be livid. But I couldn’t waste time worrying about Alcaeus’s reactions. Nothing I ever did was right as far as that guy was concerned.

“You suppose Alcaeus had a hand in placing that shield? That’d be a lucky break for us.”

I shrugged. “Anything’s possible.” But not bloody likely.

Unfortunately, I feared Alcaeus hadn’t had much of a hand in placing the shield on Bethany’s mind. He was more of a give-orders-and-criticize-the-outcome type than a do-the-work type. I had a bad feeling that shield had been constructed entirely by Remy Bertrand—Alcaeus’s stepbrother and Alex Reinoso’s half-brother.

I’d spent enough years within the Reinoso pack as a human indentured servant to know that while on the surface Remy came across as the most harmless of Alex’s powerful siblings, Remy’s innate talent for emotional manipulation was far too similar to Gabe Salvatella’s not to be taken seriously as a potential threat. Notwithstanding, Remy had long been the most overlooked and notably undervalued member of the Reinoso pack’s reigning family.

I doubted any werelock in the Reinoso clan but Remy could’ve been capable of creating an emotional shield like the one on Bethany. Not even Gabe or his late brother, Nuriel, had been able to access Bethany’s mind when they’d set out to kidnap her ten years ago. Their plan had been to use Bethany’s life as a bargaining chip with Milena and Alex.

But when the mind compulsion tactics they normally employed with humans failed to work on Bethany, it had fallen to me—under Gabe’s orders—to charm and persuade Bethany into coming with us to South America.

Just thinking back on the time my Bethy had spent in close company with Gabe and Nuriel made my stomach turn and my wolf anxious to teleport back to her side.

“Did you get everything in place for the asshole?”

Mike’s face split into a broad grin at my inquiry. “I assume you mean the plan for Gregg? Oh, yeah,” he said with a chuckle and a nod in the affirmative. “I’m rather looking forward to watching that play out.”

“You and me both.”

“Not to brag, but it might be some of my best work yet on short notice.”

“Thanks for that, by the way.” I meant it, too. Mike was a wiz when it came to hacking.

“My pleasure.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Always more fun to torment the deserving.”

“Speaking of … what’s going on up in Washington with Kai and the seer?”

“More of the same.” Mike knelt to pet Kitsune. “You, my little friend, are going to love Argentina,” he assured the puppy.

I felt myself frown. “What’s happened? Did Kai see something in one of the seer’s visions? Something about Marib—I mean Sloane?”

“You’ve got to stop slipping up like that around Avery, you know,” Mike admonished, his eyes on Kitsune as he scratched behind the dog’s ears. “No mother likes having her ten-year-old referred to as the reincarnation of a werelock renowned for harvesting souls as an undead being.”

“Sloane is nine years old and eight months,” I corrected him. “And I’ve only slipped up and referred to Sloane as Maribel once around Avery. Quit avoiding my questions about the seer.”

“It was twice.”

“Once. But it’s been twice now that you’ve avoided my Washington question. What’s happening with Kai and the seer?”

“Her name is Lauren.”

I felt my jaw unhinge. “I—wait, are you serious right now? Please tell me you’re not crushing on Kai’s coed.”

“Of course not,” he huffed. “Since when does calling a person by her given name mean—”

“When you know we’ll probably have to kill that person at some point, and yet you’ve started identifying her as a human being rather than the threat to Sloane’s safety that she is.”

“We don’t know that she’s a threat.” He abandoned petting Kitsune and stood to face me. “Her abilities are novice, Raul. She’s confused. She’s had no guidance. Besides all of that, there’s too much fear in Lauren’s heart for her to be able to—”

“Did you sleep with her while Kai was on his pouting tour of Greenland?”

“No,” he balked, his face flushing.

“Shit. You did. You slept with the seer.”

“We kissed—by accident. It was one time.”

“By accident? What, like you fell onto her and started making out?”

“I was in her dream, all right? She doesn’t even think that it was real. Besides, I made sure she wouldn’t remember. And for the record, yes, Kai was away in Greenland when it happened.”

“Jesus, Mike.” I shook my head, cracking up. “What the fuck, man? C’mon, she’s not that hot. You couldn’t allow her even one week of peace from Kai invading her dreams and making creepy sexual advances on her? You had to take advantage, too? See what all the fuss—”

“I did not take advantage of Lauren. It was a lapse in judgment—a rash decision. I needed to come up with a distrac—oh, quit being such a dick. It’s not that funny. And she is hot. Even Avery agrees.”

“Please, you can’t trust a woman’s opinion on whether another woman is hot.”

“Well, you certainly can’t trust a mated man’s opinion.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Fair point. Guess it’s settled then. You have a crush on the seer.” I wiped the laughter from my face. “And I’m pulling you off seer watch and putting Avery on full-time.”

“What? You can’t—Raul, that’ll never work. For one, Alcaeus will find out what we’re up to if Avery is on the mission twenty-four-seven. And secondly, what if Avery sees something in Lauren’s mind that connects Sloane and Maribel?”

“She’ll find out sooner or later.”

“Better if it’s later.”

“It’s not going to change anything. You just admitted that your judgment’s been compromised.”

“Avery’s still learning how to invade minds and cover her tracks. Kai will be onto her in no time.”

“Kai already knows you’re watching the seer. What’s the difference?”

He groaned and yanked at the roots of his hair. “He doesn’t know the extent.”

“Mike, your emotions are involved. You know this is the right decision. You’d pull any one of our guys off a job for less.”

“She had this crazy vivid vision, okay? But it ended too soon. I needed to try and keep her dreaming. I was trying to find a way to guide her back to the same vision.”

“By tonguing her?”

“Fuck you. I’m calling the whole plan for Gregg off.”

I busted out laughing. “Okay, okay, what was the vision that threw you so far off your game?”

He let out a sigh. “You and Kai were fighting.”

“Really?”

“In wolf form.”

Huh. “So I’m meant to kill Kai then,” I processed out loud.

Mike cleared his throat. “Well, I didn’t uh … didn’t get to see the end of the fight.”

“But I was winning. Right?”

He winced. “Mm—not exactly.”