Maximus

“Are you sure we should be doing this?”

“It’s fine, Gavin,” he ground out, reassuring his younger brother.

“I thought we’d agreed to lie low though.”

Maximus whirled. “It’s a diner at the crossroads of two streets practically in the middle of nowhere. It services farmers, travelers, and people like us.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kassian said, trying to lighten the mood. “I am not ‘people like us.’”

Maximus fixed the second eldest of the Koche brothers with a glare that silenced him immediately.

“I was just saying,” Kassian remarked, slipping into the booth side of a nearby table.

The others in their entourage filed in. There were nine of them. Four human females. Five hulking shifters. Not for the first time Maximus looked around at the four mated pairs. He was happy for his brothers. Ecstatic, even, that they’d found their mates. It had certainly been a long time coming, that was for sure. But it also emphasized the fact that he was alone, that there was no mate for someone like him. He was too old, and in the odd moment of self-honesty, too much of an asshole, for a woman to ever love him like these women loved his brothers.

“We needed to change things up. This place isn’t going to be on anyone’s radar, trust me,” he reassured them, falling silent as the waitress, a wizened old woman in her late fifties approached the two tables they’d commandeered.

“What’ll it be?” she asked. “And make it snappy. Can’t afford to dawdle with you takin’ up this much seatin’.”

Maximus looked at her for a long moment, and then glanced around at the—one, two…five, nine—nine other empty tables in the joint. One old man in a plaid shirt and mud-kicker boots was sitting at what appeared to be a bar. Otherwise they were the only ones in the joint.

“Right,” he said. “Maybe some menus, so we know what you make?”

The short, stoop-shouldered woman narrowed her eyes. “You some sort of city-slickin’ wise-ass mister?”

Maximus reared back in surprise at her acerbic tone. He assumed she was making fun of him for being from the city, which couldn’t be more wrong. Not that he was positive, he’d never heard the term “city-slickin’” before.

“No,” he said, trying his best not to turn it into an angry growl that would fill the place. “Just never been here before.”

The waitress—her name tag read Mary—simply stared at him. Her faded blue apron and uniform that had likely been a lovely pale red at one point were several sizes two large on her current frame, indicating she’d probably been there a long time. Why it should surprise her so that she still got new customers was beyond him. But how the hell could she not remember him and his brothers coming there before? They were all well over six feet tall, most of them over six and a half feet tall, and built like tanks, with thick, broad shoulders and biceps thicker than her waist.

What he was saying was, they kind of stood out in a crowd.

Was she blind, maybe? He decided to go with that answer. Blind, but so used to her surroundings she could still function. It was the only logical answer.

“Well, then maybe you should have read the name of the restaurant, hmmm?” she responded tartly.

“Doesn’t it say Four Corners Diner?” he asked.

“So you can read. Too bad you missed the menu on your way in.” She took out her pencil and a notepad, though he wondered if she actually needed it. “We serve breakfast at this time of day.” She peered closer at him. “Do them steroids you take make you hungrier than normal?”

His jaw dropped open. Behind him there were snickers of laughter from the others. Maximus was flustered. He truly did not know what to do with this little lady, who seemed to be taking him to task for all sorts of things he didn’t do.

“Well, don’t just stand there wit’ yer mouth catching flies like that. Hurry up ‘n’ give me an answer.”

Maximus was saved by Kean, who spoke up. “I’ll take the number four, please, and she’ll have the number two. Both over easy with bacon. And a side of bacon.”

The pencil scraped across the paper, the noise somehow assaulting his ears even as he turned to look at Kean. How the hell had he come up with an order?

“We’ll both have number threes please,” Pierce said, gesturing to him and his mate Mila.

“Number one for me, and a number four for him please.” That was Lena, Gavin’s mate.

“Same,” Kassian said, speaking up for him and Rosie.

In seconds, all of his brothers had ordered, except for him. Maximus still hadn’t even seen a menu! Where were they…then he rolled his eyes. Behind them, on the wall, was a huge printed copy of the menu. All this time, while he’d been exchanging remarks with the waitress, they’d been reading it, deciding what they wanted.

“Well, what about you? I said I don’t gots all day,” Mary remarked.

He continued to study the wall.

“Time’s a-tickin’ mister.”

He eventually turned, with deliberate slowness. “I’ll take a number five. Scrambled, and pancakes instead of French toast.”

Mary just looked at him, pencil hovering above the paper. She didn’t say a word.

“Number five,” he repeated. “Scrambled eggs, and pancakes instead of French toast.”

“Is he always this daft?” she said, speaking to the rest of the table.

What the hell did I do wrong now?!

“Yeah, but he’s our brother, so we put up with it,” Pierce said, his tone light and easy.

Lena leaned in from her seat next to him. “Say please.”

“Please,” he said through gritted teeth as Mary’s eyes returned to focus on him.

“Sure thing. Coming right up,” she said, her demeanor changing immediately as she bustled off toward the kitchen.

Maximus slumped into his chair. “Defeated by an elderly twig. What am I coming to?”

The others chuckled, but nobody seemed inclined to provide an answer to his question. The TV caught his eye. It appeared to be a news show, though the sound was muted.

“Excuse me, Mary?” he called.

The wrinkle-lined face popped out from behind the door. “Yes?”

“Is there any chance you could possibly turn on the volume for us, please?” he asked, doing his best to be polite.

“Of course, dear,” she said with a grin, and a few seconds later the voice of the woman reporting was audible.

Behind him the others struck up several conversations amongst themselves about various inane things. Their food, the morning, the weather. None of it mattered to Maximus. He only had one goal, one focus.

Destroy the Institute.

The Bothwell-Ingrim Institute of Theoretical Anthropological Studies. Or, if you didn’t enjoy the mouthful, simply the Institute. A shady organization with government support that had gone from think tank to militarized shadow agency over the past few years. It had but one mission: Integrate shifter DNA into the human population with the end goal of removing full-blooded shifters from the planet before they could overwhelm Homo sapiens.

It was a ludicrous philosophy. There would never be enough shifters to eradicate humanity. He and his kind simply couldn’t stomach such population densities, for starters. They preferred to spread out amongst nature, like their feral counterparts. But the Institute hadn’t realized that, assuming that he and every other shifter were just like them, and would act exactly like humans. The catch was, they weren’t humans. In a lot of ways.

Nobody ever reported on the Institute though. Maximus knew that if the general population got wind of the planned genocide that it had in store for his kind, that they wouldn’t react well to it. Not in this day and age. A few decades ago, they might have gotten away with it. But the world was changing rapidly, as he understood it. According to the females amongst his family now, they wouldn’t put up with it anymore. If only they could get the word out.

He watched the TV as the news show ended, and another program started. It was a local morning talk show, according to the name, and its host was a gorgeous woman with piercing green-gray eyes that seemed to stare at him through the television set. Amazing, that he could be so entranced through some glass and electronics. His attention piqued, Maximus listened for her name.

Haley Salvannah. What a beautiful name.

Breakfast came and was served, but Maximus barely touched it, enraptured by the figure on the television as she spoke, talking about current events and other things in the area. She seemed so impassioned, so…attached, to the subjects she was speaking about. It was a mesmerizing change compared to the dispassionate news reporter from before who could have put him to sleep if she’d droned on for much longer.

Maximus memorized her face. The high, swooping cheekbones and the dimples in her cheeks that formed when she smiled wide for the camera. Or the way an old-fashioned pencil stuck out of the bun she’d made of her perfectly natural brown hair. Her lips were thin, but active, carrying all sorts of expressions, to the point that he found himself wondering what they were like to kiss.

Then, before he knew it, the show was over, and something else came on. It was an older lady trying to sell some sort of new gadget. He turned around and dug into his breakfast, ignoring the fact that it was cold. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t get the woman out of his mind. He wanted to reach out, to caress her cheeks, to massage away the tenseness he had seen hidden away in her shoulders, and whatever else it was she needed. He would do it all for her, without question.

Now, now. Don’t go getting smitten by someone you don’t know and will likely never meet.

His mind was right. It was useless to daydream about her.

“Maximus.”

He jerked slightly as someone touched his shoulder, bringing his awareness back to the present.

“Yes?” he asked around a mouthful of egg and bacon.

It was Lena again, but this time she was pointing at Kassian, who had the look of someone who’d asked a question and never gotten an answer.

“I was saying, we need to discuss what we do next. Where do we go from here?”

Maximus nodded in understanding. He knew Kassian wasn’t referring to when they were done eating. Instead, he was asking what the next step would be. When were they going to go after the Institute?

“We can’t take the whole organization down,” he stated. It was blunt and harsh, but also true. The Institute as a whole was far too big for just the five of them to dismantle. They could do major harm, inflict lots of damage locally, where it seemed to be centralized, but they could never topple it.

“So you think we should just give up?” Kean asked, sounding shocked.

“Absolutely not,” he said, perhaps a little harsher than intended, judging by the way Kean reacted as if he’d been slapped. “Instead, we need to focus on what we can do, and what will lay the biggest hurt on them.”

“Reashallow,” Gavin said quietly into the silence that followed. “We take down Reashallow.”

“Yes.” His voice was almost a hiss.

G. Reashallow. That was about all they knew of him, besides the one look they’d had at his face. The shadowy head of the Institute. Until just recently the brothers had all thought another man, Brandon Burnatawiz, had been the director of the Institute. That was until Reashallow had gunned him down in front of all of them as a punishment for his failure. Since then, they hadn’t seen nor heard anything further. The man was a ghost. And he was also the one who was to blame for all the death and destruction the Institute had wreaked. Maximus was more than ready to pay him back for that.

“But what about the Institute itself?” Pierce asked.

“We need the humans to be aware of what’s going on,” Kassian said. “If they knew, they’d stop it from happening.”

Something tickled the back of Maximus’s brain as his brother spoke. He could feel the idea coming, slowly forming in some hidden, recessed corner of his mind. Relaxing was tough, but it would be the best way for it to come forward and reveal itself. So he sat back into his chair, rolling his shoulders several times and tuning his brothers out.

In the background the TV salesperson droned on and on about their new favorite choppy-mixy-spinny thing. He didn’t even want to know how much of a piece of junk it was. With any luck it would end soon and someone like the woman with the green-gray eyes would come back on, her smooth, even voice enticing him to listen and to care about what she was talking about. To want to do something about it.

“So what do we do, Maximus?”

His brothers were all leaning forward, looking at him. Next to them, their mates also waited, though they didn’t look quite as invested in having him decide what was happening.

The TV salesperson’s voice cut off as it went to commercials.

Please bring back Haley Salvannah, he thought to himself. I’d listen to that show all day if I could.

He sat bolt upright, his eyebrows meshing with his hairline they rose so high. An evil, excited grin spread across his face as he looked around the two tables, meeting everyone’s eyes.

“I’ve got an idea.”