Elijah wanted to snarl at Valentina the way she was ordering him around, but he didn’t want to piss her off so much that she left him behind. He needed to know what happened to him. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that when he thought about being apart from her, this new side of himself became angry.

She was haughty and way too bossy for him, definitely not his kind of woman. Liana, though? She was beautiful and seemed much more relaxed than his current company. That thought brought about another wave of anger. He sighed, resigning himself to his current course of action.

Valentina had walked away from him and was speaking with a server. When both of them looked over at him, he wasn’t sure whether to stand tall or play the victim, the latter of which was a role he had never seen himself in. The female alpha raised her hand and waved him over. He obediently followed even though he rankled at the idea of being her lap dog. When he reached them, the server began walking to the back of the restaurant area.

“Max is this way,” she called over her shoulder.

Valentina said under her breath, “Just follow my lead when we are talking to the manager, okay?”

“Whatever you say, boss,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Easy there, buddy. It’s only because I have more experience. No one is doubting your manliness.” Valentina’s voice stroked his ego but did nothing to quell the anger bubbling inside him.

“Max,” the waitress called as she knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she knocked again and opened it. This Max person was nowhere to be seen. “That’s super weird. He never goes out without talking to all of us first.” Her worried eyes glanced first at Valentina and then at Elijah, silently pleading with him to reassure her.

“Is there somewhere he goes regularly?”

“If he’s super stressed, he’ll take a smoke break either in the alley or on the roof.”

“Mind if we go have a look?”

“No, just don’t tell him I gave up his hiding spots, okay? I should really get back to my tables. Good luck finding him.” She smiled her pearly whites at Elijah again before spinning on her heel and heading back toward the restaurant.

“Okay, so why don’t you go looking for him outside and I’ll take a peek in his office?” Valentina asked, trying to squash the tendril of jealousy winding through her.

“Are you sure I should be the one looking outside?”

She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands, which almost made Elijah burst out laughing. “Whatever you want. Let’s just decide and move before we get caught just hanging around his office.”

“I’ll go office, you go outside.”

“Fine,” she said before stalking away toward the back door that they could see from their current position. The angry sway in her hips made his mouth go dry and his hands clench at his sides. It hadn’t been that long ago he had been touching that sculpted ass, and he wanted to feel it again so badly that he almost went after her. She paused before she exited, and whispered, “If I ruin these shoes, you’re buying me new ones.” Then she pushed open the door and was gone.

His mind stayed stuck on her for a moment before he glanced around and, finding that he was still alone, went into the office. There was a beat-up old desktop computer almost hidden by the stacks of paperwork all over the place, along with half-finished mugs of coffee, some of which had the occasional cigarette butt floating in the dark liquid.

The desk was so overwhelming that he didn’t really know where to start. It wasn’t the eighties, though; there weren’t going to be VHS tapes sitting out like in the movies. No, this was a modern restaurant run by a man who clearly detested the managerial aspects of his job, but modern technology meant that Max probably had access to the footage on his computer.

As he sat down, he wiggled the mouse back and forth to wake the ancient thing up before looking around for clues as to what the man’s password might be. The blue screen stared at him, making him feel watched. When he opened the desk drawer, he found a small yellow post-it with a name on it.

This had to be it.

He typed it in quickly, and when it didn’t work, he wanted to growl in frustration, but that would probably attract attention, something he didn’t want. So instead, he breathed and focused on the task at hand. This had to be it, but what if he had entered it wrong? He tried all lowercase, this time typing more carefully just in case he had misspelled it last time. Then all uppercase, and finally capitalized. None of them worked.

Out of sheer frustration and a lack of any other ideas, he typed in password just in case the guy had never changed it. When the blue screen faded, he knew he’d either succeeded in locking himself out of the machine or it had worked. When a desktop covered in icons appeared, he almost wanted to whoop in excitement, but then he heard voices outside the hall.

He expected Valentina to be bringing Max back to his office, having cajoled him into showing her the security footage, but the timber of the voice was off. It wasn’t his jaguar’s; it was too high-pitched. Not that she is mine, he amended in his head.

The server’s voice was clear now. “Sir, I told you, you’ll have to come back later. I don’t know where Max is, and I don’t know where they went looking for him. All I said was that he might have been outside for a smoke.”

Something thumped, and he heard a pained feminine squeak.

“Sir, please. You can’t go in there,” she said as the door flew open, smacking against the wall. When she saw Elijah standing next to Max’s desk, her brows furrowed in confusion. “What are you doing in here? I told you he went outside.”

Before he could even process what was happening, the man who had burst in withdrew a gun from his trench coat and aimed it at Elijah. Everything happened so fast after that moment, but instead of everything blurring around him, it all became crystal clear. The edges of furniture and objects were more clearly defined than they had been seconds ago.

The server was screaming in the background while the man in the trench coat simply said, “What are you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elijah said as he put his hands up and took a step forward.

“Ah, ah, you stay right there. I don’t want to get any of your filth on me.”

He bowed his head as if he was going to comply with the man’s wishes, but instead, he launched himself at his attacker, pushing off from the desk and stretching through the air toward him. The flash of the muzzle and the excruciatingly loud crack let him know that his opponent hadn’t waited to fire the shot. A growl roared out of him, and suddenly, the attacker was turning away.

The panther within him was pushing to the surface, and Elijah wasn’t sure how long he could keep it at bay. When the sound of sobbing broke through his haze of anger, it was as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown over him, and his panther retreated slightly. It still wanted to claw the man’s face off, but it knew that Elijah couldn’t shift in that moment without putting himself in more peril.

When he landed on the other man, they both fell to the floor and the gun slipped from his hand. Elijah swiped his arm at it, getting it as far away from the other man as possible. Before he could brace for it, his attacker rolled and flipped him over so that he was now straddling his chest and pinning his arms with his knees.

His fist connected with Elijah’s face over and over again while the screams of the waitress rang in his ears. There were other voices surrounding them now, but his eyes were beginning to swell shut and he couldn’t make out what was going on.

The weight of the man was suddenly gone, and Valentina was at his side. Her hands were warm on either side of his face. “Elijah, listen to me. You’ve been hurt pretty badly, so I’m going to take you to a hospital.” Her voice was oddly loud, and her eyes were wide from what he could see. “I need you to stand, though. Can you do that?”

He pushed himself up and clasped her hand as she pulled him completely upright. His head swam, and the world spun around him. Valentina braced him against her side and swung his right arm over her shoulder while she walked them out, supporting most of his weight as they went.

“You need some help?” a man’s voice sounded just in front of them.

Elijah’s lips pulled back on his face in a silent snarl.

“No, I’ve got him, but thanks.”

“You must be stronger than you look, then,” the young man said again, and if the world hadn’t been so topsy-turvy in that moment, he would have lunged at him, pinned him to the wall by the throat, and held him there until his point was made. The jaguar was his.

Valentina did an obvious fake laugh and just said, “Crossfit.”

“Shouldn’t we be calling the police or something?” another woman said from just behind them.

“I’ll call them on the way to the hospital. You guys just get back to your tables.”

“What about him?” another voice piped up behind them.

Elijah felt Valentina turn them more than he saw anything. “Leave him where he is. I’m sure he’ll be out a while yet, and the police will be here soon, anyway.”

Then, before anyone else could say anything, they were out the back door and moving down the alley toward the car. She shoved him into the back seat, and he felt the car take off. A ringing phone caught his attention, though he was struggling to stay awake.

“Services,” a gruff voice answered.

“This is Valentina, alpha of the Midnight pack. I need a cleaner and a police officer sent to the following address.” She rattled off the address and name of the bar they had just been in. “Reaper is on-site and currently unconscious. I would like to question him, if possible. Staff are expecting the police and may have called them themselves, but I don’t think so. When the cleaner goes for the security footage, I ask that he grab everything from the last couple weeks, as that is what we were there for in the first place.”

“Cleaner, security footage, and crowd control. Police, taking custody of the Reaper. We will call you with the location if we are able to secure the target. Anything else?”

“The Reaper is using silver laced with wolfsbane and possibly another toxin.”

“Chemical risk. Got it. Will report back shortly.”

The car fell silent then, and Elijah couldn’t help but wonder what kind of underground society the shifters had, because after that phone call, it was clear that it existed.

“You hanging in there?” Valentina asked as the car stopped for a red light.

Her voice danced along his skin and seemed to settle on his chest as it called to the beast within him. When he looked up at her, he saw a jaguar’s eyes staring back. Bright rings of gold were centered around her pupil before the color seemed to condense into a rich coppery-mustard color. The whites of her eyes were completely gone, and he knew if they were pulled over anytime soon, the cop would immediately know she wasn’t human. When a car horn sounded lightly behind them, she turned back around, and he felt the warmth of her gaze go with her. It seemed as if only a couple minutes had passed when they turned down an alley and the car stopped.

He tried to push himself up, but was too exhausted. When two hands that felt much too large to be Valentina’s grabbed him by the ankles and pulled, he tried to resist, thinking they were under attack once more, only to hear a man’s voice scold him.

“The alpha wants you in the basement, so that’s where I’m taking you. Clear, cat?”

The world swam around him when he lifted his head to see who was talking. He hadn’t seen the man before and could barely make out his features. All he got was the impression of long black hair; everything else was just too blurry.

When he next opened his eyes, he was on a cot of some kind and Valentina was squatting next to him. “I really hope this shirt wasn’t a favorite of yours,” she muttered right before he heard scissors cutting through fabric. Pain lanced through him as she pulled the cotton of his T-shirt away from whatever wound was on his shoulder. She doused it with some kind of liquid, and it burned as if she’d just set fire to his skin. He felt something impale him then, and he was barely able to stifle a howl of pain. When she pulled back, he started to pant through the agony radiating outward from his shoulder. All she said was one word, and he was compelled to obey. “Shift.”

Elijah felt his cat come roaring to the surface, practically exploding out of him. The room shifted and the colors in his vision faded as his body changed into that of his animal.