Hierarchy (17 page)

“That wasn’t the question.”

“What was the question?”

“Do you know him?”

Bronwyn considered it. In the biblical sense, definitely, but she didn’t think they had any idea she and Luke had been playing hide the salami for nearly a week and, really, she couldn’t say she knew him. “I don’t think so,” she said finally.

“What about Caleb Westmoreland?”

“That name rings a bell,” she said cautiously, wondering if they’d seen her leave his place. “Why do you ask?”

“There might be a tie.”

“With the Indian … I mean Native American gang?”

“Who said it was a Native American gang?”

“You mean it isn’t?”

The four men exchanged another long look and apparently decided to try another tact. “We believe you may be in danger.”

Bronwyn blinked at them. “Why would I be in danger?”

“Because of your ties to the Native American gang!” Brown bellowed impatiently, slamming his palm on the table in front of him.

Bronwyn jumped. “I thought you said it
wasn’t
a Native American gang?”

“He was at your apartment. Why would he have gone there if he didn’t know you?”

“Luke Gray Wolf was at my apartment?”

“Westmoreland.”

“What was
he
doing at my apartment?” she asked curiously before she suddenly recalled he’d told her he’d been to her apartment looking for her.

“We don’t know. We were hoping you could answer that question.”

Bronwyn stared at the man. “But, you’re the police! If you don’t know how do you expect me to know?”

The four men stared at her for a few minutes and finally got up and filed out of the room. Bronwyn settled to trying find more nail she could bite off. That time they left her waiting over an hour.

The two FBI agents returned without the detectives and settled in the chairs.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?”

“Let’s not. If I’m not under arrest, you can’t hold me!”

“We’d appreciate your cooperation, Ms. Williams.”

“
I
would appreciate being released!”

“So … you’re refusing to cooperate?”

Bronwyn stared at him indignantly. “Exactly how do you consider that I’m
not
cooperating? I’ve been sitting here for nearly two hours! I could’ve been home by now!”

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The man frowned. “Now that you mention it, it’s an odd time of the night to decide to move. May I ask why you decided to move?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business or what the time of day, or night, has to do with anything,” Bronwyn said crossly.

“Most people don’t load up their car in the middle of the night to move.”

“Well, obviously, some people do and I happened to feel like moving.”

“Why did you feel like moving in the middle of the night?”

“Why do you keep mentioning that it’s the middle of the night—as if a person can’t move at night! It isn’t against the law that I ever heard.”

“You must have had a powerful reason to move at night.”

“
How
did you arrive at that, Sherlock? I’m free, single … and pregnant! I can move any damned time of the day or night I want to and I was in the mood to move!”

The man studied her. “Who’s the father?”

The question sent a jolt through her. She felt her face redden. “Actually, I’m not sure … uh … what that has to do with you.”

“Is it a secret?”

She glared at him. “No! It’s a damned mystery! It’s called, ‘I screwed several guys’ and I thought I’d go home and see if I could figure out which one knocked me up!”

The FBI agent reddened that time. “One of them wouldn’t have happened be named Luke Gray Wolf?”

She frowned uneasily. “Now that you mention it, he was a little dark skinned.”

The man studied her for several unnerving moments. “If you feel like your life might be in danger, Ms. Williams, we can put you in protective custody.”

“If that’s a synonym for jail, no thank you, but thank you for offering!”

“You wouldn’t be in jail. We could move you to a safe house and you’d have around the clock protection.”

“That actually sounds a lot like jail. Anyway, I’m not in danger. I’m tired and I have to pee.”

Both men reddened that time. One nodded to the other and he got up and moved to the door. She was escorted to the damned bathroom by a female cop.

“More comfortable now?” the FBI agent asked when she was escorted back.

“Oh! Wonderfully! Thank you for asking. Can I go now?”

“Just a few more questions.”

Three hours later Bronwyn stopped even trying to volley questions. She got up, looked the floor over, found a spot near one wall, and lay down.

The female cop came in and made her get up.

“I want a lawyer!”

“Why? You aren’t under arrest,” the FBI asshole said.

“Then I’m leaving! Get the fuck out of my way!”

They stopped her at the door. “Bronwyn Williams, we’re taking you into protective custody.”

“Fuck you very much! I’m going to call a lawyer as soon as I find a phone and I’m going to file charges and talk to the newspaper and raise all manner of hell!”

She was so tired when they escorted her out of the police station all she wanted to do was curl up somewhere, anywhere, and sleep. As she was being shoved—‘helped’—

into the black sedan, though, she caught a glimpse of a man near the corner that looked
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vaguely familiar.

It wasn’t until the FBI drove past him that she remembered she’d seen him somewhere before.

He was one of Luke’s pack members—she thought.

Or maybe she’d seen him in at the club?

* * * *

The safe house Bronwyn woke in wasn’t a huge step above the apartment she’d rented. In fact, in a few ways it was worse. Hers didn’t have people walking around it carrying guns. She supposed she either wasn’t very important or the FBI weren’t as convinced that she was connected to the ‘gang’ they were after as they’d made out like they were.

All she had was a female FBI agent inside and a male on the outside.

They couldn’t have been doing much investigating into Luke’s business partners or they wouldn’t have thought a skinny teenage girl and wormy guy would be much help to her. Then again, maybe she was their bait and the grown-up FBI agents were hidden on the rooftops nearby?

She still couldn’t figure out how they’d gotten the impression Luke was in some sort of organized crime gang and she certainly couldn’t understand how they’d pulled Caleb in to him.

Boy was
he
going to be pissed off! He didn’t like attention, not
that
kind of attention. If there was one thing she’d learned about Caleb, he was
extremely
particular about his privacy.

Of course the entire thing was ridiculous! She didn’t believe for one minute that either of them were mixed up in anything illegal! The cops had to have jumped to the conclusion that Caleb was involved for no other reason than the fact that he’d been around her apartment right after she’d been ‘rescued’. They’d put that together with his wealth and power and decided he couldn’t possibly have gotten so wealthy in an honest way.

It wasn’t even Luke’s pack that had killed the poor man! It had been Tommy Two Something. She distinctly recalled overhearing Luke and the others talking about it.

Unless they’d known she was listening, and she supposed they might have, why would they say it was the alpha of another pack?

She supposed Luke might not have wanted her to know that the beast man that had attacked her and Duncan had been one of his pack members, but then again, if he had been Luke wouldn’t have fought him for her, would he? If he’d been one of Luke’s pack brothers he would have been grabbing her for Luke.

She discovered when she finally unbent sufficiently to ask the female agent where her belongings were that the damned cops had them. That made her so angry that she didn’t speak to the woman at all after that. Instead, she shut herself into the bedroom and spent the day staring out the window and trying to figure out how she could scrape the cops and FBI loose and go home.

Not that they had anything they could charge her with! She hadn’t done anything criminal and neither Luke nor Caleb had, so they couldn’t even charge her with associating with criminals. She knew damned well that taking her into protective custody hadn’t been anything but a ruse to hold her while they looked for something they could use as evidence against one of them.

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She wasn’t particularly worried about it. It did worry her, though, that they might be using her to bait a trap. She had a bad feeling that if any of the guys, including Constantine, knew where she was that they’d be all over the ‘safe house’.

As the hours ticked by, though, she began to think that was less and less likely.

She realized she’d been waiting and hoping that they
would
rescue her because she had no idea how to extricate herself from the mess she’d found herself in. The FBI and the cops had completely ignored her when she’d demanded her right to see a lawyer and when she’d demanded to be released. She couldn’t overpower them and she hadn’t discovered any way to sneak out of the apartment. If it hadn’t been on the third floor she might’ve considered trying to climb out a window, but one look at the view was enough to convince her that that wasn’t a possibility.

Besides, simply escaping probably wouldn’t fix the problem. They knew who she was. They’d probably just track her down if she headed home, particularly since she’d told them that was where she meant to go.

She was picking at the food they’d brought her around dark when she heard a sound outside her window that caught her attention. Moving to the window, she opened the blinds.

Constantine was hovering in the air directly outside and a surge of excitement and relief went through her. She almost called out to him before she realized that the agent in the other room would probably hear her. Instead, she very carefully and quietly raised the blinds and then looked for a way to open the window.

She discovered after struggling with it for several moments that it had been painted shut. “I can’t open it,” she said on a breath of sound, her ears pricked for any indication that the agent in the other room might’ve heard her.

“Invite me in.”

Bronwyn blinked at him. “But it isn’t my house …. Please come in.”

He motioned her away from the window.

She studied him doubtfully. “There’s an FBI agent in the next room,” she mouthed at him then put her finger to her lips to caution him to be quiet.

She’d barely stepped away from the window when it shattered inward with the most ungodly racket she’d ever heard. Glass shards and pieces of the window hit the wall on the other side of the room. Screaming, she bounced up and down on the bed in shocked horror, wringing her hands. “My god, Constantine …!”

She didn’t get anymore out. The door to her room burst open just as Constantine levitated through the window. The agent’s eyes rounded. “Halt right there or I’ll shoot!”

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Constantine held out his arms in a gesture of surrender.

The agent eased her stance, looked him up and down and discovered his feet weren’t on the floor, and snapped her gaze back to him. He fixed her with an intense look. Before he’d had time to fully mesmerize her, however, there was an explosion of sound from the other room and she whirled instinctively toward the threat behind her.

When she did, Constantine rushed her, binding her with his arms from behind.

Bronwyn let out a squeak in response to the sudden noise and chaos of activity and bounded off the bed.

Luke and three other lycans bounded through the open door of the bedroom and Bronwyn stared at them in stunned disbelief, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that Constantine and Luke seemed to be working together.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Luke growled, glaring at Constantine.

“I might ask you the same question,” Constantine retorted dryly, “except I’m fairly certain I know.”

He flung the agent bodily toward Luke then and leapt toward Bronwyn. One of Luke’s pack brothers beat him to her and was in the process of slinging her over his shoulder when Constantine plucked her away and sent the lycan sprawling.

Luke grabbed Constantine’s shoulder and dragged him around to meet the fist of his other hand. Constantine went flying backward at the blow but Luke made a grab for her even as Constantine reacted to the blow, managed to snag her arm and jerked from Constantine’s grasp.

Bronwyn’s head spun dizzily as he whirled and raced for the door with her over his shoulder, but she managed to lift her head to search for Constantine. He’d recovered and was struggling with the two lycans who’d entered the room with Luke. His face a mask of pure fury, he slung one of them off and lifted his hand toward her and Luke, but he caught her gaze just then and froze.

It wasn’t until she heard him utter a howl frustration that it dawned on her how close he’d come to slamming both her and Luke with a burst of his powerful energy. She didn’t have time to dwell on the fact that the fear of hurting her had stopped him. Luke burst from the apartment with her.

The agent who’d been standing guard outside was lying in the hallway. She caught a dizzying glimpse of him as Luke raced past him and saw to her relief that he seemed to still be breathing.

Up and down the corridor, alerted by all the noise, several residents who’s nosiness had overcome their sense of self-preservation, opened their doors and peered out. They promptly slammed the doors again when they saw the gang of lycans charging along the corridor.

Luke had made it to the elevator with her, where several of his men were holding the doors open, when the elevator beside it arrived. The moment the doors began to open, men wearing FBI vests burst out.

Luke went into half-shift at the first sign of threat. The moment he did, his pack
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brothers also shifted. Several of the agents actually screamed. Either the shock of suddenly being confronted by beast men made their fingers jerk in reaction or they simply yielded to the instinct for self-preservation. They began firing.

Luke whirled with her and ran the other way as his pack brothers closed ranks behind him. Slamming his free arm and shoulder into the door of the first apartment he came to, he took the door clean off its hinges. The occupants screamed and ran to hide but, with barely a glance at them, Luke charged to the nearest window.

Covering Bronwyn with both hands, he leapt through it.

Bronwyn screamed as the glass shattered around them and her stomach went weightless in flight. Luke’s hard landing on the fire escape across the alley cut her off with a grunt. He paused, staring down at the alley below them and finally charged up the fire escape with her when he saw police cars below.

Bronwyn stared down at the ground bug-eyed as Luke charged up the metal stairs with her, wishing she could faint.

Constantine met them on the roof. Tightening his already bruising grip on her, Luke uttered a snarling bellow and charged straight at him like a football player running the ball. At the last second, Constantine stepped out of the way. Caught of guard, Luke stumbled but managed to maintain his footing and kept going.

Bronwyn caught a glimpse of Constantine right behind them as Luke ran across the roof, paused to check the distance to the next building and leapt, barreling through the window across from them. Constantine reached the window just as Luke plowed through the door barring his path on the other side.

As abruptly as he’d appeared, he disappeared, almost as if he’d been snatched backwards through the window. Bronwyn gaped at the empty window blankly, trying to wrap her mind around it, but she was too shocked for her brain to produce any sort of explanation.

Without any regard for the fact that he was leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, Luke raced down the corridor on the other side of the door and then barreled through the door leading to the stairs. Expecting him to go down, Bronwyn felt a wave of disorientation wash over her as he charged up the flight of stairs instead. She’d just managed to regain some sense of balance when he flattened the door at the top and bounded out onto the roof.

Caleb was waiting for them.

“I see you’ve retrieved my property,” he drawled. “Hand her over and I won’t be forced to kill you.”

“That didn’t work out too well for you last time, did it?” Luke retorted, darting quick looks around in search of an escape. “I tell you what. Why don’t I just set Bronwyn down so she’ll be safe and then you and I can settle this?”

Caleb studied him suspiciously but finally nodded. “Agreed. I will also concede the use of any magic to make things a little more interesting.”

“You’re so gracious!” Luke growled sarcastically, carrying Bronwyn to the edge of the roof.

He met her gaze almost apologetically when he’d set her on her feet. “Sorry, baby,” he murmured. “I’ll collect you in a bit.”

Fear for both him and Caleb abruptly assailed her in spite of the fact that she was so shaken up already she could barely put two thoughts together. Before she could say
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anything, however, Luke scooped her up and dropped her over the side.

She screamed, flailing her arms and legs. The hard jolt when she landed on something made her bite her tongue, but the short drop and hard halt was brief. She began to slide almost the instant she touched down. She clawed uselessly at the slick sides of the nearly tube like thing she’d landed on, her mind scrambling to identify it and the threat.

It was a trash chute for construction, she realized as dust and dirt flew at her, choking her. There was some relief in that, but not much when she knew she was several stories up. Flailing her arms and legs, she finally managed to orient herself and wedge her shoes against the sides of the chute. She thought for several moments that the friction was going to set her shoes on fire, but she began to slow her descent.

She slowed a lot more when she began to bump over the debris cluttered here and there near the bottom, collecting bruises and scratches, but she managed to stop herself before she landed in the back of the truck where the chute ended.

Thoroughly shaken by her experience, she lay panting for breath for several moments, trying to keep from having a heart attack, struggling to gather some strength into her jellified limbs. When she decided she might have enough strength to climb up, she stood up shakily and peered around the area.

She could see the flashing lights of police cars down the block. When she lifted her head, she could hear noises indicating Caleb and Luke’s fight was in full force.

Anger washed through her abruptly.

Crazy damned paranormals!
She
wasn’t a damned immortal! But did they think about that? No! They were too busy trying to kill each other over
their
territory—her pussy!—to consider they might break their play-pretty fighting over it!

Alright, so she was obliged to admit that they’d actually been amazingly careful with her considering they didn’t have to worry about broken bones and such.

Constantine could’ve grabbed her from Luke if he’d been willing to unleash the full brunt of his powers, but he’d held back, she knew, because of her.

She hoped he was alright. She had a bad feeling Caleb had something to do with him abruptly vanishing from the melee.

Shaking her thoughts off, she peered through the shadows for a way down and after a struggle managed to climb out of the chute and down the side of the truck.

Brushing at herself and her clothing to try to get rid of as much of the dirt and grime she’d collected from the ride down as she could, she looked around and finally started walking away from the scene.

She’d lost her purse, she discovered in dismay, when she finally managed to hail a cab, but she discovered a roll of bills in the pocket of her jeans. She didn’t even remember putting it there, but it turned out to be what she needed to pay the cab fare and buy a ticket home.

She was halfway back to Greenville before it occurred to her that she had nowhere to go. She’d sold the boarding house!

She shook the unnerving thought off. Nanna had told her to. She had to trust that Nanna had had a plan that would be revealed to her when she got there. It was around two in the morning when the bus finally dropped her at the deserted bus stop in Greenville. The idea of spending the rest of the night on one of the hard benches didn’t appeal to her, so she walked to her boarding house. It was no surprise to find it dark, but
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it
was
a surprise to discover that the door opened as soon as she turned the knob.

Shrugging, feeling almost as if the house was welcoming her back, she went in. The owner, she figured, had taken up residence in her and her grandmother’s apartment, so she crept down the hall to one of the rooms they leased to short term or over night guests and, finding it, too, was unlocked went in and showered, then climbed in the bed and dropped to sleep.

She slept half the following day, but she felt better when she woke up than she had in ages, excited, filled with anticipation.

She discovered there was a for sale sign in front of the boarding house when she’d checked the house from top to bottom and discovered it was completely vacant.

Chuckling with delight, she examined the sign for the name of the realtor and then headed back into town to buy her boarding house back, stopping first at the bank. It was one of the few times she had reason to be glad she lived in such a small town that everyone knew everyone. Despite the fact that she’d lost all of her identification, she didn’t have a problem. They didn’t even ask for her ID.

When she’d checked her account balance, ordered new checks, and gotten a little cash and a few counter checks, she left to walk to the realtor. She was in luck. The guy who’d bought the boarding house from her had been trying to sell it ever since and hadn’t found a buyer. She bought it back for less than he’d pay her for it and still had a tidy nest egg. The realtor, Carol, a woman she’d gone to school with, filled her in on all the local gossip while she typed up the sale papers and alternated with trying to pump her for information as to why she’d returned.

She smiled at Carol brightly. “Oh, I’m not a city girl. I just wasn’t happy there.

I only went to get knocked up, anyway.”

The realtor nearly fell out of her chair. Bronwyn thought for several moments that she might swallow her tongue. She waited in horrified expectation but, to her disappointment, Carol recovered. “You’re pregnant?”

She patted her flat stomach proudly. “Yes, I am!”

“Well … uh …You got married?”

Bronwyn grinned. “No, I didn’t! I mean, as Nanna used to say, why buy the pig if you can get the sausage whenever you like?”

Carol nearly passed out in horror at that. Bronwyn was actually surprised she didn’t cross herself and try warding her off with a crucifix. She finished the paperwork in record time, her hands shaking so badly with the need to rush off and tell everyone that she could hardly finish.

It was like a drug to these people, Bronwyn thought with disgust as she left the office and headed home. She supposed she shouldn’t have been quite so blunt, but it wasn’t as if it would be her little secret long. In point of fact, she had no intention of behaving as if she had a dirty little secret to hide! The neighbors could have apoplexy over it as far as she was concerned.

The boarding house had a musty closed up smell she hadn’t noticed the night before—small wonder when she’d been so exhausted. She wasn’t surprised, though, given what Carol had told her. Apparently the man who’d bought it had turned out her long term tenants as soon as the ink was dry on the paper—the lying bastard—expecting to make a go of it was a bed and breakfast. Hoping some of her previous tenants might come back, she took the sign stating that she had rooms for rent and planted it near the
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curb in place of the for sale sign.

Wondering if the jerk had also thrown out the furniture and belongings he’d offered to store for her in the shed out back, she went around the house to check to see if she had anything left to her name and discovered with an uplifting of her spirits that everything was just as she’d left it.