Mine for Eternity [Council Enforcers] (Siren Publishing Classic) (3 page)

Damn. How did he know that was exactly what she was planning to do? Tessa could feel her cheeks heating as she blushed. “Okay,” she agreed. Mitch had already done so much for them without asking for anything in return. Letting him know when she was leaving was the least she could do.

Seeming satisfied, Mitch left the room, closing the door behind him. Tessa quickly went over and flipped the lock. She may have been willing to trust Mitch, but she wasn’t going to be stupid about it. Plus, she wasn’t going to make it easy for Simba to sneak in and have himself a midnight snack.

In all the confusion, Nico hadn’t been able to take a shower, so she went into the bathroom and soaped up a washcloth. Tessa cleaned him up as best she could without waking him. Once that was done, she crawled into bed and curled around her son. As she drifted off to sleep, Tessa thought about Mitch. She had meant to ask him about his choice in pet but never got the chance. He had obviously locked the lion in his room because she hadn’t seen it since she ran out of there naked and screaming, and she hoped it stayed wherever it was.

Thinking of herself naked reminded her of how Mitch had looked at her. Tessa shivered thinking of how the man’s eyes traced every inch of her body. Too bad she was leaving in the morning. Her last thought was how she wanted to run her fingers through his wild, golden hair to see if it was as soft and silky as it looked.

* * * *

Mitch heard the lock click on the bedroom door and smiled. His mate was something else. Not only was she beautiful with the same ice-blue eyes and black hair her son had, but his mate had inner strength that called to him. He had seen her temper several times so far, mostly when she was protecting her son. She was like a momma bear with her back up, ready to charge at anyone she felt was a threat to Nico. It was a definite turn-on to him and made him want to throw her across the kitchen table and claim her right then and there. His gums and teeth itched just thinking about sinking them into her shoulder and cementing their bond.

Too bad she didn’t know that she was no longer in charge of protecting Nico. Since Tessa was his mate, that automatically made Nico his cub. Both their protection and safety were now his responsibility. He had a bad feeling Tessa would fight him on that point, but he didn’t care. It was one issue he wouldn’t back down from.

Mitch headed back downstairs and grabbed Tessa’s bags from the kitchen. He should have felt guilty for going through her things, but he didn’t. His mate was tight lipped about who she was running from, so he was going to find out the answers on his own. He was glad his mate had literally walked right into his life, but she wouldn’t have been on the run if someone wasn’t threatening her, so Mitch needed to find out who it was and eliminate the problem.

He went through both bags noticing there was nothing but a few sets of dirty clothes between them and a few pictures. He gritted his teeth when he only found twenty-seven dollars, knowing Tessa wouldn’t have made it much farther. There was no way he was letting her leave, so the little bit of cash she had was no longer a problem. Once he had Tessa’s ID, Mitch headed to his office. Working as an enforcer, he had made a lot of contacts. Contacts that owed him a lot of favors. He planned to call in a few of those favors to find out everything he needed to know about his mate. He started first with his contact who worked at the police precinct closest to the address listed on Tessa’s driver’s license. The man was human, but his mate was a shifter who Mitch had saved from a member of her old pack who had become obsessed with her. He thought of his mate as he waited for the other line to pick up. According to her address, she was from a suburb of Chicago. If that was where she had run from, then she was a long way from home. He lived about thirty miles outside of Flagstaff, which meant that she had run halfway across the country.

“This is Detective Reynolds,” the man announced when the line picked up.

“Hey, Detective, this is Enforcer Ericson.” Mitch used the enforcer title to let the man know this wasn’t a social call. He knew enforcers were feared. They were the boogeymen that parents told their kids about to keep them in line. No one wanted a visit from an enforcer because, nine times out of ten, it meant instant death. It was a lonely life, but Mitch took his job seriously. He did it to protect his race, to keep their secret from getting out. They were judge, jury, and executioners all in one. The gasp of breath and quiver he could hear in the detective’s voice proved his point. Evidently the man’s wife had clued him in on the shifter world.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“I need some information on a Tessa Palmer. Her last known address is in that area.” He could hear the detective typing as he spoke.

“I have a Tessa Palmer, age twenty-three, listed as missing along with her son, Nico Palmer, age two,” the detective read.

“Does it say how long she has been missing or who reported her?”

“Yes, it looks like she has been missing a little over two weeks. It was reported by her employer when she didn’t call or show up for work for a couple of days. Also—oh no.”

“Also what?” Mitch didn’t like the pause he heard. He had a feeling whatever he heard next wouldn’t be good.

“It says Tessa called in a murder at a park near her home one night before she disappeared. She said she saw a man ripping a woman’s chest open. The case had been flagged as one of ours, and a cleanup crew was sent to check it out. Tessa was informed that there was no body or blood found at the scene and she must have imagined things since it had been so late at night and she was walking home by herself.”

“So you’re telling me she watched a rogue kill a woman and she was told that she must have imagined it because she was spooked?” Mitch could feel his fangs dropping and his claws lengthening at the thought of his mate coming into contact with a rogue.

“Yes, sir,” the detective squeaked.

“Was the rogue caught? For that matter, why wasn’t Tessa being monitored?” Whenever humans came across a rogue shifter, they were supposed to be watched to make sure they didn’t go telling everyone what they saw. If they did, then they were quickly dealt with. Tessa should have never made it out of the city if she was being monitored.

“This was all reported to the council, sir. We did everything we were supposed to do on our end. I can tell you this isn’t the first attack we’ve had to deal with. Over the past three months we’ve had to send out containment units for over thirty rogue attacks, and it seems like it’s getting worse every day. It’s getting harder and harder to cover up everything.”

That stunned Mitch. Why was he just now hearing about this? Even though Chicago was out of his territory, he should have still heard something if they were having that many attacks. Something was going on, and he didn’t like it one bit. “Was Tessa’s rogue ever caught?”

“There is nothing here to indicate that it was.”

“Thank you, Detective.” Mitch hung up before the man could respond. He logged onto the secure council website and tried to pull up Tessa’s case file. If she was witness to a rogue attack then she should have had one, but just as Mitch suspected, there was no trace of her. He tried to pull up any case files for the territory that she lived in but was met with the same issue, none existed.

Mitch sat back, frowning. There should have been at least thirty files according to Detective Reynolds. Anytime a containment unit was sent out, a file was started. It wasn’t closed until the rogue was caught and handled and they were sure the witness wasn’t going to talk. Then and only then were the files closed and only by an enforcer. Still those files were archived, so he should have been able to pull them up. The fact that none existed completely contradicted the detective.

Someone was covering for a rogue, and he had a feeling it was an enforcer. He didn’t like what he was thinking, but Mitch knew deep down in his gut that he was right. He just had to do a little more research and figure out who to trust with the information once he found it. The situation needed to be handled carefully and quietly. The fact that an enforcer could turn bad would have the whole shifter society in an uproar. Mitch had three enforcers that he trusted with his life, so once he gathered all his information to present to the council, he would bring them in. He had a feeling they would be hunting one of their own very soon.

He still had to figure out what to do with Tessa. Mitch had a feeling he knew what was going on. Tessa witnessed a rogue killing a woman and reported it. In normal circumstances, she would have been protected until the rogue was caught, but Tessa hadn’t been and the rogue came after her. She had been smart enough to take her son and run, but Mitch knew she wouldn’t have lasted much longer. Hell, the fact that she had made it halfway across the country without being torn apart was a testament to Tessa’s strength. Once rogues locked onto a scent, they didn’t stop until their prey was caught. Tessa was prey at the moment, so all Mitch had to do was sit back and let the rogue come to him. His problem was going to be figuring out how to keep his little mate from running before that could happen.

There was nothing Mitch could do but wait. He had his mate and cub safely tucked away upstairs with no plans of letting them out of his sight in the near future. In the meantime, he needed to get to work gathering all the evidence he needed to take down an enforcer.

Tessa sighed as she turned over and blinked her eyes through the shining sun on her face. She felt relaxed and refreshed after the good night of sleep she had in the soft bed. She hadn’t slept that well since the night before she witnessed a woman being killed, and she had Mitch to thank for that. Tessa shuddered and squeezed her eyes closed trying to block out the memories. Instead, she focused on trying to make herself get up so that she could get her and Nico’s things together to leave.

She was saddened at the thought of leaving, but if Tessa was honest with herself, she didn’t know if it was because she was leaving the first place she had felt safe since she had started running, or if it was the thought of leaving Mitch. Just thinking of the man sent shivers down her spine. Tessa couldn’t figure out what it was about Mitch, but there was some unexplainable connection drawing her to him. She wondered if it was all one-sided or if he felt the same strange pull as well. Judging by the way he had looked at her the day before, she would have said yes, but it could have been just because she was naked.

Tessa rubbed her face with her hands and groaned. She didn’t need to be thinking about Mitch. She needed to think about what she was going to do to keep her and Nico safe. She knew they couldn’t keep running forever. It was only a matter of time before whatever was chasing them finally caught up to them. There had already been too many close calls as it was. Tessa feared she was going to have to do the one thing she didn’t want to do and that was find a place to leave Nico. Her heart broke just thinking about it, but that thing was after her, not him. She would die if something were to happen to her son because of her.

The only problem with leaving Nico somewhere safe was that Tessa didn’t know where to take him. She had no family herself, and as bad as it was to say, she didn’t even know where Nico’s father was. Her son was a product of a brief fling she had when she was twenty-one, but Tessa had no regrets. She finally had something that she could call her own and would love her unconditionally. She had spent her entire life hopping from one foster home to the next until the system turned her out on the streets as soon as she turned eighteen. She had gone a little wild after that and partied most nights up until she had found out she was pregnant. From that point on she had gotten her life together because she had someone else that was going to depend on her. She never once thought of giving Nico up because she knew what life was like growing up in the system. Tessa was able to use her high school diploma to get a secretary position at a family-owned company and rented a small apartment. The pay wasn’t much and it was hard to make ends meet with rent and baby expenses, but somehow Tessa managed. It was the first time she had felt like an adult.

Unfortunately, now Tessa had to contemplate giving her son up all because she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She felt tears prickle her eyes but refused to give in to them. Crying wouldn’t solve anything. There had to be a way to fix the mess she was in without having to give up her son. She just had to figure it out.
It would be so easy if we could just stay here forever. Mitch and his lion would keep us safe.
Tessa laughed at the thought. If only it were that easy. She rolled over to shake her son awake and froze when she realized he wasn’t in the bed with her.

“Oh no, Nico!” she yelled, feeling like her heart was about to beat out of her chest. Tessa dove out of the bed and ran to the bathroom but immediately knew he wasn’t there because the light was still off. Panicked, she raced to the bedroom door and flung it open. “Nico!”

Tessa ran down the steps screaming her son’s name. By the time she reached the bottom, she was practically hyperventilating. It hadn’t slipped past her that the bedroom door had been unlocked although she had locked it before she went to bed. She didn’t know if Nico had unlocked it himself, which was highly unlikely, or if Mitch had come in during the night.

“Nico!” she screamed again.

“Hey, hey. Calm down. What’s wrong?”

Mitch held his hands out as if he didn’t want to spook her, but Tessa wasn’t having it. “Where is he!” she yelled, slamming her hands into his chest. “What have you done with my son?”