Redemption: Montana Wolves, Book Three (Montana Wolves series 3)

REDEMPTION

MONTANA WOLVES BOOK THREE

CHLOE COLE

FROG PRINTS PUBLISHING

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

1.
Chapter One

2.
Chapter Two

3.
Chapter Three

4.
Chapter Four

5.
Chapter Five

6.
Chapter Six

7.
Chapter Seven

8.
Chapter Eight

9.
Chapter Nine

10.
Chapter Ten

11.
Chapter Eleven

12.
Opposition

Also By Chloe Cole

Copyrights

INTRODUCTION

Amber Jansen is losing her mind. After a near tragic run-in with a psychopath, she’s trying to go back to life as she knew it, but she can’t seem to shake the feeling that something is still terribly wrong. Riddled with guilt and plagued by nightmares, she wonders if she’s buried some important piece of information in the depths of her mind. Information so disturbing that remembering it could destroy her…

Wolf-shifter Billy MacKenzie has lived by one rule and one rule only: The pack comes first. Always. But when Amber Jansen accidentally sees something she shouldn’t have, he feels an unprecedented desire to protect her from the powers that be, who would rather silence her forever than risk being exposed.

If he breaks the laws of his kind to shield her, he’ll leave himself vulnerable to the one woman he wants but can never have.

PROLOGUE

A 
mber Jansen stared at her reflection and wondered dully if she was going to lose her job.

She wouldn’t be surprised. She’d taken a two-week leave of absence already, telling her boss she’d pulled a muscle. But even now, the vitality was missing from her face, and her hair was as lackluster as her skin.

The black bustier she wore was looser than it should have been since she’d lost ten pounds she couldn’t spare, and she was totally exhausted. If she wanted to keep dancing--and by extension, paying the bills--something was going to have to give. Three weeks had passed since she’d been tied to a chair while a woman was attacked and kidnapped by Tobias Wheeler right in front of her, and she was no closer to moving past it than she had been the day it happened.

She stripped off her costume hastily, and then stepped into the dressing room shower. Turning the water on full blast, she leaned her back against the cool tiles and pressed her balled fists over her eyes, determined to halt the instant replay that was her now-constant companion.

She began to hum. Then, desperate to shut out the insistent images, she began to sing the lullaby her grandmother used to sing when Amber was small.

She could almost hear that clear soprano; could almost feel the soft hand stroking her hair as they rocked in the chair. How she wished she was still alive to sing to her and comfort her. She had never needed it more.

God dammit, get a hold of yourself, woman. There’s no such thing as werewolves.

Her voice broke as she began to sob.

CHAPTER ONE

One week later

Pray, Montana
…

^“
W
e should never have let her go like that,” Billy said as he leaned forward in the wide, leather chair by the fireplace. Try as he might, weeks after the incident, he still hadn’t been able to get Amber Jansen out of his head.

The expression on her face when she’d realized that she almost cost Chandra her life.

Or the one after that, when she’d seen him shift into a werewolf from afar.

His stomach clenched at the recollection. Fuck, he’d hated that he’d scared her.

“You all keep saying that, but what was the alternative?” Liam asked, scrubbing his hand over his face. The alpha stood in the center of the great room, eyeing each member of his pack questioningly. “Anyone?”

Billy shifted in his seat, pissed off and primed to argue, but with nothing that even remotely qualified as a solution to add to the conversation. He’d been losing sleep for the past month trying to solve this particular problem and kept coming up empty.

“I don’t know what the right thing to do was,” Amalie said, finally breaking the silence. “I just know that sending her back home like nothing happened was wrong. She never believed the whole ‘delusion triggered by stress’ nonsense we tried to feed her. I’ve heard of PTSD, but who the hell goes through a traumatic event and imagines they saw a werewolf? Of course she’s going to be asking questions, and causing problems. Maybe we should tell her the truth. Keep her here for a while until we can gauge how she’s taking it.”

She shook her head slowly and then shrugged, a bleak expression on her pretty but strained face as she looked at Liam. “And, if she decides to blow the lid off of it, we run.”

“Telling her the truth isn’t an option.”

The alpha’s tone was sharper with his mate than Billy had ever heard it before and he winced on her behalf.

“We barely avoided an all-out clan battle when I told you we were shifters,” Liam continued, “And you’d already been bitten and on your way to becoming a werewolf. Amber is totally human. At minimum, telling her would result in repercussions from the other packs when they found out. Tensions are still high and alliances are fragile. Another straw on that camel’s back and…”

He trailed off, but there was no need to elaborate.

He was talking about war.

Billy clenched his jaw, the feeling of helplessness weighing on him so heavily, it made his gut ache. There was no perfect answer here, and in lieu of that, the pack was almost always going to pick what was least destructive to the pack as a whole. Several of them were already nodding their agreement, murmuring softly amongst themselves, but Liam held up a hand to silence them.

“And yes, worst case scenario is that she blows the lid off. But if humans know about us, believe me when I tell you, we can’t run far enough. We’ve seen it too many times. People are dangerous when faced with the unknown. Our kind was almost wiped out more than once due to crazed mobs. At the end of the day, no matter how strong we are, we’re still outnumbered more than ten million to one. I’m not willing to risk it for a woman we hardly know. Especially if her life isn’t in imminent danger.” Liam looked questioningly at his second in command. “Jax?”

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t have a lot of sympathy.” He slid a muscled arm around his mate and held her close. “She’s the one who put Chandra in danger to start. To my mind, her thinking she’s got some screws loose is getting off easy. I would have cheerfully cut her throat at the time.”

A snarl rose in Billy’s throat but he choked it back. If he’d been in Jax’s position, he might feel the same way. But more than that, the level of attachment he felt to Amber after only knowing her a short time was out of line. Probably just some twisted savior complex because he’d been the one to take care of her the night everything had gone down.

He stayed silent as his packmate continued.

“That said, I know Chan feels differently, and I respect that. She’s a more forgiving soul than I am. I’m definitely concerned about Amber prying and the research she’s been doing, though. And it makes me think that some steps need to be taken to help her make peace with what she saw. Or forget it altogether.” Jax shrugged and shook his head slowly. “If there was some way we could alter her memory, that would be the best option.”

Billy’s hackles rose again, and he couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “Hey, yeah, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you call the Men in Black and ask them if we could use their flashy thing to wipe her memory?” he asked, laying on the sarcasm, thick. “I wish I thought of that.”

He could feel the weight of Jax’s stare and turned to face his friend. Clearly, not happy. He had nothing but love for the guy, but Jax had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide about humans since Tobias Wheeler had kidnapped his mate.

Wheeler was a flat-out psycho obsessed with proving they were werewolves, and he’d enlisted an unwitting Amber to help him. He’d told her he was a private investigator hired by victims of a recent rash of burglaries, and that he had found the culprits. If she would infiltrate the compound and gather some concrete evidence for the police, he would give her the reward money, not to mention that she would be doing her civic duty.

It wasn’t until she’d inadvertently lured Chandra into Wheeler’s clutches that she had realized her mistake.

Billy, like all of his packmates, had been furious with her at first. But when he’d scooped her trembling little body into his arms, his anger had melted away. She’d been terrified, completely vulnerable, and the fierce and sudden need to protect had welled up inside him, unbidden.

Even more surprising than that? He had wanted to run out of that house with her in his arms; to shield her from the fury of his pack . . . his
family
.

What the hell was
that
about?

Jax still held his gaze, and for a moment, the atmosphere grew even more strained until Billy blew out a sigh, willing some of the tension from his body. It wasn’t Jax’s fault this had happened. Taking it out on him wasn’t going to help.

And his friend wasn’t wrong. Amber was in this mess because she’d made a serious error in judgment. She had trusted the wrong person and had eventually led a psychopath into their midst. That naïveté had almost proven deadly.

Too bad the events of that day had robbed her of that naïveté. It would have been really helpful now. If only she’d believed their story, they could’ve all just moved on like nothing had happened.

But he’d seen her face after the fact. She was already fragile and devastated by the consequences of her actions, wracked with guilt. Seeing something that couldn’t be explained by anything that made sense to her had been the final straw.

Her mind was slowly coming unraveled.

As they took turns randomly checking up on her and watching from afar, it was becoming more and more clear that she was spiraling out of control. At first it seemed like depression, she was near catatonic, unable to make her shifts at work. But lately, she was almost manic. At the library, furiously pawing through books on folklore and scouring ancient microfiche.

He tried not to think of how fragile she’d looked the last time he saw her. And he tried even harder not to think about why the hell he cared so much. For some reason, though, he couldn’t get her out of his head. Call him crazy, but the thought of that one terrible mistake ruining her whole life sickened him.

He refused to let that happen.

“As much as memory wiping would be helpful right now, we don’t have that ability,” he said, keeping his tone even in spite of the riot going on inside him. “We need to focus on something real and actionable. Something that will give us an idea on where her head is at so we can attempt to do some immediate damage control before the other packs get wind of this.”