Twin Wolf Trouble (Shifter Squad Six 2) (8 page)

She’d been on birth control when they had met that night, but she got pregnant anyway. She’d blamed the potency of her two lovers, and it seemed like a solid enough assumption. When she found out she was pregnant, she’d known immediately that she’d keep the babies. What she’d told Thatch and Tex had been true—she wanted to bring children into a loving family—but for her, the right decision was to make sure that
she
would be all the love they needed, if fate had decided things that way.

She’d manage. She always did. No matter what, she’d make it work.

Anything for my boys,
she thought, taking a big sip of her wine.

“Earth to Adley! You still there? Did I give you too much wine? I’m happy to keep it all,” Fiona said with a laugh, waving her hand in front of Madeline’s face.

“Oh! Sorry,” Madeline replied with a start, brushing the thought of her hot wolves out of her head. “What were you saying?”

“I was asking if you wanted to come for a walk in town tomorrow. Cornell is leaving me with the van so we could fit the kids and the strollers in it and go have a walk through town. You know, see humans again, the type other than the suburban variety?”

Madeline nodded quickly, grabbing for the wine bottle to fill her glass again.

If it gets Tex and Thatch off of my mind for a minute, I’ll do anything!

“That sounds like a great plan. What time?”

But as usual in Madeline’s life, nothing easy was actually going to be easy. There was no such thing as a simple walk with luck like Madeline’s!
 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Thatch

“I’ll be expecting to see you tomorrow, man. Bring the cash.”

The text was nondescript as usual. Thatch’s face hardened as he stuffed the phone into his pocket, pretending to ignore it but knowing damn well he was going to show up. Blake Wilby was like a big pus-filled wart on his life for the last two years, sucking the life out of him however he could. And the worst thing was, Thatch couldn’t get rid of him. Instead of putting the son of a bitch out of his mind once and for all, one way or another, he constantly had to pander to the man’s ever-increasing appetite for money and being a pain in Thatch’s ass.

“What was that? That girl from last week blowing up your phone?” Tex asked, leaning back with his chair so far that Thatch was sure the knucklehead would topple over.

“Naw. It’s no one,” Thatch replied offhandedly, flicking the TV on.

He clicked through the channels until he arrived on some obscure news channel, blasting Chicago news around the clock. Though seeing as it was Chicago that they were currently hunkered down in, not much was actually going on. Connor, their squad leader, was out somewhere, and Grim was out looking for trouble, presumably, even if it was the middle of the damn day.

By the sounds coming from one of the adjoining rooms in their spacious, but still suffocating rented apartment, Grant was busy pummeling the shit out of the heavy bag. Only Dutch was in the living room with them, sprawled out on the couch, reading something. Everyone with the notable exception of Thatch were entirely bored of… well, everything. They’d been on hold in Chicago for a week now, waiting for mission details that were arriving “any minute” and it was driving the special ops shifters wild with impatience.

Thatch, of course, had other things on his mind. Like how to deal once and for all with the guy trying to wrangle money out of him for the last two years, and as usual not coming up with anything other than murder. But that wasn’t his style.

Though the bastard completely deserves it,
he thought grimly.

Slumping down in a recliner, Thatch kicked his legs up on the coffee table, garnering a look from Dutch. The sniper quirked his brow, looking at Thatch’s boots and then at his face.

“What?” Thatch snapped, practically snarling.

After a short pause, Dutch shrugged. “Nothing, man. Chill.”

Tex leaned back again, stopping his incessant twiddling on another timer. Thatch could feel the question coming before it even left Tex’s mouth, and he already knew it was going to annoy the hell out of him.

“You cool, bro?”

“No, I am not cool,” Thatch spat, snapping his neck side to side. “We’ve been on hold for a week while I could have been doing other jobs with other teams, nothing’s fucking happening, and I can feel myself growing old and withered as we fucking wait. This shit’s ridiculous. And it’s Chicago. In the fall. Nothing but wind and rain.”

Tex smirked, shrugging his shoulders. “And you say I’m high-strung,” he noted, going back to his fiddling.

He must have a truck full of timers and triggers by now,
Thatch thought darkly, glancing at his brother.
Exactly what got us into this shit.

Not getting to do anything twisted him up. The past two years had been a damn headache to begin with. Ever since Blake got in touch, Thatch felt himself getting more and more agitated with the world. It wasn’t made any better by the fact that he couldn’t share his problem with Tex, since it would only escalate the issue. So there he was, getting more agitated, on edge, and aggressive by the day and now The Firm wasn’t even putting his foul mood into use? Fucking fantastic.

Of course, truth be told, there was one thing that could cool down the unusually hot-headed Thatch. Every now and then, and by that he meant almost on a daily basis, his thoughts would drift to that night he’d had with Madeline and Tex back in Arizona and his stomach would knot up and his throat would go dry. He was an Alpha shifter; it didn’t take too much to realize what had happened that night. And now he couldn’t believe that they’d let her get away.

It had almost become a game, ignoring that topic with Tex. Thatch could read his brother like an open book, and whenever they saw someone on the street who bore the slightest similarity to her, Tex would be twisting himself into a pretzel, making sure it wasn’t Madeline. And for all his joshing on the topic, Thatch was entirely certain that neither he nor Tex had been with another woman since then.

They’d found their mate. And they’d let her go. He couldn’t believe what fucking morons they were.

When they’d said their goodbyes and the team carted her into the big, black, nondescript SUV, Thatch’s stomach had dropped and he was pretty sure his heart had been beating slower ever since. He knew now that he should have gone with her, whatever it took. And he had even tried to find out her new identity in a moment of weakness a few months back, but no luck.

If The Firm decided that something shouldn’t be known or someone shouldn’t be found, they damn well kept it like that. Their commanding officer, Colonel Hemingway, a retired SEAL like the rest of them, had been very clear on what would happen if Thatch tried to find her on his own. No more job, no more team, no more anything. Thatch figured that he could take it, but he couldn’t make that decision for both himself and Tex. And he knew that if he brought Madeline up, it would open a can of worms neither one of them were prepared to deal with.

She’s safer without us,
Thatch told himself, watching the news with absolute disinterest.

There was some sort of a commotion going on in the middle of town, a suspected explosion that got Tex picking up his project and walking into the living room to watch it. Thatch, however, couldn’t have cared less. The happy, warm, and fuzzy thoughts he usually had about Madeline, remembering her sweet lips and that body that drove him crazy, were replaced by a nagging anger at himself for fucking up the most important thing in his and Tex’s life.

Alpha twin shifters were nothing without their mate. And Thatch’s and Tex’s was nowhere to be found, kept from them by both fate and their personal failings. If that didn’t kill what little could have been left of Thatch’s mood after getting a text from his favorite blackmailer, Thatch didn’t know what could.

“The hell’s going on?” Dutch asked, propping his head up with one hand and closing his book.

“Some sort of bullshit,” Thatch commented dryly, getting another questioning look from Tex and shaking his head at it.

Rein it in, man. You’re supposed to be the calm and calculated one,
he reminded himself, taking a deep breath and letting the tension flow out of him.

He was about to peel himself out of the chair and go ask Grant if he could have a go at the heavy bag, or if the medic wanted to spar, when something caught his eye on the screen. Thatch frowned, leaning in closer, and a second later he felt his heart skip a beat.

“Holy shit,” Tex muttered next to him, dropping the project he was holding.

“It can’t fucking be,” Thatch said, standing up and walking closer to the flatscreen, crouching down in front of it.

“What?” Dutch asked again, curiosity in his voice.

There, standing at the sidelines of the presumed bombing site, trying to make her way through the crowd with a baby stroller, was Madeline. Thatch could only vaguely tell when it was that Tex came to stand next to him, the both of them staring in stunned silence as the camera panned over the crowd and caught a lick of Madeline’s flaming red hair and then her peeking over her shoulder, clearly trying to get as far as she could from both the cameras and the street with the commotion.

“It is,” Tex finally replied, his voice sounding giddy. “It’s her. We gotta go get her!”

“No, we can’t,” Thatch spoke, rationality galloping way ahead of his emotions for a hot second.

He could feel the burning look he was getting from Tex. And that’s when his heart caught up with his head.

“You’re right. We have to get her. If we recognized her, odds are those fuckers from the train will as well,” Thatch barked, jumping up and leaping into action.

Tex was halfway through the door, grabbing his go-bag on the way by the time Thatch had realized the urgency of the matter. Of course they had to go get her. The Firm wouldn’t care what the hell happened to her at this point—they’d gone above and beyond by giving her a new identity to begin with. But if something happened to Madeline, Thatch could never live with himself. And then, of course, there was the baby stroller. His mind didn’t even bend around the implications of that.

“The hell are you two going? Should I come?” Dutch called after them, receiving a firm “Fuck no!” from both Thatch and Tex.

They were speeding down the stairs almost in unison, both holding onto their lightly packed bags filled with essentials.

This can’t be a coincidence that we’re here,
Thatch thought feverishly.
What the hell’s going on?

He was dialing Connor’s number on his cell by the time they got in the matte gray SUV, Tex taking the wheel. They had no way of knowing if they could even find Madeline in town, or if they could get close enough to it with the commotion, but Thatch knew for a fact that he couldn’t let her slip away again. The way Tex was gunning it, breaking every traffic law known to the fine state of Illinois, suggested that Thatch wasn’t the only one with those exact feelings.

For now, Thatch only knew that they needed to find her and keep her safe. Anything else was bound to be figured out when he could get rid of that painful stab in his gut telling him that things were way more screwed up than they should have been.

We’re coming for you, Madeline. Hold on, baby.
 

CHAPTER NINE

Madeline

“Adley, are you okay? I know that stuff was scary, but calm down, girl! We’ll be fine,” Fiona said, throwing glances at Madeline.

“Just get us home as fast as you can, Fiona, please,” Madeline replied, twisting herself in her seat to check on her boys as well as peek out the back window.

Any minute now, she was expecting to see some hulking black SUV, or a damn attack helicopter appear behind the horizon, zooming in with only one mission—to kill her and her kids. It sounded ridiculous when she tried to put it into words, it really did, and so she didn’t attempt it again. But something in her heart told her that she had to get out of Chicago as fast as possible.

There were cameras there. What if I got caught on one of them? What if they already know where I am? I can’t let anything happen to Raze and Rhodes… I have to protect them.

She was chewing on her lower lip, gnashing her teeth into the soft flesh so hard she was sure she’d draw blood soon. Her hands felt clammy and she had goose bumps covering her skin. In a lot of ways, she was more terrified now than she had ever been on the train. There, everything was happening in the moment, all the possible outcomes laid out for her neatly in one row. Life or death, no other choices. Now? Now she didn’t know what to expect.