Uncaging Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 4) (8 page)

Scarlet crossed her legs nervously in her chair, her gray eyes tracking Gavin’s every movement as he sat behind his desk and laced his fingers together on top of her file.

“So, is Sarah your middle name?” he asked.

Shit
. He hadn’t meant to ask that, but it had just come out, totally unbidden.

“No,” she said evenly. “It was the first name I could think of.”

“Why’d you lie about it?”

“I didn’t think you’d be my parole officer.”

She did have a point.

“I guess I know why you hightailed it after...”

Gavin swallowed. He couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud in his office

“After the show,” he finished.

“I went there on an impulse,” she said, keeping her voice low. Her gray eyes locked onto him, and Gavin could already feel himself drifting. “It was my first night out of jail, I just wanted to be regular again, go out, have a drink—”

“Get laid?” Gavin said.

Something occurred to him, and he opened her file, glanced at a page.

“That’s why you wouldn’t take your shirt off,” he said. “You’ve got two prison tattoos and you didn’t want us to see them.”

Self-consciously, Scarlet tugged her cardigan sleeve down over her forearm and held her hand against it, like maybe the tattoo wouldn’t exist if Gavin couldn’t see it.

“At least you brought condoms,” he muttered. “Have you been tested lately?”

“I’m clean,” she said. “The tats are a couple of years old.”

I went looking for you
, he thought.
I misused government data to find you
.

“Look,” she said, her gray eyes flashing. “You got what you wanted. Nobody got hurt. I’m sorry I lied and then ran, but what was I going to say, that I just got out of jail?”

“Forget it,” Gavin said, looking down at the file again. “Just forget it. Let’s discuss the terms of your parole.”

Scarlet nodded once, curtly.

Chapter Eight

Scarlet

Scarlet felt trapped. Gavin’s office was a decent size, but with the two of them in there, it felt utterly stifling, like she couldn’t breathe or escape.

He looked down, reading aloud from a sheet of paper, refusing to look at her.

I can’t believe he’s my parole officer
, she thought.
Of all the luck
.

The worst part was the way she’d felt in the moment that she’d seen him: utterly elated, even after a full day of convincing herself that what had happened meant nothing. Her heart skipped, and then come crashing down.

Not only was she caught in a lie, she’d slept with her parole officer. How was it even possible for her to fuck up so soon after getting released?

“I understand you’re living with your brother, Trevor, and his spouses?” Gavin asked. He looked down at the desk instead of up at her.

“Yeah,” she said.

I wish I didn’t still want him
, she thought, watching his forearms against the desk.

“And you’ve found part-time employment?”

“At the Sweet Dreams Bakery,” she said.

“That’s human-run,” Gavin said. He still wouldn’t look at her.

“Sure is,” she said. She knew that she was being bratty, but he wouldn’t even
look
at her. What was she supposed to do?

“You don’t have a problem with working for humans?”

“No,” she said, starting to get exasperated. “I live with one. A bear, too, and I haven’t tried to murder
either
of them yet.”

Finally he looked up at her, his blue eyes dangerous.

“You came very, very close to a life sentence for murdering a federal agent,” he said. “You remember that, right? When you shot a kid in the neck with a dart?”

“He was bait,” Scarlet snapped back. “The Women’s Penitentiary gets the news, you know. That FBI director who got disgraced, what was his name —”
 

“Brown,” offered Gavin.

“Right. He sent that kid out to get shot, and I’m the unlucky one who did it.”

“You’re still the one who did it.”

Scarlet leaned back into her chair, forcing herself to stay calm, or at least sort of calm. She looked out the window and counted to ten slowly, watching the rain drip down the outside of the glass pane.

“What does this have to do with right now?” she finally asked, making her voice as soft as possible.

Gavin looked at her for a long time, then finally looked away.

“You’re right,” he said. “Nothing.”

“I know I did bad shit,” she said. “But it was a long time ago. I’ve been in prison for
four years
, Gavin, and I ratted on my family to get out, and now I’m here and I’m trying to be a good person for once.”

They looked at each other again, and Scarlet’s heart lurched as Gavin’s blue eyes searched hers again.

“I’m sorry I lied,” she said. “I wanted to be a regular person for once, not an ex-con trying to get her life together. Can we get past that to the part where I get a life back?”

Even Scarlet was astonished that she sounded so
reasonable
. For some reason, she thought again of the tiny bird that morning on her window, three eggs in its nest, and she felt her throat close a little.

We all just want our normal lives
, she thought.

Gavin said nothing, but he held her gaze, flipping a pen around in his right hand.

“Okay,” he finally said.

Then he looked down at the desk, at the stack of paperwork on it.

“We still have to go through all of this, though.”

Scarlet nodded, and he handed her a pen so she could start signing paperwork.

It felt like it took ages, but when Scarlet looked at the clock again, her hand cramping from signing again and again, it was only eleven thirty.

“All right,” he said. “That’s everything. Any questions.”

Is that really all
? Scarlet wondered.

I won’t say anything if he doesn’t,
she thought.

“I don’t think so,” she said, curling her fingers together again. “Stay out of trouble. Don’t leave the state. Call you every Monday at three.”

He just nodded. Scarlet held her breath.

Say something
, she thought at him.
I apologized, now it’s your turn.

Silence. Gavin’s jaw worked below his skin, the muscles tensing and softening, and Scarlet couldn’t help but think of how it had felt when he’d grabbed her wrist and held her against him, how his mouth had felt against her neck...

A shiver went down her spine, and she forced herself to stop thinking about it.

Purely professional from here on out,
she promised herself.

“I’ll see you in a month,” he said, standing. Scarlet stood as well, and Gavin held out his hand. She shook it.

“I hope things work out for you,” he said.

Is that all I get?
Scarlet thought, pausing for a moment at the door.
 

Gavin didn’t say anything else, so she opened the door and walked through it, down the hall, through the lobby, nodding once at the receptionist before the tears blurred her vision too much for her to see anymore.

Scarlet barely made it to the car before she burst into tears.

Chapter Nine

Chase

“All right, thanks,” said Chase.

“You got it,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, and Chase hung up.

He’d been trying to get the head ranger of the upper eastern Sierra district on the phone for weeks, and he’d finally spent nearly an hour and a half talking to the man. For someone who spent most of his time alone in the woods, he sure did love to talk.

Maybe he loves to talk because he spends all that time alone
, Chase thought.

Whatever the truth was, he finally had the full set of reports that he needed, and he’d discussed them thoroughly with their author. Now he knew the current status of every mountain pass, road, holler, and gully in that district, knew what was likely to flood, to avalanche, that sort of thing.

He spun around in his desk chair, his arms over his head, and stretched. Being in charge of coordinating the search and rescue operations of Eastern Cascadia involved way more spreadsheets and expense reports than actually looking for lost people, but it had turned out that Chase was good at it. Besides, as the
only
person coordinating search and rescue for Eastern Cascadia, his boss was technically the governor, and the governor was never going to stop by just to check on what Chase was doing that day.

The only problem was that he still hadn’t found Sarah. After searching for her online and going through the phone book, Chase wasn’t really sure what to do next. Sure, he could just call every Sarah he could find and hopefully turn something up soon, but there had to be a better option.

He’d left the tab with the band’s email account open all day, on the off-chance that she looked up Leather Chain, found the website, and then contacted them. It hadn’t happened yet, though.

During work breaks, he’d brainstormed a list of ways to find her: Triangle, the dating app. The ‘Missed Connections’ section of the newspaper. Asking around at The Den.

It wasn’t a great list.

The clock said 4:50, and Chase had literally never met his boss, so he shut down his computer, grabbed his jacket, and headed out, nonchalantly waving goodbye to the woman at the front desk.

By nature, Chase knew he was more of an optimist than Gavin. His mate could brood sometimes, get into a funk if he really put his mind to it. Gavin seemed to have already decided that they’d never find her, but Chase knew they’d only been looking for one day.

Once, he’d found a teenage girl huddled in a rotted-out oak tree after a four-day blizzard. Alive. Barely alive, but alive, and it was stories like that that Chase preferred to think about. Not the ones where they found frozen skeletons.

He pushed the front door of their house open, then paused, just like always.

From the darkness, a meow.

“Hey, Piney,” said Gavin.

Another meow.

“Not yet,” he said, flipping on the hall light.

Pinecone chirped, then turned around, leading Chase toward the living room.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he told the cat. “You think you could share us with another woman?”

The cat jumped onto a chair, and Chase lifted the enormous, fluffy black cat up and held her. She put one paw on his face and started licking at his jaw.

“Yeah, I need to shave,” he agreed.

They hadn’t
meant
to get a cat. For fuck’s sake, they were
wolves
, and wolves and cats just didn’t mix.

Pinecone hadn’t really given them an option, though. She’d wandered into their yard one day, her long fur matted and dirty, sat by the back door, and acted like she lived there.

They broke down after a day, bought cat food, and started feeding her. After she ate, she jumped into Gavin’s lap, and when he petted her, he found an entire pinecone stuck in the fur of her tail.

Three years, a haircut, and a couple vet visits later, she was there to stay. Not that the two mates thought they had a say in the matter.

As Piney licked his face, the front door opened again, and Gavin walked in.

The moment Chase saw his face, he knew it was bad. He tossed Piney onto the couch, where she bounced once, meowed in protest, and then went to greet Gavin.

“What’s wrong?” Chase said, skipping the greeting. His stomach knotted inside him.

Gavin bent to pet the cat, avoiding Chase’s gaze.

That
was an even worse sign.

“You want a beer?” asked Gavin.

Chase studied his mate’s face for a moment, not quite sure what was happening.

“Am I gonna need one?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Gavin.

Chase flopped back onto the sofa, watching Piney’s fluffy black tail disappear into the kitchen.

“No cats in the fridge,” he heard Gavin say, followed by a meow of protest. Chase half-smiled. It was a conversation he had with the cat at least once a day.

As Gavin walked toward Chase, Piney galloped in front of him, jumping onto the back of the couch and sitting down, her yellow eyes staring at Chase. Gavin handed him the beer, then sat next to him.

“Well?” Chase said. “What’s so bad?”

“I found her,” said Gavin.

Chase’s heart leapt, then froze.

“Why is that bad?” he asked.

Gavin took a long drink, then scratched Piney’s head.

“You remember when the Ponderosa pack tried to form a militia and take over the state of Cascadia, right?” he asked.

“You mean when a crazy person had a lot of guns in a shed and a plan that wasn’t going to work? Yeah,” said Chase.

“You remember the daughter, Scarlet?”

Chase froze, his beer halfway to his mouth. Of course he remembered that case. No wolf had been able to talk about anything else for months, and he’d been on parole himself at the time, a couple years before they moved to Rustvale. Gavin had still been a guard at the prison, taking night classes to get his college degree, and Chase had been working at a garden center for minimum wage.

His coworkers had watched him suspiciously for
months
afterward, even though he’d never even met that pack before. Even though all he wanted was to make enough money to pay for food and rent, and to not go back to jail. All over the place, police had been busting down wolf doors on the flimsiest evidence possible, just because they were wolves.

Out west, closer to the coast, a human man had shot a wolf shifter in broad daylight, right in the middle of town, claiming that he felt “unsafe” with a wolf in public. There had been days that Chase hadn’t wanted to leave his apartment, wondering if today was the day that someone decided he was a threat.

“That wasn’t her,” he said.

Gavin stared forward and nodded. Chase put one hand over his eyes, trying to remember what she’d looked like four or five years ago.

“That can’t have been her,” he went on. “Wasn’t she this skinny, hateful thing? She couldn’t have been more than nineteen when she got locked up.”

“Twenty-two,” said Gavin.

“All that shit she said about bears and lions and humans during the trial,” Chase said, his voice faint with disbelief. “That was
her
?”