Enigma (27 page)

Chapter Twenty

If there was a magazine that celebrated the conceit of millionaires living on luxurious ranches where no actual ranching ever took place, Jorge Ochoa’s home would belong on the cover.

Maybe it made a funny kind of sense. Shifters had embraced capitalist greed, and money bought a certain insulation from the human world. A wolf with a few thousand acres didn’t need to worry about where he’d run or someone edging into his territory. When you weren’t running, why not live in the finest comfort the human world could provide?

Julio had been embarrassed to inherit this sort of wealth, which was its own sort of privilege. Patrick had done pretty damn well for himself, but not so well that he could go around feeling sad and awkward over how many swimming pools he had.

Not that Patrick would be invited to swim in those pools any time soon. He’d made Anna Lenoir cry. He’d made her
weep
, and any dreams of sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with the Mendoza family had to be put to bed, unless he wanted Sera carving up him instead of the turkey.

He had to be hard. He had to be steel. See the job through, because putting one foot in front of the other was what mattered. Doing the work you’d committed yourself to, making the world safe for everyone else to live out their happily-ever-afters with their babies and families and white picket fences.

Or big fucking ranch houses.

“Hang back,” Alec murmured to him as they approached the door. “Ochoa’s gonna be watching me, and his bodyguards are gonna be watching Anna. We can keep attention off you until you’re ready.”

“It won’t matter,” Anna interjected. “The one we have to worry about will see him coming.”

Alec snorted. “Yeah, well, let’s hope she’s stupid enough to shout,
Help, Dad, there’s a scary wizard about to cast a spell, I can see the magic.
”

“Just to be safe, I wouldn’t get in his way.” Anna pinned Patrick with a pointed gaze. “Last night, your boy here made a chair disintegrate just by looking at it.”

Patrick couldn’t tell if the words were an accusation or a warning, so he met them with a cocky smile. “Actually, I don’t remember looking at it.”

“Go ahead, McNamara. Make my point for me.”

A warning, all right, but for Alec, not him. Anna Lenoir was warning someone that
he
was dangerous. It would have made him laugh if there’d been anything left inside him to feel. “Fair enough.”

Alec slashed his hand through the air. “Quiet. They’re coming.”

A tall man as wide as a bus opened the door and motioned them down a hallway directly off the foyer. He said nothing, offered no greetings or threats, just led them to a set of double doors that swung wide into a spacious, mirrored parlor nearly devoid of furnishings.

The kind of place cleared out for a fight.

“Jacobson.” Jorge Ochoa rose from his chair in the corner.

Alec smiled—or bared his teeth, with him it was hard to tell the difference sometimes—but neither man moved close enough to offer or accept a handshake. “Ochoa.”

“I don’t suppose I should insult your intelligence by explaining why I’ve asked you here.”

Alec had made it clear he planned to be blunt, but even Patrick wasn’t prepared for the alpha wolf’s rough growl. “Because a witch is wearing your dead son like a bad suit, and probably fed you some bullshit lies about how I sent my people to kill her.”

Jorge blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m sorry, man. Really fucking sorry. If there was an easy way to break it to you, I’d have picked it. But listen to me. You can hear the truth.” Alec leaned forward slightly. “Your son is dead.”

That got Jorge’s attention—and raised his ire. “Shut up, Jacobson. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but—”

“This isn’t a game,” Alec shot back, and Patrick flinched. Not at the raised voices, but at the sudden pressure closing in on him, like an invisible, magical hand squeezing his heart.

Literally.

His sword was strapped to his back again. One tug would swing the sheath around for an easy draw, but the bulky wolves lining the wall might actually tear their wary gazes from Anna if he pulled a longsword in their boss’s house.

He liked the feel of the sword in his hands, but he didn’t need it. He hadn’t been touching it the night before when the chair had crumbled to dust, after all. It was merely his focus, a tool. The power was inside him. Wasn’t that what Michelle had said over and over?

Jorge and Alec were still arguing. Patrick let his eyelids droop and concentrated on the bonds tightening around his chest. It was getting hard to breathe now, but he didn’t waste time with panic. He focused on the shape of those phantom fingers, on the places they pushed in on him, and imagined them breaking.

No, not just breaking. Shattering. Flying apart, smashed into as many tiny particles as that damn chair, and he only had a tingle of warning as the power flooded through him.

A male voice yelped in the next room, and the pressure vanished. Ochoa snapped his fingers, and one of the bodyguards headed for a door at the back of the room.

Anna took a step forward. “Get him in here, Jorge. Look him in the eyes and tell me if that’s Oscar you see in there. We’re being
straight
with you.”

“Because you’d be the first to admit you tried to assassinate him, right?” he asked sarcastically.

“Yeah, I would.” She swallowed hard. “He’s dead. I saw his body with my own eyes, but I didn’t kill him.”

Oscar Ochoa stepped through the open doors. “Only because I didn’t give you the chance.”

Patrick’s stomach flipped over. Seeing a dead man walking would have been reason enough, but this one glowed with colorful power, bright silver shot through with menacing streaks of blood red, and one glance around the room told Patrick he was the only one who could see it.

“This is getting us nowhere.” Anna shrugged out of her jacket and kicked off one boot.

Alec whirled around. “Lenoir, what the fuck?”

But Patrick already knew. In his gut, or maybe a little higher, in that place that knew
Anna
, no matter how hard he’d tried to convince himself that everything between them had been a grand delusion. The only plan they had involved Patrick poking at a madwoman, which meant Anna was going to do the same thing she’d done at that gas station.

She was really damn good at throwing herself between him and danger.

“I challenge you,
Oscar Ochoa
,” she said, lending a mocking lilt to the name. “For your council seat, and everything that goes with it. Right here, right now. Because I’d bet it all that you don’t want to face me as a wolf.”

If what was left of Patrick’s heart hadn’t been trying to shred its way out of his chest, Alec’s expression of outraged frustration might have made him laugh. But there was nothing funny about watching all that power flare with the witch’s anger and fear.

Oscar’s features twisted with fury. “This is
his
doing,” he snarled, flinging out an arm to point at Alec. “This must have been his plan all along. To put one of his people on our council. It’s how he likes to do things, we all know that.”

“It’s a fair fight, with your own father here as witness.” Anna yanked her shirt over her head. One of the burly guards stepped forward, and she tossed the garment over his arm like he was her own personal valet. “What’s the matter, Oscar? You scared to tangle with a girl?”

Trembling with rage, the witch spun Oscar’s body and directed a perfect, plaintive look at Jorge. “Are you going to let him get away with this?”

It was a mistake. The first shadows of uncertainty darkened Jorge’s face. “You sit on the Southwest council,” he said slowly. “It’s your duty and obligation to prove your worthiness to lead through formal challenges.”

Anna turned to Patrick as she reached for her belt. “I made a promise to Oscar. The witch doesn’t leave this room, no matter what. Swear it.”

She needed his reassurance to clear her mind, and he didn’t know what it said about either of them that the right words spilled from his lips, as sincere now as they’d ever been, even with all the pain between them. “I’ve got your back, Lenoir.”

Her hands stilled, and her eyes locked with his. The room fell away, nothing left but the two of them as she cupped the back of his head and drew him down for a rough kiss.

She expected to die. That was the only explanation for the desperation, the open, unrestrained hunger. She was getting her last taste of him, the one she planned to carry into her grave, and he lied to her with his lips and tongue, with the hand he curled around her neck.

He let her believe he’d follow the rules, because the witch needed to believe it too. The wolves were so tied up in tradition and ceremony, they wouldn’t be ready for it when he ripped that witch right the hell out of Oscar Ochoa’s fake body.

Maybe it was the shifting, and maybe it was pure, primal instinct, but Oscar was in control of the wolf.

Anna had seen him fight. More than that, she’d seen him win the challenge that had garnered him his council seat, an hour-long battle against a straight-up, old-school cowboy type who’d given him hell, despite his advanced years.

On all fours, fur bristling, Oscar feinted left and then twisted right at the last second. Anna recognized the move and barely avoided having her shoulder ripped out by a lucky bite. He followed it up with a sharp snap at one of her back legs, and she nearly tripped scrambling away.

Jorge’s doubts had vanished. “That’s my son,” he said flatly. “I would know. I taught him how to fight.”

“I told you—part of him’s in there with the witch,” Alec replied warily. “I talked to the Seer last night. She dealt with his ghost.”

The witch was listening; Anna could feel it. But the bitch also had Oscar to fight for her and could afford to divide her attentions.

Anna couldn’t.

She’d never be able to match Oscar for size, which meant she had to be lightning fast, anything to keep him from getting hold of her. So she hung back, diving out of the way when he attacked, hard and vicious, every ounce of effort behind each lunge.

If he caught her, managed to snap those huge jaws shut—

She shoved the thought out of the way, locked it beneath the rush of the fight. Adding self-doubt to distraction could cost her dearly.

Alec and Jorge were still bickering, their angry voices buzzing in the background as she and Oscar circled. He feinted again, not abandoning his charge when she didn’t fall for it, and too late she realized he was driving her back toward the wall.

She broke away, but not fast enough. Pain ripped through her, clouding her vision, as Oscar bore her to the floor and sank his teeth deep into her haunch. Anna struggled to free herself, but he growled and held tight, like a dog with a bone.

He wasn’t fucking around.

She managed to snap her teeth on his leg, and he backed off with a yelp. No, he wasn’t fucking around, and Anna didn’t blame him. He wasn’t just fighting out of instinct, but for survival. He was back in his body, and it had to feel like something he could keep if he held on long enough.

He rushed her with a different attack, raking his teeth down her side. Agony bloomed like fire, and she whipped around and bit him in the shoulder, mere inches from the soft, vulnerable arch of his throat.

She wasn’t fucking around, either.

Oscar yelped and stumbled, his movements shifting from graceful to jerky, stilted. It was the only warning Anna got before the air around her grew sticky and thick. It was hard to draw in a breath, hard to move, and the cry of outrage went up as she struggled to free herself from the clutching spell.

“Magic!” A burly guard advanced on Patrick, who drew his sword in response.

“Get him the hell out of here!” Jorge barked.

“Lenoir,
back
.” Patrick ducked under the guard’s arm and swung his sword between Anna and Oscar, as if cutting invisible tethers. The pressure around her vanished as Patrick let his momentum carry him toward the far side of the room. “The witch is attacking Anna!”

No way would Jorge believe him—it sounded like an excuse, an easy way to cast with impunity and blame it on the man’s staggering son. Her suspicions were realized when two more guards stepped forward, their guns drawn.

No.
No.

The burning in her hip and shoulder was nothing—
nothing
—compared to the sheer terror of watching three of Jorge’s goons advance on Patrick with violent fear in their eyes. They didn’t care about what was right or true, only what they thought they knew.

So end it now, dumbass.

She struck. Not at Oscar this time—she pushed the thoughts of him and his girlfriend and their kid right the hell out of her mind. It was the witch who’d started all this, the witch who needed to die.

Anna didn’t even know her name.

Oscar tried to fight back, but the constant attacks had taken their toll, not to mention the drain of the spell the witch had cast. He stumbled, almost fell, and Anna pressed that advantage, snapping and snarling. She sounded crazy,
rabid
, and she didn’t give a fuck if it was true. Let them put her down.