Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (4 page)

Chapter Four

Mateo’s bunker was a two-story cement box of a building not far from the center of the pride compound. Dominec made himself invisible in the shadows near a side door, waiting. The building was one of the few in the pride with security, and though he could have gone around to the front, pressed the buzzer and argued his way in via the intercom like everyone else, he preferred a more subtle approach, saving his powers of persuasion for when he got inside.

Lurking in the shadows and watching had taught him the rhythms of the pride. He only had to wait about twenty minutes before the side door opened and one of Mateo’s little minions exited. Dominec hadn’t bothered to learn her name. He just knew she was the blonde one who always left at the end of her shift via this door, invariably with her head bent down over her phone, utterly oblivious to the shadow that slid along the wall and through the door before it had time to swing closed behind her.

As a shifter, she really ought to have smelled him, even if she hadn’t heard his carefully silent footsteps, but shifters were no better than humans when it came to zoning out the rest of the world and falling into the pit of technology, their natural instincts swallowed up by those distracting ones and zeroes—yet another reason Dominec didn’t have a phone.

Another example of that distraction waited for him as he made his way upstairs to Mateo’s main office. The leopard shifter didn’t even twitch when Dominec opened the door and slipped inside, and while he’d love to take that as a sign that he was just that stealthy, he knew the real culprit was Mateo’s absorption in his work. Or perhaps his apathy.

The boy was slim, his refined features almost pretty when his face wasn’t marked by the heavy shadows it carried now. He bent over one of his many computers, wearing a pair of jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with some mice and a giant number 42 on it—a shirt which the smell indicated he hadn’t changed in at least two days, possibly more. Though Dominec vaguely remembered him wearing something else during the raid this morning. Something darker.

Dominec knew shit about psychology, but wondered if putting the dirty shirt back on meant something significant about the leopard’s mental state. Something he could exploit.

“I already encrypted them.”

For a moment, Dominec thought the tech kid was talking to himself, then something about his posture—though he hadn’t looked up from his screen—alerted him that Mateo might not be as oblivious as he’d originally thought.

“What are you talking about?” Was Mateo trying to warn him off, telling him not to bother stealing the schematics because he wouldn’t be able to get at them anyway?

“Your files,” Mateo said, still not looking away from the screen in front of him. “I encrypted them the same day you asked me. No one can look at them without the password.”

Dominec’s shoulders shot through with tension. He’d forgotten that the last time he’d been in here, it had been in an attempt to bully Mateo into destroying the Organization’s records on Dominec that had been on one of the three hard drives the Hawk had stolen. Mateo had refused—opposed to destroying any information that might prove useful at some future date—but he had agreed to encrypt the information on Dominec before he duplicated the records and began passing it around to the pride’s lieutenants.

Dominec had already checked up on Mateo by “borrowing” Xander’s tablet with his copy of the Organization’s files. He’d searched it for any mention of Dominec or his family. If he’d found any, he would have had words with the wiry leopard, but the search had come back clean. No one who didn’t have the first fucking right to know about his past was going to learn anything from the data on that hard drive.

But it wasn’t
that
hard drive he’d come about.

“Thank you,” he said, the words tasting like a salt lick. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“I can’t get you back on the incursion team,” Mateo said, his fingers never pausing in their rapid movement across the keys. “That isn’t my call.”

“I don’t want back on the team. I want the other hard drive. The one with the locations of all the Organization outposts.”

Now Mateo’s fingers did lift from the keys and he slowly spun his desk chair to face Dominec.

He didn’t need to say what he wanted them for. Mateo was no fool. But his face was carefully blank.

Dominec played his trump card. “Tell me which facility held your sister and I’ll kill them first.”

Mateo flinched.

There weren’t many members of Lone Pine who hadn’t been directly impacted by the Organization. Dominec had made a point of learning those pressure points. When Mateo had arrived at the pride years ago, his sister had already been missing for over a year. The leopard had made no secret that he wanted to use the pride resources to try to track her. It was only recently they’d learned so much about the Organization that was responsible for nearly all the mysterious shifter disappearances over the last two decades.

And only a few weeks ago Mateo had cracked the hard drives and found the Organization files detailing what had happened to whom—and learned that his sister had been dead for months.

He was functioning remarkably well for someone whose entire purpose in life had been ripped away in a tide of grief. But then, Dominec knew all about that. About the automatic impulse to survive, how it would carry you through the motions of living until another purpose could be found. A purpose like revenge.

“The ones who hurt her will die bloody,” he promised Mateo. “Just say the word.”

The shadows that had fogged Mateo’s eyes cleared and he focused on Dominec, a slight, bitter frown pulling at his mouth. “I saw what you did this morning. The doctor—Rachel Russell? They’d attached an explosive device to her leg to keep her from being able to leave her lab and they needed someone who could deprogram it in a hurry, so Kye sent me down to the basement. You left quite the trail of bodies.”

“That was just the beginning. Tell me where—”

“It didn’t make me feel better,” Mateo interrupted. “I thought it might. Giving them what they deserve. But it didn’t. It didn’t bring Cari back.”

“If it stops them from taking even one more Cari, then it was worth it.”

Mateo nodded absently. “Maybe. But did you look to see if any of the others had those anklets? The bombs attached to their legs to keep them in line? How do you know you didn’t slaughter a bunch of prisoners who were no more free than you were when you were their favorite pet?”

Dominec growled. “You weren’t supposed to read my files.”

“I promised you to hide them. Did you think I wasn’t going to make sure there wasn’t something valuable in them first?”

Dominec forced himself to unclench his fists. “Are you going to give me the list or not?”

Mateo released a soft, humorless laugh. “None of you ever know what you’re asking, do you?
Wave your magic wand, Mateo, and give me a list.
Do you have any idea how fucked up the data we have is? How freaking non-intuitive the whole fucking system is? The Organization is beyond paranoid about security. The entire system has an airwall—none of their computers have
ever
been connected to the Internet. They don’t even use consistent security protocols across their own records. I had to design half a dozen programs just to get all the roster files into a single searchable format. And the schematics? All written on proprietary software and all uniquely fucked up. It’s like they reinvented the wheel every fucking time. I thought I was paranoid about security, but these people? They don’t even let their people have cell phones in the buildings—because they know that as soon as you have a line out to the net you’re allowing a line in—so every single one of their outposts is a closed system. The moles who put those hard drives together for Dr. Russell and the Hawk must have physically gone to each site and downloaded the files they needed from the site server. The Organization is using deliberately antiquated technology, in conjunction with some seriously advanced shit, in order to create a system that revolves around secrecy. You lose one node, all you lose is that node. There is no central server to hack. No way to take out the brain because there
is no fucking brain
. It’s all little nerve clusters and we have no idea how they’re communicating with one another. For all we fucking know it could be with carrier pigeons.”

Dominec followed about a third of what the computer tech was ranting about, but kept his mouth shut, hoping the bitching would resolve into something he could work with.

“Do you know what I was doing when you came in? Trying to make some fucking sense out of the data we got from the raid today. Trying to find something useful in the scientific babble that seems to be about all that particular post produced. Trying to find some fucking answer key or code breaker or something to make all the rest of the piecemeal shit we’ve gathered make sense. And, you know, as badly as I want to punch the asshole who came up with this shit, part of me has to respect the technique. Up until a couple months ago we didn’t even know these assholes existed. All we had was rumors, because they are that good at keeping their secrets. And as someone whose entire job used to be keeping
our
secrets, I know exactly how difficult that is.”

Mateo shook his head. “My team is working overtime now, doing my job as well as theirs because I’m the only one cleared to deal with this Organization bullshit. And I am working flat out to make the information accessible for Kye and Roman and
you
, because we need this. Because I owe it to my sister. But I am exhausted and so far behind there is no catching up, and I am not going to take time out from what needs to be done to feed your crazy. If you want back on the team, take it up with Grace. I’ve got nothing for you.”

He swung back to his computer and his hands settled immediately on the keys, resuming their rapid tapping.

Dominec frowned at his back. People almost never turned their backs on him. Especially not after telling him no. But no matter how tempting taking a swipe at Mateo with his claws might be, the little punk was protected by the fact that he was the only one who could do what he did. And Dominec still needed him.

He slipped out of Mateo’s office without another word and walked on silent feet down the stairs and out into the night. The moon had come out from behind the clouds and sat fat and bright above him, casting a silvery light over the pride like some mystical fairy land.

Dominec stripped quickly and shifted, too irritated to hold his human skin. The night air that had been biting was now pleasantly cool against the fullness of his thickening winter coat. Unlike the lions, his kind had been designed for the cold and it sharpened his thoughts now as his animal side—sometimes his more rational side—clicked into control.

His wide paws crushed the short, frost-hardened grass, but he wasn’t worried about leaving tracks. Not here.

He circled around, coming at the low bungalow that housed Grace’s office from behind, but the caution quickly proved unnecessary. The pride pathways were all but abandoned at this hour of the night and he could tell by scent that she wasn’t inside.

He gathered his feline bulk and leapt onto the roof of the single story hut, taking care to land lightly—in a spot where the shingles were already worn from his previous visits. He stretched out on his belly on the roof, curling his tail around his haunches and lowering his head to rest against the shingles as he waited. This was one of his favorite spy perches. Few shifters had ever looked up to see him up there, watching and listening to everything that went on below, and something about the vantage point had always soothed him.

He could stand to be soothed now.

He’d been good for
years
. Listening. Watching. Accumulating every tiny scrap of information about the bastards who had destroyed him. He’d held himself in check until that moment of beautiful action, the release of everything he’d been containing as he waited, and now this. Locked out of the action. Unable to go out on his own without the information Mateo refused to give him.

Which left him where? Forced to be good? Calling on a patience he’d already worn to tatters?

A low growl tried to rise up his throat but he swallowed it to silence. There was a scent on the breeze. A very familiar scent.

He heard the low voices before he saw them.

“You know we’re good together. It’s okay to let me make you happy.” Male. With a lazy drawl.

“I am happy.” Grace.

Dominec’s ears pricked forward.

“Then what’s the problem? Nothing has to change. It’ll just be a little more official.” The man again.

“And if I don’t want more official?” Grace, irritation tightening her voice.

“Then give me a good reason why more official is bad.”

They came around a curve in the path then and Dominec saw them. Grace walking swiftly with her ground-eating stride and the man at her side almost trotting to keep up, a cowboy hat tilted low over his brow. Kelly Mather. Lion with a shit-eating-grin. Dominec felt his hackles rise.

“You’ll split my priorities,” Grace snapped. “You’re already taking up time and mental energy that could be dedicated to the pride.”

“Grace, I know you. You fight for the pride to protect the people you love. So add another loved one to the list—and maybe a few more, in a few years, when we’re ready. But you don’t have to worry that I’m going to ask you to give up being a lieutenant.”

“And if I don’t want kids?”

“Then we don’t have to have kids.”

“Oh please,” she snarled. “You know you want to be a daddy. It’s all over your face every time you’re with the pride cubs.”

“I want
you
, Grace. And I’ll be as flexible as I need to be to make that happen.”

“Maybe I don’t want flexible.”

Kelly tossed his hands up. “Now you’re just being difficult.”

“Exactly! Why would you want to be with someone as difficult as I am?”

“Maybe because I’m crazy about you?” They were past Grace’s office now, nearly out of sight again up the path toward her bungalow. Kelly caught her arm, spinning her around to face him. The muscles in Dominec’s haunches tensed, readying to spring.