Wolf's Secret (District Shifters Book 3) Read online

  He went back outside and hung around, waiting for her to come out. He wasn’t going to attempt to question her in there, with hundreds of people milling around. He would stalk her home and demand answers once she was alone.

  The morning dragged, but lunch time rolled around, and the students began making their way outside. Archer’s wolf howled within him; the girl was close by. He let his wolf in just enough to heighten his senses. He saw the campus as a grid, the people as dots on a heat map. One of them was pulsing, and he knew it was the girl. He pushed his wolf back and looked at her with his normal eyes.

  He felt his heart skip a beat when he saw her. She was gorgeous, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She looked to be in her early to mid-twenties. She was on the short side, and her body had curves in all of the right places. Her hips were wide, striking. Her breasts were large and full, and her stomach was ever so slightly rounded. She was voluptuous. There was no other way to describe her. Archer pulled his eyes away from her hips that swayed slightly as she walked. Her sleek black bob perfectly framed her face, not a hair out of place.

  He chastised himself again, forcing himself to look away from the girl. His eyes were drawn back to her almost instantly, and for a second, he met her gaze before he turned away quickly. It wasn’t so quickly that her pale green eyes weren’t etched onto his brain permanently, though. He couldn’t help picturing her as a wolf, lithe and graceful and strong, her eyes standing out against midnight black fur.

  It was not going to happen. She was mortal. And if she had the Sanmere protein in her blood, Caroline would have known about it. And she wouldn’t have been offering him some second-rate teacher as a deal, she would have been offering this exquisite beauty. Would he still have been able to turn the deal down if Caroline had shown him a picture of the girl? He liked to think he would have, but it would have been so much harder than it had been.

  Archer shook his head, shaking away all thoughts of mating with the girl. She was a loose end that needed to be dealt with. He wasn’t willing to risk the pack’s identity by letting himself get caught up in a dream. It didn’t matter that his wolf was clamoring for her scent, or that he was instantly mystified by her. It was business. Just that, and nothing more.

  He watched as the girl sat down at a bench with her lunch. She was with another girl, who was pretty enough, but she paled in comparison.

  Archer cursed the other girl. This would have been a perfect moment to talk to the raven-haired woman. The bench she was sitting on was on the edge of the campus, far enough from the others that they could talk privately, but close enough that she wouldn’t feel threatened by his presence. He would have to find a way to get her alone so he could question her without scaring her half to death. He would just have to be patient and bide his time. The other girl was talking on the phone now, and Archer settled down to watch them.

  He felt his pulse speed up when the other girl ended her call and stood up. She said something, and the girl nodded and waved her away. The other girl left. It was Archer’s first stroke of good luck in a long time, and he wasn’t going to waste it. He stood up and quickly approached the girl’s bench, smiling while he did so.

  She smiled back at him, somewhat hesitantly, and Archer knew he would have to play this just right. She didn’t look like someone who trusted easily. Her smile lit her face up, and he spotted tiny flecks of amber in her pale green eyes.

  “Hi. You mind if I join you?” he asked. The girl shrugged. Archer sat down. “I’m Archer,” he said.

  “Brianna,” she replied. She was watching him, and Archer thought he saw something on her face. Something that told him that maybe she felt the chemistry sizzling between them as acutely as he did.

  “I hope you don’t mind me approaching you like this, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” he said.

  “About what?” she asked with a frown, guardedly.

  “About Caroline Maynard. She was a good friend of mine, and I heard you were with her when she… you know.”

  He saw a flicker of sympathy flash across Brianna’s face, and he knew his halting sentence had worked. He had convinced her he was just a grief-stricken friend, and he was confident she would talk.

  5

  Brianna’s heart skipped a beat as she looked up and saw a guy approaching her. He wasn’t just any guy. He was by far the hottest guy Brianna had ever seen. He was tall and well built. She could see his pecs through his t-shirt, and she could only imagine the six pack that must lie beneath it. His arms were big, but not big enough to be comical. They looked strong, like if he wrapped them around her, she would feel safe from the whole world.

  She dragged her eyes away from his body, feeling herself flushing slightly as she thought of his body moving against hers. She ached for his touch.

  His face did nothing to calm her. He had a square jawline, and something about it made her want to reach up and run her fingers along it. His hair was sandy blond, but it had flecks of gold in it that caught the sun when he moved. And his eyes… holy shit, his eyes. They were bright blue, almost turquoise, the color of the ocean washing up on a tropical beach. They were the most intense eyes Brianna had come across, and when her eyes met his, she felt like she couldn’t look away.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt herself blushing again. Her mind was working overtime, imagining him on top of her, herself looking up into those beautiful eyes as she screamed his name. She shifted on the bench, sucking in a breath as she moved.

  “Hi. You mind if I join you?” the guy asked with a charming smile.

  She felt her heart flutter as he smiled down at her. She almost said no. It didn’t matter how smoking hot he was. Something about him felt like trouble. There was an edge to him, something Brianna couldn’t put her finger on. While she wasn’t scared of him, she felt like maybe she should be.

  She couldn’t very well say no, though. It was a free country, and he had every right to sit anywhere he wanted to. She shrugged, going for casual, like she had no real interest in what he did. He sat down.

  “I’m Archer,” he said.

  “Brianna,” she replied. Her voice came out breathy and unlike her own voice. She could barely pull her eyes away from Archer’s face, and she told herself to get a grip.

  “I hope you don’t mind me approaching you like this, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” he said.

  “About what?” she asked. What could this perfect specimen possibly want from her?

  “About Caroline Maynard. She was a good friend of mine, and I heard you were with her when she… you know.”

  Brianna felt her heart break a little. His words caught as he said it, and she could almost feel his pain. She was glad now that she hadn’t sent him away. And it would make not flirting with him easy. She couldn’t do that, knowing he just wanted answers about his friend’s death.

  What exactly should she tell him? She decided to stick to the sheriff’s story. That was safer for everyone involved. She wondered fleetingly if Archer knew Caroline was a shifter. No; if he did, he wouldn’t be here questioning her. He would have a damned good idea of what she had been shot with.

  “This is going to sound crazy, but the sheriff said she died of blood loss. I saw her body in the morgue, and the wound didn’t look deep enough for that,” he said.

  Brianna felt her instincts kick in almost immediately. Archer wasn’t what he seemed any more than Caroline had been. He knew something, and he wanted her to confirm it.

  “I’m no doctor,” she said. “There was blood, though. The sheriff told me the bullet nicked an artery.”

  “Yeah. That’s what he told me, too. I just… oh, I don’t know. I’m probably just grasping at straws, trying to make sense of something that makes no sense to me. I mean, Caroline didn’t have any enemies. She was liked. Who would want to kill her?”

  “I think it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time,” Brianna said, trying to make him feel better. Although her suspicions ha
d been up about Archer when he mentioned not believing the sheriff’s story, he seemed nice enough and genuinely upset by Caroline’s death.

  “Maybe. Did you see anything odd?”

  “Odd how?” Brianna asked.

  “Her skin looked kind of weird,” Archer said. “Like it was the wrong color or something.”

  “Death does that. The blood pools in the back of the body, and it leaves the face and the front of the body a weird color. Waxy, almost,” Brianna said.

  She instantly regretted it. How would she feel if someone was talking about a good friend of hers that way?

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly.

  “It’s okay,” Archer replied as quickly. Too quickly.

  Brianna studied Archer’s face for a moment, ignoring how it made her feel. He wouldn’t meet her eye now, and she knew he was lying to her. She just wasn’t sure about what.

  “So you didn’t see anything weird on her skin or anything when she died?” Archer asked.

  He knows, Brianna thought. He knows about the silver poisoning. About the black lines. He’s trying to work out how much I know. She took her time answering the question, trying to work out who he was and what was going on. He wasn’t with the sheriff’s department; she was sure of that. The sheriff just wanted this to go away.

  “I was kind of distracted by the blood and the fact that there could still have been a crazed killer in the area,” Brianna said carefully, neither confirming nor denying what she had seen.

  “Yeah. Yeah, of course,” he said. “So you thought there was a chance he could have killed you, too?”

  “Well, sure. Like you said, Caroline didn’t seem like the kind of girl who had enemies. Not enemies who shoot people, anyway. I figured he might decide to take out the one witness.”

  “You saw the gunman?” Archer asked.

  For a second, Brianna saw panic in his eyes. She knew then with certainty that Archer had been the one to kill Caroline. She knew that should terrify her; she should run from him, but he didn’t give the impression of being a threat to her, and she was intrigued rather than afraid.

  Archer clearly knew Caroline was a shifter. That meant one of two things: he was either someone like Raina, who had known she was a Matchmaker, or she was wrong about the Matchmaking thing, and Archer was a hunter. Either way, that meant he was unlikely to kill her. Unless she gave away that she knew too much.

  From what she had learned about Matchmakers, if that was the case, then Caroline had gotten what she deserved. But if she wasn’t, and Archer was just a hunter, then that didn’t seem fair at all. Not all supernatural creatures where bad. She had seen that firsthand.

  “No,” Brianna said. “So, technically, it could have been a gun woman.”

  Archer smiled, and she saw the relief on his face. She had to push it. She had to know for certain if Archer had killed Caroline.

  “I don’t think it was totally random, though. We had just had lunch in the diner down the road. And as we walked back to my apartment building, I felt like we were being followed. Caroline laughed it off, said I was paranoid. But now, I’m not so sure.”

  “Maybe she had a stalker,” Archer said carefully.

  “Maybe,” Brianna agreed. For all she was sure that wasn’t true, a shiver went through her anyway. She thought back to her and Caroline sitting in the diner eating their burgers. She imagined a face pressed up to the window watching them.

  Her blood turned cold, and she had to force her face to stay normal, to remain seated. Because when she had let her mind go back to the diner, she saw him there. Archer. She knew it with a certainty now. Archer had killed Caroline.

  She had seen him from the side, walking past the diner window. And then he had been on the street when they had. He had been her stalker. But why? That was still what she needed to know more than anything.

  “Can I ask you something now?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.

  “Sure,” Archer answered, but he looked nervous.

  Yeah, you should be nervous, Brianna thought. And my God, I should be terrified. If I ask you this, then you’ll know I know. And that will make me a loose end, something to be dealt with.

  She still had to know. She just had to hope that, whether Archer was a Matchmaker hunter or a more general hunter, he was a decent guy who wasn’t in the habit of killing mortals.

  “Why did you kill Caroline?”

  6

  A shockwave went through Archer’s whole body at Brianna’s question. She knew he had killed Caroline. Perhaps she had known all along, or perhaps something he had said had given it away. Whatever it was, it was obvious to him now that Brianna knew a lot more about immortals than he had thought. She was far too calm to think he was just some random killer. She had to know Caroline was a shifter, and that he was one, too.

  Maybe she was one. Maybe she had taken some sort of enchantment that had fooled his wolf into believing she was a mortal. However, he didn’t think that was true. His instincts were usually pretty spot on. She had gotten brave and asked her question, but before that, he had smelled the nerves coming off her. She had been testing the waters, trying to work out whether or not he was a danger to her. She had obviously decided he wasn’t.

  Archer should kill her. She knew too much. He wasn’t worried about being arrested. Stanton would never let that happen, and he figured Brianna was unlikely to go to the police and tell him she knew he had killed her friend because she was an immortal. She wouldn’t expect that to be believed.

  He was more worried about who exactly she was. He didn’t think she was the hunter. There had been nothing on her face to suggest he repulsed her, and hunters never showed their fear. Maybe she was working with the hunter, feeding him information for some reason.

  The thought was enough to get Archer moving. He wasn’t going to kill Brianna. He wouldn’t be able to bring himself to do it. But sitting out here passing the time of day with her was a bad move. He had made a mistake coming here at all.

  He stood up abruptly and walked away from Brianna. He could hear her footsteps behind him. He should run; she would never catch him. But something about her intrigued him, and he couldn’t bring himself to run from her. Instead, he whirled back around to face her.

  “Why are you following me?” he demanded.

  “Because you didn’t answer my question,” she said.

  “That’s because your question was fucking offensive,” he snapped.

  Her steely expression slipped slightly, and he thought maybe he could still pull this back. Brianna was a complete mystery to him, and no matter how hard he thought about everything she had said and done since he had sat down with her, he couldn’t work out exactly how much she knew.

  Maybe he could still have her think she’d made a terrible mistake. If not about what Caroline was, then at least maybe about what he was. There was no way Caroline would have told Brianna she was a shifter, so she had to be getting her information from somewhere. Likely from the hunter who was after his pack. If he could convince her he wasn’t a shifter, it might turn the hunter off their trail for a time.

  “Offensive, huh?” Brianna smirked, her composure back in place.

  Archer set his face in what he hoped was a convincing impression of a grief-stricken friend. “I came to you because I wanted answers about my friend’s death, and you accuse me of killing her. How can you think that’s anything but offensive?”

  Brianna threw her head back and laughed. It was far from the reaction Archer had expected and hoped for. He had hoped for a guilty look. An apology, maybe.

  “I’m sorry,” Brianna said through her laughter. “I know it’s not really funny. But you almost had me there. You do play the wounded friend pretty well. It’s just a shame it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Archer asked. Where the hell was she going with this? Was she going to attempt to take him out here? No, it was far too public. And with those tight jeans, he would be able to see if she was carrying a weap
on.

  “Too late to play the friend card,” Brianna answered. “I admit you had me at first. But then you said Caroline’s name, and you let your guard down. I could see the disgust on your face. So I’ll ask you again. Why did you kill her?”

  Did Brianna not know how fucking dangerous it was to stand and outright accuse him of this? Did she have no fear that he would end her? Apparently not. It seemed like she knew he wouldn’t have it in him to harm her. If anything, he felt protective of her somehow, even though she had mocked him and drawn information from him—information he should never have revealed.

  “You know, you’re acting like Caroline is the wronged party here,” Archer said.

  “Well, she is the one that’s dead,” Brianna pointed out with a raised eyebrow.

  “True. But she wasn’t so innocent herself, you know.”

  “Really? So what did she do that was so bad you murdered her?”

  “You know, you seem pretty invested in this. And yet you don’t seem in the least bit pissed off that I killed your friend,” Archer said. There was no point in denying it any longer. Brianna clearly knew the truth about that much. He had to find out how she knew about the immortal world and why she was more curious than afraid.

  “Oh, I’m plenty pissed off about it,” Brianna said. “But at this point, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and giving you a chance to tell me why she deserved to die.”

  “Or what?” Archer asked.

  “Huh?” Brianna replied, her confusion clear to see.

  “What are you going to do if I refuse to answer your questions?” he pressed, taking a step closer to Brianna.

  He saw a flash of fear run across her face, but it was gone almost as soon as it appeared, and she made no effort to back away. She still didn’t have an answer to his question, and that gave him a good feeling about this whole thing. There was less chance she was working with the hunter. She would have told him in no uncertain terms what she would do to him. He was starting to think she was just someone who had somehow found herself in a whole mess and was completely out of her depth.