Siren's Kiss (Seraphine Thomas Book 5) Page 18

  “I can do just about anything she would want,” Jacqueline called over. “It would be amazing publicity for your opening weekend and my cake business. Yes, I’m in even if I have to not sleep and make coffee cakes and anything else. I make amazing muffins.”

  “Fine, but the chefs? We have huge stores of seafood only.”

  “Yeah, we do, awesome shrimp, scallops, salmon, lobster, and crab that’s super pricey and done amazingly that will be so talked about we’ll be booked for months.”

  Something hit me in her excitement instead of nerves. “How much are they willing to pay for this?”

  “Gobs,” she giggled, actually giggled. “Her mother-in-law is a bitch apparently, and the venue had been her choice, boring and proper since he originally came from money. So our girl is trying to lock in something she would have wanted anyway while the mother throws more fits at the venue as if it’s their fault a fire started.”

  I mulled that over and sighed. “Can we really swing this? If we can’t, and try, it could really hit us hard, Simone.”

  “We can,” she promised. “I’ve got a bistro and a deli, Sera. We’ll make it work even if we have to get some of the catering and fillers from them, okay? I’m more worried about fitting that many people down…”

  “How many?” I asked. When she told me, I wished I hadn’t. Holy shit! They were inviting more people than most weddings.

  “Wait, Sunday is football.”

  “They play Monday night,” Simone chuckled, rolling her eyes at me like of course they would have figured that out.

  Chefs started arriving, and all agreed that they would want the extra work, but they didn’t think there was enough help for such a big party and with so little time.

  “I’m fine with it. It’s really not my permission you need but Simone’s, as she runs the place,” I told them when the debate got a bit heated.

  “No, for a risk like this, we both agree. Plus, once we do it, it will always be on the table of we do parties at least for Sunday brunch,” she said firmly.

  “We’ve got movement at the house,” one of Brian’s guys informed us, basically announcing it was go time. Movement could mean anything from they were waking so late to they were moving out soon to attack… We didn’t want that last option.

  “Mother, if you would influence these two that Jason could take to Chief Havers’s offices and interrogate to his heart’s content, that would be wonderful,” Alena asked as we stood.

  “I’m coming with,” Jason argued.

  “No, you are entirely too interested in what they will do and how it benefits you than in the problem before us,” Eva said firmly, meeting my gaze. “He has been since he learned about your genetics.”

  “Thanks, Jas,” I sneered, stepping around him. “Simone, I’m with you on whatever you decide. You have more knowledge here, and if you say you can pull it off, then call them in for a consult to see the space, work menus—whatever. I never doubt you.”

  “Got it. Don’t worry, we’ve got everything here.”

  “Hey, wait,” Jason hissed as he hurried after us, grabbing my arm. “I can’t help my thoughts. Yes, I’m thinking about how awesome it could be to get terrorists and your hunters easily. How many lives it would save. Lives that served like you, Sera. That’s not the same as thinking we should lock you up and you become our lab rat. You understand thinking like that, whereas your family couldn’t as they didn’t serve.”

  “And they’re not Americans,” I muttered, bobbing my head. I’d seen Alena and Zeno’s attitude like that before. They were wolves in the worldwide nation of wolves before being Greek. I’d always be an American first.

  Different ideologies really.

  Hagan and Reagan insisted on coming, arguing since Eva and Zeno were staying with the boys, plus everyone else at the club who were paranormals as well, plus the wolves we had in the parking garage now, the boys were more than safe. But I was walking into something we didn’t have remotely enough information on, and it was a wolf thing.

  Alena nodded, and I had a feeling it was more about their being upset at their failings at Betas that they couldn’t allow me to walk into one more potential disaster.

  I relented.

  On the way there, I got a bit lost in my head, thinking about what I’d learned from Alena and Eva about the fae and their abilities plus some of Laila’s goals. By the time we pulled up to the house twenty minutes later, I had really been in my head because I had four five-by-seven notebook pages of ideas, questions, and possible meshings.

  “Solving world peace?” Brian asked as we got out of my SUV, our whole caravan doing the same along with SWAT that met us.

  “Something like that,” I chuckled, glancing around for the surveillance team.

  “Shup up,” Reagan told everyone quietly. I glanced at him, seeing he was listening intently. I had just enough time to look at the house in question before I saw something come flying at us. “Grenade!” He knocked me to the ground and caught the damn thing before launching it directly up in the air to do the littlest damage possible.

  It worked because it went off about a hundred feet up, away from even power lines, and luckily there were no planes.

  “Who the fuck tipped them off we were here?” I growled as I got back on my feet.

  The party favors weren’t done yet though. This time I shoved Brian away as Theon, Hagan, Reagan, and I each caught another one and followed Reagan’s wise lead.

  “We need as many alive as we can for questioning,” I reminded our wolves and the ones from Greece that we’d brought.

  “And leave alone the two in the upstairs back bedroom,” Alena ordered, pointing to where she was talking about. I shot her a questioning look. “One is an intelligence agent from one of your allies, I believe, and the other has committed no crimes, using this chance to hopefully flee what his family forced him into.”

  “What do you want from us, Chief Thomas?” the leader of the SWAT team asked. “Perimeter and catch any who escape?”

  “You read my mind, Lieutenant. Thanks for joining me on another circus.”

  “Do we get soaps again? I ran out,” one of the other guys teased.

  “You must bribe them to do their jobs?” Alena sneered, eyeing them over like they were shit. “And you speak so highly of those who support you in your job.”

  “It’s not like that, Mom,” I assured her, waving off the comments I could feel coming from SWAT. “This isn’t technically their job. This is a pack problem, but we’re spread thin, so I asked them to come to my party. Think of it as a party favor.”

  She shrugged and started undressing. Yeah, I figured it wouldn’t make much sense to her. I did the same, others following suit… Much to the discomfort or pleasant surprise of the humans there.

  “You are more familiar with this sort of scenario,” Alena said after we’d all changed to half and half form. Those of us who could. A few went straight wolf. “You lead, and I will make sure you are protected. Hagan and Reagan, check every inch of the house and help those two we want safe. The others, remove the ones we subdue to the humans out here.”

  “I love a good plan.” I winked at her, and away we went. As we reached the house, I heard the pumping of a few shotguns. “Down!” We all dropped, and sure enough, the door and front windows exploded outward. The noise gave us the distraction we needed because it would be ringing in the humans’ ears while we recovered faster.

  I barreled into the house, tossing the first one back to Alena, and from there she passed him along. Sort of like a messed up hot potato game. Either way, it was the best idea to thin them out and fully use the help we had available to us. The first six were easy to handle that way, all grouped at the front.

  I snarled as I realized they had scanners—which was how they’d busted us coming—as I could hear echoing of what was being radioed in outside. I was about to head upstairs when I smelled something off coming from the garage.

  Just when I thought my day was don
e with surprises after playing catch and release with grenades, I found a shit ton of C4 and bomb making everything. How had they managed to get that much in the damn country? It was fucking terrifying.

  I opened the garage door and signaled for SWAT. The lieutenant jogged over, closest in position and wanting to handle it since I’d changed the plan. “We’re almost clear, but I don’t know bombs. Not my deal.” He blinked at me, and I stepped aside and showed him the cache I’d sniffed out. “Nothing’s ticking, like bomb ticking, but I have no idea if all bombs do that or not.”

  “They don’t,” Hagan answered, his voice all growly—as were all of us in shifted third form. “Reagan and I can clear them, but it wouldn’t hurt for bomb squad to make sure just in case.”

  “Agreed,” the lieutenant confirmed and called it in on the radio.

  “I expected a much more enjoyable hunt,” Alena complained as we got calls of the house being clear. “Taking them alive is not as satisfying to my wolf.”

  “Cheer up, they’re not all here,” I drawled, gesturing to the humans kneeling on the front lawn, restrained with zip ties.

  “How do you know that?” Brian questioned, taking in the seventeen people we’d easily caught.

  “Because only six smell like jet fuel as if they’ve been to an outside airport terminal for private planes recently like the two caught at the border,” I explained, glad when I saw several wolves nod around me. “Jason said a dozen came landed in Canada. That leaves four unaccounted for.”

  I shifted back, approached the first one, and swallowed down my worries at what I was about to do. I hated to do it, but for the boys I’d do just about anything. Taking a deep breath, I put my hands on his head, ignoring when he started rattling off what I guessed to be very unflattering things about me in another language. His agitation helped immensely, and he was a loud broadcaster.

  “Two guys left with vests of C4 already, planning to slip into the club once they confirm at least Laila and all the Chicago leaders are inside,” I muttered, my head feeling like it would explode soon.

  “Sera, stop, that’s enough,” Hagan growled, trying to pull me back. It made me realize I’d fallen to my knees it hurt so bad.

  “Six slipped out the back when they realized there was surveillance in front talking on radios they intercepted,” I bitched, getting all of that from flashing images in his mind. I screamed when I saw the boys’ faces hung on corkboard, darts thrown at them. They knew what all of them looked like… Recently.

  It took a bit more to get how, and I only did that because a gut feeling told me it was important. I let the guy go, turning to the side and throwing up everything I had in me. There was a horrible ringing in my ears as I did, but then I turned back to him, my hand changing into a claw, and I sliced him across the chest, much to the shock and horror of everyone there.

  “You’re a dead man,” I spat in his face, knowing he understood me. “If that heals, you die as a wolf in my territory, and I will fucking eat you along with my pack. You survive it, and you die humanely. Pray to your fucking god one last time because I doubt he’ll answer a monster who hunts children.”

  I got to my feet with Hagan’s help and made him take me over to Brian. He realized it was something important and private, so he took over, walking me to my clothes. “Why do I think this is bad?”

  “It is,” I confessed, taking a big swig from the water bottle he’d offered me to rinse my mouth and spit it back out. “The former Special Agent in Charge Richard Frank has been radicalized. He fed some bullshit to someone in your office—I saw a face, but I don’t know them—about helping a buddy who was worried one of the boys was his kidnapped foster kid he’d been looking for. These got their photos from your office, Bri.”

  The litany of curse words that came out of his mouth even made me blush, and I had a potty mouth three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.

  “Yeah, that’s about how I feel and then some, but I leave it to you.”

  “You’re going?” he asked, not hiding his shock.

  “I want to get to the boys,” I confessed, not caring if that was mushy. “I want to be at the club because I have the faces in my head, Bri. I—I can’t be away from them when I know they’re there and after what I saw.”

  “I promise I’ll handle things here,” he swore, leaning in and kissing my cheek. “Don’t feel bad. You wouldn’t go if you didn’t know we could do this. You’re not picking family over the job or your club opening, which is incredibly important too, Sera.”

  “How did you know that was what I was thinking?” I whispered, not sure I wanted the answer.

  “Because I know you,” he chuckled easily, pulling me into a hug. “The job is always first and has been for so many years. You’ve never had conflicts before like family, really close friends, and other responsibilities. And you got them all within the last year. It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming.”

  “It makes me feel a bit like a pinball being bounced around,” I confessed.

  “That’s being boss all on its own,” he assured me, scrubbing his hand over his hair when we separated. “You’re in charge of all the cases, and you have to know them all. You’re getting a bigger taste of that now that your teams are trained and Monroe is doing more of the job he should have if he was regular FBI and the training center is almost up. It’s all huge. Delegation is the only way you will survive.”

  “Thanks. I still want Frank and this other guy. I just need to see pictures to find them.”

  “Give me basics.”

  I did. He said that he was pretty sure he knew who it was, a transfer from New York to cover some of the empty slots the Chicago office had after losing some people, like me, Frank, and some who’d gotten killed from Bob the assassin. Some other reasons too that actually had nothing to do with me, which was always nice.

  “I leave this in your hands,” I told Hagan and Reagan when I realized they’d joined us. They glanced at each other and moved closer, Brian rushing off to give orders. “What?”

  Hagan shifted back and moved closer to me, taking my hand. “On one condition.” I gave a slow nod, not understanding why he was challenging me. He moved my hand over his heart and leaned in. “That you hear us that it hurts to let you walk away when you’re heading to the threat.”

  “I don’t…” I trailed off, not sure how to answer that, but thinking I wasn’t sure I understood either.

  “How you feel about needing to get to the boys, we feel too. It hurts you more from whatever you saw, but it about killed us to watch you endure that pain. It terrifies me that you’re heading to the club where terrorists could bump up the plan if they realize things were compromised here and we’re not at your side.”

  “Okay, I hear you, but I’m not sure what to do with it. You guys don’t really tell me these kinds of things. And what’s with the hand?”

  “We haven’t told you because we haven’t wanted to put more pressure on you,” Reagan explained. “Because you always put it back on yourself. But that means you also haven’t seen it’s how we feel or how much we feel for you. It’s way more than physical. Brian tells you things like that, and we thought only he got away with it.”

  I finally filled in pieces. “No, Noah does too. Tristan did but didn’t make it a thing when I had to go.”

  “We never saw any of that,” Hagan confirmed, making me feel good at least I knew what was going on and was not a total relationship idiot. “And I wasn’t being cheesy that I wanted you to feel my heart break to let you leave, but you can hear my worry in my heartbeat, smell it coming off of me when we’re this close.” He leaned in, backing me against the SUV in an aggressive move given who was around. “You are more than sex to us. More than our Alpha, Sera.”

  “Then why haven’t you shown me that?” I rasped, closing my eyes. “I showed you everything you both wanted in Vegas and by having you live with me. To be a family with you both. Why wasn’t I worth such lengths?”

  “You are, but we s
crewed up. We were all drowning, and we fucking screwed up big time,” he choked out, hugging me. “We tried so hard to be what we thought you wanted, and it wasn’t what any of us needed, so we’re going to be us and hopefully that’s enough and you will tell us what you’re thinking too. Okay?”

  “I don’t want to hurt like that again,” I confessed, unable to get my shit together after what I’d seen about the boys and just the week of roller coaster that was far from over. “I can’t stop hearing what you guys said.”

  “I’m the one who said it. Don’t blame Hagan,” Reagan muttered.

  “He didn’t disagree, so he was thinking it too. You both did… I can’t get into this right now.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you hear me and what I said just now. That you understand that we don’t want Sera, the woman we love, to race into wolf danger without us by your side.”

  “Then hurry back to me,” I offered, unsure if it was the right thing to say. When I saw relief in their eyes, I mentally patted myself on the back.

  And then Hagan leaned in to kiss me. I turned my head, and he leaned his forehead on my shoulder, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs at the rejection. “Can we ever fix this?”

  “I don’t know.” I moved my head on his. “I let you hug me and we talked a bit. That’s better than a few days ago. I just don’t know, guys. I hurt. I’m not saying I’m faultless, but I hurt. I don’t know, nor can I tell you how to get past it.”

  Reagan had an answer. “A hug is a good start. I think we should recourt you the way we would have wanted now that we get you’d accept flirting and courting.”

  “And maybe some damn foreplay,” Hagan muttered.

  I shoved him away, pissed he went too far. “I’m sorry, I publicly went down on you. In what world did that say I wasn’t open to foreplay? Hell, you’ve seen me do it with other men!”

  “Dain, we’ve seen you do that with Dain,” Reagan corrected, a big piece of the puzzle falling into place why they thought what they did.

  “Listen to me now because we have jobs to do.” I waited until they nodded. “I have not done more than feed from Dain since the one time we were together in Vegas at Laila’s court.”